Slam - ChaoStructured Creativity

Chaostructured Services Showcase: Gilbert Rocks

2011-08-08T09:30:00.005-04:00

Having a good web presence is a key element for artists who want to showcase their work and interact with their fans. And it really doesn't take much more than a web site and a Facebook fan page.

Gilbert Rocks is a professional musician, songwriter and singer who creates great music for kids. Although his focus right now is on getting the first full cd completed, his ultimate goal is to bring music back to kids in a tangible way. More and more funding for music in schools is being cut and less children are being exposed to the real joys of creating music, singing and performing. Gilbert wants to find ways to replace what used to be a given in schools and to give kids a good musical foundation.

(click on image to go to the web site)

You can click on the image above to go check out Gilbert's web site or click here to go to his Fan Page.

We had fun working on this site and still have some additional cool things to add to it.

As Gilbert would say: Rock On!

Happy birthday, Woubie!

2011-03-24T19:15:00.007-04:00

It's hard to believe, but it's been a year since Woubie went live. In honor of Woubie's birthday we've given the Slam Industries web site a little face lift.

Thank you to everyone who has spread the word about Woubie over the the past year!

(click on the above image to go directly to the web site)

ChaoStructured Services Showcase: MeRob Concepts

2011-01-01T10:37:00.006-05:00

Happy New Year!

We've been away for a bit, but we're still chugging along and getting work done. We hope the new year brings all of you (and all of us) health, wealth and happiness. To start Slam's new year off on a great note, we're showcasing the most recent web site we designed and built.

MeRob Concepts provides both architectural and woodworking services. Rob Freeman (AKA MeRob) has over 25 years of experience working for structural design firms as a senior level manager responsible for Technical & Engineering departments and processes. He's won the "Innovator's Hall of Fame" award twice from a national engineered wood products manufacturer. Over the years, he has also created many custom-made pieces of furniture or built-ins that focus on creative designs that make the best use of the available space.

(click on the image above to view the site)

Architectural Services:

Floor plans from scratch or modifications to plans bought online.
Conversion of plans to PDF or CAD formats.
Redraw service to transfer hand drawn plans to electronic format.
Blueprints printed at your local blueprint shop.

And...the coolest one of all:

3D Walkthroughs

Woodworking:

Sometimes it's hard to find exactly what you're looking for when it comes to furniture and storage for your kid's room. Just the right size toybox, table or storage shelf, in the exact color you want, can make all the difference in the world. MeRob excels at making those unique, one-of-a-kind, items at reasonable prices.

ChaoStructured Services Showcase: Morality√Check

2010-07-31T12:31:00.020-04:00

Companies are exposed to many different types of complaints when employees are involved. Employees can help drive a company forward or causes problems. Company employees are the eyes and ears on how things are really operating at the company level.

The Morality√Check Hotline system is an objective tool and unbiased consultative outside support system that delivers results to aid in the vulnerable areas that are costly to most companies, such as:

√ Sexual Harassment
√ Drug Abuse
√ Unsafe Working Conditions

√ Employee Theft
√ Vandalism

“One Call Can Save Thousands of Dollars”

(click on the image above to learn more about Morality√Check)

Making Woubie Even More Woubieful

2010-07-01T23:14:00.000-04:00

We've spent the past couple of months ensuring that Woubie 1.0 runs smoothly and efficiently. Now we're excited to be working on new features and functionality. Within the next couple of months we'll be upgrading to Woubie 2.0 with the following added features:

The ability to store Contact information.

The ability to store Business information.

The ability to print individual items from any of the data sets.

And...the function we're excited about the most:

The ability to link tasks, characters, comedy, facts, attributions or locations to a Woubie.

If you thought Woubie was useful before, this new feature will knock your socks off.

Here's an example of the difference it will make:

Let's say you're a comedian. You've created a Woubie called "Comedy Club A - 6/23/2010 Show" and you've stored detailed information about where you performed it, how long the set was, how well you performed, whether you sold promotional items or not, etc.

You've also created a database of 800 jokes and you've assigned categories & subcategories, ratings, duration, key words, etc. Simply having a flexible web-based database of your comedy material saves you a lot of time.

So, what could be better?

You could have the ability to flag the 20 jokes you used for the "Comedy Club A" show and link them to the Woubie you created for that show. Then you could easily print your set or replicate the set, change a few jokes and have a whole new set within minutes.

