Website Update: October

We are still fixing bugs in the friends and family alpha release.  I have a few videos up on CwhatIcanDoProjects on YouTube. This will provide a sneak preview...  Enjoy the videos...

Web release update

We are in process with the alpha testing of Rel A 1.0 CwhatIcanDo website. We have a few who have signed up, but only one or two people are actually uploading a video and instructions. Anyway, I've budgeted two months in this limited alpha test model. I started out by applying to some of my friends and family to jump on and give feedback. I've gotten only a little feedback and about a dozen testers.

On the other hand, I've personally uploaded a couple of projects and will do some more over the next two months. Also, I'll be making our first distributor "deals" with some of the websites which sell robot and robot-related parts.

I'll keep you posted. Things are pretty quiet right now.

Alpha Testing Begins

Wheeee!

And I mean it! This has been the most fun I've had building a website. Now it is open for inspection and positive creative contributions by a horde of Friends and Family, followed by a select group of do it yourselfers of various kinds and flavors.

We already had a couple of web builder/designers take a sneak preview of the site. Their feedback was positive enough to stop me in my tracks. The site is nice. It's the best Andrei and I could crunch together. It's pretty complete, complete with it's own list of bugs which we are using the site to keep track of. At the first of August, the bug list was pretty significant. A few events went on between our various families and it took a while. But I realized one day, the bug list only had two bugs. Neither was a real bug, just a feature that needed to be hooked up...

We did it. And now, and maybe for a couple of months of testing, we are opening the doors for Creators. Some we want to give us design ideas and others a technical checklist, but we also want people to use the tools to create projects. And they are coming too... I can't wait to send the invite email! Gonna Happen!!!

Alpha Release Candidate 1 AlphaRC1

While we ended up a little off the bulls eye, our vector is still aligned and we are moving in the right direction. Our Target Was to be Ready For Alpha Testers by the end of July. It's the beginning of August, still in an acceptable range, true, but while I already am Alpha Testing, it's not quite ready for our Friends and Family Alpha release. I do have a few web developer friends and they are being very helpful, so we really are in Alpha Testing.

I wish I could show it to you, but it has taken four complete functional frameworks to get here, where we're all pretty happy with our choices. Of course integrating it all together for the Release Candidate and our friends and family surfing around in there, they can forgive the color scheme, but the navigation has to work. It drives me crazy when navigation spins me around. So in a little while now, we will go into stealth mode tests. In reality, this blog entry will probably be long lost by the time you run into C What I Can Do, or C what I did... So even as I'm writing it, it is an historical document. Just like from one moment to the next. It can all change...

Here is the state of this project:
1. As mentioned we have a design in place that is A Release Candidate. Target, around the middle of the month.
2. CwhatIdid.com opened it's potential and we are re-thinking of it as more of a Sister Site as much as a part of CwhatIcanDo.com Right now the logo is CwhatIcanDo with a pale version of CwhatIdid behind it. But as some others have been introduced to the concept, I may have discovered another use altogether for CwhatIdid and the potential is high.
3. We have many things to do before the site will be available to web surfers, bullet-proofing everything making sure our agreements with Creators give them the Intellectual Property Protection we promise. Dotting i's and crossing t's, plus the mechanisms for a lot of the features that will put the dazzle into the site that will make it a cool place to hang out with your creator friends you get here.

I'll keep you posted occassionally here. I have a few notes to myself I need to be able to look back on and regain my bearings. Not that I'm floppin' around just busy.

Architecture

CwhatIcanDo.com

This is the root of the website.

From here we branch out into the website pages. We decided on a blog-like interface to create the projects and by actually building several versions of the website. We were working our way to choosing the optimal combination of videos, photos, weblinked pictures with step by step instructions.

This format allowed users to create projects based on ideas. Just hit Create New Project and scratch in your project idea. Now CwhatIcanDo serves as a place for you to create a new project.

If you've already built something, then you might not want to put in the steps of how to build, but rather the elements of the experiments that led you to the actual project. So we wanted flexibility for the creator...

This led us to develop the feeder URL: cWhatIdid.com, a place where finished projects are displayed and the user can dig deeper to see the Steps to Build, or the Experiments that led to the project, whatever someone wants to expose is shown on cWhatIcanDo.com. Say you're a carpenter who installs cabinets, you'll want to put your projects on CwhatIdid.com so you can send perspective clients to see what you did, or how you do a typical installation, or whatever you do that people might want to see your finished products.

So CwhatIcanDo was designed for multiple purposes, but the core of it is a way to show people how to built simple robots, or robotic drives or how to sense IR and use it to add obstacle avoidance to any robot project. The list goes on and on. The architecture of CwhatIcanDo must be able to support a wide range of possible applications. Who knows what the users will do with this website?

Thus the architecture of the website(s) functionally looks something like this:

CwhatIcanDo.com Collects and formats the steps or elements or chapters of a project, be it a story, an experiment, or even a robot.

CwhatIdid.com AND CwhatIcanDo.com Peruse Complete Projects (and steps)

SEO optimizing server optomize.CwhatIcanDo.com Controls optimization of website on Search Engines.

