Davison Ventures

6 Days with Bob Proctor - The Master Thinker

I had the opportunity to spend 6 days with Bob Proctor in August.  To say the least, it was a Mind blowing experience.  He is doing it again in early December for a select group of individuals--checkout The Bob Proctor Matrixx.  

Bob is a living Master of the Philosophy of Achievement and Success, as taught by Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie, Wallace D. Wattles, James Allen and others.  You may know him as one of the teachers in the movie The Secret.  

Bob has become a guide and mentor in my life.  Although I have been a student of Bob's for more than 5 years, 2009 has been an extraordinary year of personal growth.  Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a student of human potential and awareness.  Bob is a living Master of these subjects.  He is known to his peers in the Personal Development industry as 'The Master Thinker.'

Bob is genuine to the core.  He is on a mission to help people experience Right Thinking--to teach people the laws of the universe that you don't learn in school--and to ultimately make an indelible imprint on millions of peoples lives by helping them become who they want to be.  In particular, he teaches about Money, the Mind and creating Multiple Sources of Income (MSIs).  Some of my favorite books of Bob's include "You were Born Rich" and "It's Not About the Money".

He is 75 years old, yet more active than most 25 year olds--and he is not slowing down.  I can say this first hand, as I have had the opportunity to be with or in close proximity to him 10 days this year.  He is a student of human nature and a master of human potential and natural laws.

He continues to study every single day.  He carries with him everywhere he goes a 50 year-old copy of Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.  He can recite verbatim the wisdom of many masters.  He lives what he teaches.

Bob will tell you that all the Geniuses are dead--people thought they were crazy when they were alive.  It wasn't until after they were dead that they realize their contribution and impact.

I think Bob is a Genius, and he's still alive.  Experience The Bob Proctor Matrixx!

Paul Joseph Skok - An Awakened Leader

A favorite quote of mine from Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune is when Paul Muad’dib realizes his destiny and shouts to the universe “Father, the sleeper has awakened!”  I was reminded of this after listening to Mr. Paul Joseph Skok this evening give an inspiring address to more than one hundred leaders in the Denver area.

I first met Paul almost 7 years ago.  At that time he was the facilitator of a personal growth and awareness seminar I attended called The PSI Basic Seminar.  Paul was captivating and inspiring and the material resonated with me.  While listening to Paul speak tonight I realized how much he and PSI Seminars has impacted my life in amazing and wonderful ways.

Thank You Paul for setting such a great example of Leadership in the Community and being a mentor to me!  I look forward to working with you and PSI World Denver—knowing we will make a real difference. 
 

Paul Joseph Skok, I will follow you.

Vozle.com is LIVE!

Check it out at www.vozle.com

Vozle LLC is my new venture and primary endeavor.  It is the result of several years of conceptual development and we have been developing the Vozle technology and services infrastructure for nearly a year now.

Vozle is about capturing information in the moment, anytime, anywhere, and putting action behind it.  It is a horizontal technology and service infrastructure that your vertical business can use to enhance existing applications and create new powerful services and applications.

Checkout the website, and stay tuned for a lot more details as we unveil vertical applications using the Vozle Platform and Network.

Brain Mapping & The Neuroscience of Leadership

I had the serendipitous opportunity to meet and visit with Dr. Jeffrey L. Fannin recently, who gave me a glimpse of what I call Fitness for the Mind.

Dr. Fannin is a well known neuroscientist and the Executive Director of the Center for Cognitive Enhancement in Glendale, AZ.  He and his team are leading the field of Brain Mapping—the process of precisely recording and analyzing brainwave activity and energy patterns in the brain.  Fannin has analyzed thousands of brain maps, in neurotherapy areas such as ADD, ADHD, head trauma, stroke, chronic pain, depression, performance brainmapping, anxiety and other disorders.  He does this using Electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that are placed in 20 locations around the head.  By generating vibrations that balance cross-coherence amplitude and phase using special training devices, the brain becomes more receptive and efficient.  The result is an accelerated mind changing experience.

