Catholic New Media Conference 2012 Recap

Untitled

This past week was the 5th Catholic New Media Conference and it was held in Arlington, Texas, alongside the Catholic Marketing Network trade show and the Catholic Writers’ Guild conference.

This was my third CNMC–my first was in Boston in 2010 and last year I attended in Kansas City, Kansas–and I have to say that each year it improves, not because of some deficiency in the past events, but as a natural growth as more and more people become involved.

I won’t go through a detailed play-by-play of everything that happened, but I’d like to give my impressions. The first day included some Main Track events as well as the first Catholic Tech Summit. The latter was particularly interesting to me because of my work as Creative Director for New Media at the Archdiocese of Boston. Josh Simmons’ talk on the 7 keys to a great organization website was both an affirmation of the work we’ve been doing as well as the source of some good ideas for how we can improve. Pat Padley’s expert explanation of how to create a winning digital strategy (based on his professional work for very large corporate brands) will pay dividends as we implement those ideas for the Church.

The discussion moderated by Matt Warner and Jeff Geerling on Catholic standards and APIs could be just the start of a very important effort that will result in a unity among Catholic developers and end users, including parishes, ministries, and dioceses. During the discussion, I said that dioceses often have multi-faceted needs and we turn to very expensive big-company solutions, which are sometimes too expensive to afford. But if there were a common API and true interoperability, we could break down those problems into smaller chunks that we could address over time. In addition, the software for those smaller parts could be written by smaller developers, opening up the market much wider.

I didn’t stick around for a couple of the late afternoon and evening events because I was meeting my sister-in-law Theresa for lunch. She lives in Plano and works in Dallas now, so we agreed to meet a Chinese restaurant she knows about in Arlington. Unfortunately, rush-hour traffic in Dallas is as bad as it is in Boston, plus she ran out of gas, and oh by the way, there was both a baseball game at the Ballpark at Arlington and a football game at Cowboy Stadium right outside the convention center which didn’t delay me, but all of which in fact made Theresa two-and-a-half hours late. Hunger may be the best sauce, but the food at First Chinese BBQ was excellent. The portions were huge and the price was cheap. Plus so authentic.

On Thursday, Fr. Roderick Vonhogen kicked things off with a retrospective of the past seven years of Catholic new media, by which they are measuring time by their own work in Catholic new media. For some of us, ahem, we’ve been working in Catholic new media a lot longer. After all, Catholic World News began with me and Phil Lawler way back in 1996 and there were others even before that. But I understand that Fr. Roderick was using his own perspective to show how quickly the field of new media changes. For example, seven years ago Facebook was still a quirky little website for college kids.

Elizabeth Scalia’s keynote on new media and the new evangelization managed to be both humbling and inspiring. I am a big fan of her blog The Anchoress for her ability to excel at both the spiritual writing as well as the cultural and political observations, and all her editing work over at Patheos where she has brought an amazing gallery of some of the best Catholic bloggers.

Rob Kaczmark of Spirit Juice Studios, which produces some of the best Catholic videos on YouTube, which isn’t to say they don’t do a lot of other regular commercial work too. Anyway, Rob reviewed the videos of the top ten Catholic YouTube channels and then the top ten mainstream channels. The results weren’t even close. Even for most of the professional Catholic channels, the quality wasn’t as high as even some of the one-man secular channels. Rob drove home the point that (a) details–like proper hair and makeup for everyone in every shoot–matter and that (b) quality isn’t about your budget, but it’s about your attitude and unwillingness to settle for anything less than your best.

Following up on that talk was Brandon Vogt’s, which in my estimation may have been the best of the conference. Brandon is a rising star in Catholic new media, not least because of his book “The Church and New Media”. (I joked at one point that Brandon was mentioned by name by every other speaker at the conference. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.) That reputation is well-deserved because Brandon is knowledgeable about new media, persuasive in his delivery, and has a knack for explaining things in an accessible way. Brandon’s presentation showed how Mormons, Protestants, and Atheists are using new media in ways that put Catholics to shame, and of course what lessons we could take from them. I was particularly impressed by the work of the Mormons, from their beautiful websites to their incredible work in search-engine optimization to the “why didn’t I think of that” concept of their LDSTech website, which matches up volunteer technology professionals with church technology projects. It’s genius.

Later was the talk by Bishop Christopher Coyne, who has also become a rock star for Catholic new media folk. More than once I saw someone taking him aside to ask him how to approach their bishop about one new media idea or another. Bishop Coyne’s topic was about being the bearer of the Good News within a digital culture, which means we need to stop shooting each other in the foxhole and start treating one another like Christians.

That night was a dinner for both the CNMC crowd and the Catholic Marketing Network hosted by Ignatius Press. There was a little too much talking, but the highlight was the performance by country music star (and Catholic convert) Collin Raye, who also spoke about the brief life and death of his granddaughter from an undiagnosed neurological condition at 10 years old.

