Archives for posts with tag: tech
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It’s Time to Reinvent.

November 27, 2011 //
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Every now and then I run across great design and work that is simply more than just inspiring. Work so good that it actually helps break the notion to stay in a pattern that has worked for a while and even if your clients love it — it may be time for a change. It may be time to reinvent.

If you are a leader, designer or creative you know what I am talking about. Every few years and often sooner you have to reinvent what you do and how you do it. Today I stumbled onto Josh Hemsley’s design site. I am truly digging the attention to detail. Good work man. See Josh’s work and other talented designers on dribbble.com.

Is it time for you to reinvent? Post who inspires you.

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Categories Uncategorized

Big Dreams

October 8, 2011 //
6

Just to warn you. This is a response to a challenge to define what my BIG DREAM was and if I still had it in me to go for it.  If you don’t know my story this may seem a bit odd but here you go. This is the bullet point version with many gaps but it’s a start.

Part I – Us

I am working daily to clarify my BIG DREAM but as of right now it’s making sure our kiddos know they are loved and that they have a solid foundation for life. To find out how to consistently love my wife Myra in the way she needs. We are both so broken it’s tough sometimes. By broken, I mean we have survived excruciating loss. I’ll have to write a book on all that but trust me when I say broken for us is sometimes best described as a black hole. So the first part of my ‘dream’ is to get ‘us’ right. That’s a huge deal.

Part II – Connected 

I would love to start a “connected” community hub that integrates tech/design/new media & a mentor/relationship with real accountability for people who want to step off a path that leads to nowhere onto a path with possibility. Accountability for personal goals but also measurement for real world – real impact goals.

To underline that while we have this awesome time on Earth we also are a part of a larger plan. We were created to love Him and love others. To share His story of sacrifice for us. He could have come to this earth to destroy us… to punish us… which is what we have seemed to do very well on our own. But He chose to send His son to let us know there is a different choice, even in pain, hurt and wounds — we could still choose to love.

Part III – Discovery

I think my dream is to be what I have always wanted. A real encouraging, loving, friend. The issue, for me at least to is being able to look past my own void and actually be just that. Most of the time I am the exact opposite. Especially to those I love the most. Not cool but true.

That’s a start for me. What’s your BIG DREAM?

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Categories getting here, The Lundstroms

Love/Hate The Process

June 28, 2011 //
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Today marks a first. I registered online at Apple.com for the genius bar repair appointment. Seriously. The funny thing is I use to be one of “those people” who protested this process. I still kind of wish I could just walk on in and say “help please”, drop off my broken device and go run some other errands until I received a text or email that everything was all better.

So what processes do you wish you could ditch or are you at the point of adding new ones? If the end game is providing a better service then… fine, I’ll think about conforming.

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Categories getting here, just cool stuff

Bay Area Fellowship Multisite Campuses

May 21, 2011 //
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Had a great couple of days in Corpus Christi, Texas hanging out with the Bay Area Fellowship Multisite Campus team and wanted to post some of the photos. We toured five out of their eight campuses and all were uniquely setup while offering a consistent BAF experience. Thanks again to John Atkinson, Brandon Cunningham and Joey Davila for being excellent hosts. These guys took a day and a half out of their schedules to give us an excellent multisite experience! Amazing. Check it out via Flickr below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gfcinnovation/

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Categories Church, Design, Multisite

Stairway to Heaven – LIVE Tomorrow!

May 1, 2011 //
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Pumped about our new series, “So You’re Dead… Now What?” What will happen to you the second after you die? Tomorrow’s message is going to be pretty cool, it’s titled “Stairway to Heaven” — Join us tomorrow and judge for yourself if the band lives up to Led Zepplin’s original! See you there http://live.gfcfamily.com 9:30am & 11:00am cst.

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Categories Church, just cool stuff

Design Snapshot

April 29, 2011 //
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What’s on your desktop? Post Link.


