In looking over everything I’ve come to a simple inescapable conclusion: I never talk about coding. That isn’t going to change. I don’t feel like I can talk about most of the stuff I do professionally here in a public forum so I don’t. And the stuff I do on the side… well it’s nothing you haven’t seen before.

So. What to do. Simple. Reboot.

Instead of focusing on my programming professional life I’m going to use this site to talk about anything I want. Chances are there will be a lot of writing posts here and very few (if any) code or programming.

With all the hoopla and tension around the MITX awards and being a finalist something got lost in the shuffle.

A couple weeks ago sam submitted AP to the Above the Fold – Tap that App! Contest. It’s part of their New Years resolution to evangelize and promote UX design and development. The winner gets actual usability testing from ATF. Awesomeness.

To be honest I didn’t really think much about it when he mentioned he had submitted it and I didn’t looked into it any further. Life kinda sucked at the time.

I bring all this up because on June 6th they announced the winners (yes, I’m that behind on this) and the First Place winner? None other than Accessible Places!

Woohoo!

So now we get to find out just how bad my UX work on the project truly is (I already have an idea ;) and we get professional advice on how to make a great idea work even better.

You listening Google? We are kicking butt and taking names! Make your offer now before you can’t afford us ;) (j/k)

My apologies to the ATF gang for the delayed posting. Hope not to keep up the trend (the MITX post was late too if that’s any consolation)

So, MITX Innovation Awards were last Thursday night. For those that don’t remember Accessible Places (the project started by Sam Bisbee and myself at the Boston.com Hack-a-thon) was a finalist in the ‘Best Doing Good’ category. The entire team was there including my wife who was the inspiration for the project.

The food was okay, first time I’ve ever seen ‘make your own take away’ boxes at an event like this. I got to see some friends I haven’t seen in a while and got to make a couple new ones. Also got introduced to Debi Kleiman, president of MITX which was very cool. Especially since she knew what AP was.

I was going to drag this out a little longer and go on abut the event and how exciting it was and all that but by now everyone already knows the results of the evening anyway. We didn’t win.

Anything.

I can understand not winning the category, especially considering what Gazelle has done since it launched, but I thought at least we’d get a ‘promise’ award since it was designed for companies that are under a year old and have a lot of *promise* (get it?) and potential. We have tons of potential. But it was not to be.

Was/am I disappointed? Of course. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. However there is one very important factor that almost got lost in all this.

The project.. no the idea is only 4 months old. 4 months. We were by far the youngest company there, hell we aren’t even a company yet and we were a finalist in the MITX awards.

Let me say that again for effect: AP is 4 months old and was a finalist for MITX.

That alone is a heck of an accomplishment and something to be proud of. And I am. Very proud.

It also means I didn’t have to attempt to get up and say anything in front of a ton or people (we all know the risks there). So I’ll say it here. Thank you to the judges and to all of MITX. Especially thanks to Project 11 and Boston.com for putting on the Hack day event.

Most important, thanks to my wife Becky. Without whom none of this would have been possible.

ACCESSIBLE PLACES SELECTED AS A 2011 MITX INNOVATION
AWARDS FINALIST
Mobile Site Recognized for Innovation

BOSTON MA (May 5, 2011) – Accessible Places today announced its mobile web app has been selected as a finalist in the Best “Doing Good” Innovation category for the MITX Innovation Awards. Held annually by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, the MITX Innovation Awards celebrates the innovations powering the future of marketing and revolutionizing the way we work and play.

“This year’s finalists blew us away with their creativity, ingenuity and passion for innovation. They are truly reflective of the many exciting things that are driving our industry right now,” said MITX president, Debi Kleiman. “We’re proud to showcase the region’s top innovations through this Awards program – giving these innovators a place to shout loud and proud about what they’ve achieved,”

Accessible Places is an app that uses crowd-sourced data to go one step beyond your typical ‘handicap’ mapping site or app. By allowing people on the street to designate what types of accessibility attributes a location has, such as curb cuts or powered doors, we learn not just that the location is accessible but HOW it is accessible. Is it easy to get to? Are the elevators, escalator and ramps (if there are any) easy to find? What type of entrance does it have?

There are over 60 million people in the US that are consider disabled for one reason or the other.

In most cases they are unable to find the information they need to determine if a location is accessible to their needs, and when they do find that information, be it through website or phone call, it is often misleading or unclear. When they are able to gain access to a location the conditions are often less than ideal. The mechanisms needed to give them complete access are often, cramped, unsanitary, confining, or in some cases, outright dangerous.
Accessible Places will be recognized with the other finalists in the category of Best “Doing Good” Innovation at the ceremony traditionally attended by over 350 of the region’s top interactive marketing and technology professionals. Winners will be announced at the ceremony in the Westin Boston Waterfront on Thursday, June 16th at 6pm. Tickets can be purchased at www.mitxawards.org/innovation.