That's what the linking function will let you do!

For writers, the ability to link facts, characters and locations to a Woubie for a book or article will turn the process of managing hundreds of individual pieces of information from painful to painless.

So, keep on Woubiefying your world and we'll keep you updated on our progress towards Woubie 2.0.

Have a great summer!

ChaoStructured Services Showcase: Mat Street

2010-05-04T10:22:00.008-04:00

Mat Street - artist, writer, comedian, actor, director. Basically anything that requires creativity, but doesn't include having a regular 9-5 office job or a lot of manual labor.

Matstreet.com was a joint creation between Slam Industries & Mat Street and is subject to frequent changes. The cool stuff is ours; anything you don't like was done by Mat Street. :)

(Click on the image to go directly to Mat Street's web site)

If you're looking for a cool t-shirt, be sure to check out the Store. Mat Street's t-shirts are created using eco-friendly Waterbase Screenprinting (ink soaks directly into the thread). You can't even feel the printing.

Small Business DIY: Convert PowerPoint to Video

2010-04-17T09:24:00.006-04:00

Over the course of the past year, while we built and launched Woubie, we learned how to do a lot of things ourselves. If you're a small business owner or self-employed, you understand how important it is to save money by doing as much as you can yourself. We thought it might be fun to share some of what we've learned, so this is the first of our Small Business DIY series.

The most recent trick we learned is how to convert a PowerPoint presentation into a video that you can upload to sharing sites like YouTube & Vimeo and then embed in your web site. Social Media is a great tool for small businesses and it seems that people find it hard to resist at least checking out a video. They're much more likely to watch a short video, even if it's just images & music, than they are to read a whole page describing your product or service.

But making a video can be a daunting task. So we started searching for an alternative and found out that you can create a PowerPoint presentation, complete with animation, and then convert it to video. Here's the first one we made; it took about 2 days to make, mostly because we tested different conversion programs. In the end it cost us nothing except our time.

Here are the basic steps to doing it yourself:

1) Create a PowerPoint presentation around 10 slides long. You don't want the video to be too long & free video converters may limit the number of slides that can be converted per video. It's a good idea to create just two or three slides and convert it to video, so you can see how text looks. we didn't do that and we wound up having to redo the whole presentation because our original text was way too small.
2) Add animation (if you want to). The more animation you add, the bigger the file will be, so keep in mind that you don't want to overdo it.
3) Once you have it ready, time the slide show. If you don't have a stopwatch, use http://www.online-stopwatch.com/.
4) We didn't do a voice recording for our first one; we simply found some open source music that we liked. One of the places you can find out-of-copyright sound recordings is http://www.openmusicarchive.org/ .
5) If the music you found is too short and you want to either loop it or merge two different songs into one MP3, you can download a free MP3 merging program that makes it simple to select two MP3s and merge them into one. The idea is to have a sound file that is about the same length (maybe a few seconds longer) than your slide presentation.
6) After trying several different video converters, the one that worked the best for us was E.M. PowerPoint Video Converter. They have a free version that limits you to 10 slides, but it did a great job and the resulting video was cleaner and clearer than some of the others. The program is easy to use and you can simply select your PPT file, your sound file and click Convert. You have a choice of AVI file or MPG. We tried both and the AVI file was better for us.
7) Upload your file to a video sharing site, such as YouTube. If you don't have an account, it's simple and easy to create one. Once you've uploaded it, you or you webmaster can easily take the code they provide for embedding and insert it into your web site or blog.

You can see what the above video looks like on our web site here: http://www.woubie.com/WoubieSite/ProductPage.asp and how it looks on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gvbPAME0L8.

ChaoStructured Services Showcase: PTA Web Site

2010-03-11T08:56:00.007-05:00

The second example in our showcase is a simple and clean PTA web site for a local elementary school. By using the school's existing logo and school colors and gathering some pertinent information from the PTA group and the staff, we were able to complete this site within less than a week of starting the project.

