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…

All buildings have a personality, and to a certain extent an office sets the tone for a business, as does its environs. Exbiblio is based on First Avenue in Seattle. I’m told that a couple of decades ago it was a rather seedy area, full of shops selling guns, porn, and worse. Now there are book and art shops. Many have a trendy ethnic feel – tribal masks at fabulous prices – that sort of thing.

Exbiblio is based on the fourth floor of a former hotel. On the ground floor, there is a large airy coffee shop. An impressive staircase with an art-deco carved banister leads up to the office floors. The walls have been taken back to the brick. The carpet smells of newness. Judging by the brass plates, many of the other occupants of the building are lawyers. Exbiblio has a good chunk of the fourth floor. The walls of the reception room are covered in book shelves, mostly bearing classic novels in pristine covers. I noticed the complete cartoons of the New Yorker among the library. One or two well-thumbed computer manuals are often lying around.

One room, which is always be pointed out with pride on a visitor’s tour, is the “meditation room”, which is furnished with orange floor-cushions. It has a glass wall and I have never seen anyone inside it on my way past. Elsewhere there is a table with organic muesli bars and other healthy eats spread out on it. The stationary cupboard contains boxes of various brands of scanner pen, and a good supply of a small book called “The Corporate Mystic”, which is a sort of Exbiblio Bible.

The hardware project has its own small lab, which contains all sorts of impressive looking optical instruments and circuit boards. Even so, part of the scanner pen’s development happens off-site at a contractor called Synapse which is based in a suburb. You’ll often bump into a Synapse person at Exbiblio.

The 15 or so Exbiblio workers inhabit various rooms in ones or in pairs. The corridors are somewhat labyrinthine, and I often wander round in circles. In other words, Exbiblio people are fairly well dispersed. I’m told that computer programmers prefer to work in solitude, as they need to concentrate hard on their code. Only Lauren, the HR and office manager, told me that she is a more sociable creature and might prefer an open-plan office.

I’m writing this up in London from memory. I drop into Exbiblio about once a month for a week. My third visit is scheduled for about ten days from now. Do I look forward to breathing in rarefied atmosphere of the Exbiblio office? To tell you the truth, not hugely. I’m with Lauren on this one – it’s a bit lonely. It’s quite hard to break the ice with people when you have to knock on their door. I do, of course, find my visits intellectually stimulating – Exbiblio’s that sort of place – but it’s my job to get to know everybody, and the office-layout is not a great help in that. When I do chat to somebody, usually by appointment, it’s always enjoyable.

I’m told that Exbiblio people communicate by instant messaging. There are also webcams, but I don’t believe that people use them much, if at all. People do of course visit each other’s offices and hold discussions in meeting rooms. As far as I can tell, the conversation is pretty serious. In fact, when they start a discussion about computer code or optical theory, I simply can’t understand a word.

The big social event of the week is the Wednesday lunch, with take-away pizzas. This is when you will hear people chatting and laughing – but the conversation usually has a bit of technical bent. Topics have included the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner and the Tesla electric sports car. Towards the end of the lunch, there’s usually some announcement about the latest Exbiblio thinking. I once heard the founder, Martin King, give a small speech on how Exbiblio encourages career development, and it’s not disloyal to look for another job.

Outside the Wednesday lunch, I’m not aware of office socialising, but no doubt it does go on. It’s not like any office I’ve worked in before. I suppose I’m used to working in media companies where people tend to express opinions all day long, until the deadline approaches and they start working like mad. The phones are constantly ringing. People talk loudly, and sometimes I have to put my fingers in my ear when I’m reading. Tempers are are often frayed in a newspaper or broadcasting office – but everyone knows that it doesn’t really mean anything. It can be rather boisterous. Exbiblio is not at all like that. It is much more cerebral and high-minded. It’s the nature of the company. But it is certainly not unfriendly. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any bitching, not once. People seem contented.

Perhaps on my third visit I’ll start to have a different view. I’ll fill in some gaps and my understanding will become more rounded. I’ll keep you updated, but it’s good to have a record of how I see it now. It’s quite easy to forget your early impressions.

Here’s a green design idea that I don’t think even Exbiblio has considered yet (though I don’t know that for certain) – circuit boards made out of pasta and cases made out of corn. Both are wonderfully biodegradable, and if you feel peckish, you can eat your handheld device instead of throwing it away.

You can read more and watch a video report on the BBC’s website.

This is a story about a scanner device that was mentioned in an anonymous comment on this blog. I thought it was worth reading up a little more about it. It’s a failure story – but there’s always something to be learned from others’ mistakes (and your own!).

As a note to new readers, Exbiblio’s first product will be a scanner pen with a difference. It will link a paper document to its digital equivalent by means by capturing five or six words of the text. It turns out that a few consecutive words in any text are almost always unique.

CueCat was a scanner device designed by DigitalConvergence in the late 1990s (there’s a nice article about its history on Wikipedia). It read barcodes, and when plugged into a computer, it could take readers to a related page on the internet. The company mailed out free CueCats, often unsolicited. Wired Magazine gave them away. In 2000, CueCat bar codes appeared in some leading publications, including Forbes and Time. RadioShack gave away the devices and included CueCat barcodes in its catalogs.

Hackers quickly saw the CueCat might have other applications as a general barcode reader. For instance, if modified, it might be used to build a catalog of your book or CD library, or to take you to an Amazon page. The firm expanded its licence agreement to forbid such modifications, claiming that it remained the owner of the device.