What makes a great Leader?

There have been numerous articles about Dr. Fannin’s work, as well as his colleague Pierre Balthazard, Associate Professor at ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business.  

Financial Times – A brainwave in the study of leadership

ASU Research – Mapping the Complex Mind

WCHS Eyewitness News – Drug-Free Help for ADD

The Wall Street Journal – This Is Your Brain on the Job

Dr. Fannin and Professor Balthazar are leading the neuroscience of Leadership—a quest to answer the question “What makes a great Leader?”  They are well on their way to mapping 500 or more Leaders, providing enough empirical data to model the mind of a true Leader, including a myriad of factors and traits from complexity of thinking to morality.

As a student and fan of Napoleon Hill, I recall he also set out to interview 500 of the wealthiest men in the world—nearly 100 years ago, starting with Andrew Carnegie.  However, Hill’s quest took 25 years to complete…   In contrast, Dr. Fannin’s quest to map 500 Leaders is moving very rapidly—and has already produced significant empirical results. 

Based on these results and the speed at which this work is moving, I expect Brain Mapping to become a common term in the near future and that it will be available to a wide variety of patients and people who simply desire to improve their mind.  I specifically say ‘mind’ instead of ‘brain’, because I am a believer that the brain is a Transducer for a greater Mind.  If Napoleon Hill were still alive, I think he would find this work fascinating, as we are becoming aware of how to harness the power of the brain and thus the mind—in new ways. 

Fitness for the Mind

I personally find this work both awe inspiring and also very humbling.  I believe we are on the cusp or inflection curve in dramatic growth and understanding of the human brain and human potential.  This growth curve has been accelerating for more than 100 years, and I believe we are likely to see more growth in the next 10 years than we have had in the last 100 years combined.

I personally think of Brain Mapping as analogous to fitness for the body.  We know today that we must exercise, eat well, and maintain emotional and mental well-being to maintain great health.  In a similar way, I believe Brain Mapping & Training will become a key activity for developing the Mind.  It is not a replacement for the principles that Napoleon Hill published in 1937, or what Bob Proctor is teaching today, but rather it is an important compliment or enhancement to these existing timeless principles.

Bottom-line is Brain Mapping and the process of training (such as Audio Visual Entrainment) is making a significant impact on people’s lives today!  

I want to personally thank Dr. Fannin for sharing his passion with me, and I look forward to the developments and opportunities to come in this space.

I am grateful to my good friend Mr. Peter Jessen for this incredible introduction.

Meeting Malcolm Gladwell

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers.   Since then, I have been reminiscing about the first time I heard about Malcolm—and then I met him.

It was June 3, 2001.  I had been invited to join Freshwater Software’s first annual ‘eBusiness Growth Summit’, by Donna Auguste, whom I had the pleasure of working with at US WEST Advanced Technologies  in the early 90’s.   Donna had an incredible line-up of interesting speakers for her debut annual exec forum.  However, the only person that really stood out to me was Malcolm Gladwell.

It was about a year after ‘The Tipping Point’ had been published.  Looking back, I’d say he was at his tipping point--on the brink of significant success, yet still willing to leave NY and come speak to small number of startup exec’s in the basement of a hotel in Vail, Colorado.  Gladwell was speaking about the power of word of mouth—a familiar topic from The Tipping Point.  Despite his afro, which can be a bit distracting...I found him to be very personable and articulate.

I have gained great respect for Malcolm Gladwell and his writings.  The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers have all been incredibly insightful.  I especially like the personal touches in the Epilogue of Outliers, where he shares his own family story and cultural legacy.  “This book is about the meaning of work…” and it is very convincing.  I highly recommend it.

VOXEO is HOT!

The last week, my RedPrairie team completed a Voice Response integration package that connects the RedPrairie BPP product to the World of Telephony.   This is something I’ve wanted to do for some time, after all, I spent the early part of my career in Telecom and have a Master’s degree to boot.  Little did I know how straight-forward it has become to create robust voice response interfaces—without owning any of the hardware or telephone lines.

