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Behind the Design: Graffiti, No Longer Just for Underpasses
One of the graffiti-covered walls at Firebrand Saints in Kendall Square. All photos by Charlotte Wilder for Boston magazine.
Street art isn't just for the street anymore, as Boston restaurants are now sporting graffiti-adorned walls. I stopped by three of the restaurants behind the recent movement: Firebrand Saints in Cambridge's Kendall Square, Backbar in Somerville's Union Square, and the soon-to-open Happy's Bar + Kitchen in Boston's The Fenway, to find out what is is about this gritty style that has restaurateurs whipping out their spray cans (well, rounding up artists with their spray cans) and tagging their walls.
Firebrand Saints, Kendall Square:
"Part of the aesthetic we were going for was using the space as a palate," says owner Gary Strack. "We weren't interested in hanging people's pictures up; we wanted to let artists come in and work." Strack has always been a big proponent of street art; he has a legal wall in Central Square where anyone can tag the space as they like. But while work on the Central Square wall gets covered up quickly, the inside space at Firebrand Saints is a more curated, longer-lasting framework.
"We like people to work around other people's work so it's a collaborative piece," Strack says. He adds, however, that if an artist "has better idea and wants to take the center, then they do that, and the person who was there before is gone. That's the great thing about street art—it's important and immediate, but it's not permanent."
The wall has been a runaway success: superstar graffiti artists from all over the country have lent their work to the space, such as Rene Gagnon, Kenji Nakayama, New York's enigmatic Momo (who once tagged the width of Manhattan with a single line), Thom Buildmore from Philadelphia, Michael De Feo, and many more. As Strack says, it's a "who's who of graffiti artists."
Hand-painted work isn't the only art on view at Firebrand Saints. Near the entrance, a projector draws a picture onto a blank wall in twenty seconds, keeps it there for about thirty, and then repeats the process with a new image. Strack told me that the project, built by Theo Watson and Emily Gobeille of tech/design studio SoSolimited, "is a Google street view that's updating live—essentially it's picking a destination and drawing it on the wall." This all happens in real time; the cars parked outside the restaurant that I saw when I walked in showed up in the projections. With this installation, Firebrand Saints is literally bringing the outside in, in a way that fits with Kendall Square's high-tech vibe.
Backbar, Union Square:
Backbar, Journeyman restaurant's adjacent bar sibling, has a wall with a similar a model to the one at Firebrand Saints. "My hope for this wall is to make it a rotating piece of art," says bar manager Sam Treadway. "We'll give the wall to different artists, and their work will stay for a few months or so; it's a big blank canvas to play around with."
The first artist to take over the "Backwall," as Treadway calls it, is Josh Wisdumb, a graffiti and abstract artist who was invited to this year's ArtBasel Show in Switzerland. Josh is hanging a few of his works on paper at Backbar this week as well, in order to compliment the work he did on the brick wall.
Josh isn't the only one lending his talent to Backbar's Backwall. Catherine Owens, a server at Journeyman, drew intricate chalkboard menus on the opposite wall. "This is starting a next chapter in her career," says Treadway. "She saw I was trying to draw on the chalkboard one day, and was like, 'Oh Sam, can I do that for you? 'cause you suck at it.'" Catherine started drawing the menu each day, and eventually decided to make a more definite rubric for the various offerings. Each panel took her about ten hours.
Chalk Art at Backbar from Catherine Owens on Vimeo.
"I don't understand how viral videos work," says Treadway, "but she made a time-lapse video [shown above] of her doing this chalkboard and got 45,000 views in one day." Owens has since done boards at RJ's Gourmet, a coffee-shop in East Cambridge, and is planning to do the board for the new Ball & Buck store on Newbury St.
Happy's Bar + Kitchen, Fenway:
Michael Schlow's new venture, Happy's Bar + Kitchen, mixes whimsy and story-telling with its graffiti. When asked about the graffiti artists who tagged the walls of the new Fenway spot, Schlow says, "The story I'm telling everyone is, you know what? I never even met them. They came in in the middle of the night, marked up the walls, and I kept it." He then, of course, told me the truth: the people who painted the space are local graffiti artists, who would prefer to remain anonymous (though, according to Thrillist today, they are affiliated with the high-end sneaker shop Bodega). "[The artists] were great to work with. I gave them very few directions other than I wanted a blue wall; they came up with the "Happy's" stretching around the corner and everything else."
To give his diner a culture and a theme, Schlow came up with a fictional backstory: that the Trilogy building (where Happy's is located) had to be built around an old Boston bartender, Happy, and his establishment. Schlow tells it best: "Happy had been an old school bartender, and people kept marking up his walls. So finally he said, 'You know what? It's colorful, do what you want,' and left the graffiti."
The billboard hanging by the bar fits with Schlow's vision; his fiancé came up with the idea, found one from 1951 from Seattle, and Schlow had it mounted on the wall.
Schlow's favorite part of the entire space is the section of wall above. He says he loves how it pops, and how it contains last part of Happy's name.
While I didn't make it in there, Schlow told me that the men's bathroom has the words "aim straight" stenciled over the urinals. "I want [the design] to be whimsical and funny without being gross or sophomoric," he says. "For me, as a chef and a restaurateur, the creative process is what makes this so much fun. You have a vision, an idea, and you think it might work, but you never know. You just start to put pen to paper."
While I can't necessarily see graffiti becoming the standard in Boston (not quite sure how Rialto would look all tagged-up), it will be interesting to see if other restaurants follow suit. You never know, perhaps a gang of spray paint-weilding hooligans will break into Clio one night, and Ken Oringer will keep the aftermath.
For more online food coverage, find us on Twitter at @ChowderBoston.


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Porsha's Embarrassing Behavior
Kenya weighs in on Porsha's confusion about the Underground Railroad.
My blog is dedicated to the freedom fighters and the brave people who fought for our rights to live in equality, to be educated, and for our civil liberties. I thank those activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and others. They risked -- and sometimes lost -- their lives in the name of freedom and equality.
I am particularly fond of the late President Nelson Mandela. His speeches and courage changed my life and how I see myself. Mandela changed minds, changed lives, and changed the world.
I initially dreaded going on this trip. I made a few wise cracks about Savannah being a small town with nothing to do. When in fact, it is one of the most beautiful and historically significant cities in the South. Particularly, because of ties it has to slavery.I'm not fond of ghosts, but there definitely was some unusual energy in the mansion. No, Kandi should not have taken the master bedroom. She was invited on this trip and she should have asked NeNe before claiming it out of respect and decorum. But I guess us "hos" were getting on her nerves. Why Porsha asked a complete stranger to sleep in the same bed with her… I can't be bothered.
Visiting the first African church was bitter sweet. Steeped in culture and history, I was amazed to see it first hand as I have other historical sites around the world. When the guide pointed out the actual markings that the iconic Harriet Tubman and or others used to identify the safe stops for slaves seeking freedom along the Underground Railroad, it was amazing to see.When Porsha was perplexed at how the train operated or "who went down there first to make room because they didn't have electric trains like we do now," I became incensed. Her late grandfather, Hosea Williams, was a prominent civil rights activist in Atlanta. It was crystal clear that Porsha did not know that the Underground Railroad was not a literal train!
Porsha is an embarrassment to her grandfather, his legacy, her family, and most importantly, herself. It's easy to laugh and call her dumb, but the reality is even more painful -- WE have failed her. Our educational system has failed her, anyone who coddled her or encouraged her to focus on her makeup, weave, and shoes to find a man to take care of her rather than her education has failed her. Anyone laughing at this gross ignorance has failed her. I encourage all people to teach our young girls to value the things that one cannot take away from you. A woman's value is not between her legs but between her ears.
Yes I'm messy! I ask the questions everyone wants to know. I wanted the dirt. Kandi was trying to be nice in the hot seat about her former fling with Mynique's husband Chuck. And of course it was fun to see Phony Phae Phae squirm at describing her jump off "relationship."
[video_clip_url:http://player.theplatform.com/p/PHSl-B/yT7k3t_YLXoZ/embed/select/hFMYp5DvDndO]I LIVED FOR:
Cynthia teaching Mynique how to "read" someone and look good while doing it.
NeNe singing hymns in the church... I was impressed with her voice.
Kandi telling Mynique she was hot in the '90s and everyone wanted her then.I have to admit I've watched this episode three times and still want to watch it again. It was the best so far! Be sure to watch us next week as it will be more fun with unexpected revelations and admissions.
Enjoy your holiday everyone. May you find peace, happiness, and love!
Merry Christmas!
IG: thekenyamoore
Twitter: Kenyamoore
Facebook: TheKenyaMoore


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Of men, Giants and Texas Greeks bearing fourth-down conversions
I once dated a fellow who fancied himself a die-hard Eagles fan.
I ONCE dated a fellow who fancied himself a die-hard Eagles fan.
He had the epidermal, obvious things covered fairly well. His "man cave" sported a giant, theater-quality flat screen that made the weekly viewing of the game a lifelike experience.
He knew the lingo, and would never say "make the first down" as opposed to "convert," or mistake a safety for a touchback.
He even had the body mass of a defensive end, although toward the end of our relationship his girth became a bit more offensive, if you get my drift.
In other words, the guy appeared to be a certified football fan (as opposed to the certifiable ones who, when kicked out of the imploded 700 Level, resorted to wandering aimlessly in the Linc's parking lot and muttering poignantly about better days).
Sadly, though, the man I could have married turned out to be an imposter.
It was a reality I pieced together in small but telling increments - things that separately meant very little but which told volumes when taken together.
The fact that he preferred to watch the Golf Channel instead of the pregame show on Fox was a clue.
So was the fact that he treated his Super Bowl party the way a woman on any of the "Real Housewives" franchises would; namely, all show and no substance. What I mean by this is that he would pay more attention to the menu and the ambience than to the game.