The 2011 MITX Awards are sponsored by: Digitas, Isobar, The Atom Group, DLA Piper, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Boston Innovation, and Metropolis Creative.

About Accessible Places
Founded in 2011, Accessible Places sheds light on our communities, easily showing how accessible locations are. Our goal is to allow any user to plan their daily life by mapping out how to navigate a traditionally poorly built physical space. By contributing your experiences and observations you will help yourself and others while increasing awareness of accessibility problems.

About MITX
Established in 1996, MITX — the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange — is the leading industry organization focused on the web and mobile, bringing together the digital marketing, media and technology community to engage in what’s next and how it will impact the marketing and business worlds. Connecting more than 7,500 professionals in New England, MITX is a dynamic community of thought leaders and collaborators in search of insight, education and opportunity. Creator of FutureM, MITX is located in Cambridge, MA. For more information, visit http://www.mitx.org/.

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If the world got a little brighter about that time it was me grinning like an idiot.

Maybe it’s no big deal for some to be nominated and make it to being a finalist, but for a couple friends that built something on a whim over 48 hours, and has had an avalanche of interest since launch it’s awesome. If you want deep detail about what AP is you can check out my post about it here, but the basics are: we built it at the Boston.com hack-a-thon based on the seed of an idea from my wife where we ended up winning ‘Best use of Geo-Location’. Since we have been approached by Code for America about keeping the data open and having them consume it into their Open Civic dataset. We’ve also been approached by CitiRoller about also taking our data once we get a reasonable amount.

We’ve had a meeting with the Boston Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities to work with the city to get their existing data cleaned up and put into our system to help build a better system for people to get where they want to go safely.

Now we are finalists for MITX.

All in 2 months, and all without any kind of promotion. Everything has been word of mouth to this point.

Your head swimming yet? Mine is. The original plan has us here next year. So, as Sam said at the presentation Tuesday night, we went through our One Year plan in 2 months. Now we are trying to figure out the next steps.

Speaking of the presentation, those that know me know I hate presenting. Especially when I’m talking about myself or something I built. I get nervous, tunnel vision, the whole thing. Even as a kid I sucked at presenting in front of the class or at the science/art/whatever fair. I failed to get into the theater class in high school (where I figured I could fix the problem) because I was so bad.

I made it through without sounding too much like an idiot, thanks in no small part to Sam. The stupid part is, once the ‘presenting’ is over and the Q&A starts I’m fine. No nerves, no tunnel vision, nothing. Like I said, stupid. Best part is that after we were done every judge gave us their card and said they knew someone that would love to work with us on this. It’s mindblowing that we are getting all this attention.

Anyway, that nightmare is over and now all I have to do is wait until June 16th to see if we win. I’m actually okay if we don’t win because we’ve come so far and being a finalist this soon in the lifecycle is a special thing. Plus we made some great contacts at the presentation, and I’m sure we will make more at the event in June.

But I so want to win.

Just hope I don’t throw up if we do :)

Knowing if a place is handicapped accessible is a good thing.  Knowing how that place is accessible is even better.  That’s what Accessible Places aims to solve.  By allowing people to tag a location with accessible attributes it helps to inform others how easy or hard a place might be to get into.

For example it might have an elevator but no easy curb access.  So once you’re in the building you can go anywhere but getting into the building itself is difficult.

The project was conceived and built within 48 hours at the Boston hack day back at the end of February.  It was inspired by my wife who is occasionally in a wheelchair and who wanted me to do something at the hack around accessibility.

The idea was born out of need.  The need for people who are in some way physically challenged to find out exactly how accessible some places actually are without actually having to physically visit the location to find out.

Accessible Places sheds light on communities, easily showing how accessible locations are. Our goal is to allow any user to plan their daily life by mapping out how to navigate a physical space that wasn’t designed with them in mind. By contributing to the project everyone’s experiences and observations will help inform others while increasing awareness of accessibility problems.

By using percentages next to accessibility details for each location we can show how frequently users select or agree with that option for this location, a ‘confidence index’ for each attribute.  The higher the number, the greater confidence that particular attribute (for example, powered doors) is actually there.  It’s basically a self-correcting system.

The ‘Hack” consisted of three main events.  The idea/team creation, the build and the presentation.  It turned out we only had 5 minutes to present the project before a panel of judges, so we decided to split it into 2 parts, ‘Why’ and ‘How/Demo’.  Since I originated the idea I got the why side of things.  I had 2.5 minutes to talk about why we were doing this.  The problem wasn’t going to be ‘what was I going to say’, but ‘what was I not going to say’.  I easily could have talked about it for 30 minutes.