There are many players out there; however, we chose VOXEO—primarily because we liked the self-service philosophy and the fact that they’ve got a great Developer Portal with free hosting and limited calling to get you off the ground.

You can choose from multiple platforms to build your app, including:

CallXML 3.0 – Proprietary VOXEO platform

CCXML 1.0 – A new W3C Call Control Standard

VoiceXML  2.1 – The standard for IVR and TTS today

We built our interface using CCXML, which gives us maximum flexibility for call control, yet allows us to start dialogs with VoiceXML—so we get the best of both worlds.

Using RedPrairie BPP, our customers can now incorporate Voice Response into their BPP orchestrations.  Application examples include: Contact escalation, Recall notification, field/operations updates, etc.  We able to dynamically generate a voice response workflow, capture data from the recipient and dynamically change the flow based on call responses.

I want to give a big Kudos to the VOXEO Team!   Great Product, Service, and Partner!

P.S> I'm looking forward to see what VOXEO does with IMified--a recent acquisition!

Haptics, Mice, and Listening Applications

I am personally fascinated with the concept of Multimodal Interaction, yet find it surprising at how slow we are moving toward using voice and touch as a common way to communicate and interact with computers.

Touch Revolution

Touch screen technology has been around a long time.  I remember overlay touch screen kioks back in the early 90’s.  However, the technology really hasn’t taken off until recently, with the advent of multi-touch technology, and in particular the Apple iPhone has become a major catalyst for touch technology.

Multi-touch enables gestures that are more intuitive than ever before.   What sold me on the iPhone when it was introduced was the ability to zoom in and zoom out with 2-fingers, not just pictures but web page content and email.  It makes the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) experience more natural.  The iPhone is also very responsive, making it usable and practical.  You could say it’s Haptic aptitude is very good.

Because of this catalytic success, there is a sea change occurring in wireless devices, where touch is wanted and will be expected going forward as the primary HCI interface for some time to come, at least for Smart Phones, formerly PDAs.

A new Generation of Laptops and PCs

HP has made an investment in leading the industry toward a new generation of laptops and PCs that are touch enabled.  They sold 400,000 TouchSmart PCs in 2008 (according to WSJ), and introduced the first ‘Consumer’ touch laptop earlier this year.  I bought one—read about it here.  Unfortunately, I haven’t had the same satisfaction as I have with touch on the iPhone.  However, I expect it will get better soon.   Many other hardware manufacturers are focused on bringing multi-touch to the market.  Microsoft is investing a significant amount of resources and dollars into making Windows 7 a multi-touch success.

Microsoft Surface has been around for several years, yet is still considered a high-end technology demo in most respects.  It’s really cool to play with, yet too expensive to be practical yet.  It reminds me of the late 80’s when CD-R technology was introduced.  I was doing a research project on practical ‘multimedia’ applications, and the use of CD-R as a microfiche replacement was one of the areas my team was investigating.  The corporation I worked for (and many others) were spending tens of thousands of dollars per month to have paper documents transferred to microfiche for archival.  The thought of recording to CD and having a searchable document repository was compelling.  This was obviously before the Internet took off…  A long story short—the CD-R drives at that time cost $12,000 to $15,000 for a single drive and the media was close to $100 per disc.  Today, you can buy a high-speed DVD / CD-R drive for under $100, and the media is just cheap commodity.  I think touch technology is making a similar transition, yet I expect it will accelerate even faster than the CD-R example above.

Notably, Microsoft just announced this week a touch Zune HD device and a Touch Pack for Windows 7, which will enable hardware OEMs to provide a few of the Surface apps on Windows 7.

The old and the new

We’ve been using a form of multimodal interaction for some time.  Can you imagine using a PC without a mouse?  Using a laptop without a touchpad or stick?  This was obviously another example of Apple (and Steve Jobs in particular) creating a catalyst that would forever change how we interacted with computers.

