How simplicity can improve your speech

Posted on 29/10/2007 by admin

Shot by Kallideas I’m on a fast train connecting Florence to Milan together with my colleague Luciana (aka the uber wonderful Luciana Gabetti): today I had a talk at the Creativity Festival at the Second Life pavillion on the economy of the Gabetti project in the metaverse.

I don’t want to bother you with so much showcased informations and data (but, if interested, you might want to take a look at my latest presentations – both in Italian and English) but – instead – I’d like to share with you the thoughts that are crosing my mind will looking out of the window, in the glowing dark of the Italian countryside.

Simple is effective. Be simple to be effective or – in other words: increase your simplicity to increase your effectiveness.

I’ll talk about presentations in this post, but – probably – you can adapt this to other scenarios too.

I’m a loyal reader of the Presentation Zen blog and always try to strengthen my slide with Garr‘s tips: I use more images then text, I write short and memorable sentences, I always try to engage my audience. But there’s one thing I ALWAYS do: I keep the technology aspect of my presentations at the stone age: very very few motion effects, no audio and, most of all, absolutely no need for an Internet connection. (and I use Keynote as my slideware)

Why? Because you don’t know anything of the scenario your going to find and the conference centre; you cannot know whether or not the audio mixer will melt up just before your presentation or the internet connection automagically crashes in the very moment you click on the link.

And, my friend, the today conference (albeight being plenty with SL professionals as speakers and a very interested public) was a PRESENTATION INFERNO:

A speaker (a dear friend, by the way) presented using a cool mash-up that takes selected photos by flickr and let you organize and access them in presentation style mode; BUT he was plenty with shots (really too much) and not very used at the software shortcuts, resulting in most of his presentation time spent passing from one wrongslide to the other (again, wrong)
Another guy based his introduction to the usage of a very laughable video of a famous italian showman; please note that the video itself wasn’t important but what the showman said in the video was the topic the speaker would have moved on… but there was no audio cable in the room at all; so the presenter tried to move the mic (with a HUGE tweet while passing in front of the speakers system) the mic nearer to the computer speakers… but no sound were heared at all. Creepy.
On videos, again: a presenter choosed to use a Flash Video… choosing to compile it, in the Flash IDE, during his speech (and, by the way, audio and video were out of sync);The last one. Promise. It’s been a while I learnt an interesting lesson: your audience NEVER know when something in your presentation has gone wrong… until you tell them.
This man chose to link a file from his presentation but something gone wrong and the magnificent “file not found” window opened. And, adding problems to problem: he started looking for the file in the operating system!

Conclusion: the simpler your presentation is (and I’m speaking about presentation style and technical aspects) the more chance you have to appear a really smart presenter.

P.S. The organizer told me his appreciation for my presentation saying “It was so obvious the you were the marketing guy among the others looking at your presentation style”. Ehm… It’s now 10 years I’m working in IT related teams/companies

The long tail of helpdesk tickets

Posted on 19/10/2007 by admin

I should have had lunch with Leeander today to discuss the 2008 edition of The Interaction Frontiers, the innovation related seminar we co-produce each year. Just a few minutes before our appointment he SMSed me cancelling the lunch. After a while, while at lunch with my boss, I received a call from Leeander where he told me he was in a mess managing the calls after an article on Virtual Assistants (he’s an Interaction Design Director at Kallideas, and they actually produce VAs) on a major Italian magazine.

A Virtual Assistant is basically a 3D human-like interface that processes natural language (both spoken and typed) and is ahead of an artificial intelligence engine which takes information from a knowledge base.

I’m gaining more and more knowledge on this subject since we’re developing a VA – named Gabi – at Gabetti (see here a video interview with some interaction with the VA, in Italian) , together with the Kallideas team, to manage the basic support at our IT helpdesk. And – since the pilot phase launch early on July 2007 – we started training Gabi.

We choose the training arguments by taking a look at the most frequent items on our online helpdesk: we released Gabi with basic knowledge on PC, printers and network problems and then moved to email and password management.

During a meeting, early this week, with our Helpdesk manager and the IA expert from Kallideas I was taking a look at the tickets data to understand which arguments need to be teached to Gabi next and then BOOM I “saw” the long tail in these data.

It’s not long ago that I finished reading the inspiring The Long Tail book by Chris Andreson: looking at the ticket statistics I saw how the higher number of tickets was concentrated in less then 10 different arguments and, from there, the number of tickets decreased rapidly while the problems our users were declaring raised impressively.

It was pretty interesting finding my first tail, but now problems arise: VA are very good at managing a small amount of know-how helping with this large numbers of users; but we’re now going to face a nice task: managing a large amount of information to help a relatively small number of users… uhm… need to go deeper into this to better understand the most effective solution.

The power of the web

Posted on 13/10/2007 by admin

I know I know, this is definitely the worst of the starts: I promised to write (at least) each Friday evening and I’m posting late on Saturday evening; but there’s quite a bunch of things you still need to know about me (I’ll going deep into this in the forthcoming weeks) that’s bringing me quite busy at the moment. So: I’m sorry dudes.

I’ve read on the last number of MyGabetti News (the newsletter we monthly publish at Gabetti for our site subscribers) of a cool fair about home automation and home security which had my whole attention; and it was held in Milan down town: a bunch of kilometers from my house.

I’ve spent half this week convincing my wife to visit the expo together so we can start to get accustomed to the cream of the crop in home innovation.

[Note: I'm used - mostly at work - to reach any information very quickly; that's why I fastly become dissappointed when I cannot easily reach what I need to know... this is usefoul to properly understand what follows]

This morning, while my daughter was swallowing biscuits all around the kitchen, I was on the sofa trying to remember more details on the fair: was it in Milan City Fair? Or at the new expo? Wasn’t it at the Datch Forum?

I perfectly knew where I first read the info (MyGabetti News) and I remember where the mail was laying. But had not mood for opening Entourage, looking for the email and then following the link; so I (poor me) chose to google for more info on the fair.

Google, uh? Yes: the result was the “Casa Sicura Expo” (secure home Expo), “The first fair on home automation and home security”.

I don’t actually know how you, my friend read it, but once having paid 5 euros for parking and 16 euros for the entrance ticket I faced a whole plaetora of solar systems, energy saver systems, fuell cells prototype… it wasn’t about home automation! There were no home secutiry experts.

It was a damn save the damn world fair!!!

I admitted with my wife of being wrong: I probably mistyped the site or something this morning and wrote down the wrong address on our TomTom.

So, back at home I re-checked the (damn) site and… I was right! Today is 14, the month is October, we were at the Datch Forum… so: where have all you domotic systems hidden?

This is the power of the web: keeping a wrong information and making it appear correct; even when I personaly verified it was, actually,wrong.

P.S. We came home plenty with energy savings lamp, they were for free.

Update: I’m puzzled. The link I found on Google was actually the same that was laying in MyGabetti News… so the Conference organizers were kidding when designing the websites content? Or were they just trying to gain a couple of thousands more visitors?