He actually cared more about whether his clueless guests (mostly the female ones) were having a good time than whether the "team that was not the Eagles" was executing on the field.
By most standards this made him a good man and a fine host, but it troubled me. I mean, I wanted Chuck Bednarik on Sundays, not Suzy Homemaker.
This person also preferred to watch the game in the comforting confines of his basement instead of roughing it out at the stadium. To me, this was unsettling. As a woman who had attended literally dozens of games in all types of inclement weather - including a Monday Night Special at the Vet when the wind chill was lower than Kim Kardashian's IQ - I couldn't understand how a man could actually prefer the crystal-clear reception of his hi-def toy to the fuzzy, alcohol-fueled maelstrom known as Eagles Nation.
Still, affection kept me holding on.
Then came the day that I learned he really didn't hate Dallas.
At that point, the writing was on the cinder-block wall.
To be truthful, the Eagles played a relatively small role in our breakup. But as I look back on the relationship so many years later, I realize that I never could have married a man who was so disconnected from my own Philadelphia reality: generational sports hatred.
I've sometimes mentioned to friends that, in the grand scheme of things, I probably hate the New York Giants more than the Cowboys. That's because New York is like that pretty, snotty cousin your grandparents like and treat better than you on holidays, whereas Dallas is the blond cheerleader who barely knows you exist.
Familiarity breeds more contempt. And yet, in my heart, I know that if I were in a desert with a Giants fan and a Dallas fan and had a flash of Christian charity, I'd share my last drop of water with the New Yorker. That's just how a Philadelphian rolls.
That's also why Sunday's regular-season finale is such an important game. More than a mere game, it's an epochal event. Not only will it determine whether the Eagles make it to the playoffs, it will be a pivotal chapter in the ongoing saga of good vs. evil that has played itself out lo these many decades in Philadelphia hearts (if not in Dallas minds.)
Even if Tony Romo doesn't play, there is such meaning to this battle between a surprisingly good Eagles team and the always-dangerous boys from Texas.
To those who love the classics, let me make this analogy. Every time these two teams meet, at least from the Philadelphia perspective, it's like the Iliad. Homer knew a little something about destiny and despair, and the capriciousness of the gods. To me, the Eagles have always been Trojans, star-crossed and destined for defeat, but noble warriors nonetheless. The Cowboys are the Greeks, beloved of Olympus (particularly the national-network broadcast deities) who get every possible break and march across the battlefield expecting their victory (which is usually handed to them by the referees).
Some of you may not like that analogy because the Trojans ended up losing the war. But real classic scholars also remember that one of those vanquished Trojans, Aeneas, ended up founding the eventual Roman Empire, which then conquered the Greeks in an epic slap down.
So, that is why I have faith in the team's ability to pull this one out on Sunday.
It is also why I'm very happy to still be single, with season tickets.


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According to a report in the venerable entertainment industry trade rag Variety, Zucker, president and CEO of NBC Universal, asked Apple for a cut of iPod revenue as part of the failed negotiations between the two companies over a contract extension for the right to sell NBC's shows on iTunes. (Thanks, Valleywag.) If that's true, wow.
A source familiar with NBC Universal's negotiations confirmed that the company asked for a slice of iPod revenue but only after Apple refused to budge on variable pricing.
"Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money," Zucker reportedly told The New Yorker's Ken Auletta during a benefit for former football powerhouse Syracuse University. "They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing."
The content industry has long had a beef with Apple's fixed pricing structure on iTunes. They would prefer to charge more for newer hit shows and less for older programs, but Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been firm on the $1.99 pricing for television shows on iTunes. Now, NBC and Zucker certainly have the right to decide what they want to charge for their content. And it's very early days for online video sales, so you can see how negotiations might have broken down over the pricing.
But seriously, you guys asked Apple for a cut of iPod revenue? Justifying it by claiming that they are making tons of money off your content?
I'm not even sure where to begin. First off, in earlier comments reported by Variety Zucker said that NBC took in only $15 million in revenue through iTunes during the last year of its deal. I'm not exactly sure when that began or ended, but in 2006 NBC Universal did $16 billion in revenue, according to parent company General Electric's annual report. So even if you tripled the amount of money NBC was taking in from iTunes sales a year, that would have only amounted to 0.3 percent of NBC Universal's revenue for the year. By comparison, NBC Universal's theme park business did $100 million in revenue.
So it's not like Apple screwed NBC out of all this revenue they would have otherwise been earning, although the network will get a chance to prove otherwise with the pending launch of its Hulu project and its own NBC Direct site. But that's not really the point.
How much revenue does Sony give NBC when it sells a television? How about Panasonic? Or Sharp? The idea that NBC thought Apple would agree to give them a share of iPod revenue is either the funniest or the most horrifying thing I've ever heard come out of the mouth of an high-profile executive like Zucker.
NBC may or may not need iTunes to distribute its content, and it will be interesting to see if it can build an online distribution model on its own. But does Apple really need NBC's content? I'm sure Apple would like to sell hit shows like Heroes or My Name is Earl on iTunes, but I can't imagine there's a network show good enough on television to justify Apple giving anyone a share of revenue from its crown jewel.
You have to have leverage to demand revenue from a prospective partner, like Apple did with AT&T over the iPhone. And that worked: the iPhone is AT&T's top-selling model, and brought hundreds of thousands of new customers to the carrier. Is Bionic Woman really going to bring thousands of new customers to iTunes?
I would have given anything to have been a fly on the wall when Zucker or one of his lieutenants made that pitch to Apple. Apple immediately retaliated after talks broke down, announcing plans to pull NBC's shows from iTunes before the contract between the two companies ended. They're still offering several shows, perhaps a signal that not all is lost, but I'll promise to watch an entire season of The Singing Bee if Zucker gets a cut of iPod revenue from Apple.
By the way, if you're going to start selling your own shows online, shouldn't you try to get a cut of PC sales from Hewlett-Packard and Dell, while you're at it?
CNET News.com's Greg Sandoval contributed to this report.


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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Along The Canals In A Gondola
Start time: 19:00
Place: Calle Vallaresso
Organizer: C.C.I.
An enchanting 30′ gondola tour in costume ending with a dinner in one of the best Venetian restaurant: the Do Forni . A classical way to celebrate Carnival, spending an evening with friends and meeting new ones, in the lively atmosphere created by our artists. Dress Code: costume
Partecipation costs: Euro 220


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Go back to Part Two
Part Three: Services that communicate
There's an almost mythological story about Amazon.com where founder Jeff Bezos made a list of the things he thought he could sell online, and then ordered that list so that the best items to sell would be at the top. Amazon first started selling books, his number one choice, and then moved down the list until it was selling all of the listed items.
At MSN, things didn't happen quite that logically. The company started as an online service and then moved into the online content business. But by the early 2000's, MSN was starting to gel. It had services like Hotmail and Messenger that were wonderfully popular but offered no true integration between them. Thanks to early work by Blake Irving--described as the "tip of the spear" in terms of the MSN turnaround--and then later by Mehdi and Cole, a more customer-centric approach began to turn things around.
Irving's early work can't be emphasized enough. After joining Microsoft in 1992, Irving was responsible for the company's first Internet video conferencing product and collaboration product, Netmeeting, and worked on Internet phone and Internet mail client software. Moving to MSN in 1998 with John Ludwig, Irving launched the MSN Messenger instant messaging service in 1999. That product is now in use by over 165 million customers every single day. That makes it an ideal outlet for exposing customers to other MSN services.
"When you think about services like Hotmail or Messenger, or Spaces, or the My MSN home page, those are a few of the services where you actually have to authenticate to the network," Adam Sohn, the Director of MSN Global Sales and Marketing PR, told me. "We know a lot about what our best customers are doing. And given that we're at about 380 million unique users a month, that's a pretty decent sized sample for us to know, in our network, what's resonating with people."
MSN also closely watches for integration points across all the experiences it offers. Sohn believes that is an outcropping of the reorganization MSN did, and a shift in the mentality down at MSN, "We're leading that wave across Microsoft, where you think more about what the user wants to accomplish, rather than trying to jam features into the shape of the application," he added. "It's a confluence of those things."
MSN Messenger and Spaces
The recently released MSN Messenger 7 and MSN Spaces are off to a torrid start. Messenger is now the number one IM service on earth, with over 15 million people using the service simultaneously each day, exchanging over 2.5 billion messages each day. There are over 4.5 million Spaces online, making it one of the largest blogging services on earth. Spaces, overall, gets over 180 million page views each month.
"Since it launched, we've been averaging about 160,000 Spaces created each day," Larry Grothaus, a Group Product Manager for MSN, told me. "Initially, it was about 300,000 a day, and then it leveled off. The important point is that a lot of the discovery [of Spaces] came from Messenger 7. And that's available for [manual] download today, but we haven't started the auto-update process on that. As that larger base out there gets it installed, and sees this new [Spaces] button, they'll [discover that new service]."
Sohn added, "there's this interesting social phenomenon with Messenger 7. You learn a lot about what's going on with your buddies before you even start talking to them. So you see a little flashing star--a Gleam--and you think, what the heck is that? And all of a sudden you're reading someone's Space, and it's like, damn, I want to get one of these. In some ways, that's a tightly constrained social network."
It's predictable that a product like MSN Messenger 7 would do well, as the previous versions were used by so many people. That MSN Spaces has jumped out of the gates so quickly, however, is somewhat astonishing. Not only are people starting up Spaces-based blogs, they're continuing to add content to them over time. "People are being very active," Sohn said. "In the beta--and I'm sure the numbers have gone up since then--we were seeing 5 million comments a day, and 1.8 million photos uploaded a day [on Spaces]. So this is something that people are not only starting, but also they're actually using. It's just so drop-dead easy to throw photos up there, that if all you want to do is scrapbooking, it's a great tool."
