Permission to Buzz the Tower, Over

Today's word of the day is "Buzz". This week, secret NSA shell corporation Web giant Google launched its new Google Buzz web-application. I still haven't worked my bearings around on it yet, but it seems to essentially be another Twitter-like microblogging application that syncs to your Gmail contacts. The nice part about it is that it is fully integrated into Gmail, so you don't have to log into anything special. However, it will be another way for Google to tap further into our minds!!1!1one! Still, if you have Gmail, see if you can't follow me on Google Buzz! We can get watched by Big Brother together!

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I had started Private Pilot Ground School. Thus far, we've read a few chapters and listened to a lot of lecture about airfoils and stability of flight. This past Tuesday, we got pizza, which helped us tide over the three-hour session. For homework, I got to build a little balsa wood plane to demonstrate how to use rudder and ailerons to counteract the plane's natural tendency to yaw left because of various forces from the propeller's motion.

Today, however, we got to go on our very first field trip. Well, most of us did, anyway. Mark had to stay back because he isn't a U.S. citizen (though I don't know that they would have actually stopped him anyway - they were really cool about letting us in).

So, our first field trip was to Melbourne International Airport's (MLB) very own Ground Control Tower! This tower is responsible for all air traffic in and around the Space Coast area and also has influence over airspace as far south as Broward County!

At the tower, we listened to the three control officers talk about their job, and asked questions about how busy it gets and how difficult it is to coordinate in high traffic times. Turns out most of the traffic at MLB is actually student pilot traffic rather than airliners, but in that sense, it is even more chaotic because student pilots pretty much fly whenever they want to and primarily fly VFR rather than IFR, which means that they use visual cues and thus rely on snap decisions from ground control more than your typical scheduled airliner flight.

It seems like a pretty neat job, and we got to hear them say things like "Alpha bravo, you are cleared for landing at runway 5, over!" But perhaps the highlight of the visit was watching one of the controllers surprise the other when he turned on the window washing sprinklers!

Wufoo's Net Promoter Score

The following feature is an "A" paper that I wrote for my Business-to-Business marketing class. In fact, it was my best paper yet - the teacher said it was "flawless". Like Mortal Kombat. Xtreme!

The context is on whether or not a Website can provide a "Delightful Customer Experience". With Karn's help, we found the site Wufoo.com, and I wrote my assignment on it. Wufoo certainly sounds like a pretty cool tool to use, if you need that kind of thing. The paper below will let you know all about it! - Grantis Mantis

As an early adopter of the World Wide Web in the 90s, I was never able to create the web empire I imagined I would when I created my very first website. Contrary to popular belief, not all engineers are great coders, and to this day, my claims on web space remain little more than venues where I express haphazard trains of thought and share photos and other media. While my failure to make it big in web-commerce is likely due to lack of effort, the ability to create online forms for registration, surveys, invitations, and payment without knowing a lick of code could have helped me overcome my lack of software prowess. As this very assignment references, companies today need to have robust websites with all of the aforementioned features. While companies could use their own resources or hire contractors to develop these features for their website, they could save substantially if there were an easy way to create professional looking forms. Startup company Infinity Box’s website, Wufoo.com, provides individuals and companies alike a way to do just that.

Wufoo.com is a website that provides an interface to create online forms for various purposes. Their website is similar in design to many so-called Web 2.0 websites, with clean presentation, bold colors, and easy to read text. Titles and subtitles are shown in a whimsical text to match the site’s whimsical name, which, as the site’s FAQ explains, was derived as a combination of the names of music groups Wu-Tang Clan and Foo Fighters. Just as attractive presentation can help a salesperson close more deals, an aesthetically pleasing website helps to create a better experience for potential customers, and Wufoo.com is, if nothing else, an attractive website:

The presentation of the website also makes it very easy for potential customers to get around and find information. Clear links are presented on the homepage, leading to pages that explain their product, show some examples, and allow potential customers to try it out for free. A variable splash page shows how Wufoo can help enhance websites for individuals, businesses, education, and payment interfaces. Additional links take customers to detailed product features, information about the company, FAQ pages, explanation of pricing, and also a list of prominent clients that use Wufoo.com, a list that includes companies such as Microsoft, Best Buy, Disney, J. Crew, the American Red Cross, Amazon.com, and Ycombinator (the venture capital firm that incubated Infinity Box when they were getting started). Most technically impressive is the site’s interactive tour, which contains videos demonstrating the site’s features.

Payment is safe and easy, as the site is encrypted for security. As previously mentioned, there is a clear link to the pricing information on the homepage, clearly showing the prices for the different levels of service, which is quite competitive considering the alternative of hiring IT to maintain your forms. When you are ready to try the product, clicking on another link takes the customer to a registration form no doubt created using Wufoo.com, where you can either make up to three forms for free or go “all-in” and purchase the service.

If potential customers have any further questions or comments about Wufoo.com, there is a link on the site that launches a pop-up window where the customer can ask questions and provide feedback directly to Infinity Box. Users, potential customers, and fans of the company or site can stay on top of updates via the company’s blog or through Twitter and Flickr. Furthermore, as with any self-respecting Web 2.0 site, Wufoo.com also has a member forum where users can show off their Wufoo.com creations, find tips and advice, or request new or improved features.

After thoroughly going through the features of Infinity Box’s nifty form-making website, I give Wufoo.com a solid 9 on the NPS scale. The site is intuitive, easy to navigate, attractive, and it provides any information you could want and ample opportunities to ask if you don’t find what you need. An informal survey of ten friends, plus me, resulted in the following splits:

No. Promoters: 7
No. Neutral: 4
No. Detractors: 0

These scores yielded a total combine Net Promoter Score of 63.6% (which is quite good - anything above a 50% is excellent!)

