Category: Video

Software tools for working from home.

Software tools for working from home

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The global pandemic of Covid-19 requires us to be extra diligent when connecting and communicating for work and private conversations to a greater extent than before.

Having worked remotely for large parts of my professional life with developing remote tools at GeekGirlMeetup, Scrive and Lookback I want to share my favourite tools for connection and conversations. I hope you find the list helpful, and that it helps you connect well, communicate better and stay safe from home.

To learn more about the best practices for leaders as well as remote and distributed teamwork, benefits and challenges I suggest a listen to the chat with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg in the episode  “New Future of Work” from the podcast ‘Making Sense’ by Sam Harris.

Communication tools for connection in remote times: 

  • Slack:  For teams already using slack as a closed chat channel, their video functionality is excellent, allowing users to share their screen and draw on their own screen. Great for sharing sketches and ideas, during technical production. My own personal favourite across work and private projects.
    Requires: account and login, free.

  • Zoom: A great video tool that allows participants to share their screen, and extra good for recording a video session or instruction and sometimes even shorter UX research.
    Requires: download and login.

  • Hangouts: A great tool for simpler video chats with lower technical requirements, allows sharing screens of participants. Great for a simple meeting or a lunch chat.
    Requires: a google account and login, downloads optional on desktop, requires mobile app download on phone, owned by Google.

  • Whereby A personal favourite for meetings and sharing your screen, where on desktop the level of entering the service is low. The user who receives the link to a call on desktop and does not need to login. The simple “open-link-to-enter-video-chat” lowers the threshold of complexity speaking with people who are less likely comfortable taking time and effort to prepare for a meeting, downloading software. Whereby was formerly known as Appear.in.
    Requires: Does not require user account login on desktop. The mobile usage requires a mobile app download.

  • Skype: An old favourite and possibly the longest standing Voip (Voice over IP) service, sold to Microsoft. Probably the most widely adapted tool in the world for simple meetings across work and family calls.
    Requires: user account downloads and login, owned by Microsoft.

  • Whats app. A mobile app that allows free phone and video calls across operating systems iOS (iPhone) and Android. For example, you are on an iPhone and your dad is on Android, FaceTime won’t work, What’s app does! Several users can participate in a call. Great for family calls. Owned by Facebook.

  • FaceTime. A phone and operating system dependent app, thats is embedded for free on every iPhone. No need for downloading anything, just click “FaceTime” when calling any other iPhone user. Several users can participate in a call. Great for family calls.

Learnings from a Meerkat interview

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Last week I did an AMA at the Slack-based UX community Designerhangout as the UX research at Lookback.io with Meerkat. Meerkat, similarly to Periscope allows you to live streaming app that allows you to take questions and re-posts your interview to Youtube later which, very neat and practical. Here is a short description of the experience and the findings.

The founder of Designerhangout Jacob Rogelberg and I scheduled the AMA (Ask me anything) a week in advance so I had time to do a test recording with Meerkat before going live on @designerhangout  with their entire community and not bugging them with tech details etc. I would do this again just out of curtesy, you don’t want people waiting while you get yourself together.

I also emptied my phone for excess materials. For example i synced all my photos externally and then deleted them so I had more than 200 MB to play with, that makes it a nice experience. Mainly I do this at any point in time when you are using video on your camera over 10 minutes of recorded material. My interview was 33 minutes. That takes some overhead, clean out some space on your device.

I signed in to Meerkat with our Lookback Twitter account as I have hade major difficulties with twitter password support after adding SMS verification, that has gone awry and won’t let me back in. Twitter customer service has a lot left to wish for but thats another story.

By tagging the video #katch Meerkat allows it to catch the video on Youtube later, so its documented. I named it appropriately so if people RT it it makes sense if its of for them on not “AMA with @lookbacks UX research @heidiharman”. This way when the tweets from your Twitter and Meerkat happens, it’s clear what the clip is about.

Once you are on Meerkat, people will show up in little round circles on your Meerkat screen, thats filming you if you flip to selfie mode (frontal camera). You will also get questions thru the Meerkat app. I got most of my questions thru our UX forum (designers hangout). My thoughts this, it being a new experience for both the founder and me, was that we could have prepped up with some questions in advance. And the forum could have directed the question to be done via Meerkat, this way I as the interviewee would not have to go between 2 screens.

Things I did in the beginning were:
1. Introduce myself, name, role, company and why I’m here – for the AMA.
2. I spoke briefly about what Lookback does.
3. I started answering questions.

It seemed as if more questions started popping towards the end of the 33 minute conversation in 2 different chat-rooms, Twitter and Meerkat. If advise to keep it one Channel.

I might even set up a tripod, so I don’t have to do handhold the recording at the same time I’m looking for questions on my desktop screen, ultimately i would only be working on the Meerkat screen.

All in all, it was a neat experience with people asking great questions and it was a lot of fun teasing out new stuff. Id definitely do it again and recommend it as a great tool for this type of interviews and makes it simpler to gather the material and publish it. Best of luck with your recording, AMA, Q&A or whatever creative use you find for it. Hope this helps your future Meerkat or Periscope interview in the future.