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Categories Church, Church Marketing, Design, just cool stuff

New Mobile App Launch

April 24, 2011 //
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Just released a brand new GFC App today to the Android Market. It’s in beta of course so if you find any bugs or weird happenings – leave feedback here on the blog. Also, happy to say that AppMakr.com is meeting our need for mobile content pretty well. It’s great to have a Free option to create and publish mobile apps to test the water and see where and how it would be wise to invest further. I am pretty happy with the solutions for both iPhone and Android. The Android functionality is limited to RSS feeds mostly but allows users to access our streaming media, flickr, blog posts and some social media.

By the way, publishing an Android App is about 1000 times simpler than the iPhone app. Excellent work Google for keeping things simple.

So what’s the cost so far, about 40 hours of my time, $99 Apple Developer Registration fee & $0 zero for Android. Working on publishing the Microsoft Windows version at the moment, invested another $99 App Hub registration fee but should be good to go after another several rounds of inefficient communication with Microsoft =) (Sorry, but if you only knew.)
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Categories Church, Church Marketing, getting here, technology twist

Ideas That Take Flight

March 2, 2011 //
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Today, we had a staff survivor challenge… with paper airplanes. To win the challenge you would have to build an airplane out of one – 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and have the longest flight without touching the wall, launch platform or other stationary object — the stopwatch will start once the plane leaves your hand and stops once plane hits the floor. Very happy to report that I brought home the gold with the longest inflight with 3.6 seconds. I chose The Dart concept just in case you were wondering.

Reminded me when I was a kid — paper airplanes, pencil wars and drawing battle vehicles to compete the next day in class. What a blast. Kind of like a 1980′s kids version of the X-Prize. Funny how even at a young age I geeked over prototyping and sketching ideas. It’s really the first step to bringing an idea to reality. Get it on paper or build it out of anything. One of my favorite books talks about this, Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, from the CEO of IDEO.

Some of the drawings I can remember were a mountain-based Airplane Landing Track or my favorite Vehicle Cameraflage, a high-tech invisibility cloak – which I would like to claim publicly was stolen for Die Another Day, 2002 James Bond movie.

What was one of your favorite things to do as a kid?  Comment


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Categories getting here, just cool stuff, technology twist, The Lundstroms

A Revealing Question

February 7, 2011 //
1

Ok, so you’re standing side-stage just behind the curtain at the most attended leadership conference in 2011. You are speaking to the most driven, innovative and talented leaders on the planet. What will you tell them? How will you let them into your world, inspire and challenge them?

For me I love to hear people’s heart, their struggle, their journey.  I love to hear insights on new ventures and the challenges they have encountered along the way. But the truth is all those things just give credibility and set the stage.

I attended an Innovation Technology round table with the LifeChurch.tv team a year or so ago and also spent some time with Bobby Gruenwald and Terry Storch and left that day with this one question “What are you doing today? Not what did you do last month or last year, but what are you doing today?” That question was stuck on replay for hours and even days. I remember so clearly reading this very same idea in Dell’s mission and vision model — “Keep the celebration short so you can get back to Innovating.” more or less. Not sure how they measure up today but it’s still a very clear idea.

Our team decided to answer this question and started developing a prototype of church online and live streaming for our church. Three months later we were live streaming and answering questions live from stage to anyone all over the U.S. who was attending online as well as in-person (via Twitter using ParaTweet). That next month we were the front page story in the Houston Chronicle “Praise for Technology“. It was wild to say the least. How many conferences and talks will you attend before you actually decide to start making an impact?

Revealing Questions

  • What are you doing today that is making an impact?
  • What are your strengths & are you using them?
  • Do you have people in your life that challenge you to be your best?

Ok, so if the first question is not tough enough, you may find the second question a bit tougher. What are your strengths? Do you know them or are you guessing? This past year I took Strengths Finder 2.0 and the final report nailed me down as Learner, Strategic & Achiever among others. Very revealing and accurate. If you have not taken it and have not taken your team through it I highly recommend it.