"As for the blogging ... for once, we're not too early," he added. "But we're just early enough for blogging for the mainstream. The blogosphere likes to say all kinds of things about where blogging is. But people want this level of communication. It's great just to be able to logon from a vacation and throw some photos up. You're just enhancing your relationships with people, and you can do that in lots of different ways. Online is one of them. It's a key component."
Next generation communications experiences
"This was a big release season for us with what we call the 'Wave 10' products, including Spaces, [MSN] Messenger [7], and Hotmail," Sohn says. "But I think in the next year, you're going to see us really turn up the volume. Right now, the Search volume is--if I can use a Spinal Tap metaphor--at 11, right? I think we're at about 9 with the communications services right now, and it's going to go to 11 over the next year."
One contacts store to rule them all...
To facilitate the next generation of communications services, MSN has developed a unified contacts store. "Again, we're thinking like the consumer thinks: There are a bunch of people I have relationships with," Sohn told me. "So when you get away from Search, which is about your relationship with information, communications is about the people who are important to you. And how do we pivot software-driven experiences around that metaphor?"
"There are people I care about. How do I communicate with them today? Well, there's email, there's telephone, there's instant messaging, there's in-person stuff. Now how do we drive a bunch of software-powered experiences there? One of the key things we realized was, it's ridiculous to have an address book in every single application you have, especially when they're online. If you think about something like Messenger, you can certainly look at your contacts offline, and you have email addresses for all of them, but ultimately, that's an online service. It works when you're online. Hotmail, too, is an online service, although there are offline ways to access it through MSN Premium or the [Microsoft Office Outlook Connector] offering. Still, it's this thing that lives out in the cloud, and it's always on, always there."
The unified contacts store--or ABCH (address book clearing house), as it is called internally--is a huge infrastructure investment that took MSN a couple of years to complete. Work on this technology came out of Irving's personal commitment to unify the madness of competing address books at Microsoft. He and his team played a veritable game of "whack-a-mole" for a couple of years, preventing other teams from trying to build yet another address book. For MSN, this is important work: The division has created both an infrastructure investment and is releasing features on top of that investment in a more rapid fire way than was possible in the past. "This way we innovate not only for consumers, but also move the state of the art in terms of operating large services and building new capability into the platform," Sohn says. "And all of this is built on the new innovations that go into Windows [client and server] as they are updated. So it is all part of an interesting cycle."
To the end user, the unified contacts store is essentially plumbing, but here's an interesting statistic: MSN has over 8 billion contacts in that database. "Without beating our own chests too broadly, because right now, as a social network, it is one of the biggest social networks on the planet. It might be the biggest. We really don't know. But in the next year, year and a half, you're going to see us start thinking about how we can provide experiences that can take advantage of that."
"We have to be super careful," Sohn adds. "You know we're held to a different standard. We have to be super, super careful with anything that even remotely touches privacy or user consent. Also, we don't want to inundate people with very complex relationship metaphors. For example, my mother should not ever have to think about her relationships in terms of a graph, or think about mesh networking, or peer-to-peer protocols. She should just think, hey, I want to talk to my son."
Social networking
Over the next year, MSN will also expand the social networking functionality of its communications services. What's the next-generation communications experience? "If we think about all the ways in which you communicate through MSN today, where we give you the unified contacts store, there's a bunch of presence information in there ... how do we bridge that to the offline world?" Sohn asked. "Is there a scenario where I can say, I just want to contact Paul, and then the network figures out the best way to do that? I see that he's online, so maybe I want to initiate a video conversation. Maybe down the road somewhere, I want to call you, and you're not online, but I have all your numbers in my contacts list, and my computer starts calling you."
"I see a future where my cell phone just becomes a communications device," he added. "When I'm in the house, maybe I'm doing a wire line sometimes; maybe sometimes I'm doing VoIP. When I leave the house, I'm out on Cingular's network. Inside the house, maybe there's something smart enough to tell me when I could be having a VoIP conversation handset-to-handset, handset-to-PC, or PC-to-handset. Or maybe there are times when it just makes sense for me to have a wire line conversation, and then that cell phone just becomes a cordless phone. Today, I have my cordless phone at home, I have a cell phone, and I have whatever it is I use with my PC. I have no one stored in my cordless phone, but I have six hundred contacts in my cell phone, and more than 150 people in my [MSN] buddy list. How do I unify all that and pivot the communications experience around what I'm doing? The next year is going to be about relationships between people and how to make those relationships more meaningful."
The future of MSN Music
MSN remains committed to MSN Music and promises to ratchet up the volume on that in the coming year as well. "We've got Plays For Sure on the platforms side," Sohn said. "You literally see a logo on a box and you know it's just all going to work. That's actually been a pretty successful campaign so far, but what it's done is really set the stage for unchecked device innovation. You're going to see, over the next year, the device guys come out with some very cool stuff. And we're going to continue to drive cool features into the music service."
What about the competition? Today, Apple's iTunes continues to dominate the online music world, despite recent advances from MSN, Napster, Yahoo! Music, and RealNetworks Rhapsody. "We made a choice," Sohn told me. "It's a rapid-fire innovation choice. If Apple wants to push out a bunch of new features in iTunes, they have to go and touch every client. We just have to change some things in the service. We've already done that a bunch of times. We've added the ability to gift people songs, now that just shows up. We added download cards. We just keep churning the innovation wheel and we can just deploy stuff on the site, and boom, new features appear."
MSN portal prototypes
MSN has also been working on interesting prototypes that might turn into next-generation versions of its MSN portal. Not coincidentally, Google's announcement last week about adding personalization to its own Web site looks suspiciously similar to some of this work.
"We have some prototypes, stuff we're just throwing over the wall, in order to see how it works," Sohn said. "There are some very interesting information-driven experiences if you go to start.com/1 or start.com/2. We've done some interesting work there. In that set of experiences, we're thinking about how people think about the information that's important to them in their lives."
Gathering data
"One of the most interesting things I saw when I first came back over to MSN was a design ethnography going on," Grothaus told me. "We have anthropologists and ethnographers on staff dedicated to going into home environments, and looking at everything people are doing, not just with computers. They see how people are using their PCs."
"That is just indicative of this mentality of just understanding how people want to relate to other people and how people want to relate to information," Sohn added. "Then we go back and figure out what role the PC can play today, what role it can play tomorrow, and what partnerships we need to establish with device makers. This idea of having anthropologists around, they're not computer scientists at all. They just understand people. They drive a deep understanding of what people are trying to get accomplished. And then we figure out how we can use software to help them."
"We believe in that. You've covered Microsoft long enough that you probably roll your eyes when you hear the various iterations of our mission statement... Realizing your potential. But ultimately, that's been true forever. We just believe that software can make a lot of stuff better. But I think we've gotten much smarter about understanding how that is. You need something to bridge that gap [between Microsoft and the consumer]. Our ability to do that is just awesome."
Elsewhere at Microsoft, other groups are now thinking about users the way that MSN does. The Windows team, for example, has really institutionalized this concept by coming up with a set of prototypical users, called personas. "If you're a program manager writing a spec, you'll have to explain which persona you're targeting, like Abby [an inexperienced user] or whatever," Sohn said, alluding to the personas posters that adorn the walls around the Windows division offices. "This is a shift the company is making. But MSN is on the frontlines with the consumers, we're the online business for the company, and we're just leading that charge. There are other pockets of interest too. Robbie Bach and the Xbox guys get the consumer for sure."
MSN and advertising
MSN is even trying to innovate with advertising, if you can believe that. For a customer-centric division like MSN, of course, advertising is a fine line to walk. You need the revenue, but you don't want to alienate customers with in-your-face pop-up windows and other annoyances.
"There are a couple of interesting trends going on in advertising," Sohn mentioned. "Number one, if you look at search advertising and even display advertising, the experience that advertisers have interacting with these networks today are horrible in terms of how they buy across these big networks, and how they track campaigns. So we piloted this thing called Ad Center. We realized that this was a big horizontal problem for our customers where software could make a difference. As you know, that's the kind of thing we get excited about. So we build a system. Today, we do that with a partner called Overture, which is now owned by Yahoo!, and we think that partnership with continue. But we also think that there are places where we can add a lot of value."
"The other thing that's interesting on the ad side is that there's been a shift in thinking from the big brands. When [advertisers] think about their online mix, they think about banners, and keywords in search, but they're also thinking more about branded entertainment experiences. We actually took one of our ad sales units and gave them a charter where they became the Branded Entertainment and Experiences team, and if you've seen the Sprite stuff inside of Messenger 7. It's a branded experience, powered by Sprite. Is it an ad? I mean, to us, it's an ad. But it's also a software-powered, fun experience that builds a relationship between that consumer and the brand, but doesn't interfere with what they're doing, and in fact can actually enhance that interaction."
Another example of these new branded entertainment experiences is the VW Spin Cycle, which links the Volkswagen brand with mood-based music playlists like "back roads," "morning commute," and "bad hair day." VW aficionados can watch VW advertisements, sign up for a newsletter, or even shop for a new car. On the road of life, Volkswagen says, you need a great soundtrack. It's an interesting concept that combines a beloved brand with consumers in a non-painful way. "We've moved over the past years from believing we were building a giant communications network years ago, to believing we are building the largest, socially, demographically, and geographically distributed audience for advertisers, brand and direct the world has ever seen," Sohn adds, "and the way we do that is building the leading edge services that delight customers and keep them coming back, so everyone wins."
When I speak with people from the Windows division at Microsoft about new product releases, there's always an unspoken assumption that I won't see these people again for many months or even years. With MSN, it's sort of a running joke that I'll often be speaking with them just days later. They just have so much going on.
