jeffreyharmon.net

On Wednesday the 15^th of this month, we released the brand spanking new iMemoryBook! Everything you need to collaborate with family and friends to turn your memories and photos into a beautiful book.

Here are 10 reasons why iMemoryBook is the best Christmas gift ever:

1. iMemoryBooks are about you, about mom, about anyone – You can make an iMemoryBook about almost thing or anyone.
2. iMemoryBooks are unique - When was the last time you had someone give you a hardbound book about you?
3. iMemoryBooks are collaborative – Your entire family can work on an iMemoryBook at one time. Everyone from their own home internet connection.
4. iMemoryBooks last forever (or at least a very long time) - For generations to come your posterity will be able to learn about who you are.
5. iMemoryBooks can’t be destroyed – House-fires? Floods? Natural Disasters? Terrorists? Kids or Siblings? Not to worry. Your memories and photos are now perpetually secured on multiple servers.
6. iMemoryBooks are completely customizable – Your Cover, Your Memories, Your Book. There are literally 10s of thousands of combinations to customize your iMemoryBook. No two iMemoryBooks look alike.
7. iMemoryBooks can be big or small – Your iMemoryBook can be 5 pages long or 460 pages long.
8. iMemoryBooks are quality – These are no cheap PhotoBooks. Your iMemoryBook will be professionally bound with a double-fan adhesive, library binding.
9. 10. iMemoryBooks will lift you in the most difficult of times - “God gave us memories, that we might have June roses in the December of our lives.” -James Barrie
10. MemoryBooks are affordable: The system is FREE to use. You only pay when you publish.
    Our publishing pricing structure is simple:

• $1 per color page
• $0.15 per black and white page
• Hard bindings starting at $12 (i.e. Leather and other premium quality covers are more)

Share This

Every week I receive 5 to 10 emails from my Religion class members saying. “Hey everyone, I missed class today, can you send me your notes?” It is important that I respond to these emails because I know that I am going to need others notes just as much as they need mine, but I thought there must be a better way. I decided that I would post all my notes on writely, an online word processer (there are several of these online word processors out there, from my experience, writely and zoho writer are the best of the bunch—I would use zoho but the backspace has issues), and then I sent out this email to everyone:

Hey yall’

There is a group of us using writely (just like Microsoft Word but by Google) so that anyone who wants to can be involved in collaborating notes for each lecture. Here is how it will work.

I post my notes each day on writely after class. Everyone else in the class can get on the same notes to read them, edit them, add to them, or share them with even more class members or others you think would like to see them. You can also view them if you miss class. We have collaborated like this in some other classes and it works great.

Just let me know if you want to be a part of our group and I will send you an email with a link to each days notes.

Thanks
Jeff Harmon

Within 30 seconds of sending this email out, I received 2 responses. In the next 16 hours I had more than 50 peers asking for links to collaborate(writely only allows 50)! Everyone LOVED the idea. I was blown away. By the time I got done inviting them all, I wished writely would connect straight into my Gmail groups so that I could just send invites to a group. It was a pain to copy all those emails in. Google should pay me for this. I not only just invited 50 users to writely, but I also just converted about three-quarters of those to get Gmail accounts (you have to have a Gmail account to use writely).

Talk about viral marketing.

Here are some other ways I have used writely:

1. I wrote my essay application to BYU on writely. At the same time I was writing the application, my sister-in-law in Oregon was editing it.
2. The other morning, 1 hour before my paper was due, my mom—850 miles away—collaborated with me to get a project done. We were on the phone talking while we both looked at the same document. I could see as she made corrections, ALL REAL TIME!
3. Yesterday, Daniel and I learned that we had to push out a, 700+ word, press release for iMemoryBook in less than a day. We had at least three people working on the document from two states. It was a synergistic experience. Theron, my brother helping to edit the document from Oregon, was talking to Daniel on the phone. New to writely, Theron asked, “So we can write on this at the exact same time?… wow, this like a wickipedia deathmatch!”
4. I have used writely for several group projects.

Collaboration is King

The power of writely and zoho writer is completely derived from cleanly executed collaboration. There are also spreadsheet collaboration systems from Zoho and Google (these are not near effective enough to replace Excel in most situations yet). Here at FamilyLearn we followed these principles and have created a powerful online collaboration system for families to create and print: wedding books, anniversary books, retirement books, teacher books, family histories, and all kinds of other books. It is called iMemoryBook (the internet memory book). Snapfish recently released sharing/collaboration online as well for creating their photo books. There are countless other collaborative project springing up each year. I think it was Paul Allen who told me that the original guys who started the internet had collaboration in mind as the internet’s primary purpose.

So… how long will it be before we can invite anyone we would like to collaborate with us in, an email document, or even a common blog entry, online photo sharing, family home video editing, and pretty much any thing else? In five years I could see a “collaborate” button as common as spell check on any rich text editing system. Just watch, it is too helpful to not happen.

Share This