The actual stream:

GeekGirlMeetup Stockholm #makeIT

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As a founder that has worked with the internationalization of GeekGirlMeetup, one thing that strikes me is strong belief that we need a diverse uptake of ideas (womens ideas) to create the next Skype and Spotify. One way to get more women into the STEM/ ICT area is to elevate the fantastic women that are already out there. If you have ideas of how to help us with our mission please don’t hesitate to contact us to grow the network or to bring new ideas to the organisation and out to the society. And what better way, but to celebrate the wonders of technology by playing with it!

GeekGirlMeetup is themed “Make IT” this year at the Science museum in Stockholm Sweden on May 24-25th.

Sign up now for tickets and speaking and lets co-create an amazing weekend.

This year we will as the theme suggest be geeking-out in maker-culture. Expect 3-printing, hardware, trans-humanism, knitting workshops and manga-creation.
With speakers, maker and creators like Stockholm maker-space, Carin Ism, Robot-Robyn, Johanna Koljonen, Nina von Rüdinger we expect total geekdom-ness at the three threads of ‪#‎creativetechnology ‬‪#‎socialbusiness‬ and ‪#‎justepic‬. After-party at Spotify!

Like what you see? Our previous themes have been:

2008 The architecture of winning
2009 GAME ON
2010 Code is Queen
2011 We love API’s
2012 Beautiful Data
2013 Enter.Space
2014 Make it

GeekGirlMeetup is a un-conference for women in web, code and startups aiming to elevate female role-models, create new networks and active knowledge exchange.

Some articles:
• The Guardian – Four groups bringing women in tech together
• VentureVillage – Diverse groups make better products

Hi-Tempo hackathon lookback

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The Hi-Tempo Hackathon with Protothon and Tempo documentary filmfestival took place in Stockholm (Sweden) this week. Given that I have participated at a dosen hackathon’s and arranged half a dosen hackathon’s myself, it was a pleasure to attend. New to me was the approach with film and the transmedial expression, as Protothon previously worked with several different players for different perspectives. I doubt that any of the 20-something participants knew or could predict what was to come out of this we just had to trust the process. Exciting!

We were either hackathon beginners, experienced or just technically curious of what can come out of this. By trade we were developer, design-thinkers, students from Hyperisland and Bergs School of Communication and many more.

The groups introduced themselves to principles of a transmedia approach, soon my group was working with a solid design-driven process developing a concept after trying a few different concepts. We set up goals and elaborated in the universe that Angela presented us with at the same time as we held our autonomous freedom to do what we wanted. It was fantastic to have access to Angela regarding questions and ideas on background and understanding what visuals and thoughts we could work with.

Angela Bravo’s film is her story about being the child of political refugees from a Pinochet tortured Chile. Angela grew up in Sweden hearing of her heritage, her memories are with animated style of the 80’s like heroes, superman, StarWars portraying activist and perpetrators.  A scenario as a child growing up, that has never been to Chile, Chile very easily became a Imaginary Country, what was real and what was a childhood memory and interpretation? In her documentary she follows the activists as well as Pinochets closest bystanders. We quickly identified that it is not a light subject. We wanted to create something that reaches people’s abstract mind by breaking it down to a humans character and characteristics. What makes you a hero, and makes you a perpetrator? Could this situation that happened in Chile happen again if we are comfortably numb here in Sweden and forget to learn from history?

Our group focused on making a mobile first solution for rapid spreading on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. The solution identified the topic of StarWars being a nice hero/villain style to work with and decided to do a questionnaire and meme-like piece on “what real StarWars character are you?”. By answering a few questions on what life choices you make you were lead down to become Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Chewbacka or a Stormtrooper?

At the end of the personality test you became one of them, however, this was also a play on human traits, and what makes you who you are, so if you tested to be a hero like Luke Skywalker you also carried the same traits and characteristics as Silvia, an activist. The test lead to 4 short interviews with characters from Imaginary Country, activating the landscape of character building or/and deconstructing as a perspective of the movie. The solution was built entirely in Java Script, and the team consisted of 5-6 people. bit.ly/imaginarycountry Please note, this is a mobile only piece. feel free to test being both super evil and very good. You will notice that it’s not always what you think nor expect.

The pieces opened the Tempo Film Festival 2014 and have been standing this week at Debaser Strand, hornstull.

This week was also closed down by two heavyweights in the sector Annika Warn and Simon Alexandersson.

I moderated a panel of Ph.D Annika Warn, Upsala University at the Tempofilmfestival Workshops speaking on pervasive gaming showcasing some best cases in history of transmedia projects.

Simon Alexanderson Ph.D student at KTH, showed us some of the works he was making with stopmotiongraphics, 3d works and animation aiming to be able to create animated characters quicker. This methods is highly applicable, especially in Angela Bravos case where the imaginary country is illustrated by rotoscoping as well as animations though out the film. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the future of this documentary film as well as to see how the future of media, games and film blend into what future we will in a decade take for a given contemporary future.