"It's a very exciting time," Sohn said. "This is a Bill Gatesian thing to say about MSN, but as fired up as I am about the stuff we've done in just the last year or two, I feel like we've just finished laying the foundation across all of our services so that we can do the next wave of super cool stuff. I feel like the whole MSN division is inhaling, and as soon as that ends .... If people think we're fast now, or people think we're spry and nimble, you just wait. The next year is going to be just awesome. We're going to floor people over the next 12 months. We're ready to rock."


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After a slow start, Dell turns up the dial on Steam Machines
The viability of Steam Machines, a family of Linux-based PC gaming consoles with SteamOS, has been questioned, but Dell isn't giving up yet. With better hardware and an expanding list of gaming titles, Dell is hoping that interest in Alienware Steam Machines will grow.
The Steam Machine's rectangular console is based on a concept design from Valve, the world's largest independent game distributor. At the E3 show this week, Dell is announcing Steam Machines with faster graphics processors and chips. The systems will start shipping this week.
A lack of top gaming titles has hurt Steam Machines. The number of titles doesn't match that available for Windows, the focus of most PC game development.
It's a slow process, but as Dell improves the Alienware line, more attention is being paid to gaming in SteamOS and Linux, said Chris Sutphen, senior marketing manager at Alienware.
"We expect the SteamOS catalog to strengthen at the end of year," Sutphen said.
Steam Machines will get a boost from Vulkan, an API (application programming interface) that will improve graphics and gaming on mobile devices and PCs. Vulkan, which was released earlier this year, is already improving gaming on Linux and Steam Machines PCs, much like how DirectX 12 advanced gaming in Windows 10.
Vulcan will also make it easier to port DirectX 12 games to work on Steam Machines. It originally took a long time to port games from DirectX to OpenGL -- Vulkan's predecessor, introduced in 1991 by Silicon Graphics.
"Vulkan will speed up transition for SteamOS to AAA content," Sutphen said. AAA content refers to top-line gaming titles.
Gamers usually want the latest and greatest hardware, and one of Vulkan's strengths is to exploit GPUs to render powerful graphics. Dell is packing the latest chips into its new Alienware Steam Machines with the goal of matching gaming on Windows.
A new Alienware Steam Machine priced at $749 will have the Intel quad-core Core i5 chip based on the Skylake architecture, Nvidia's GTX 960 GPU, 8GB of DDR4 memory, a 500GB hard drive and 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
For more horsepower, a $899 Steam Machine will be loaded with a Skylake-based Intel Core i7 chip, an Nvidia GTX 960 GPU, 8GB DDR4 DRAM, a 1TB hard drive and 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
Both the new Steam Machines will have the Steam Controller and a content bundle. Dell said a version of the Steam Machines with AMD's GPUs could come later this year.
For budget customers, Dell will continue to offer the original Alienware Steam Machine, which started shipping last year for $449.
Dell also introduced faster versions of the Alienware Alpha with Windows, which offers better graphics performance, storage and connectivity. The systems can also run PC applications.
The new Alpha systems run on Intel Skylake processors, and could be configured with AMD's Radeon R9 M470X or Nvidia's GeForce GTX 960. Memory capacities range from 4GB to 16GB of DDR4 DRAM, while storage can be up to 2TB. Prices start at $599.
The new Alphas can also work with the latest GPUs through the Alienware Graphics Amplifier, a $199 external attachment that can bring additional graphics power to GPUs. The amplifier will bring virtual reality capabilities to the Alphas, said Frank Azor, general manager at Dell. The Amplifier will help gamers play games via Nvidia's upcoming Pascal GPUs at a later date.


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Exciting times. You can now play our puzzle game Triple Town in your web browser. We are releasing it as a beta and the game should evolve quite substantially over time. Huge kudos to Cristian Soulos for making this project blossom after a long winter. You can play it here.
Triple Town is a special game. It has the highest user rating of any of the games I've designed (94%). It is also the only one of my designs that I go back to again and again. Why is this?
The big addition for this release? Bears.
Bears, bears everywhere
Triple Town helped solidify how I construct the world and setting in my games. My inclination is to look for ways of supporting the emotions inherent in the game dynamics. If you've ever played the Kindle version, the design is a rather abstract puzzle game with highly symbolic tokens and mechanical rules. It has only the briefest of settings. Yet as I played the game and watched other play, I realized that it evoked an intense spectrum of emotions. Here were some of the ones that I noticed:- Pride: When you create a great city, you want to share it. People take screenshots. They brag. Pride in what they've built is the primary emotion that drives players of Triple Town.
- Curiosity: You want to know what the next item looks like. Some people are driven to get a castle for the first time.
- Hate: You learn to hate the teleporting Ninjas. They never attack you, but they end up blocking your plans.
- Sadness: You have slight sadness the first time you kill a bear. Then you learn to steel yourself against the emotion.
- Irritation: When fate gives you the wrong piece at the wrong time.
- Competition: When you notice that your friends are doing better than you.
- Despair: When you feel the board closing in and realize that you can't possible catch up to your friends.
- Relief: When the board is filling up and then you perform a miraculous move that empties a swath of the board and helps you start afresh.
(You can read a bit more on the theory of how games are unique suited to creating emotional experiences in my previous essay on Shadow Emotions and Primary Emotions. I include a small section at the end of this essay on the OCC emotion model that fits nicely with my process. Thanks, Aki!)
Tuning emotions
When I revisited the Triple Town design, the emotions were already clearly evident. However, I wanted to explore how I could more directly shape those emotions to fit my vision of the game.Emotions are complex to say the least so we need some sort of entry into the topic. There's a general consensus that you can divide emotions into rough categories. For example 'negative feelings toward others.' Then within those rough categories, you see variations that we recognize as distinct emotions. For example, hate and irritation are actually highly related and are typically related to a sense of loss or constraint caused by others. As a designer, how do I push the conditions that elicit a general class of emotion so that I can dial in the emotional variant that I desire?
There are a variety of theories. In Triple Town, I was influenced by the two factor theory of emotion and the somatic marker theory. Like many aspects of human cognition, multiple inputs are necessary to create the final refined experience. The 'taste' of wine is synthesized out of the actual chemical taste and the perceived quality of the wine. A five dollar wine labeled as a 100 dollar wine can be perceived to taste better than that same wine in it's original bottle. Similarly, we posit that our brain synthesizes most common primary emotions out of the following:
- An ambiguous physical response (your adrenaline jumping and your heart rate elevating)
- The system-derived context of the situation you are in.
- Recalled cognitive labels of related past experiences.
- If you can evoke a general class of emotions with game mechanics, then you can apply evocative stimuli to label and therefore tune that response to elicit a specific emotion.
Monsters or children?
Consider a very basic example of labeling in Triple Town. The raw materials I was working with was an observation that players felt immense sense of relief when they killed annoying NPCs. I experimented with applying various labels to see how we could tune the response.- Pass 1: During one early prototype, the NPCs were accidentally displayed as small children. Naturally, players felt bad when trapped them and they turned into grave stones. Accidental deaths led to guilt and sadness while deliberate deaths evoked a dissonant feeling of cruelty.
- Pass 2: So next we switched them to evil looking monsters. This was a dramatic change. Now players felt righteous glee when they trapped and killed the monsters.
- Pass 3: Finally, during this latest build, I settle on bears that have slightly evil looking eyes. Most players feel fine killing the bears, but for some there is a slight edge of ambiguity that makes them uncomfortable.
- Future passes: Now that I've explored the emotional space a little, I've set up the bears so that with one simple tweak of the eyes, I can make the bears incredibly cute and bring back many of the feelings of guilt and sadness.
In essence, I was balancing and tuning the player's emotional response. Much like Sid Meier using a binary search ("double it or or cut it by half") to narrow in on the correct setting in his game, I was trying out various extremes to narrow in on the appropriate emotion.
Using evocative imagery is a common enough practice, but in practice the labeling of NPCs is functionally quite different than merely putting up a picture or cut scene of a dead child. The bear is not an image for the sake of being an image. Instead you create a distinct label that is only meaningful due to how it builds upon an emotional foundation derived from play. Without the mechanics, you just have a picture of a bear. With the mechanics setting the context and providing the raw emotional reactions, you craft a carefully refined emotional moment.
Avoiding dissonance
With the children images in the first pass, I saw an example of dissonance. It is easy to add a poorly fitted label that confuses the emotions the mechanics are eliciting.The heart of Triple Town are the strong feelings of pride and accomplishment. These comes directly from the rather amazing investment in extended tactical play that the player exerts when creating their 6x6 city. A well crafted city can represent hours of carefully considered labor.
In the Kindle version of the game, I used the sort of end game tropes that you find in Tetris or Bejeweled. You play the game, you get a score and then move onto the next game. Most designers rely on proven fallbacks to get the job done since it is difficult to always be reinventing the wheel.
Unfortunately, this 'obvious' design choice conflicted rather painfully with the slow and steady building of pride. There comes a point at which the player presses a button and in the act of creating a new game, erases all their hard earned progress. It is surprisingly how many times I've let the game sit on the last screen, not willing to leave it behind. The label of 'its just a game session that you finish and move on from' didn't fit the emotional response that the other systems were creating.
- 1st pass: The first attempt at fixing this involved added coins so there is some persistent resource you take with you after each city. That helps a little, but not enough. Coins are merely a resource and players weren't sad because they were losing some simple generic token.
- 2nd pass: The second attempt involved the ability to flip back and look at your city a last few times before you move on. This was quite effective since it lets the player say goodbye. The emotional dissonance was channeled into an activity that let players come to terms with it at their own pace. This still isn't good enough.