Friday was devoted to the topic of blogging and it started with a keynote by Jennifer Fulwiler, who gave an amazing synopsis of the spirituality of blogging. The two other highlights of the day were Dorian Speed’s talk on building a blog community (Dorian is so entertaining, I’d listen to her read the phone book) and Julie Davis’ talk on Catholic bloggers as the 1st Corinthians of the internet. (It’s not necessary a complimentary comparison; go read what those Corinthians were like.)

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stay for what I heard was a great panel discussion on blogging because I had to catch my flight home. But overall, once again, the CNMC has proven to be an indispensable opportunity to get together with likeminded individuals and inspire one another, not to mention to actually see face to face some of these people I’ve been talking with for ages online.

Speaking of which, I couldn’t end without giving a public thank you to our online friend MamaT of the Summa Mamas, who heard my online plea for a place to stay in the Dallas area for the CNMC and opened up her home for me. While I didn’t spend as much time with her and her husband as I could have wished, we did have some very nice late evening conversations. (I was up and out of the house very early most days and back very late.)

So now the CNMC is ended for another year and most attendees are already wondering when and where the next one will be. I know that I for one will be there wherever it is. After all, the lessons learned and the relationships forged are invaluable.

Photo by Flickr user OntheU (Steve Nelson)

 

What web designers can do for more password strength

Padlock

Password security has been in the news lately and so the last few days I’ve been slogging through a long-neglected project replacing all the insecure passwords I’ve used over the years on various websites with new, very strong passwords.

(I use 1Password from Agile Bits Software for my password management. It’s available for all major platforms, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. It’s powerful, easy to use, secure, and allows you to sync your passwords across all platforms.)

Something I’ve discovered is a discouraging tendency among the user interface designers for many e-commerce websites to fail to provide a good experience to their users to encourage good password discipline.

For one thing, they often fail to give you any requirements for passwords up front. I typically use a 20-character password consisting of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. I can’t tell you how many times I have submitted a new password along those lines only to receive an error message that I couldn’t use symbols or that the password had to be shorter. You should never present necessary information for the first time to the user in an error message after their first attempt. In a sense, you’ve created a Soup Nazi customer service experience. It’s a minor annoyance, but the customer’s attempt to do something that seemed completely valid received the equivalent of a hand-smack and makes them feel stupid at some level.

Another troublesome trend is from websites that put an upper limit on the length of passwords. I understand that when you have hundreds of thousands of users, an extra dozen characters to store in a database will take up, oh wait, 3.5 megabytes of disk space. If you have that many users, you can afford the disk space. What’s even more disturbing is that some large sites, like CafePress, which handles financial transactions on behalf of users, puts a maximum length of 10 characters on its user passwords! That’s hardly suitable, according to many security-minded folks. In fact, I think that should be a minimum password length.

Something else to be wary of in account security is the use of security questions. The best security questions ask for obscure questions that only you will know. Unfortunately, what you often get asked for is your mother’s maiden name or the city where you were born. In this day of massive Internet databases, that information is all too easily found. Other answers might be similarly easy to mine if you’ve talked about yourself at any length on a blog or social network. In 2008, Sarah Palin’s personal email was hacked because the security questions on her email provider asked for data that was available in her public biography.

The best security questions are open-ended. They let you devise your own questions you will answer. Second best are a large selection of questions that ask you for some obscure information. But even if the site asks for some obvious data, keep in mind, you don’t have to tell the truth. Make up fake answers. Just be sure to remember your mis-answer or record it somewhere secure, such as 1Password.

Far too many people still use easily cracked passwords. Many security studies have shown the most commonly used password is, in fact, password. The rest of the top 25 list is similarly maddening from a security perspective. (Also, I am always appalled at the password-insecurity of even my friends and colleagues who are technologically sophisticated.)

So like with locking your car door to keep your car from being easy pickings by opportunistic car thieves, your goal is not to be perfectly secure from hacking, but making your passwords less hackable than the majority. After all, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the guy whose password is password.

Padlock by zebble, on Flickr

Social networks should be more like email, less like AOL

My social networks

The owner of a company developing a product based on the Facebook Platform has written an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg describing how Facebook, at first, encouraged him to develop his software and then tried to force him to sell or be destroyed by a competing product from Facebook. Dalton Caldwell then goes on to talk about his new quixotic quest to develop a paid alternative social network that treats users as customers rather than the product being sold to advertisers.

It sounds a little ridiculous to suggest that a little company could overtake Facebook with its 1-billion-plus users and Twitter with 500-million and Google+, which is backed by the Internet giant. On the other maybe it’s not that one small company could overtake, but many. Maybe social networks should work more like email.