I discussed the scores with each of my survey takers. All agreed that Wufoo.com is an attractive site that is easy to get around and get information about. One immediately recommended it to his fraternity, which is always looking for better ways to collect dues. The most negative feedback came from individuals with experience in web design and IT, who thought that the price was a little high, that the data would be kept on Infinity Box’s own servers (rather than the customer’s server), and that “there are people who could do it better”, no doubt indicating themselves. However, they agreed that for people who have less software or web design experience, Wufoo seemed like an excellent tool that was a good alternative to hiring a full-time IT employee or was handy for anyone wishing to put together a quick and easy website.

Chinese Language Learning Tools

Some more fascinating online tools, courtesy of the usual suspects, Ed and Karn. Today's featured highlights of the Interwebs are a couple of Chinese Language tools, Skritter and NCIKU. With the growing popularity of Chinese as a second language, these tools are very handy both for beginners and for people who already have experience with the Chinese language!


The first, Skritter, seems to be some kind of introductory online course in Chinese, meant to teach you the basics of writing and pronunciation. It's pretty neat, as it drills you in some important concepts such as tonality. In Chinese, the tone of each syllable is very important. By pronouncing a word using tone 3 instead of tone 1, you could well be calling your mother a horse! Unfortunately, Skritter does not appear to be a free service, but you can still try it out here: Skritter

The second tool is probably a bit more useful for the likes of me - someone who has some marginal skills in Chinese but sometimes needs to look up a word or two. It's an online Chinese dictionary, courtesy of NCIKU. I have no idea what NCIKU is, but they make a pretty mean Chinese dictionary. Like Google's translator, NCIKU allows you to look up a word by typing it in its search field. However, if you can't type in Chinese, you can also search via Pinyin, the main Romanization system used today to transliterate Chinese using Western characters. The strength of this dictionary, however, is the fact that it allows you to use your mouse to write the character. Traditional bound Chinese-English (or just Chinese, for that matter) dictionaries force you to search for the word based on a number of strokes in its radical (a part of the word that often determines the words base meaning and/or base sound), then search within the radical group for the final word. NCIKU's engine let's you make your best approximation of the word, then displays a number of choices that the word could possibly be. You select the one that matches the word you came across, and it then gives you a good definition, plus several sample sentences that include sound clips to show you how the sentences are pronounced! Very cool. Bookmark this one, because, as far as I can tell, it's free! Link: NCIKU

DropBox - Your Online Storage Solution!

Good ol' Karn is always hooking me up with cool stuff that he finds on the internet. My first rave review for the day is about DropBox. DropBox is a cool little app that seamlessly creates online storage for your files. I know what you're thinking. "How is that different from plain ol' FTP?" Patience Grasshopper, for I once thought as you do.


DropBox prompts you to download a client. That is one of the things that kind of turned me off at first - I hate downloading weird stuff. But, the benefits that the DropBox application provides easily trumps the hassle of having to download the client. In fact, it encouraged me to download the client several times! I'll explain.

See, when you download DropBox, it creates a folder in your Documents folder called "My DropBox", that looks and acts just like any other Windows folder you have. In fact, you can move it somewhere else if you like, DropBox will know where it is. You drag and drop files you want to make available online into the folder, and you can make subdirectories and everything, just like the real thing.

Here's the fun part. If you download the DropBox application onto a second PC and sign in with your account, that folder automatically syncs itself. Any file you put into your DropBox previously is available now on your other computer. Still, how is that different from, say, e-mailing a file to yourself? Well, for starters, you don't need to keep a local copy of the file. What does that mean? Basically, you can open the file directly out of DropBox, make changes and edits, and save the file, all without ever having to download it to your computer and re-upload it to the web. Any changes you make will be synced the next time you turn on another computer that has your DropBox account set up on it! Plus, you can put it on as many computers as you want!


Let's say you are at a computer where you don't (or can't) have the DropBox application installed. You can still access your file online, via the web interface. Unfortunately, you can't edit your files live this way, but you can move, add, or remove files in and out of your DropBox and they will be there for you to play with when you get back to your own computer.

Still not convinced? That's okay, because DropBox isn't about to give up yet! You can designate any folder to be a "Share" folder and add collaborators (friends that also have DropBox accounts) to use the same folder. They will be able to access and edit the same file, so long as you aren't doing something to it at the same time. Think GoogleDocs, except you are working with real Office files, or photos, or pictures, or whatever you want, instead of the stripped down Google suite. What's more, any file that you put in your "Public" folder, you can create a URL that you can send to your friends that don't have DropBox, giving you a quick and easy way to distribute files you store in your DropBox.


Basically, DropBox is like one of the network share drives you probably use at work, except it uses the Internet as its server. It can come in particularly handy if you need to collaborate on schoolwork or projects and don't want to continually send dozens of copies of the same file back and forth between you and your team members. You can also use it like a virtual thumb drive that you don't have to carry. DropBox starts you off with 2GB of storage (2.25GB if you join on my referral), so it is plenty of space for you to put just about anything except for big movie files. It's seamless with your regular Windows file system, to the point that you can shortcut to files in your DropBox folder, and that your photo-flipper screensaver can access the photos you put in it so you don't even have to make multiple copies of the photos in order to be able to view them at any of your computers!

So, hurry up and get DropBox today! (of course this is also so I can get a referral bonus, but really, this thing is pretty cool!)