Deriving the world's metaphor from gameplay
These individual emotional moments form a unique emotional fingerprint for Triple Town. Due to dissonance, you can't simple apply any theme to this set of dynamic emotions and still end up with an emotionally coherent game. Instead, you want a theme that fits the mechanics like a glove where the emotional beats elicited by the system dynamics have a clear connection with the labels you'd applied.With Triple Town, as with most of my designs, the theme and metaphor for the world came from watching people play. I would observe and note the emotions and then ask questions about the fundamental nature of the experience that was evolving. Is this a game about exploration? Creation? Building? If it is a game about building, what is a related theme that matches the current unique fingerprint? Are you building real estate? A tomb? What are those NPCs doing if that is the case?
After playing many hundreds of hours of Triple Town, I settled upon a metaphor that fit all the nuances of the mechanics. Triple Town is a game about colonization. Consider the following common dynamics and how labels derived from the metaphor tie them together in a coherent setting.
- You've been ordered by the empire from across the sea to build a new city on virgin territory.
- In the process, natives (depicted as less than human) keep showing up on 'your' land. They never attack you, but they keep preventing you from expanding.
- So you push them off to the side. More experienced players create small reservations and pack the natives in as tightly as possible.
- Due to overcrowding the natives die off en mass.
- You use their bones to build churches and cathedrals.
- When particularly difficult natives appear that seek to escape your reservations, you bring out your overwhelming the military might and remove the pest so you can continue with your manifest destiny.
What started as an abstract game is slowly but surely turning into a rich world. What is beyond the city walls? Long term, the themes of colonization, imperialism and the impact on native cultures will unfold over a series of planned game expansions. With slight variations in labeling, I should be able to tune in a variety of powerful emotions related to the theme of colonization.
Differences from traditional theme generation
I find this bottom ups, mechanics-centric method of theme generation quite different from a traditional process of storytelling. In a narrative heavy game, I think about characters, plot, or message first and foremost and then attempting to fit supporting gameplay into the mix. Often you pitch the world and characters to a publisher and then are expected to come up with gameplay that fits. Consider the implications of these two popular styles of narrative-first development:- Unique mini-games and puzzles used to support narrative: One extreme example of this is your typical adventure game where instead of a core mechanic, you have a series of plot appropriate puzzles. The emotional aspects of the puzzle (frustration, delight) are only marginally related to the emotional beats of the plot. Also, in order to avoid dissonance with the wide variety of emotional beats that the story requires, the style of the puzzles is switched up on a regular basis. It is hard enough balancing one game, but asking the team to balance dozens of tinier games results in shallow systems throughout. I think of this as chopping up gameplay to fit the story.
- Generic gameplay that supports the narrative: A Japanese RPG like Final Fantasy repeatedly uses turn-based tactical combat to illustrate story beats. The time-tested tactical combat system usually produce a handful of primary emotions such as loss, victory, relief, feeling powerful and feeling powerless. No matter what story is being told, the same system is called upon to provide emotional support. Such a pattern avoids dissonance the majority of the time, but then when the plot veers into non-combat area, the dissonance comes back full force. I think of this as telling more story than the gameplay can naturally support.
Now I follow a different philosophy that better reflects these costs. Gameplay comes first and the worldbuilding are flow from the dynamics of play. If, as you iterate upon gameplay you make a rule change that breaks the emotional connection with a particular world, you should feel very comfortable tossing that world aside and starting fresh. Create a world that supports the game, not the other way around.
The amount of theming and world building in Triple Town is still quite light. Those of players used to the extravagant productions that burden a game with an overworked story may not even recognize the labels I've choosen as having an impact on your experience. Yet they do and most players will feel the emotional beats of the game quite clearly.Nothing I've outlined here is new. The important insight for me has been creating the labels and world for a game as a bottoms up process. You start with the mechanics and then find the labels that fit the emotional beats. From this game play foundation, you build the world.
Enough rambling! Go play Triple Town. It is still a beta so let me know what you think.
take care,
- Play Triple Town!: http://apps.facebook.com/tripletown
- Original design essay on Triple Town: http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/10/triple-town-released-for-amazon-kindle.html
- Introduction to primary emotions: http://www.lostgarden.com/2011/07/shadow-emotions-and-primary-emotions.html
- Games without Frontiers: http://acta.uta.fi/pdf/978-951-44-7252-7.pdf
Cheat sheet: Steps for tuning primary emotions
Here's the process for tuning emotions- Create a playful system.
- Observe the emotional reactions of the player within that system.
- Adjust the system's emotion eliciting conditions to increase or decrease particular raw emotional reactions.
- Once you have a rich set of desired emotional responses, brainstorm natural labels that refine the emotions.
- Test the labels and see how they elicit specific emotional variations.
- Bundle the labels into a metaphor for your game that communicates and amplifies its unique emotional fingerprint.
Note: OCC Model of emotions
Aki Järvinen's thesis "Games without Frontiers" (pdf) pointed me towards a fascinating model of emotion by Ortony, Clore and Collins (OCC). It posits that emotional outcomes are tied to systemic variables. For example the strength of a player's dissapointment would be tied to the variable 'likelihood'- Low likelihood: If the player predicts a particular result, but they know from past experience that it is highly unlikely, they typically won't be overly dissapointed.
- High likelihood: Yet the likelihood is high and the outcome doesn't occur, dissapointment will also generally be more pronounced.
There is far more work to be done applying these ideas to game development, but as it stands the conceptual framework is already really quite powerful. I've referenced here several useful OCC Charts that Aki assembled that list conditions, variables, main emotional categories and emotional variants. (I do recommend you read the full thesis. It gives a bit more context and it also one of the more clearly written works and easily consumable works to come out in recent years.)
Note: Surrealism in video games
Often the best video games have disjointed, narratively surreal worlds. Mario, Pacman, Katamari, Bejeweled and even a game like Portal take place in distinctly surreal locations that obey the logic of association, but are freed from the logic of the real world. Even more interesting is that despite immense amounts of effort making our labeling systems externally consistent (They aren't 'save points', they are regen tanks), the vast majority of players happily engage in surrealist worlds with nary a complaint. If anything, the unnecessary justification introduces more unnecessary dissonance into the game by asking the player to pay attention to details that don't functionally matter.I see this surrealist aesthetic as the practical outcome of deriving the world from the emotional beats of the gameplay. The constantly tuning and tweaking of various labels needed to bring out the best parts of your game fragments the traditional narrative process. Why is there a walking turtle? Because it fits the mechanics like a glove. That is all the justification that is required and layering on more burdens both the experience and the development process. In the end, light surrealist labels are a positive thing since they gives you substantial wiggle room to avoid dissonance. And due to the solid fit with existing emotional dynamics, they often yields stronger game-centric experiences.


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Note: All meeting dates, time, and locations based on the current Who's Who as downloaded from MyLCI.
If any are incorrect update your Club's Data on MyLCI and Email the District IT. firstname.lastname@example.com
An event every month that begins at 11:30 am on day Second of the month, repeating indefinitely
Des Moines Embassy Club, 34th Floor, Ruan Bldg.


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Will we soon see the flowers of Edinburgh in full bloom in the depths of winter? This possibility is considered in a new study into the impact of global warming on spring flowering, published September 10 in the International Journal of Climatology. Data, taken from records dating back to the late nineteenth century, has been used to demonstrate the impact of global warming and to predict the effect further warming will have on plant life by the year 2080.
The study, by Dr Malcolm Clark and Prof Roy Thompson, is based on the facts that plants control the timing of flowering by adapting to the local weather and climate and that throughout the past century global warming, driven by ever rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, has resulted in local climate changes which are likely to steadily increase.
"Already there is a great deal of observational evidence of regional changes in climate associated with global warming," said Clark. "We have not only seen an earlier break up of ice on rivers and melting glaciers, but also the early emergence of insects, egg laying by birds and the flowering of plants. This new model allows us to refine predictions of the future impact of warming on plant and animal life across much of the world."
Clark and Thompson worked from a wealth of old records from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, which started in 1850. They also analysed records of Edinburgh's climate from records dating back to 1775. With this information they investigated the responses of 79 species of plant to air temperatures.
Using this data Thompson and Clark establish the relationship between air temperature and first flowering date and have used their new statistical model to predict likely changes in spring flowering in Scotland based on three potential global warming scenarios. For every 1 o C that the climate warms they predict that spring flowering will begin approximately 11 days earlier. For an increasingly oceanic climate (greater winter than summer warming) their model predicts shifts in the botanical season ranging between 16 days at the start of spring and 12 days at the end of spring. For an increasingly continental climate predictions range between 7 days at the start of spring and 11 days at the end of spring.
Clark and Thompson checked the results of their statistical model with other data sets from across the world, indicating that their results are not limited to one country.
"Although the study is based on plant life in Scotland, our phenological models apply across regions spanning hundreds of thousands of square kilometres," said Clark.
Thompson points out that "Recent climate projections based on the most comprehensive modelling yet carried out show that warming could be double that of estimates made only 6-years ago, with median surface warmings of 5.2 degrees being the most likely. At Edinburgh this would result in many plants flowering, and coming into leaf, two months earlier than today. This would lead to large desynchronisations, as other plants would continue to behave normally. But how significant is a two month change? Harold Wilson once famously said "A week is a long time in politics". That sentiment is also a good rule-of-thumb in ecology. For example for forests just one week's difference to the start of growth makes a big difference to timber production."
Using their results Thompson and Clark have been able to construct a global map demonstrating 'desynchronisation' of plant and animal life in the year 2080. The map shows that maritime climates including Western Europe, the American Atlantic coast, New Zealand, Chile and North Africa will be the greatest effected as their botanical calendar will move strongly out of sync with the seasons.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Wiley-Blackwell. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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The Path of the warrior is long and perilous. Many challenges await Ranma Saotome as he walks this unending road, including the most dangerous opponent of all: himself… (Adventure) Ranma ½. (Click image for full-size view) |
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Before I get into tonight's post, I have a fun announcement! I reviewed Texas Chainsaw Massacre from an animal rights perspective on the fabulous Our Hen House podcast this week. And I'm in the same episode as vegan actress Emily Deschanel. You must listen!