The situation today is like the old days of Compuserve and AOL and Prodigy. Those of us who were around them can recall that we were on islands on the Internet, in small communities that had minimal connection to one another. I remember the day we could finally email someone at AOL from our Compuserve accounts. It was astonishing to think we could cross over the walls that separated us. We were on the Internet.

Today’s social networks are like that. Facebook and Twitter are giant islands. Sure there’s some interoperability, but it’s at the mercy of FB’s and Twitter’s and Google’s whim. If they decide to an API developer’s business is too good, they just acqui-hire or develop their own version. Think of Instagram’s purchase by Facebook or Tweetdeck’s purchase by Twitter. The big social networks are beholden more to their advertisers than to their users and so they’re more interested in protecting their revenue sources and keeping your eyeballs captured within the boundaries they define. You’re stuck inside their walled gardens.

Maybe social networks should work more like email. We would buy service from an “on-ramp” service, someone who gives us access to The Social Network, not one site but a “cloud” that isn’t under any one person or group’s control, and using common open protocols we communicate with one another. So whether I’m on Twitter and you’re on Facebook and he’s on Google+, we can talk without any funny business from the common carriers. And then each company can differentiate and attract users by offering added value services. Those who want free service can continue to be treated like a commodity on the old guard, just like those on Hotmail or Gmail get free email service at the price of being mined for demographics so that personalized ads can be served to them. Or you can pay for your service, maybe even set up your own little domain, and connect to the wider Social Network that way. And if you don’t like your provider, you switch to a new one. Just like email.

The big social networking behemoths wouldn’t go for it, of course. The status quo benefits them in the short term. But maybe if enough small upstarts worked together to create alternative, they wouldn’t have a choice.

Think it’s unlikely? Remember that AOL used to be the biggest Internet company in the world. Nothing is forever and even the mightiest can be humbled.

(CC) Gavin Llewellyn. http://www.onetoomanymornings.co.uk

My changing view on Lighthouse Catholic Media

About four years ago I wrote a blog post about a company called Lighthouse Catholic Media. I’d had some difficult dealings with them and carried out a threat to describe the details on my blog if they failed to fix things. In an illustration of the results of search engine optimization, my post ended up as the number one Google search result apart from their own website. I had some further dealings with them, especially with them wanting me to take down the post. I refused, but they eventually fixed things and as I describe in an update to that post today, things have been good in the past four years.

So, I took the step of updating that post to reflect my new attitude toward them. You might ask why I don’t just delete the post? Well, that doesn’t remove the Google link and plus everything lives forever in the Internet archive. At least this way I can provide a new explanation to those who click through.

The real secret to making money in new media

I often see tweets and status updates linking to blog posts from famed marketing and social media gurus touting the top 10 ways to make money from your blog or podcast or Twitter feed as if these were arcane secrets teased out of the Internet and shared begrudgingly with anyone willing to make the hit counter on the guru’s site spin.

The reality is that there are two requirements if your goal is to make money from your new media project: Work hard and be talented.

That’s it. Okay, I’ll expand a little.

It’s like the rest of life. There aren’t shortcuts. You can’t become a millionaire in four hours a week. Yes, I know about that one guy with the book and all that, but he’s a fluke. That’s not the real world.

If you want a lot of readers for your blog or listeners/viewers for your podcast, you have to work hard. Not work hard at artificial number inflation or stupid search-engine gimmicks or social media trawling. I mean work hard by writing a lot, by creating a lot.

You need to have something interesting to say. You need to be consistent in your publishing. Don’t be annoying. Don’t get anxious about numbers. If your stuff is worthy, people will find you.

But it’s not enough to spew words onto the page or sounds into a recorder. It has to be good. This is the tricky part. Quality is king; mere quantity isn’t enough.

Talent is innate. It’s God-given, although raw talent can’t do it on its own. Skill is learned and practiced. It must be honed. Combine skill and talent and you have a winning formula. Add in hard work and passion and you have success. This isn’t just true of success in new media. This is success in anything.

It seems so simple. So why all the other folderol of “the secret to success” being peddled everywhere? First, because nobody likes to work hard so if there’s a shortcut to be found, they want it. Second, because not everyone has talent. I’m sorry to break the news to everyone in the self-esteem generation, but it’s true. For many people, no matter how hard you work, how much time you spend working on skills, you just don’t have what it takes to be a success in this area.

So move on. Find your talent and succeed there. Your road to fulfillment leads elsewhere.

I’m no self-help guru and this isn’t just about new media. It also seems like commonsense to me, but judging by what I see a lot of people posting, it’s not.

Good luck.

 

Facebook friend rejection conundrum

Facebook

When you reject someone’s friend request, there’s a button for “I don’t even know this creep” or something like that. (I think the actual text is “Do you know Domenic outside of Facebook? Yes or No.”) That seems innocuous enough. No sir, I do not, but I’m sure he’s a fine gentleman of good breeding and impeccable manners. So good of you to ask. It’s just that I’m only accepting new friends that I know personally.

