This week shares its name with 448 Natalie, a main belt asteroid discovered on the 27th of October 1899. That’s almost exactly 120 years ago (just 5 weeks off).
Material Conference
This week has mostly been behind the scenes work prepping for Material 2020. We confirmed two speakers this week. That triggers a bunch of other actions. We need to change the tickets from Blind Bird to Early Bird. We offer a ridiculously good price if you trust us enough to get a ticket to the event, sight-unseen of who’s going to present. We’re delighted that we had several people buy Blind Bird tickets. It shows we’re building a fan base who believe in what we’re trying to create.
Early bird tickets are still a great price, only $179, and we’ll announce a few more speakers before that price goes up again. The event is still ~6 months away, so you have time to decide and make travel arrangements.
We also sent out our Material Newsletter, updated the website, followed-up with a few additional speakers and worked on our sponsorship deals.
Material Synopses
In preparation for Material 2020, we’ve been going back through the archive and doing something we’ve wanted too for a long time.
Each talk has a video and bio, but nothing more. So we’ve spent some time this week and written synopses for 4 of the talks. This gives more back ground on how we see these relating to the Web and why we felt these topics needed to be showcased and discussed more.
Apple Updates
This week was Apple’s annual fall keynote. They showed off a bunch of new toys and services. This isn’t about what they have released, but more about what that enables us todo. The next version of iOS, iOS13, will be released shortly and that allows for the much anticipated Dark Mode. The few apps we have on the store needed to wait until the app to compile your apps, Xcode, was GM (Gold Master) released. Now we can submit the apps so they are ready for all these new features.
Work Load
Finally, survey projects are winding down and we’re scouting around for projects starting in October. We always have a few leads and irons in the fire, so it is just a matter of getting things moving again.
Overall, we’ve put our availability to 60%, which is THIN on the availability forecast for Q4. After a few more meetings this week and next, we might need to review things if projects pick-up!
As it stands, we have a few outstanding invoices to collect on. One has been sent out, another is waiting for the work order to be confirmed before we can send in the invoice. Then there is one project not quite finished for a pending invoice.
It is good to show there are always a lot of balls up in the air all at various points in their life-cycles. You’re not alone, no one has the perfect system or perfect client.
Bric-à-brac
This is a very old conference talk from 02008. We were talking about zoetrope this week and we’ve referenced this video so many times, it’s worth documenting here too.