The school's PTA group now has a web site that costs them nothing to host, significantly improves their ability to provide up-to-date information to parents and PTA members and is easy for them to maintain. We also set up a Twitter account and a Facebook Fan page, using the same look & feel for all of them.

http://twitter.com/TwinLakesPTA/

Twin Lakes Elementary - Official Page

Promote Your Page Too

Slam's ChaoStructured Services

2010-03-01T21:54:00.001-05:00

Although a good portion of our focus for the past year has been on building our flagship product, Woubie, we've also been working on developing our "ChaoStructured" services.

When we started the company, we intended to hire someone to build our web sites, so that we could focus strictly on the development of Woubie. We had the skill sets to handle what it took to build a program like Woubie, but we hadn't dipped our toes into the design pool. Yet. Then we found out that it would cost us upwards of $2,500 just for one basic web site and it wouldn't even cover everything that we wanted or needed. And since we wanted a company site and a Woubie product site, we quickly realized that it just wasn't going to happen.

So we learned how to do it ourselves. And let me tell you, it was a frustrating and hair-pulling process during which we frequently said, "huh?", "WTF?" and "Maybe if we try...". In the end it was worth it. We've learned several new skill sets and we're proud of the fact that we've literally built everything for our company ourselves. From our Slam logo to Woubie, every design element, web page, support process, tweet, blog, photograph, animation, video, etc was done by one of us.

While we were doing all of this we found that many writers, comedians, small businesses & NPOs would like to have a web presence and make use of social media sites to promote themselves and their business. But like us, they just can't afford to pay what it typically costs. Or, if they do pay to have one built, because of the way web sites are typically built and hosted, they're stuck paying more every time they want to update it.

So we began working on developing a way for those folks to have a well designed, branded web presence at a fraction of the typical cost, which they can maintain and update on their own.

The result is our ChaoStructured Services.

Over the next few weeks we'll be showcasing the sites we've built using this method and showing how easy it is to get your brand out there.

The first site in our showcase is for Freeman Solutions, Inc., a home renovation company with an excellent and well-deserved reputation for impeccable work. Click on the image below to go to the site.

P.S.
We're not a hosting company, a marketing company or SEO experts. But we do know some very talented people who are and would be happy to point you in their direction if that's the type of service you're looking for.

Balls In Motion

2010-01-19T23:56:00.008-05:00

Wednesday, January 20th 2010, marks the one year anniversary of the creation of Slam Industries LLC.

We decided that the best way to celebrate would be to put our Slam balls in motion.

Check out the new design on Slam's home page at: www.slamindustriesllc.com

Woubie's Error Message

2010-01-06T08:50:00.004-05:00

2010 - Year of the Woubie

2010-01-01T22:39:00.001-05:00

We're back on track. Keep an eye out for our press release coming this spring.

Soft Launches & NFLM

2009-11-03T15:05:00.000-05:00

Due to weather delays, we have postponed the full rollout of the Woubie program and only did a soft launch over the weekend. By "weather delays" I mean clouds of Halloween cobwebs and residual damage caused by an excess of sugar flooding the area.

What the heck is a soft launch? Find out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_launch. Please keep in mind that Woubie is a software program; not a missile.

Access to Woubie is currently limited to a set group of people for final testing. However, within the next week or so we will be providing "demo" access for a few days to anyone who is interested in checking Woubie out and giving us feedback. If you're one of those people, please click on "Contact" (just below the red line above), enter your email address and let us know that you would like to participate.

PSA:
November is National Family Literacy Month. You can get involved by simply reading with a child (your own or your nieces, nephews, grandchildren, someone else's grandchildren, the neighbor's kid...just find a kid and read, okay?). Or you can find literacy programs in your area by going to this site: http://www.famlit.org/programs/search (National Center for Family Literacy). Happy reading. :)

Woubie Woubie Doo, Where Are You?

2009-10-24T15:07:00.000-04:00

At the beginning of the month the plan was for me to post a new blog at least every other day leading up to the Woubie launch. Clearly a dumb plan. Here we are, 8 days away from D-Day, and this is only my fifth post since the October 1st.

