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Wired ran an article a few days ago about pecha kucha, an art-house event that turns PowerPoint on its ear and makes presentations bearable.

The rules are simple:

1. 20 slides per presenter
2. 20 seconds maximum per slide
3. The presenter talks as the slides whiz across the screen.
4. No questions may be asked during the presentation.
5. When the show’s done, the presenter is done.
6. Next presenter, please.

I checked Pecha-Kucha.org to see if there were any events posted for Honolulu. After all, there have been pecha kucha events in over 80 cities around the world since 2003.

No luck.

Pecha kucha in Honolulu?

But this seems like a natural for First Fridays. Pecha kucha was first developed for architects and designers, to keep their pitches reasonable. A typical pecha kucha event has 14 slide shows in a single evening. That’s 280 slides.

There are reports of businesses who use pecha kucha as a presentation format for internal meetings. Perhaps this works better when no one else in the room is using a laptop. This article in the New York Times and this Microsoft web page discuss how Microsoft managers deal with laptops in meetings.

Personal computer use in a meeting can be helpful, but a computer is often a distraction, especially when they’re connected to the Internet. Mobile devices are almost as bad, too.

Now I’m wondering if pecha kucha is a useful tool for teaching. While the format doesn’t leave much time for questions, it does provide a quick pace.

Could pecha kucha help in the classroom?

Over the years, I’ve given student presenters rules that are similar to pecha kucha. I hadn’t made the connection until today, though. One common issue was that students tend to have problem with time limits and slide counts, possibly because this type of presentation format takes some practice to do well.

This format might be very useful for presentations given in online courses, though.

Based on a quote from John Heilemann’s article on Steve Jobs, the Internet is bubbling with rumors that Google might buy Apple. Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Business 2.0 discusses the rumor here.

The two companies have cultures that are similar in some ways, so the rumor has some face validity.

Google + Apple = something interesting

Apple would give Google a platform to roll out some interesting consumer devices. As I’ve noted in other posts, including my discussion of the Heilemann article, the iPhone includes a few Google web applications, including mapping.

But Google really hasn’t shown much interest in the high volume hardware business. Sure, Google builds most of the machines in its data center from off-the-shelf hardware. Google also sells a couple of search appliances, but those are rack-mounted devices designed for a server room.

Google has shown a great deal of interest in networked storage, however. Given the pervasive nature of broadband Internet access in the US, Europe and the Pacific Rim, it’s only a matter of time until we see PDAs and portable computers that rely on services provided by Google, Microsoft, and other vendors to store user email, images, music and documents.

Google doesn’t have enough cash to buy Apple… yet

In the end, Google doesn’t have the cash on hand to buy Apple. Matther Siegler at ParisLemon ran the numbers. Apple’s network is over US$100 billion and climbing, while Google has a net worth of $US158 billion. So a buyout doesn’t make much sense this month.

This article was first posted on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=285

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,72458-0.html

Bruce Schneier discusses how password crackers work, and how users can create more secure passwords that will resist these attacks.

His earlier analysis of 34,000 MySpace passwords was alarming. Many MySpace users have passwords that are easy to crack or guess. The most popular choice was password1

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,72300-0.html

From Yahoo, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and the Honolulu Advertiser: Del Monte announced yesterday that the company will shut down its Hawaii operations within the next 60 days, the minimum amount of time allowed by Federal law for a layoff announcement. The layoff affects 551 Del Monte employees.I’ve heard of giving pineapples as a Christmas present, but this seems cruel. Del Monte’s been a part of the Hawaiian economy for a century, and this announcement is another nail in the coffin for Hawaiian agriculture, as more farmland is converted to residential and commercial use.

It’s much less expensive for Del Monte to grow pineapples in Costa Rica, the Philippines and Thailand than Hawaii, mostly because of labor costs. Apparently Hawaii pineapple no longer commands a premium price from consumers.

The company had announced in February that it would shut down operations in 2008. The new date means that the current crop of pineapple, grown on a 5100 acre plot in Kunia, may be abandoned. Pineapple takes three years to cultivate and harvest. Maui Pineapple has asked to salvage the abandoned crop, but Dole may become the only company growing pineapple on Oahu.

This article first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=36

 http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,70946-0.html

What happens when your new computer can’t open an file you created or bought years ago?

In IT, we call this a “legacy” issue. See chapter 9 and pages 326-7 for a brief discussion of legacy issues and end user resistance.

I’ve used several different word processors since 1981.

During the first year of my MBA program, our university’s computer lab used Samna Word. Samna was ugly, but it worked. The software had one ridiculous feature - if you swapped the floppy disk while a document was open, Samna would overwrite the new floppy disk’s directory tracks with the old disk’s directory information. This was a fast, effective way to lose every file on both floppy disks.

Between my first and second years, our computer lab switched to WordPerfect, which had a commanding market share at the time. WP couldn’t open Samna documents easily, but we kept Samna around so that users could save their old documents to the WP format. The converted documents still required some cleanup, as Samna’s conversion wasn’t word perfect enough. (rimshot)

File conversion is a common legacy issue for IT departments. If I had to convert my old MBA files today, I’d use Google to find a conversion service like this one. They’ll even process a 5.25 inch floppy disk, which is what I used as an MBA student.

In 1997, such conversion services were difficult to find at a moment’s notice. While I was packing for a cross-country relocation, I gulped down hard, said “goodbye”… and tossed all of my 5.25 inch floppies into a dumpster.

I hadn’t owned a working 5.25 inch floppy drive in years. Those floppy disks were in bad shape, and I didn’t see the point in retaining them. I still have some digital and hard copies of my MBA work, but the original disks are sitting deep inside a landfill in Indiana.

Between 1987 and 1997, I used WordPerfect. I can still open and read the files I created, including my dissertation.

In 1997, I moved from academia to the corporate world, and I switched to Microsoft Word. I’ve been using Word ever since, even though it’s a bulky troll of an application when compared to WordPerfect. Most Windows computers don’t have WordPerfect installed these days.