The product soon ran into more controversy. Each CueCat had a unique serial number, and it was asserted that DigitalConvergence could spy on how individuals used them. The company set its lawyers on hackers who published ways to modify its product.

It all ended the way many businesses do. In 2005, a liquidator was offering 2 million CueCats at 30 cents each.

Exbiblio has a very different approach. It’s committed in its values to protecting users’ data and to generally being good (“leaving beauty in our wake”). Still, there are some interesting parallels here and lessons to be learned.

If you want a glimpse of the newspaper of the future, you could do no better than take a tour of the Daily Telegraph’s new offices in London. The UK Press Gazzette has been inside the new Telegraph.

In keeping with the Exbiblio vision, paper and digital content will live happily side by side. All print journalists will be put through multi media training courses, and some specialist video journalists will be recruited. The Editorial Managing Editor, Will Lewis, says the Telegraph will develop an entirely new type of journalist.

“There’ll be no old media versus new media, them and us”.

The Telegraph will offer down-loadable PDFs of some its articles that will contain embedded video and audio. This is the sort of content that Exbiblio plans to enmesh inside a paper document by use of its hand-held scanner.

Newspaper archives going back 200 years are now available to be searched on Google. Some newspapers, such as The Guardian have opened up their historic content for free. Others such as the Washington Post will charge for downloads of old news. Here’s an article from Time about the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and here’s one from the Guardian about the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

Meanwhile some leading bloggers have been saying that they’ve given up reading newspapers in paper form. Robert Scoble agrees with his former colleague at Microsoft, Don Dodge, that using an RSS reader allows him to absorb so much news that he doesn’t need to read the “dead trees”. But the fact remains that RSS – which provides an amazingly convenient way to skim the Internet – hasn’t caught on with the wider public.

Jason Barkeloo, president of Somatic Digital, has a vision that is strikingly close to Exbiblio’s. He concludes a recent post for the AlwaysOn community site saying:

I think the great step forward will be clipping the printed page to a device that will enable the print to become the navigation portal to the digital world…

And it’s more than a just a nice idea. Somatic already has its own “device” to hand: the TouchBook.

The TouchBook™ platform, through the use of Touch User Interface (TUI) technology, enables a reader to press the pictures and words on the regular printed ink and paper page and retrieve digital content from an appliance. This technology, in essence, turns the printed material into a remote control to digital content.

You will find more detail in the PDF brochure. but I think the concept is demonstrated most clearly in this short video of seven-year-old Tommy using a TouchBook. He presses an icon in his book, and a song plays on his laptop.

Just to remind readers – I’m an outside blogger and am not involved in developing Exbiblio’s products – and so I would be fascinated to find out what the Exbiblio team makes of the TouchBook. It would also be great to hear what Jason Barkeloo makes of Exbiblio’s approach to bridging the divide between paper and the digital world.

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!

Sony have come up with an idea for a talking book, without the need for an actor to go to the wearisome trouble of reading the whole text out aloud. The New Scientist Invention blog reports that the giant electronics to media company has filed a patent for a new type of audio book.

An actor has to record a series of words and phrases containing every type of sound in the language. The system would also note the actor’s pitch, tone, and rhythm of voice. In theory, a customer could match any book in the Library to the voice of any actor in the system. It might even be possible to revive the voices of dead actors, using archive recordings. Orson Wells reading Winnie the Pooh?

I have to say, I spend quite a bit of my time producing an actress reading audio stories for children. I know how much time she spends thinking about how to bring out the meaning. It’s a performance, just as much as if she were taking part in a stage play.

How about this for a suggestion? Perhaps Sony should add a moving hologram of the actor to its invention. Then users could choose costumes and scenes and put the actor inside any play or film ever written. I’m not entirely kidding. I have a feeling this might happen one day – perhaps in a virtual life site such as Second Life. Moving avatars of celebrities are already becoming popular.

Another observation: every few days there seems to be a news story about the future of the book. There clearly are a lot of people thinking about bringing traditional books and the digital world closer together.

Earlier today I presented my preliminary design proposal to a group of Exbiblio team members including Ania, Martin, Jesse, Ed Tang, Ed Mahlum, Adam, and Hugh. The meeting was held as a review point at the boundary between the planning and development portions of the redesign effort. When it comes to building things, I’m of the “measure twice, cut once” mindset. Careful planning and consideration does much to prevent having to do the whole thing over again.

On the other hand, change is the only constant, and a web development effort should plan for change so that the redesign effort results in a scalable solution. As Peter Morville put it, we can avoid “The Infinite Loop of Destructive Creation” by seeing a web effort as a program rather than a project (for more of Peter’s thoughts on this topic, see his article entitled The Speed of Information Architecture). This is a sentiment that was echoed during the meeting today, as we stand poised at the transition to product launch, creating a need for growth in web-based user support.

The group generated some excellent structural suggestions that will be considered in the final site design, proposing changes to navigation elements and reinforcing the need for fresh content at regular intervals. But what struck me most were the deeper levels of thought. A major topic of conversation was how we will use the site to not only communicate from the company, but to also encourage participation and communication into the company. I think it’s rather unique that we are not only are we talking about citizenship, but we’re also actively looking for ways that we enact and cocreate citizenship with our users.

All in all, I thought it was a highly successful review. Thanks go out to the participants for their focus and attention during the meeting. On to processing everything we’ve discussed into a final design proposal!

By Ariel van Spronsen