But before you even do that. Take some time and inventory what you and your team have done in the past 3-6 months. Are you innovating or maintaining. Don’t get stagnant. Don’t be afraid to reveal what is truly happening in your role, team and organization.

What revealing questions have impacted you? Post here, I would love to check them out.

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Categories Church, Church Marketing, getting here, just cool stuff, Missional Church

No Pets Culture at The Office

January 21, 2011 //
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Our staff is going through Cracking Your Churches Culture Code by Samuel Chand this month and BJ had us commit to a NO PETS policy on our staff.

No Problems
There are no more problems in our organization. Only challenges or opportunities. Problems are negativity and the solution is usually to get rid of them. Instead take some time to learn from whatever is going on and improve. Offer solutions and ideas instead of marinating on the issue. I talked with our Innovation Team about this constantly, that we are problem-solvers, we provide solutions — and we were not going to settle on complaints and issues unless someone wanted to figure out how to address it, creatively and constructively.

No Excuses
Excuses happen when things are not going so well. It’s a defense mechanism. How many organizations do you know that give an excuse for how and why they do what they do? Take Responsibility. Address the hard truth about performance and effectiveness. If one approach is not working then try a different approach. I read once how Michael Dell empowers his employees to take risks and if the venture fails or not working out as expected the leader had to know when to pull the plug. That’s it. We are all going to mess up, our ideas do not always work — we’re human. Just don’t expect to clean a mess up by pouring more stuff on top of it or even worse make excuses for why it is not effective.

No “They”
I hear this at least once a week. They said… Usually they is one person who decides that they are representing a whole group of people. How many times are we guilty of building a case and adding a few extra people? Stop giving power to they. If you have something to say, say it directly to the person who can do something about it. Matthew 18:15 says something about that.

No Secrets
We recently listened to The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey. Every team and organization must operate in a culture of trust. Without it your cost will go up and speed will go down. Trust is simply “Character + Competence”. To have trust you must be able to communicate directly with one another. To kill trust, do just the opposite: don’t communicate directly others, just complain or gossip to everyone else — or keep “secrets”. Secrets are the not-so-silent trust killer. If you are going to solve problems or opportunities together you have to be willing to communicate openly and honestly.

Sorry, PET lovers. There not allowed here anymore.

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Categories Church, getting here, just cool stuff

Simple Tool for Building iPhone Apps

December 13, 2010 //
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Build it today, test on your iPhone today. (Release to app store 10 Days)

So I have wanted to build an iPhone app for about a year now and received several cost estimates from excellent companies SubSplash, MobileRoadie and a few others. We will most likely move ahead and invest a bit in the next year for mobile media but before we totally took the plunge I wanted to test just how popular and useful an iPhone mobile app would be.

If you have been looking for a simple way to build and fairly simple way to publish an iPhone app and really don’t want to invest thousands just yet, I would recommend AppMakr. You can design and build straight forward apps pretty quick and if you know some HTML and CSS you can push the functionality a bit.

Building is the easy part actually, it’s connecting and publishing to the Apple iTunes App Store that’s a bit complex, at least at first. I’ll outline that process in a future post. If you don’t want to figure the second part out AppMakr will publish for you at $1,000.00 (each release).

Give it a try, I think you’ll dig it. Here is the direct link to the Grace Fellowship Church app. Released today. Looking forward to checking out the stats. Have fun.

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Categories Church, Church Marketing, just cool stuff, technology twist

New iPhone or Droid?

October 4, 2010 //
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Ok, so I am selling my Apple iPhone 3GS (32GB) – curious for those of you who have done the same. Do you recommend upgrading to the iPhone 4 or going for the new Droid? The international market for smart phones is crazy. Our friend just sold his for over $600.00. Seriously.

Mobile phone service plans and even the phone purchase is now subsidized by countries and becoming more available since third world countries cannot offer telecommunications infrastructure. The rest of the world just may catch up in the next 25 years. Remember when “global economy” was just a debate in freshman economics?