Create and Edit Your Projects create.CwhatIcanDo.com A super-blog, if you will. Allows the creator to control all the aspects of what is displayed for a project. And that includes all the monetizing potential.

Essentially then, we would build two websites both using web2.0 technology.

One site will focus on speed. Promptly loading and allowing quick perusal of the project and the video showing the project in action in the real world.

A second website where the concentration of the technology is on ease of use and tools to create. It would load slower and not show up in too many search engines, but it would make the best and easiest to use Creator Tools on the web today.

We divided up our work. Andrei would be responsible for building the tools and I would be responsible to build the optimized for speed part. At first I was in a learning curve, but with Andrei's help I got my arms around the encompassing technology and together we created the architecture for the site.

At some point we would merge the two together and call it our Alpha Release. We are on schedule for having the Alpha Site completed by the end of this month - give or take... OK, probably actually it will be a little later, but our goal is to launch the site as Beta by fall of this year.

Then we will be about the business side of the site, establishing vendor status with any of the Alpha Tester's projects that need it. And ready to establish a commissioned sale when you get to your project's parts list.

• Who knows what it will look like when we open for business in the fall, we will have built and tested the site technically, but expect a lot of feedback and refinements during Alpha Testing, so it's a little hard to predict, but soon Everyone will be able to C What YOU Can Do...

History

It all started with those robots.

I was waiting on another "deal," babysitting another $50 Million Dollar Idea. Babysitting a deal leaves you with a lot of spare time. It's a large development loop consisting of propose, stay persistent, tweak the proposition, wait for email feedback. Repeat these steps till the deal is made. It's the way some people make their living.

In the Military they called it, "Hurry up and wait."

During my last round of hurry up and wait, I killed the time building robots. Just started out buying a couple of ten dollar "walkers." Cuz I wanted to see how far the hardware had come while I had spent the last twenty years in various loop-cycles investments for Motorola.

The state of AI in the days when I got first exposure to the field was a disappointment. The more I learned the more I could see that processing power would not be able to keep pace with software demands. Really meaty AI, the stuff of robots pets and android kitchen helpers, was the territory of new kinds of computational architectures. That would take a while.

In the earliest years AI flipped and flopped eventually morphed into one of its sub-units, Knowledge Based AI. That was great for all the call centers of the world, but it wasn't the stuff of my dreams.

I guess that's what eventually steered me do go into AI, messing around with Artificial Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic. I had gone so far as to stick my neck out 30 years ago and declare that someday we would have Microprocessor driven pets published in my book on Personal Computing. And, as opportunity would have it, eventually I came to land in Motorola's Semiconductor Division.

But where did CwhatIcanDo come from? The robots!

Killing the time building robots allowed me to understand the robotic "state of the art." What I discovered was a sizeable number of sites dedicated to robots, often homemade and held together with tape. That is, for every professional robotics site there were probably two to three amateur robot sites. The quality of the amateur sites ranged from super-professional looking, yet homemade "bots" to the aforementioned tape and wire with everything imaginable between. There were a lot of bots, a lot of bot websites, yet there didn't seem to be anyone tying all of it together. I started a blog and used everyone else's software pictures on picasweb, blog on google, videos on google video and you tube.



By experimenting with the blog and you tube and it's associated search engines I started to get position on interesting search words and played around with that for a while. I was able to optimize my approach. But a blog format wasn't the best for creating a step-by-step project or experiment with robot pieces. Thus was born the concept for a website oriented toward building projects which people could look at by scanning through projects until they found something interesting. If I built the website correctly, then when you looked around at finished projects and the steps leading up to them, you could become not just inspired to build your own or another, version of something that inspired you, you could instantly sign up and begin to document your project.

In addition, I thought my fellow homebrew robot friends would like to make a little money and show off their projects all at the same time. So we integrated the parts list into the project in such a way that when a person clicked on the parts list, they could click and easily order the part online, without leaving their project. Since it was clear the click for purchase came from CwhatIcanDo, so we made deals with distributors. Now when someone is inspired to build a wall-climbing bot inspired by your dancing flower pot project, CwhatIcanDo makes money on the sales commission. Then the website splits the income with the person who created the dancing flower pot project that inspired the purchase.

Not only that, if the project resulted in creation of a complete kit of parts, the creator could link to and sell his or her (or it: allowing for androids) directly on CwhatIcanDo. In addition, we encourage our creators to publish (and sell) their own robot books, parts, anything and everything by granting a commission to CwhatIcanDo. Yes, it is possible to double-dip. That is, you can sell your book on Amazon, then you not only get your royalty check, you get your cut of the commission from CwhatIcanDo!

Robotic amateur creators need to be free to create not only fun widgets, but also a have a way to monetize their interest in robots and robotic experimentation.

But there are other creators out there as well. It's not just about Robots... It's about how to do just about anything you can think of. And our creators will no doubt think of things we hadn't envisioned. We are thinking maybe Home projects, automotive, electronic, we allow you to categorize your project where you think it's best. Eventually, those categories will populate with projects and the popularity of getting a chance to CwhatOTHERScanDo ...

Checkout CwhatIcanDo.com (Opening for Beta in the Fall of 2008.)