I was at a meeting last week in a corporate building that has just recently been finished. Outside of each conference and meeting room is a small touch panel display that was displaying a calendar for the day.

I did a quick search for the manufacturer and found more options that are available from AMX.

After seeing the calendars, and thinking about some current challenges in my own family, here’s some functionality I’d like to see, and these kinds of panels in each room could really make it a reality. There’s also some entertainment features to take advantage of as well.

• each kid’s room has a panel that I could list events on their calendar. Easily put things like sports practices, upcoming tests, doctor’s appointments, birthday parties, etc.
• each kid’s bedroom panel could display a list of “To Do” items. Similar to Outlook calendar tasks, these could be set to automatically occur and repeat as needed.
• each bedroom panel could serve as a message center for members of the household. The messages could consist of a view of their email Inbox, voice-mail messages, and even private messages among family members.
• in conjunction with a home media server, the ability to access and play music into any room independently of the other rooms, including the ability to play the same music throughout the entire house

All of this type of information management can probably already be done, but what I think is missing is the management of the information in the first place. I should be able to add and manage tasks for each person (and their associated panel) as needed from any Internet connection. Each device could be wired into a home network or connected wirelessly for existing construction homes.

I’d love to be able to send a message to greet my kids when they get home from school, remind them not to forget to take out the kitty litter and clean their rooms. It would also be nice to be reminded of their upcoming math test when I get home and know I’ll be spending some time with them on their homework.

Post from: EveryJoe

A Few Thoughts on Family Information Tech

The service is now out of private beta and anyone can download and install it to see for themselves.

I’ve heard some people say that Outlook slowed down tremendously after they installed it, but I haven’t noticed anything like that up until this point during my usage of the application.

With the new public release they’ve also made just some slight appearance modifications to the Xobni information pane.

I don’t think the search function needed to be made quite so prominent in the new, updated user-interface design. Maybe that’s because I’ve not been a big user of the general search features. I more regularly use the network, conversations and files information.

Xobni had some news coverage in the New York Times as well if you’re interested in what some other people besides myself think about the product.

In the article, Jeff Bonforte, expressed interest and goals in expanding the reach of Xobni into other e-mail and communication clients:

Xobni now has ambitions that extend well beyond Microsoft Outlook. Jeff Bonforte, a 35-year-old former Yahoo vice president, joined Xobni as chief executive in February. He plans to expand Xobni’s reach to various e-mail programs, like the popular Web-based services Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail as well as social networks like Facebook and Linkedin.

That would be pretty slick to be able to type in a name in Xobni and it be able to read my e-mail for that contact’s information regardless of which one of my e-mail accounts I had been communicating with the individual.

The only problem I can see is I don’t keep my e-mail around for very long in other e-mail clients. So, not sure if Xobni would keep a history of messages that I’ve already deleted from my system. Not sure how they would.

Post from: EveryJoe

Xobni Goes Public and New Design