**

Protothon – the space between code and creativity

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HI-TEMPO-WEB_3

Protothon  have teamed up with Tempo Documentary Festival bring you HI-TEMPO: a two day hackathon exploring radical futures of documentary storytelling.

Three film (amongst them, David Herdies) makers have fearlessly agreed to let the participants use their films-in-progress as a starting point for this adventure. Debaser Hornstull will be the canvas. The rest is waiting to be discovered.

Protothon  wants to know what you can bring to these stories and the way that they are told. Programmer, designer, engineer, writer/director – whatever your background we look forward to hacking with you.

Hope to see you there!

Bonnier Accelerator opens up adminssions

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The *Bonnier Accelerator program opens up it’s second year of admissions. I would like to as an Alumni of the program to encourage everyone with a business idea or app idea to apply for the program.

Upon acceptance the program allows you to develop you idea with Bonniers corporate team as well as input from startup lecturers is a tailored program.

You can now book a spot at the Bonnier Accelerator kickoff breakfast March 4! First come, first served.

* Bonnier is Sweden’s and Scandinavia’s largest publishing house, and are also behind Toca Boca and many more interesting digital ventures.

Think big, build small, create always by Heidi Harman

Börja blogga

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Under 2010 gjorde jag en serie WordPress tutorial videos om hur man börjar blogga med Binero webbhotell som säljer domäner som man behöver när man vill komma igång och blogga. Jag vill samla instruktionsmanualerna här då det fortfarande är många som ber mig om WordPress hjälp om hur man kommer igång och dessa videos är de jag refererar dem refererar nybörjare till.

Dessa komma igång videos fokuserar på hur man med en One Click Installer med ett klick där du slipper installations processen. Jag går igenom 8 grundsteg för att börja blogga oavsett om du vill vill starta en blogg eller hemsida.

1. Så installerar du Wordpress
2. Sökbarhet, SEO till Wordpress
3. Så använder du Wordpress som hemsida
4. Ändra Wordpress -tema
5. Wordpress: ändra bakgrund och sidhuvud
6. Wordpress: använd Akismet antispam
7. Fler användare i en WordPress 3-installation
8. Statistik genom Google Analytics i Wordpress

Domäner och Webhotell
Man ska inte idag behöva betala andra för en enkel hemsida eller prenumerera för att ha en hemsida på internet. Allt du behöver är en två saker, en domän och ett webotell. Ett exempel på domän – exempel.com eller dittnamn.se, det är du som köper din domän och du som äger den för under en hundring per år och äger då rätten till att ha din blogg under det namnet/domänen.

Webhosting eller webbhotell är där din hemsida bor på hotell och ofta blir det billigast att köpa detta hos samma leverantör, jag har valt att göra så för att minimera strul men man kan givetvis göra hur man vill och använda vilken leverantör man vill.

Uppskattad tidsåtgång
Uppskattad tid för att sätta upp en timme för en nybörjare som har en domän och webhotell, är ca 4 till 8 timmar max beroende på data vana. Detta estimar inkluderar tiden du tar for att titta på videos, och göra det du ska för att gå igenom alla steg. Man kan även inkludera tiden för köp av domän och webhotell då det tar typ 5 minuter bara man vet vad man vill att domänen ska heta. Min domän heter mitt namn till exempel.

Att blogga
Många börjar blogga för att man tycker ett ämne är kul och man är intresserad och vill undersöka området mer. Andra har åsikter de vill blogga om eller föra fråga om något, allt från mode till politik. Har man ett special intresse och vill bygga auktoritet inom området är bloggande ett utmärkt sätt att göra det på då, och man kan se det som ett tidsdokument på hur man utvecklas med sina resonemang, argument och dialog med andra bloggare.

Vissa gör det for att det är kul och en bra extra inkomst medan de pluggar, modebloggare till exempel, och andra gor det när de ska skaffa jobb for att påvisa kunskap inom ett ämne, ofta då man är passionerad kring ett ämne. Det skadar aldrig att påvisa framfötterna för en arbetsgivare. Jag har startat denna blog för att uppdatera folk om mina projekt och för att det är ett tidsdokument över min egna utveckling, men även viktigt när folk söker på mitt namn på nätet så ska de kunna finna information om mig och mina föreläsningar, appar och annat på ett sätt som jag jag själv tycker återspeglar mig.

Hoppas du kommer igång du med! 

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Rollin on the startup Bus.

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Yesterday i steppen on the rolling startup bus, filled with north european entrepreneurs from Copenhagen to Paris (London bus was unfortunately cancelled) on my way to LeWeb in Paris. On tuesday approximately 40 pitches will take place at LeWeb. I joined the StartitUp Team.

StartitUp.com TV is a production company producing a docu-series about startup bus, aiming broadcast in the US during spring 2013. Team: Tommy Talley @tommysTV, Thom van der Veen, Heidi Harman, @heidiharman

Some more info here:
Nya Affarer – Busprenorer pa startup bus
VikingBus
Rockstart – Vikingbus journey to le web kick starts today
Trendsonline – Vikingbus hits the road to Le Web