Been a supporter of Pod Hunt since the day it launched, decided to have my podcast (The Better Show) become an official Pod Hunt "Supporter", and spent over an hour last night with it's founder, Mubs, on Skype talking product direction.
I can't stress how critical it is to build better podcast discovery mechanisms for the medium to continue to grow and thrive. Right now, most podcast discovery is self-reinforcing already successful podcasts. This is neither good for podcasters, or listeners. For new podcasts, its extremely hard to grow/learn, and for listeners it limits the ability to show them how broad and diverse the podcasting world is (which is one of its core strengths, there is something for EVERYONE!)
After my call with Mubs, I'm super excited to see where Pod Hunt goes in the future.
I'm not sure to what degree PowerBI is touch-screen friendly, but I dealt a lot with Qlik Sense (another BI / dashboarding platform) and it's quite touch-screen friendly -- filtering, selections, drilling down, etc. because its UI was designed for tablets.
What I was missing sometimes is the ability to easily put a dashboard on a large screen (like the Whiteboard) during a meeting in order to answer questions that arise during meetings -- what the last week looks like, what region had best sales, what products did they sell most of all, etc. Because of the visual UI, data can be queried and explored right from a dashboard.
Yes, a dashboard could be just screen-shared from a laptop, but that would be a one-man show. Sharing it on the Whiteboard would let anyone near the screen to support their points by bringing up relevant analytics.
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. It's actually a completely different stack/app, and has a lot of focus on making the real-time collab, intelligent inking (shape & table recognition) and canvas much richer (sticky notes, alt-text for accessibility, Bing image search with ink, GDPR compliant, multi-touch ruler for straight lines, rainbow/galaxy ink for pure fun during boring meetings...)
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Ink to shape and ink to table are two early examples of how we're infusing intelligence into the Whiteboard's canvas. We want to start showing people the power of the pen (or your finger/mouse if you're inking that way!) and how many things you think are difficult to do (e.g. drawing perfect shapes) or multi-step UI things (e.g. inserting a table with X rows and Y columns from a ribbon menu) can be more naturally done by simply drawing them.
This is just the beginning, but you can imagine many more examples going down this road that will unlock a ton more value in the core "ideation" scenario in which Whiteboard lives.
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. The other thing I'll note is we see a general trend of most information workers jobs in the next few years calling for more creative work, so the need for these type of solutions will continue to grow--even if it doesn't seem vital in your role today, you may be surprised to look back at how your job's day-to-day has changed 5 years from now.
Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. I've heard first-hand stories from some early Whiteboard Preview folks at enterprises that used our product to cut down on travel & accommodation expenses, while maintaining the same level of fidelity/interaction that f2f meetings gave them, when doing things like technical sales meetings.
We're seeing many enterprises starting to see the benefits & the economics just simply make sense with the decreasing cost curves of large panel displays, and the increasing quality of interactive touch/ink panels.
One of the challenges at my workplace is that these devices are currently so large and expensive that it's only practical to install them in some of our meeting rooms. But with heavy competition for meeting rooms, depending on these boards for routine meetings (e.g. daily standups) gets dicey.
So for us, they might become practical only when the price comes down enough for them to be ubiquitous, readily available, and (hopefully) on mobile stands.
In the meantime, we're looking into alternatives involving devices small enough that every developer can have them on his/her desktop, and put them away when not in use.
Microsoft seems to have some nice offerings in both form factors, but as a mixed Mac/Windows shop, MS-only solutions won't work. We need something that can be entirely hosted behind our firewall and has good clients for Mac, Windows, and (ideally) Linux.
Absolutely love these. Bought the physical printed book version last year and keep it on my desk for inspiration whenever I'm working on something and feel like the world is working against me.
Will there be printed versions of this year's book?
Probably not – last year, I only did it because I was inspired by Watsi's talk and wanted to try to give back somewhow. But it was a logistical nightmare; it's really hard to get small runs of high quality book printing done for a reasonable cost.
I can't stress how critical it is to build better podcast discovery mechanisms for the medium to continue to grow and thrive. Right now, most podcast discovery is self-reinforcing already successful podcasts. This is neither good for podcasters, or listeners. For new podcasts, its extremely hard to grow/learn, and for listeners it limits the ability to show them how broad and diverse the podcasting world is (which is one of its core strengths, there is something for EVERYONE!)
After my call with Mubs, I'm super excited to see where Pod Hunt goes in the future.