Hugh and I had a fun visit to the office of JMK Industrial Design last Friday to interview the industrial design team working on the Exbiblio portable scanner. We discussed the story of the Exbiblio scanner, Apple’s influence on the industry, and what it is like to work for a client who turns conventional thinking on its head.

Hugh is planning to post details from the interview this week, but I thought I’d get some images from our visit up on the blog today. Including, if you look closely, the first image of the scanning device (model) that we have ever shown to the public! Stay tuned for more details.

Here are some of the mp3 devices that the design team looked at before working on the Exbiblio scanning pen:

This is the first of a series of posts we plan related to the industrial design of the Exbiblio scanning device. Coming soon, we plan to have interviews with the design team, design sketches, and photos of the prototypes.

I’ll start by showing some charts the design team put together to study existing gadgets on the market for comparison, discussion, and inspiration. The following images show a variety of the USB drives currently on the market. Note that our scanning device is likely to have USB drive functionality in addition to the text scanning and voice recording features.

I wanted to give some more visuals to go with Hugh’s description of our company lunch. Here are some shots from this week’s lunch taken by Claes-Fredrik.

The above photos show Spencer demonstrating how the laptop can participate in round trip communications with our new hardware device. All I know is that I saw the lights blink… If you want more detail than that, we’ll have to get Spencer to write a blog entry!

Here I am presenting some design concepts for a new product idea to the team. That’s all the lawyers will let me say for now, stay tuned…

I came across this shirt the other day proclaiming that “Corporate Blogs Still Suck.” It made me laugh, but then it made me think… Do they?

In the 50 or so blogs that I read on a daily basis, there are very few “corporate” blogs though there are quite a few blogs of interesting people who have started small software companies. Probably the most corporate blog I follow is the Direct 2 Dell Blog.

I think most of the time, the Dell blog doesn’t suck. I’m wouldn’t consider myself a Dell fan, but I’m not a hater either. I admire their mastery of the supply chain process and have bought a few Dells over the years. It is amazing how quickly and inexpensively they can put together and deliver a completely custom machine. I have also had good experiences with their customer support the few times that I have needed to call.

I’ll admit that part of the reason the Dell blog is fun to watch is that they got completely slammed by negative comments in the first few posts. Turns out that there is a lot of pent up frustration aimed at Dell, and some of the early posts seemed canned and readers let out their steam in the comment section.

I admire the folks running the Dell blog though because they have stuck it out and have been evolving the blog into more of a conversation and less of a brochure blog. Not that it is perfect yet, but you can tell that they are really trying to get it right.

I’m wondering what your favorite corporate blogs are and whether you think that corporate blogs, in general, still suck. If you think they do, what needs to change so that they don’t? Please comment!

But, no memory yet…

It was discovered yesterday that the SDRAM chip doesn’t fit in those beautiful red circuit boards we had delivered last week.

Turns out there was a mistake during the design process where an incorrect template was used for the SDRAM chip.

This will probably set the Falstaff project back about one week. The hardware team is continuing to assemble the other components to make sure that the rest of the design looks good before we have the board rebuilt.

Ian MacDuff explained that the team has taken a risk by shortening some of the more typical review processes because of our rapid 10-week prototype schedule. We hope that things go well and that we can have working prototypes much sooner than normal. However, if mistakes are not caught immediately (as in this case), it can delay the project.

Brian Piquette (Synapse) and Ian MacDuff (Exbiblio) of our hardware team have provided the following photos of the bits and pieces of Falstaff coming together. Thanks guys!

Sensor Board: CMOS Image Sensor and Illumination LEDs.

This is the image sensor PCB. This PCB holds the CMOS sensor and the white illumination LEDs. It sits in the enclosure perpendicular to the long axis of the device, which points the sensor out the front of the unit.

Sensor Board with Lens Holder

The image below shows the sensor PCB with the milled plastic lens holder. The lens will screw into this plastic frame.

Sensor PCB mated with other PCBs in enclosure.

The PCB visible behind the Sensor PCB si the Main PCB. The Main PCB contains the processing core of the Falstaff unit. It has the ARM9 Processor, Flash and SDRAM.

Button PCB and Main PCB

The Button PCB (top) has the power supply, user interface (buttons and LEDs) and the interface between the sensor board and the main board.

Guy Kawasaki reflects on lessons learned as a member of the original Mac team and as a venture capitalist tired of listening to lame presentations in this entertaining video presentation.

I enjoy the teasing about MBAs and executive retreats as well as his perspective on keeping it simple and “making meaning” vs “making money”.

Check it out!