Apple iPhone 3GS (32GB) White (ebay link) Sold $460 (fraud) Sold $361 (legit)

Apple iPhone 3G (16GB) Black (ebay link) Sold $198

*Decision: Went with the new iPhone 4 16GB – love it! Reception is a bit off out here in the rurals, waiting on new case to help with that. Heard that was an issue. Ah, well. If it turns out to be horrible. I think I will try gazelle.com next time. I hear it’s better for selling your gadgets.

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Categories getting here, technology twist

Outgrowing Infrastructure? Facebook

September 24, 2010 //
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What happens when you outgrow existing infrastructure? You hit a wall and it slows you down. I can imagine a team of tech gurus hovering over server delay, outage and DNS reports — half the team insisting they knew they would hit this wall eventually, the other half just trying to get the problem solved. So what is the problem? Is it just not enough servers, processing power and load-balancing to keep up with the Facebook demand? Obviously. But where did the failing point happen? Within the company server rooms or in the connection to the back-bone to the Internet? Curious how many co-location sites these guys have, where they might be?

Really, I only noticed the site being down a couple of times today but what I could not ignore was all the hype and fuss about what was going wrong. Interesting. Ah, back to the real world. =)

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Categories technology twist

209 People in 4 countries, 10 states joined us for the launch of Grace Fellowship Live Services =)

September 21, 2010 //
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Great weekend @gfcfamily. Launched brand NEW church online stream. 209 people in 4 countries and 10 states joined in for the first weekend! You can check it out this Sunday 9:30 or 11:00AM CST & Monday 12Noon http://live.gfcfamily.com.

I have to say it was an amazing moment to hear BJ announce on-stage and on-air that we are now LIVE and broadcasting across the area and that several of our friends and family were joining us from all over. We are using LivePerson.com for the private chat software and JS-Kit.com for the lobby chat that integrates well with OpenId, Facebook and Twitter. We also hooked up a simple connect form for those new to Grace Fellowship and donation link for regular attenders.

We ran three services this weekend and all three were great! Currently only offering one medium bandwidth stream but moving quickly to accommodate a low and high stream by next weekend. Our next step is to stream to mobile. Love to get the word out. But also trying to implement a channel that offers more for very different audience. Who? You will see! A Big thank you to our streaming partner vLifeMedia — these guys have been streaming for years and they know what they are doing.

If you are interested in streaming for your organization give them a shout. They deliver small to large scale streaming solutions. http://www.vlifemedia.com.

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Categories Church, technology twist

Grace Fellowship Church LIVE

September 13, 2010 //
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Grace Fellowship Church Paradise, Texas - Live Streaming Services Online

It is crank week at Grace Fellowship Church as we get ready to launch the all new Live streaming of the services! Check it out September 19 at 9:30 & 11:00am. We tested behind the scenes this weekend and the quality looks good so far. The second DSL line is scheduled to be installed this week in order to help with load balance and maximizing bandwidth. We plan on using a simple custom css/php template to run it with chat, live prayer, social media integration and more. The best thing is letting friends, family and new viewers see what Grace Fellowship is all about. It’s a great way to check out the church and see if it is worth visiting but also a great tool for getting the message out across the states and globally.  Stay tuned!

http://live.gfcfamily.com

Also, our temporary page and recent announcement seems to be drawing attention from many sides. Love seeing the different perspectives in the area.

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Categories Church, getting here, just cool stuff, technology twist

Echo Thoughts

July 30, 2010 //
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- We are all creative, every one of us.
- Take time to listen, then listen some more.
- Quit thinking about what God has put on your heart — do it.
- Be available, take risks, prepare to “Go Big”. Stop letting yourself stall out.
- Communicate clearly, know who you are communicating with.
- Take time for others. Know their name. That is a start to a new conversation and relationship.
- Fatherlessness is killing the U.S.  What can you do about it? TheMentoringProject.org
- Tell a better story, people are rarely moved by stats and goals but by a STORY. — Donald Miller
- Go Big or Go Home – Help others execute their big vision. Your big vision will come and then you will be ready.
- Have a strategy, a plan, execute it, measure it and revise it. (repeat)
- We are not the hero. Jesus is.