Last year, my friend Leslie launched The Magical Traveling Vegan Potluck, which had a good several months-long run of moving from one friend's house to another before it fizzled out. But she just moved in with our mutual friend Michael, and she's bringing the potluck back. We had the first return potluck at their place last night.
If all goes as planned, the potluck will be hosted by one friend or another each month. We had a great turnout last night with lots and lots of yummy vegan food!
Since I'm working on my retro vegan cookbook, I decided to work on crafting a cheeseball recipe. Cheeseballs are totally 70s, right? After some tweaking and experimenting, I came up with these Mini Walnut and Cheddar Cheeseballs.
I made eight small balls. My plan was to make one big ball, but the soft vegan cream cheese in the recipe was too soft to get the cheese to roll into a ball. So I froze small balls in muffin tins and then de-frosted before serving with crackers. I finally got a chance to use my cheese board and cheese knives! See, vegans can still have cheese.
Speaking of cheese, Cassi made a delicious cheesy Vegan Lasagna from Vegan Planet using Daiya and tofu ricotta. I could have eaten this whole pan. But I was nice and saved some for the other guests.
Greg brought his famous Tofu Nuggets. These are like little chicken nuggets, and they're awesome. He has to bring these for every potluck now because someone always requests them. Last night, he whined about being a one-hit wonder. But hey, if the people want tofu nuggets, give them tofu nuggets, dude.
Michael and Julie brought a fresh Cucumber, Tomato, and Beet Salad made with produce picked from a garden in Jonesboro (my hometown!).
Vaughan, always the creative cook, made an interesting dish using lentils, broccoli, cashews, and almonds. He typically just throws stuff in a pot and never makes the same thing twice. But it's always good!
Leslie made so much stuff!! And since she's really into Indian food, she treated us to all sorts of interesting dishes. There was Pani Puri — fried hollow crisps stuffed with chickpeas, potato, and chutney. I've had these in Indian restaurants, but it was way more fun stuffing my own pani puri in Leslie's kitchen.
And there was my very fave, Bhel Puri! Indian chaat dishes are my favorite things, and I love this crunchy snack of sev, puffed rice, veggies, and tamarind sauce.
For dessert, Leslie made the most amazing Mango Custard. I couldn't stop eating this. It had fresh slices of apple, banana, and mango floating in a lightly sweet soy-based custard. It's a dish I often see on Indian buffets but can never try because it's typically made with dairy.
To drink, Leslie made homemade chai, but I forgot to photograph it. And she made Rooh Afza. This is a sweet Pakistani syrup that tastes lightly of rosewater, and you mix it with water. It's so refreshing and summery. I love that the label says "summer drink of the east."
Autumn stopped by Muddy's Bake Shop and picked up some Vegan Almond Brothers Cupcakes. Muddy's is a very popular local cupcake shop that always has a few vegan flavors. These were the business.
Here's a full table shot!
I ate so much! And Leslie sent me home with some leftovers, which I had for lunch today. Can't wait til the next month's potluck. I'm so lucky to have amazing vegan and vegetarian friends who can cook!
Sunday, August 25, 2013
6 comments:
- Diana @ VeggieNextDoor said...
Yum! I love Vegan Potlucks. Bhel Puri is my favorite Indian dish too.
Also, I listened to the Our Hen House Podcast today and you did a fabulous job! Thank you so much for reviewing the movie because, just like Mariann and Jasmin, I was interested in hearing about it, but too much of a wimp to see the movie myself :-) - August 25, 2013 at 8:24 PM
- jess (of Get Sconed!) said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- August 26, 2013 at 1:48 AM
- jess said...
These are some glorious, er, cheeseballs!
- August 26, 2013 at 1:48 AM
- MeloMeals said...
wow.. what awesome eats!
- August 26, 2013 at 2:15 PM
How exciting and fabulous! Looks so delicious!
- August 26, 2013 at 9:24 PM
- vegan.in.brighton said...
Yay, I love a good potluck and any potluck with a cheeseball would be a winner in my eyes!
- August 28, 2013 at 12:42 PM
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The stock closed at $24.48 on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, well above the initial public offering price of $17 per share on Wednesday, giving the company a market value of $28.3 billion, on a par with CBS Corp (CBS.N) and Target Corp (TGT.N).
At one point the stock hit a high of $26.05 and a market value of $29.1 billion.
The owner of Snapchat, an app popular with young people for its disappearing messages, raised $3.4 billion in its IPO on Wednesday, more than the $3 billion Facebook Inc (FB.O) offered to pay for the company in 2013.
With a full greenshoe option to issue more shares likely to be exercised, the company is poised to increase its deal size to $3.9 billion.
That makes it the biggest U.S. technology IPO since Alibaba Group Holding Inc (BABA.N) in 2014, despite the fact that Snap has never made a profit.
Secretive Snap co-founder Evan Spiegel, who usually favors sweats or a button-down shirt, showed up to the floor of the exchange in a suit and tie to ring the opening bell before leaving the building to watch festivities away from the spotlight he famously avoids. He earned $272 million on the offering.
Among the traders on the floor, men and women carried the company's video-camera glasses called Spectacles and stuffed versions of Snap's smiling ghost mascot.
The IPO has tested investor appetite for a social media app that is popular among people under 30 for applying bunny faces and vomiting rainbows onto selfies, but has yet to convert the cool factor into cash.
Despite a nearly seven-fold increase in revenue, Los Angeles-based Snap's net loss widened 38 percent last year to $514.6 million. It faces intense competition from larger rivals such as Facebook's Instagram as it grapples with decelerating user growth.
Snap launched its shares into a hungry market. The order book was more than 10 times oversubscribed and Snap could have priced the IPO at as much as $19 a share, but the company wanted to focus on securing mutual funds as long-term investors rather than hedge funds looking to quickly sell, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Underwriters often price their IPOs below where they estimate demand in order to maximize the chances of a first-day spike.
Such a pop, though it can be positive for a company's morale, does not ensure long-term success. Shares of social media company Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) surged 93 percent when they first opened on the New York Stock Exchange in 2013, but are now trading at $15.84, down nearly 40 percent from the $26 IPO price and nearly 70 percent from the opening price of $50.09.
The New York Stock Exchange carried out a trial run last week to make sure the third-biggest technology IPO ever went smoothly. Nasdaq Inc (NDAQ.O) received intense criticism for botching Facebook's 2012 IPO when its technology was unprepared for the level of demand for the shares.
Jeffrey Sprecher, chief executive of Intercontinental Exchange Inc (ICE.N), the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, stood in front of the trading post to monitor the hours-long pricing process, emphasizing the importance of the IPO going smoothly.
Snap's offering was well timed, with investors clamoring for fresh opportunities after 2016 marked the slowest year for tech IPOs since 2008. The broader market has also been buoyed in the months following the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, with the benchmark S&P 500 .SPX surging more than 11 percent since the Nov. 8 election, helped by optimism about the Republican administration's domestic proposals, including plans to reform taxes paid by businesses.
The S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite all hit record highs on Wednesday.
"The environment is terrific. Animal spirits are running through the streets here," said Stephen Massocca, senior vice president at Wedbush Securities. "What better time to price?"
The launch could encourage debuts by other so-called unicorns, tech startups with private valuations of 2 billion or more.
Investors bought the shares despite them offering no voting power, an unprecedented feature for an IPO at odds with rising concerns about corporate governance from fund managers looking to gain influence over executives.
To justify its relatively high valuation and fend off concerns about slowing user growth, Snap has emphasized how important Snapchat is to its users, how long they spend on the app and the revenue potential of the emerging trend for young people to communicate with video rather than text.
By Lauren Hirsch – reuters.com


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Base-station receivers for next-generation wireless systems must deliver higher performance at lower cost than their predecessors. The direct-conversion receiver architecture is a good candidate to satisfy these conflicting requirements. Although the approach has been applied to different designs in the past, performance has been compromised by limitations in available hardware, including demodulators. Fortunately, the improved performance of commercial integrated-circuit (IC) quadrature demodulators make direct-conversion receiver designs viable alternatives to traditional superheterodyne receiver architectures.
To better understand the benefits of direct conversion, it might make sense to compare the receiver approach to a superheterodyne system (Fig. 1), commonly used because of its high selectivity and sensitivity. In a superheterodyne receiver, the received RF signal is filtered by the first RF preselection filter to remove out-of-band signals, and then boosted by the low-noise amplifier (LNA). The second RF preselection filter at the LNA output provides additional filtering to attenuate undesirable signals at the image frequency. The resulting signal is then translated to a lower, intermediate frequency (IF) by a downconversion mixer in conjunction with a local oscillator (LO). The IF must be sufficiently high that the image channel falls is within the filter's stopband. Such image-rejection considerations usually dictate that the IF should be on the order of 10 percent of the carrier frequency. The RF preselection filters serve to remove out-of-band energy and reject the image-band signals. Since a superheterodyne receiver performs the channel-filtering function in the IF and baseband stages, aggressive dynamic-range requirements are imposed on the components in these stages.
For superhetero-dyne receivers in base stations, a fixed-gain LNA is typically used for initial amplification of the received signals. The entire passband, including noise, is translated in frequency to a fixed IF. For the frequency downconversion, a passive (diode) mixer is most often utilized in order to meet the dynamic-range requirements of high linearity and low noise, although high LO power (greater than +10 dBm) is needed to drive such a mixer. Poor LO-to-IF isolation, typical of passive mixers, complicates the LO filtering in the receiver's IF section. At the IF output of the mixer, the desired signal channel always resides at the center of the IF channel-select filter, which is used to remove unwanted adjacent or alternate channels.