Whoa, hold on a minute...8 days? 8 DAYS?! Do you have any idea how much I still need to do before then? Let's make a list:

1) Make final corrections to the Slam and Woubie sites (Thanks, Mom, for the grammar lessons). :)
2) Get some more of those Rolaid soft chews.
3) Final test of the billing process.
4) Buy some beer.
5) Make sure the duct tape we used on MatStreet is still holding up.
6) Finish writing the press release.
7) Have a beer.
8) Try one more time to break Woubie; click on every button, type something in every space, save, edit, search, filter...this process takes a while because Woubie does a lot of stuff.
9) Chew a Rolaid.
10) Untape MatStreet and let him have a beer just to perk him up a bit and make him create marketing and training videos.
11) Tape him back up again. This is a time consuming process. Our takeaway from this learning experience is that it's much smarter to buy duct tape in bulk.
12) Have the Advisory Board members read the press release (since they need to do something to earn the money they aren't getting).
13) Give each of the advisory board members a beer since we can't pay them. Oh, wait, 2 of them are pregnant. Sweet, more beer for the rest of us.
14) Fix the footer links inside of Woubie so that they open a separate window instead of taking the user away from Woubie.
15) Reassure the Mad Scientist for the thousandth (is that really a word?) time that, "Yes, I really do think that Woubie will make at least enough money for us to buy food and toys".
16) Finish up the Woubie Help file.
17) Chew some more Rolaids.
18) Add the "30 Day Trial" button to a couple of pages, so that people can easily find them.
19) Get ready for the Launch party (which is also going to be a Fall Festival / Halloween / Birthday Party). And by "get ready" I mean meditate, have a beer, lose sleep, stress out and have another beer, because I'm definitely not the hostess-with-the-mostess and the damn party is making me down more Rolaids than the idea of launching "the very first product of our very own company on a tattered shoestring budget".

That last one did me in. I'm outta here. I have stuff to do.

Big pain in the arse…

2009-10-16T15:12:00.000-04:00

Mat Street here, resident comedian and expert Woubie user at Slam Industries LLC, according to my description on the site. (Hey Webmaster, why not “expert comedian”, hmm?) I kid, of course, because the webmaster’s bigger than me!

I’m currently inputting years of material in my Woubie database and, as a result, I can access it all with a simple search. However, I’m giving these designers and programmers hell, sending a gaggle of emails to them about changes I’d like them to make. They know this will all benefit future Woubie users, but I have a feeling they’re starting to turn on me. As we get closer to launch date, I fear for my safety. They make the changes, but I detect a little malice in their email responses. Should my correspondence go silent for more than five days, please send help. I might be duct taped to a chair, taking the beatin’ of a lifetime, or, even worse, being forced to watch hours of reality TV. If that’s the case, don’t save me, shoot me

(Guest post by MatStreet)

Why is Woubie only going to be available online?

2009-10-08T15:08:00.000-04:00

Several people have asked why Woubie is only going to be available as a web based program and not as desktop software. Apparently 'just because' isn't an acceptable answer; hence this blog post. We decided to go with an SaaS (software as a service; tech speak for software that you access online instead of installing it on your computer) business model because...

...we like to move it, move it, we like to moooooove it!...

If you're lost right now and would like to take a break and be entertained for a minute, watch this video (no worries, its good clean fun):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD6Vk183xGQ

...the thought of having to manage multiple versions of the program, constantly send out notices about new upgrades and deal with possible compatibility issues between different versions, gives us nightmares. But it's not all about us. We thought about it from your perspective too.

Picture this:

You're doing research for an article that is due later today. A friend emails you a link to a video on YouTube. You think, "Hey, I'll just take a little break, watch it and then wrap up this research". The video is hilarious, you spit coffee all over your laptop and now it's fried. If you're using a desktop program to store and organize your research material, at this point you're up you know what without one of those doo-hickeys that makes a canoe move. If you're using Woubie, you refill your coffee cup and head over to a friend's house, go to an Internet cafe and get fresh coffee, or stop in at your local library (sans coffee unless you have a really lax librarian), log back on to Woubie and wrap it up.

For those of you who prefer lists to random hypothetical stories, here are the primary reasons we chose to make it web based:

You have secure access to your creative data from any computer anywhere that has Internet access.

You don't have to install anything on your computer, so you don't have to worry about space requirements, program compatibility or keeping up with updates to ensure that you have the latest version.

You get upgrades and new services automatically without paying more.

You don't need to worry about backing up your data.

No annoying pop ups on your computer for updates saying "A new version of blah blah is available".