Had a great time at the Echo Conference this year. Met some great people with common vision and goals. Loved sharing thoughts and ideas with peers and hearing from those who are in our world everyday. Love seeing the movement of the church and how it is again becoming less and less about the medium and more and more about the Message.

More about Echo Conference 2010 via Twitter #Echo10, Flickr Echo Conference and Echo site.

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Categories Church, Church Marketing, getting here, just cool stuff, Missional Church, technology twist

Twitter Search Operators “helpful”

May 21, 2010 //
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How well you can operate something directly depends on what you know about it – how well you understand it. So how well you know something or someone is how well you will interact with it. It has a flow, a rhythm. You can’t just use it – without first learning it, studying the rules, techniques, it’s make up. Before you can master anything you must know it first.

So, how are you using Twitter search? Why is it even important? You’ll see.

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Categories technology twist

Woodlands Church Online LIVE

October 28, 2009 //
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It all starts this November 2009!

Join us for this LIVE Online Event // Pastor Kerry Shook and Woodlands Church services online! If you are in the area join us at one of our three locations in The Woodlands, Atascocita or Tomball.

Or if you are elsewhere join us for our BETA test of Church Online and let us know what you think. http://live.woodlandschurch.tv/ Saturday 6:00pm or Sunday 9:30, 11:00am or Wednesday at 9:00am.

See you on campus or online!

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“Twitter in Church” Front Page @HoustonChron

October 12, 2009 //
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chronstory

Wow, great article posted front page on the Sunday, October 11 Houston Chronicle Newspaper. “Praise for Technology: Tweeting during church services receives blessings from pastors.” Really excited that Pastor Kerry jumped in and is experimenting with new technologies and connecting with the congregation. I am still amazed and how church is viewed and how this sort of thing might create controversy in the public. Check out the comments and the rest of the article here: http://www.chron.com/disp/discuss.mpl/metropolitan/6662287.html

Seems to be a bit of a controversy Tweeting in church. What do you think? Cast YOUR VOTE. Also, fun note: just got off the phone with my other half and she said this is the main article on the front page of the printed edition!! Amazing. Give a quick hello to Pastor Kerry via Twitter and maybe follow Woodlands Church if you want to track with us.

w1r_chronstory

Great article! Your comments and thoughts can be posted via the huge button below.

leavecomment


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The Next Zuckerberg?

October 3, 2009 //
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nextbook

Are you the next Zuckerberg? Really, how so? Tell us how you are cranking out the next big thing. Or maybe you know someone who is a true inventor – innovator. Are you cranking on stuff that is going to change the way we do life? Even small innovations can be huge in the long-term. Just curious about what’s next and what you are doing right now that will shape the way people interact. Is it You? Or someone near you? Who do you think is the next Zuckerberg?

“Initially Zuckerberg asked a small group of people to sign up to Facebook. At a certain point he told us to start inviting friends, and that is what we did on the first and second day which the site went up on the Web. We could only invite students enrolled at Harvard. In fact, if you did not have a Harvard e-mail address you could not sign into Facebook. At first, dozens of Harvard students registered. The numbers then reached the hundreds, and by the fourth day it had already reached the thousands. People were very enthusiastic about the site. It enabled them to know who took what courses and to meet new people. It conquered Harvard. In less than a week, some 4,000 students signed up for Facebook.”

During Facebook’s initial days, the walls in his room were filled with graphs and charts which showed how many people joined on a daily basis, who used what application, and who has the most friends.”

Beginnings of Facebook
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084443.html

MIT MBA (E&I) Program
http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/E_and_I.php

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