Following the IF channel-select filter, the desired channel is boosted by a variable-gain amplifier (VGA) and then demodulated to baseband for further signal processing. The high-quality-factor (Q) IF channel-select filter passes desired signals and rejects unwanted signals, including larger-amplitude alternate-channel signals. Unfortunately, such selective filters are expensive and add undue cost to the superheterodyne receiver. Moreover, high-Q filters are typically accompanied by high insertion loss requiring additional gain in the LNA and mixer stages to offset the filter loss and lower noise figure in the VGA.
Since the LNA gain is fixed in the base-station receiver, the mixer in particular must achieve very high linearity to meet the system's strict dynamic-range requirements. Moreover, the IF channel-select filter has a frequency response precisely tuned to the required channel bandwidth. The inflexibility of the IF channel-select filter limits the receiver hardware to a single RF standard. Because of the proliferation of standards for wireless communications, however, new receiver systems must support a variety of different standards seamlessly and cost-effectively, with limited cost budget for any one standard.
The direct-conversion receiver architecture can achieve the goals of a superheterodyne design, but with considerably less complexity (Fig. 2). In this system, the received signals are amplified with a fixed-gain LNA after the first RF preselection filter. Subsequently, the RF signals are directly downconverted to in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) baseband signals without an intervening IF stage. The requirements for the second RF preselection filter are less stringent than for the first, because there is no image channel. In practice, an inexpensive RF bandpass filter can prevent strong out-of-band signals from overloading the I/Q demodulator. . After the RF signals are demodulated to baseband, individual channel selection is performed using a baseband channel-select filter. The baseband filter is more compact and less expensive than the superheterodyne receiver's IF channel-select filter. In addition, the baseband channel-select filter can be designed with variable bandwidth, facilitating multi-mode or multi-standard operations.
Although baseband channel-select filters offer a great deal of flexibility, the composite baseband signals contain all of the adjacent-channel blocking signals that are normally filtered before they reach the I/Q demodulator (see Fig. 1). As a result, the direct-conversion-receiver's I/Q demodulator must provide a dynamic range as wide as 80 dB.
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Fortunately, the LT5515 and LT5516 I/Q demodulators from Linear Technology (Milpitas, CA) are among a handful of commercial products that provide this kind of performance. The two ICs each integrate the functionality of an RF signal splitter, a precision quadrature LO signal splitter and two high linearity downconverting mixers. The chips directly downconvert an RF signal to baseband, and demodulate the in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) signal components. The devices' matched I and Q channels ensure precise gain and phase matching, so that significantly less calibration is required. The LT5515 operates from 1.5 to 2.5 GHz while the LT5516 handles an RF input-signal range from 0.8 to 1.5 GHz. The chips also integrate single-pole, lowpass filters with 260-MHz bandwidth on each of the I and Q channels (see table).
Both direct-conversion quadrature modulators achieve impressive amplitude and phase balance between signal channels. The gain levels between I and Q arms of the LT5515, for example, are maintained within 0.3 dB of each other, while the phase balance is within 1 deg. For the lower-frequency LT5516 quadrature demodulator, the gain matching between the I and Q channels is within 0.2 dB while the phase matching is within 1 deg. or less. The devices are rated for RF and LO differential voltages of ±2 V (an equivalent level of +10 dBm) and maximum power-supply voltage of +5.5 VDC. They are rated for operating temperatures from −40 to +85°C and are supplied in 16-lead plastic QFN packages with exposed leads; the square packages measure just 4 mm on a side.
The efficient demodulators provide a shutdown mode in which only 20 µm current is consumed. The turn-off and turn-on times for the shutdown mode are typically 120 and 650 ns, respectively.
The LT5515 and LT5516 demodulators are ideal for receivers requiring good linearity and wide dynamic range, such as wireless base stations (for GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, etc.) and wireless infrastructure equipment, as well as instrumentation applications. Direct-conversion receiver ICs such as the quadrature demodulators eliminate the need for additional IF stages and relax the demands on high-frequency filters, especially by eliminating the IF channel-select filter. With their +20 dBm input third-order intercept (IIP3) and +50 dBm input second-order intercept (IIP2), the quadrature demodulators meet the strict dynamic-range requirements of base-station receivers.
One concern with direct-conversion receiver architectures is spurious LO leakage. This problem arises when a small amount of LO energy is coupled to the I/Q demodulator input, either from the antenna or by means of another path. The LO leakage can mix with LO itself to generate DC offset. Depending upon the LO leakage path, the carrier feedthrough may superimpose large, possibly time-varying DC errors on the desired baseband signals. In the base-station infrastructure, however, because the receiver systems are typically stationary, the DC offset caused by LO self-mixing is likely static, rather than time varying. Because the LT5515 and LT5516 employ active rather than passive mixers, only −5 dBm LO power level is required rather than the +10 dBm typically needed with passive mixers. Thanks to good isolation between the LO and RF ports, the LO leakage is minimized to a mere −46 dBm for the LT5515 and −65 dBm for the LT5516. Consequently, only a few millivolts of static DC offset may result from the LO self-mixing.
Another concern of the direct-conversion approach is DC offsets caused by device mismatches. Mismatch-induced DC offsets can originate from the quadrature demodulator and/or the VGA. DC offsets at the quadrature demodulator's outputs will not in themselves cause receiver malfunctions or performance degradation. However, due to the limited VGA voltage headroom, a few millivolts of DC offset may be enough to significantly reduce the signal swing or possibly saturate the VGA when it operates in high-gain mode with the gain as high as 60 dB, thus degrading the receiver's effective dynamic range. To handle a large blocking signal, the LNA gain is usually limited to the 20-dB range, so that the desired signal level reaching the mixer under weak-signal conditions may be on the order of a few hundred microvolts. Thus, the accumulated DC offset with reference to the VGA input must be controlled to less than that level. DC offset cancellation or AC input coupling is required to properly operate the VGA for further baseband signal processing.
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Most infrastructure base stations work in full-duplex mode, albeit with receiver and transmitter at different frequencies. The settling time of the DC voltages is less of a concern in this type of receiver system. In many modern wireless receiver systems, the baseband signals contain little low-frequency information. This allows the I- and Q-channel outputs of the LT5515 and LT5516 demodulators to be AC-coupled to the baseband filters or VGA through a blocking capacitor, effectively eliminating DC offsets. Since each of the I-channel and Q-channel outputs of the LT5515/LT5516 is internally connected to the supply voltage through a 60-Ω resistor, the resulting output highpass filter's −3-dB rolloff frequency is defined by the RC constant of the blocking capacitor and the output resistive load Rload, for Rload sufficiently large (much greater than 60 Ω).
When DC coupling of the LT5515/LT5516 to the baseband circuits is required, a digital offset removal method can be employed at the baseband VGA inputs. The DC offsets may be estimated and removed using the baseband processor at each VGA setting. Although the DC offset will not impact the RF performance of the receiver, it must be cancelled in order for the VGA to operate properly. The spectrum loss around DC can be as low as a few Hertz. For a half duplex system, the DC offsets can be separated using an adaptive approach combining carrier recovery, symbol timing recovery, automatic gain control and data detection in the baseband. Typically, in the receiver system, the preamble in the frame structure has a known DC content that allows adaptive, frame-by-frame DC offset removal. With the LO running at −5 dBm, the output DC offsets of LT5516 and LT5515 are as low as 1 mV and 4 mV, respectively. These low offset voltages allow the receiver to implement the offset cancellation with a low-cost analog to digital converter.
Another concern with direct-conversion receiver architectures is even-order distortion products. In a conventional superheterodyne receiver, second-order distortion terms usually fall out of band and can be easily filtered. However, in a direct-conversion receiver, even-order distortion, particularly second-order products, will cause in-band interference. For example, when two strong interferers with frequency spacing close to the channel bandwidth are present at the input of the quadrature demodulator, the second-order nonlinearity of the demodulator will produce a low-frequency intermodulation product. This distortion product falls in the baseband spectrum and cannot be filtered out in the subsequent baseband signal processing. Consequently, excellent IIP2 is a prerequisite for good performance in a direct-conversion receiver. The presence of mismatches in the mixers of the demodulator and LO signal paths may result in in-band second-order intermodulation products. The second-order harmonic of the input RF signals (from second-order distortion of the RF amplifier) may also be mixed with the second harmonic of the LO signal to produce a similar effect. The high IIP2 of the LT5515 and LT5516 (+51 and +52 dBm, respectively), therefore, are important to prevent even-order intermodulation from corrupting the baseband signals. This performance can be further enhanced by properly filtering the unwanted high-frequency mixing products at the I and Q outputs. This effectively prevents the unwanted mixing products from coupling back to the demodulator to generate in-band second-order intermodulation. A convenient approach is to terminate each output with a shunt capacitor. The capacitor value can be optimized depending upon the operating frequency and the specific printed-circuit-board (PCB) layout.
The design of high-performance direct-conversion receiver systems is at the leading edge of modern base-station receiver development. Although direct-conversion receiver approaches have been studied for decades, only recently have available high-performance components made the direct-conversion architecture practical for a wide range of wireless applications.


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RND(4) NetBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual RND(4)Powered by man-cgi (2021-06-01). Maintained for NetBSD by Kimmo Suominen. Based on man-cgi by Panagiotis Christias.
rnd -- in kernel entropy collection and random number generation
pseudo-device rnd
The rnd pseudo-device uses event timing information collected from many devices, and mixes this into an entropy pool. This pool is stirred with a cryptographically strong hash function when data is extracted from the pool.