Mat Street is a big fat wuss

2009-10-04T15:13:00.000-04:00

With the exception of Mr. Noseeum, the Slam team is basically a family affair. The things you learn about family members once you become co-workers are interesting. For example, I found out today that Mat (@matstreet) is a big fat wuss. Since I've known him his whole life (okay, fine, he was probably already 15 minutes old the first time I saw him, but you know, 15 minutes isn't a whole lot unless you're holding your breath), it came as a bit of a suprise that I didn't know this about him before now.

The highlight of our Woubie launch party was supposed to be Mat Street jumping out of a plane and landing on the roof of my house. Today, on Facebook, he posted this comment in response to my announcement of our plans:

"Can you park an airplane in your backyard and I jump from your roof onto it instead? Pretty please? Let's think this through. Me no likey freefall!!!"

Damn baby.

Seriously, Mat, you wimp out on this, but still expect me to believe you when you say you would do anything for your family? Does your girlfriend know you're such a wimp? And since when is a feeling like freefall a negative thing for you? Also, you couldn't tell me to my face that you're chicken?

All I have to say now is that you better come up with something awesome to take the place of the plane jumping-falling-landing-splat routine.

If not I'm tellin' Mom.

The time has come the walrus said...

2009-10-03T15:16:00.000-04:00

...to speak of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax. Of cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot. And whether pigs have wings. (The Walrus and The Carpenter - Lewis Carroll)

As much fun as it would be to discuss pigs, the state of their wings (or lack of) and the many reasons they may have wings, the time hasn't actually come for that yet. But it has come for Woubie. In our previous blog we posted a screen shot of one section of Woubie. And although it's crystal clear to me, I've been informed by The Walrus that it may be about as clear as mud to the rest of the world. So I'll try to smear away a little of the mud.

The primary purpose of Woubie is to organize data. Not just any ol' data though. Woubie focuses on data that would be stored by writers and comedians. Specifically all of the minute details about facts, characters, locations, bibliography, quotes, jokes and several other things that we like to refer to as Objects. The screen shot we posted was of the Comedy section (or Object). Using Woubie, a comedian can take all of his or her material, store it, assign categories & subcategories (with easy to use drop down lists), sort & filter it, assign duration & ratings, flag whether it's "clean" material of not (i.e. rated XXX or not) and then link multiple jokes together to form a set.

The Walrus just informed me that I'm close to exceeding my word limit for this post. So we're off to have some oysters.

First Official Woubie Announcement

2009-10-02T15:18:00.000-04:00

Labor will be induced on October 31st at 9:00pm EST.

Here's the most recent sonogram, in which you can clearly see Woubie's sense of humor:

Quitting and Starting

2009-09-03T15:27:00.000-04:00

In October 2008 I quit.

I quit the job I had for 11 years. I quit dealing with the frustration of working for a corporation that was rife with petty squabbles and tug-of-wars that blocked any meaningful progress. I quit having to deal with being told every other month to lay more people off. I quit swallowing the anger I felt about C-suite people getting large bonuses, while people who could barely survive on what they made were being let go and losing their homes.

A lot of people probably thought I was stupid or crazy. Good pay, long tenure, no real chance they were going to lay me off (no matter how much I wished they would). But it was one of the smartest things I've ever done. Because by quitting that job I also quit having stomach aches every day from the stress and frustration. I quit being too short-tempered and grumpy with my kid. I quit smoking. I quit feeling like my life was all work and no play.

Once I got over the shock of quitting so many things at one time, I started.

I started spending more time with my daughter and family. I started thinking about what I really wanted to do with my life. I started eating better, getting more exercise and sleeping soundly. I started laughing more. I started getting my life organized. I started helping my brother figure out how to manage his vast amount of comedy material. I started searching for some software that would help organize my own piles of research material.

I'm a great fan of technology. What I was searching for was software that would help me store detailed information related to facts, characters, locations, bibliography, quotes, ideas, and post-writing information such as submission and publication information. And I wanted to also be able to categorize and subcategorize it, sort, filter, print, and link pieces together. I wasn't looking for a program to help me format a manuscript, screenplay or article. I found that there are some great programs on the market for that, but they focus on the format, not the peripheral material and information. I tested a lot of programs, read through pages and pages of product descriptions, blogs related to writing, technical reviews and customer reviews. And in the end I realized that what I was looking for just didn't exist.

So I started building two more things: Slam Industries LLC and our first product, Woubie. Woubie is the software I was looking for.