This is the ‘why’ part of the presentation we gave at the Boston Hack Day:

People with physical disabilities do not have the same access to locations the rest of us do.  In most cases they don’t even have information they can call on to find places they do can access.

My wife is a perfect example of this.  She has a birth defect and is in a wheelchair part of the time.  When we go out to dinner or a movie, or even just to the mall I often find that I have trouble trying to get the door open and the chair angled through and in.  If she were by herself on these occasions, she simply wouldn’t be able to go on.

This problem isn’t unique.  We are not alone.  In the United States alone there are 32 million people over the age of 18, 5 million under the age of 18 and 2.9 million vets who are categorized as ‘disabled’.  On top of that is the 79 million ‘baby boomers’ that are coming of age over the next few years, many of which will need physical assistance of some kind.

To solve this we created the ‘Accessible Places’ project.  It is a mobile and desktop based site that allows people to search for and view the accessible attributes of a specific location.  Sites are commented on and tagged with attributes by the people that use and experience them every day.  So this is a tool that is built for, and powered by the people who need it.

Sam gave the demo and talked about the tech we used and how easy it was to navigate and search.  It seems incredibly simple on the face until you realize that all this data is captured and is going to be shared.

It was stressful trying to compact 48 hours worth of story and effort into 5 minutes, but we somehow managed.  Of course there is always an ‘unseen’.  In my case it was the mic.  No matter where I went there was feedback. So much so I have to edit down my part of the presentation to ensure Sam got his 2.5 minutes.

In spite of all that, and the fact that I non of us had more than 40 minutes sleep in the last 36 hours of the event, we won!

We ended up winning the ‘Best use of Geo-Location’ category!

The project isn’t over!  Right now we are trying to get a better dataset for our location search.  To do that we are attempting to get into the Google Places API beta.  If anyone can help, let me know!

Below is what will eventually become the about page for accessibleplaces.in.

How To Use Search for a place. We’ll let you know how accessible other people found the place. File your own report based on your findings. AccessiblePlaces.in (link) is a crowd-sourcing platform that allows people with disability to search for and report on the accessibility of places in and around Boston (and beyond). Users can search and report from their computer or their mobile device. The application is useful for people who have impaired mobility, vision, or hearing and would like to know if a place can accommodate them, before they make the trip all the way there. Use Case Susan wants to try out the new restaurant in downtown Boston that all her friends are raving about. The only problem is that when she gets there she finds out that the place is not accessible to someone in a wheelchair. Someone like her.Susan then goes to AccessiblePlaces.in and files a report based on her experience. Because of Susan, others will not have the same experience that she has; and attention will be drawn to the lack of accessibility at that restaurant. Technology The site is built using the Slim PHP micro-framework with jQuery Mobile for the interface. On the backend, PHP and CouchDB are used. It is built from the ground up to have an easy to use RESTful API and stores data that is compatible with the Open Civic Data standard.  It is fully ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Application) compliant so it’s usable via screen-readers and works even if you have javascript and CSS disabled. Best of all, the entire project is open source. Members Anthony Deaver ( @AnthonyDeaver ) Sam Bisbee ( @sbisbee ) Andrew Curioso ( @AndrewCurioso )

The coolest part of this announcement is that not only will litl web books sold after the update support 10.1, but all the web books sold prior to will automagically update to support it as well!  No need to download a giant ‘Service Pack’ or buy a feline themed upgrade!  It all happens while you sleep.

litl is a sponsor of the Flash and the City conference in NYC where we will demo the SDK and officially announce it’s release.

As part of the team developing the SDK I can tell you it’s AWESOME!  Not only will you be able to develop new channels from scratch, but you’ll also be able to convert your existing Flash content to a channel with minimal code changes.  When was the last time an SDK didn’t force you to completely re-write your applications from scratch?  Something that never works right anyway.

A litl peek under the covers reveals that we are building control and components (No, I can’t tell you what kind) that will help you get your channel up and running fairly quickly with minimal fuss and hassle.  In addition we are launching a developer site where you can sign up right now to be kept up to date on the latest SDK developments,  including a Simulator (built on AIR, for more check out Kat’s post about that very thing), AND we will be able to support Flex/Flash Builder developed applications in addition to those that are pure AS or that use some Flash IDE.  Fantastic

Litl to Release Software Development Kit (SDK) with Support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1
SDK to Launch May 14, 2010 at “Flash and the City” Conference

Boston, Mass – March 23, 2010 – Litl (litl.com) today announced that its litl webbook will soon feature a software development kit (SDK) with full support for Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1. The SDK will enable developers to create custom applications for the litl webbook using Adobe’s popular Flash platform. Litl plans to release the SDK – including a code library, simulator, code samples, and documentation – on May 14, 2010 at “Flash and the City” (flashandthecity.com), a developers’ conference in New York. Developers can learn more and join an email list at litl’s developer resource website (developer.litl.com).