Going forward, I expect the interfaces to expand dramatically.  I personally am excited about using voice as a practical HCI interface.  Although voice hasn’t had a very good track record to-date, I expect it will have as big if not a bigger impact than touch.  More important, I think voice and touch together will be the replacement of mouse and keyboard.  However, change is difficult and the transition will take more time than you might think.

Paradigm Shift for Voice

As humans we communicate with others in a multimodal form, most of the time without even know it.  I use a keyboard and mouse today naturally without even thinking about it.  Eventually, we will use voice and touch in similar familiarity.  However, the transition requires incremental change and a new paradigm shift.

Voice technology on the PC to-date has been primarily focused on becoming a keyboard and mouse replacement.  In other words, Command and Control.  This is important and will eventually succeed—after we’ve vastly improve speech recognition.  However, I believe there is another use for voice technology that is more passive and complimentary to existing Command and Control interfaces.

I call this new paradigm Listening Applications.  A Listening Application enables passive capture of voice.  Passive, meaning that it’s not a command and control paradigm—it’s capturing the information and doing something useful with it that adds value to the end-user, without them changing what they are used to in a big way.   Another word that may describe this is Annotating, yet not in the traditional sense of adding a bubble to a word document.  A good example would be capturing voice notes while you are researching a subject on the web.  The voice notes are captured in the context of something else you are doing, converted to text, indexed, and easily organized along with the traditional web bookmarks.  This is the multi-modal experience I am looking forward to—soon…

HP TouchSmart LapTop Tx2z

I just bought a new laptop this last week—the HP TouchSmart Tx2z.  Honestly, I thought my next laptop would be a Mac; however, Apple doesn’t have a touch laptop yet, and a touch laptop is specifically what I wanted.

My experience has been mixed thus far.  The touch interface (built by N-trig) is not that responsive at times.  I’ve had the touch interface freeze up on me—while in the middle of an application…not good.

On the other hand, it is considered the first ‘Consumer’ multi-touch laptop on the market.  I’m assuming it’s going to get a lot better, and my experience has already improved significantly, by just becoming more familiar with the interface and how it responds.

I’ve only had a few days with it so far—more to come.

RedPrairie E2e Business Process Platform - Part 2

My RedPrairie team has been heads-down working hard to prepare for the 2009.1 release of BPP, which will be launched at REDSHIFT:2009 (RedPrairie’s Annual User Conference).

BPP enables a new generation of process-based applications that span systems and organizations.  Why is this significant?  Because most enterprise processes that cross systems and/or organizations today have manual steps that slow the execution down considerably.

BPP is a Web Services Orchestration engine that accelerates the automation of enterprise processes like available to promise execution, product recalls, promotions execution, item substitution, and manufacturing quality control—to name a few examples.  

BPP is ideal for system-to-system automation and optimization, but also compliments RedPrairie’s Execution Management (EM) product, leveraging its massively distributed people workflow capabilities.  We are building a library of reusable, documented BPP orchestrations that will accelerate RedPrairie customer implementations across the entire supply chain.  

Check out the  E2e Business Process Platform page on RedPrairie.com.

Therapy Sessions at the Sanitarium

Sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? It’s actually quite the opposite. There is a growing number of people that go to a place called the Sanitarium to retain or perhaps regain their sanity. The Sanitarium is a Snowkiting Park on the north side of Lake Dillon in Summit county Colorado.

This weekend was the 6th Annual Snowkiting Therapy Sessons event. Everyone showed up except the wind...a few were determined to kite despite the wind--the rest just enjoyed the beautiful weather and visited with friends. Checkout the attached Photo Album.

Kiting is said to be the fastest growing extreme sport in the world! I believe it, as I am hooked myself. For me, it started in March 2008, when I took the family on a 7 day sailing trip in the Caribbean. I promised my son he could take some lessons for his 16th birthday. Little did I know that I would be the one that got hooked—even more than my son…