Everything we make is constantly evolving. We are always discussing the next cool feature we could add. However, every product has to start somewhere and learning lessons from guys like 37 Signals, we like to keep our product development process pretty simple. It normally starts off with a brain storming session, bouncing ideas around and ending up with some rough sketches. We go over the sketches and mock up the design and layout, without any functionality and have another look at what we end up with. We then review the features we want in version one and go away and produce it.
KyotoTV is no exception and I’ve included some screenshots here of the early development:
Now we know that not everyone is a tree hugging eco-warrior but, the majority of people are willing to do the small things to be a little bit greener. The Carbon Trust puts out a lot of material on energy efficiency and as a company interested in this area we are always keen to see the findings of their research.
One article in particular caught my attention, it talks about the fact that UK employees want to help their employers save money through energy efficiency – “78% (of employees) willing to be more energy efficient to save money.” How do you leverage this will to be greener - if energy use is ‘invisible’ to the occupants in a building, there is less of a feeling of responsibility towards being energy efficient. People do not always think about the consequence of their actions or inaction (leaving lights on etc). The solution is to make energy use more visible to provoke thought and action.
The article went on to point out “our survey reveals, employees want to do their bit and are increasingly seeing saving money around the workplace as part of their responsibility too. This could help most businesses save up to 20% on energy bills through low cost or no cost action on energy efficiency.” – Compelling evidence that empowering employees through awareness would lead to saving money and reducing the impact on the environment.
We like telling people about things in a cool and interesting way, so putting reams of text on our website telling you what we do was not going to cut it. Enter Prezi - a presentation and content creator that makes it not only easy but, fun, to create impressive presentations.
You jump, zoom and rotate between elements on a canvas that makes a refreshing change from the linearity of other presentation tools. Best of all you can sign up for free with the ability to upgrade to paid versions that offer private online hosting, offline viewing and offline editing (for when you're on the road without an internet connection).
I signed up for the free edition and spent some time tinkering around. In about fifteen minutes I already had the start of what is now the presentation on our website. It started off as just a way to describe one of our products but then we thought it would be cool to put most of the site content in there.
So if you have a presentation coming up or need to tell a story in an interesting way, be sure to give this a go and wow peers with this awesome way of displaying information.
Check out our presentation on the OuterArc homepage and let us know what you think - if you're feeling nice you can to the Prezi site and give us a pat on the back. Also be sure to take a look at the Prezi site, some of the presentations featured are really good and show you how much you can do with the software.
-Aaron
You know the feeling. You come into work on a Monday morning and see you left your monitor on standby all weekend. Maybe you feel a fleeting sense of guilt but, you’re not paying the electricity bill, right?
Many of us are becoming more aware of our actions, energy consumption and how we affect the environment around us. So, how do we turn this knowledge and our transient environmental conscience into changes in our behaviour that consistently make us more energy efficient in everyday life?
I’ve recently been looking at a couple of papers to try and answer that very question. One paper from the University of St. Andrews [PDF] looked at changing energy consumption behaviour within a university environment, monitoring a number of participating schools.