When a hardware event occurs (such as completion of a hard drive transfer or an interrupt from a network device) a timestamp is generated. This timestamp is compared to the previous timestamp recorded for the device, and the first, second, and third order differentials are calculated. If any of these differentials is zero, no entropy is assumed to have been gathered. If all are non-zero, one bit is assumed. Next, data is mixed into the entropy pool using an LFSR (linear feedback shift register). To extract data from the entropy pool, a cryptographically strong hash function is used. The output of this hash is mixed back into the pool using the LFSR, and then folded in half before being returned to the caller. Mixing the actual hash into the pool causes the next extraction to return a different value, even if no timing events were added to the pool. Folding the data in half prevents the caller to derive the actual hash of the pool, preventing some attacks.
User code can obtain random values from the kernel in two ways. Reading from /dev/random will only return values while sufficient entropy exists in the internal pool. When sufficient entropy does not exist, EAGAIN is returned for non-blocking reads, or the read will block for blocking reads. Reading from /dev/urandom will return as many values as requested, even when the entropy pool is empty. This data is not as good as reading from /dev/random since when the pool is empty, data is still returned, degen- erating to a pseudo-random generator. Writing to either device will mix the data written into the pool using the LFSR as above, without modifying the entropy estimation for the pool.
Each source has a state structure which the kernel uses to hold the tim- ing information and other state for that source. typedef struct { char name[16]; uint32_t last_time; uint32_t last_delta; uint32_t last_delta2; uint32_t total; uint32_t type; uint32_t flags; } rndsource_t; This structure holds the internal representation of a device's timing state. The name field holes the device name, as known to the kernel. The last_time entry is the timestamp of the last time this device gener- ated an event. It is for internal use only, and not in any specific rep- resentation. The last_delta and last_delta2 fields hold the last first- and second-order deltas. The total field holds a count of how many bits this device has potentially generated. This is not the same as how many bits were used from it. The type field holds the device type. Currently, these types are defined: RND_TYPE_DISK The device is a physical hard drive. RND_TYPE_NET The device is a network interface. By default, timing information is collected from this source type, but entropy is not estimated. RND_TYPE_TAPE The device is a tape device. RND_TYPE_TTY The device is a terminal, mouse, or other user input device. RND_TYPE_RNG The device is a random number generator. flags is a bitfield. RND_FLAG_NO_ESTIMATE Do not assume any entropy is in the timing informa- tion. RND_FLAG_NO_COLLECT Do not even add timing information to the pool.
Various ioctl(2) functions are available to control device behavior, gather statistics, and add data to the entropy pool. These are all defined in the <sys/rnd.h> file, along with the data types and constants. RNDGETENTCNT (uint32_t) Return the current entropy count (in bits). RNDGETSRCNUM (rndstat_t) typedef struct { uint32_t start; uint32_t count; rndsource_t source[RND_MAXSTATCOUNT]; } rndstat_t; Return data for sources, starting at start and returning at most count sources. The values returned are actual in-kernel snapshots of the entropy status for devices. Leaking the internal timing information will weaken security. RNDGETSRCNAME (rndstat_name_t) typedef struct { char name[16]; rndsource_t source; } rndstat_name_t; Return the device state for a named device. RNDCTL (rndctl_t) typedef struct { char name[16]; uint32_t type; uint32_t flags; uint32_t mask; } rndctl_t; Change bits in the device state information. If type is 0xff, only the device name stored in name is used. If it is any other value, all devices of type type are altered. This allows all network interfaces to be disabled for entropy collection with one call, for example. The flags and mask work together to change flag bits. The mask field specifies which bits in flags are to be set or cleared. RNDADDDATA (rnddata_t) typedef struct { uint32_t len; uint32_t entropy; u_char data[RND_POOLWORDS * 4]; } rnddata_t;
/dev/random Returns ``good'' values only /dev/urandom Always returns data, degenerates to a pseudo-random gener- ator
rndctl(8), rnd(9)
The random device was first made available in NetBSD 1.3.
This implementation was written by Michael Graff <firstname.lastname@example.com> using ideas and algorithms gathered from many sources, including the driver written by Ted Ts'o. NetBSD 4.0 October 12, 1997 NetBSD 4.0


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Black Falls Band
Style: Roots Rock, Driving & Funky Blues, Classic Rock
Members: Dominic Cantalupo - Drums, Percussion, Lead and B/U VocalsDominic started banging the skins in 1968 at the once famous Yeager's Music School in East Baltimore with Wayne Hudson and was featured in various Baltimore area bands throughout the mid 70's to mid 80's, including Elysian Fields, Hide-n-Seek and a full-time musician with Nightwatch. A rare drummer/lead vocalist with over 40 yrs. of professional experience, his energetic and groove oriented style fits like a glove with Black Falls Band.Greg McIsaac - Guitars, Harmonica, Lead and B/U VocalsPlaying electric and acoustic guitars since the 70's, Greg has performed locally for over 25 years in several bands and also as a solo acoustic player. Greg has four decades of music in his soul and his high energy and solid skills propel Black Falls Band to be one of the area's best. Ryan Geraci - Bass, Lead and Backing VocalsRyan has been a Bassist and an avid musician since his early teenage years. After many years of lessons from various professional music instructors, he's been cutting his teeth in local original and cover bands around the Baltimore area for the last 15 years. Heavily influenced in Blues, Soul, Funk, and old school Rock & Roll – He fuses these genres to make a musical voice styling of his own.Erik "Big E" Kestler - Guitars, Backup VocalsErik "Big E" Kestler plays guitar and sings backup. His smoking style and high energy is a welcome addition to the Black Falls Band. His past bands include Chuggalug, AB Normal, Beatin' the Odds, Flat-Out, Red Tractor Factory, Vineyard Pilgrim and the Shoehorns. By day, he works as an editor.
How to Book: Email: email@example.com or email@example.com Phone: Dominic Cantalupo at 410-963-5466. Please Follow us on Twitter @BlackFallsBand Please like us on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/OfficialBlackFallsBand
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Do you know who you are selling to?
No, I am not talking about a description weighed down with numbers and data that goes like a Government I.D. –
If I urged you to rack your brain to visualize your ideal customer – how would you go about it?
Sounds complicated, right? It doesn't have to be.
What Are The Marketing Personas?
A descriptive and data-driven visualization of your ideal customer is called a buyer persona. When you know who you are 'selling' too – – you can appeal to people who are more likely to stay with you for a long time.
Furthermore, possessing a richer grasp of your buyer persona(s) drives other marketing components such as product development, content creation, cold emailing, and lead nurturing. It could also reveal an opening in the market to educate customers on why they need your product.
Depending on the size and volume of your business, you will have multiple buyer personas. Let me break it down:
- Composite Sketch – A buyer's persona is not a static description. Instead, it continually evolves with the nature of your business and the consumer landscape. A reliable persona is a true reflection of the customer faction it is supposed to represent.
- Primary Audience Segment – Building upon the idea that a buyer persona is ever-evolving, it represents different segments within your primary audience group.
Siteimprove is an excellent example. It offers multiple SaaS product lines to monitor a website's performance in various aspects – search, accessibility, content, etc. Undoubtedly, every business worth its salt these days has a website, so it's reasonable to say that Siteimprove products would fit their needs in some way or the other.
Despite that, they have mentioned the different types of customers their products could be a perfect fit for, such as – Government, Medium businesses, Enterprise, Non-profits, etc.
Pixpa.com – a website building platform – features many use-cases that could fit with several visitor profiles.
Marketing personas are instrumental in helping you better understand existing and prospective customers. Consequently, it makes it easier to create content and messaging tailored to your target audience's specific needs and behaviors.
While you could create tens of personas, let's start small and dive into why you should create buyer personas and how they can help boost your small business.
The Importance of Buyer Personas
Personas are created through a careful market research process progressing from data discovery, collection, cleaning, analyzing, and finally – visualization. Most organizations rely on their existing customer data to understand what categories they fit into and the varied behaviors exhibited by them.
However, if your business is at a nascent stage or testing markets for a new service, exploring external customer datasets is a route you should take.
Let's demystify the importance of buyer personas before you get started on building them.
#1. Understanding Your Ideal Customer
What do you want to learn about your customers beyond the regular, standard information you already have of them on record?
Your existing customer data might have a few answers. Looking through it carefully will expose trends about their consumption pattern and buying behavior. How many times do they open your marketing emails? How many times do they purchase a specific product?
For instance, Josh has been buying a new pair of shoes with each change of season for the last three years, and he always times his purchase with emails informing about fresh collection launches. A few questions to uncover his background could be about the industry he works in, income range, and personality identifiers like a calm, innovator, etc.
Entrepreneurs can extrapolate an approach to identify their B2B buyer personas accurately.
This, in turn, will solidify your understanding of your target base and help you meet their needs better.
#2. Strengthen Your Offering
Maintaining a customer list is an important part of any small business's operations.
Your existing customers will provide actionable insight and are a goldmine of valuable information for you because they have interacted with your products and services, experienced them for a while, and engaged with your company.
As a result, they can provide data and insights that you can then feed into your sales records, grow your marketing collateral, and boost your next campaigns and product/service offerings.
#3. Create a Customer-Centric Culture
By tapping into customer testimonials and building accurate buyer personas, a small business doesn't only boost customer relations with its existing base but also boosts its chances of being discovered by prospects.
Embedding this customer-first mindset into a small business culture will go a long way in the future, as your business grows. Customer satisfaction should remain a focus area, no matter the size of your business.
A changing landscape of various consumer behaviors means that this buyer persona(s) will continuously evolve.
Understanding the different personas of people who benefit from your products and service offering will help you build your efforts to grow your customer base, retain your customers, and boost your profits overall.
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Funded, in part, through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.