The litl webbook is an innovative new Internet computer for the home. It can go online in a conventional laptop-like mode, rendering websites with a modern browser and built-in support for Flash. However, the computer can also stand upright like an easel when its screen and keyboard are flipped around its unique hinge. In this new mode, the litl webbook’s 12-inch screen becomes an ideal platform for displaying ambient web content ranging from photos and video to music and RSS feeds. The device also connects to large-screen televisions via a plug-and-play HDMI connection.

Alongside the litl webbook’s browser, users can also access web content through custom Flash applications or “channels. Channels transform web content to make it more useful and entertaining, especially in the litl webbook’s new “easel” mode. Channels custom-designed by litl and already available to users include Facebook, The Weather Channel, Flickr, Shutterfly, and BakeSpace. With the SDK’s release, users will benefit from a much larger selection of free and paid channels created by independent developers and partners.

“Our SDK is ideal for talented Flash Platform developers with creative ideas that will flourish on the litl OS,” said Chuck Freedman, litl’s chief channel evangelist. “The litl webbook provides a simple and enjoyable computing experience built on an innovative form factor, cool features and a clean user interface. With the launch of our SDK and Flash Player 10.1, we will provide developers with a very real ecosystem to monetize their development efforts and further enhance the litl user experience.”

“I’m quite excited about litl’s plans to release a public SDK with support for Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1. It represents a unique opportunity for the broader Flash community to get involved creating content for an interesting form-factor and innovative cloud-based operating system,” said noted mobile and device developer, author, and speaker Scott Janousek of the Boston-based firm, Hooken Mobile.

To learn more, developers should visit developer.litl.com and join the SDK’s email list. Developers are also invited to attend “Flash and the City” in New York from May 14-16. Representatives from litl will be on hand to introduce the SDK, share rollout plans, and help developers get started.

About litl

Based in Boston, litl is a new kind of computer company. The company was founded to make the web more enjoyable and entertaining for everyday consumers. Small and personal by design, we invite you to learn more at litl.com.

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I know what your thinking, “We already know about / use Facebook.  How is this different?”  Remember last time when I mentioned that there are *3* viewing modes to the litl webbook; Card, Laptop mode and Easel mode? Well the Facebook Status channel  is the perfect showcase channel for what can be done on the litl, 3 completely different way to display and play with the same data and show it in interesting and unique ways.

Most facebook apps just show you text and an icon.  We took that idea, put it in a blender, mixed in some good old fashion vaudeville fun, added a dash of  city life and pour in a tablespoon of WTF. The result is the sidewalk!  Using the sidewalk you can view your friends status updates in a completely new and fun way, a way that hasn’t been done before.

It’s also a great example of how a developer can authenticate with external websites and quickly absorb XML or JSON data.

I will admit, I’m biased about this channel, that’s because I’m the one who built it. No matter how impossible you might think this is, it’s all coded in AS2 running under Flash Lite.  Yes, it is.  Is to!  Seriously, there is no chicanery here.  No secretly packaged or hidden AS3 SWF buried somewhere doing all the work behind the scenes, it really is AS2.

It’s not using any third party code other than XML2Object. Even the authentication code is written from scratch, it had to be since Facebook officially dumped AS2, and the other libraries out there would have need extensive modification to work.  In other words, it’s all home grown and to a large extent very modular.

There is so much you can do with just this one application.  It really does show to difference in thinking that has gone into building the litl webbook.

How cool would it be to watch your Facebook feed on the television, possibly as a backdrop to a party!  Or better yet, have the feed showing via a projector at a conference and displaying peoples facebook comments about the event!  Way cool!

So by now I hope your asking yourself ‘how do I get this awesome channel!’.  For that you need a litl webbook.  If you already have one your in for pleasant surprise: it’s free!  Just go to the card catalog and download.  That’s it. Well, and make sure you have a facebook account.  Once you log in your goo to go!

Facebook Status enhances profile pictures and status updates by displaying a bustling sidewalk where friends drop in with a friendly wave to share the latest scoop.  You can either “lean forward” to browse updates and enter your own status, or “lean back” to enjoy a whimsical parade of your friends.  Connect your litl webbook to your TV using your HDMI cable, and you’ve got an entertaining fullscreen view that you can enjoy from across the room.  You can even use it as a backdrop at a party.