Suggestion: NanoNote Personalities Program

Wolfgang Spraul wolfgang at qi-hardware.com
Sun Sep 13 23:41:35 EDT 2009


sjl,
Yes! Thank you very much for writing this up in such a nice way.
Right now we are all focused on a stable kernel (and getting the product
out :-)), but right after that I believe something like the personalities
program is where we should take the product and the company.
If anyone can start going down that direction now with some preparations,
that would be fantastic.

Also, I do like the emphasis you put on manuals and customer service, and
seeing 'programming' as participating rather than coding.
Way to go, thanks again!
Wolfgang

P.S.: If you don't mind, I will copy the personalities plan to our wiki
at http://wiki.qi-hardware.com so we can follow up easier over time...

On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 01:36:17PM -0700, sjl at ross154.net wrote:
> NanoNote Personalities Program[1]
> 
> You know the changable cellphone cover fad, where they snapped on
> different colorful plastic covers? The NanoNote should offer
> different "spins" offering different types of functionality,
> aka "personalities".
> 
> Example personalities:
> * graphing calculator 
> * electronic spelling dictionary / translator
> * travel buddy (wikitravel / openstreetmap)
> * puzzle games
> * beginner programming languages (python, pascal, etc)
> * PDA
> * Gutenberg ebooks reader
> 
> Every personality would be available both as a downloadable
> image and preinstalled on SD cards sold as NN accessories.
> Every SD card would have a custom sticker to show at a 
> glance which personality is installed on it.
> There would be a little case or slipcover for the NN
> that would include a little compartment for an SD collection.
> 
> Company responsibilities:
> 
> * Pay an artist to work with personality development teams on a
>   a splashscreen + tiny SD sticker art for each team
> * Pay good tech writers to develop user guides for each personality;
>   bonus points for paying tech writers to help out on developer docs!!
> * Provide hosting for personality development teams, but also support 
>   mirroring of install images for teams that want to use their
>   own server
> * Hire knowledgable and good-tempered customer support engineers
>   willing to shield developers from grumpy customers and
>   customers from grumpy developers
> * Handle retail of the pre-installed SDs, including the custom
>   stickers for branding (also offer stickers separately for those
>   who want to download images to already-owned SD)
> * Offer to donate some portion of pre-installed SD / sticker profit to
>   project designated by leaders of corresponding dev team
> 
> Developer team responsibilities:
> 
> Most of the personalities would use the openwrt base, but some of
> the ones intended for hacking might slap the NN kernel into another
> embedded distro, e.g. a gentoo embedded experiment (gentoo has 
> mips support).
> 
> * Work with artist to come up with custom splashscreen 
>   and SD sticker art
> * Make sure the official splashscreen for the personality gets
>   displayed at boot
> * Answer questions from tech writer regarding user guide
> 
> [1] "program" in the sense of "something you can participate in",
>     not in the sense of "code a computer executes"



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