What's going through my head tonight?

Today something pretty random happened. I was sitting at an outdoor meeting, and all of a sudden we hear helicopters. Everyone turns around, and BillG's helicopters (yes, plural) plop down on the lawn next to our meeting. It was neat. This is Shanti before making a presentation at the meeting. She's my manager. I think she's cool. :-)

I can't wait until my product is announced. I've found so many cool random product blogs at work... my coworker Ben and I are just waiting to jump on the work blog bandwagon. Tic tok tic tok...

So, here's some neat stuff:

GPS-Photo Link - Your camera has photo and time data. Your gps device has time and gps data. This app links the photo and gps data based on the shared time attribute. Pretty neat idea.

Geominder - Attach reminders to physical locations. This is a really neat idea. It's too bad you need to go to the location to set the reminder. I'd love to see notifications of this type that are dynamic -- show me information that's useful to me when I enter a physical location (like where free parking spots are when I drive into a parking lot).

Ah, still so much potential in location based services. I can't wait for people to start building platforms around this type of stuff. It's an area waiting to explode. If I didn't have a job that requires 100% dedication, I'd be building this in my garage right now. Oh well.

The other day my friend Mike and I took a picture of this bus with a "FREE WiFi service on this bus" ad on it. A day later, Mike found this local news article: Transit services adding Wi-Fi to buses. They're using the Junxion Box. So cool. :-)

Oh oh oh, and I read another book the other night: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. GO READ THIS BOOK NOW (and no, I'm not taking a commission on that link to Amazon). My Director of Program Management swears by it, so I picked it up a couple months ago, but hadn't had the chance to read it. The other night I was too tired to be productive, but it was too early to go to sleep, so I picked it up off the shelf and started reading. Wow. I read the whole thing in one sitting. It's 200 pages, but very very easy reading and definitely a page turner.

In short, the book tells the story of a leader who transforms an incredibly screwed up team at a fictional company into being functional. It talks a lot about establishing trust as the foundation for a healthy team. The key concept is that absence of trust leads to fear of conflict which leads to lack of commitment which leads to avoidance of accountability which leads to inattention to results. I know.. it sounds like a mouthful of psychobabble.. but it actually rings true.

Anyway, it's a great read. Check it out if you wanna kill a couple hours reading a great book on a peaceful Sunday afternoon or somethin'.

Goodnight!