Instead, it turns out that if you click it, the requester gets a heavy-handed warning from Facebook along the lines of: “Look, stalker, we’re the biggest, baddest Internet company in the world and if this button gets pressed on you again, your profile is toast and we’ll shut you out of our loving, happy community of 800 million people….

Oh, and for good measure we just killed all your approved logins in all your web browsers and apps and you will be surprised by how many apps require you to login to your Facebook account to use them. We’re everywhere.”

There’s no indication of how to tell who pushed the button on me nor is there any appeal process or even any further explanation anywhere. The worst part is that there’s no way to see what other friend requests might still be pending or how to cancel them. It’s like a minefield in which someone else steps on the mine and you get killed.

Now, I don’t know whether to cower in fear of losing my Facebook profile or just preemptively kill it myself. (I would just ditch Facebook, but I’m responsible for my job’s Facebook pages and you need a personal profile to maintain them. I’m stuck.)

All I know is that I’ll be darned if I’m going to be friending anyone else for fear of triggering the Facebook goon squad.

Flickr photo by MoneyBlogNews

 

Strategically re-assessing your parish, diocesan, or ministry website

This one is for those with an interest in website development and management, especially with regard to Catholic parishes, dioceses, or other ministries and non-profits.

A common principle in website management for businesses and organizations is periodic assessment of the site to ensure that it’s meeting strategic goals (you have strategic goals, right?) and that it is up to date with current web standards (for example, no more blink tags or whether to replace Flash with HTML5/CSS3 animations). It’s also important to make sure that it doesn’t feel too dated, i.e. when grunge goes out of style that your site’s theme leaves grunge behind too.

How often should parishes, dioceses, and ministries re-evaluate their sites? I know there are plenty of parish websites who are still rocking the late ’90s with “under construction” animated GIFs, busy backgrounds, and non-CSS, table-based layouts and it’s obviously past time for them. But what about the site we created three years ago, or today for that matter? When should we begin a strategic re-evaluation of it?

My first thought, based on the current pace of change on the web, is that it should be no longer than every 6 years. If you have a site whose design and basic content date to 2005, you should look at whether it’s time to re-design and/or upgrade. With HTML5, CSS3, and today’s advanced standards-compliant web browsers, now is as good a time as ever.

What about a site built today? I think in six years, the web will have a very different landscape. By then I think mobile platforms—i.e. tablets and phones—will have a very large influence on web design and the web experience. Perhaps mobile apps will be more important as well. Social media is certain to be different. After all, in 2005 Facebook was still limited to college students and MySpace was the big social network. The web moves fast.

So what do you say? How often should a parish, diocese or ministry do a strategic re-evaluation of their website design, content, and goals?

 

At the CNMC

KansasCity

This weekend I’m at the Catholic New Media Conference in Kansas City, KS, as part of my work as Creative Director of Pilot New Media in the Archdiocese of Boston. We hosted the conference at the Pastoral Center in Braintree last year and it was such a great opportunity to connect with people in the same field that both I and my boss Scot Landry came out for this one too.

We’re at the Savior Pastoral Center of the Archdiocese of Kansas City. In addition to their archdiocesan offices, this former minor seminary also has a retreat center, which is a great convenience and they’re very nice rooms to boot.

I got in late last night. My flight out of Boston was delayed due to weather and after arriving in Kansas City, MO, across the river, I drove her in my rental car and was finally in my room by about 11:30pm local time. I was still keyed up from travel so didn’t get to bed about 2:30am, which would be worse if I wasn’t regularly getting such little sleep from our children waking me up in the night.

The program hasn’t started yet. Today is a series of practical workshops on new media in parishes and ministries. I think I’ll find inspiration and ideas for my own work with parishes and ministries back home. That all starts at 1pm.

Tomorrow is the main conference with a series of keynote speakers and breakout sessions.

I’ve already had a chance for some great conversation with folks here over a long breakfast after Mass this morning. To me, that’s the best part of these gatherings.

If you’d like to follow along, you can follow the hashtag #cnmc11 on Twitter. (Tweetchat is a great tool for that.) You can also see live streaming of some of the presentations at the SQPN site. Photos will be posted to the CNMC11 Flickr group. And of course, check the usual social networks: Facebook and Google+.

I hope to offer updates here as I can, but I’ll be posting at least on the social networks.

Photo by jennywetz – http://flic.kr/p/aqkv3K

Web Apps I use: Evernote

Evernote

On the new social media website Google+, I’ve seen some conversation from people who are discovering Evernote and I thought I’d write about how I’ve come to use it. I’ve written about Evernote before:

But I’ve never done a writeup just on the service itself and how I use it.

Notice that I called Evernote a “service”. It’s not just a piece of software, but instead it’s a sort of ecosystem that becomes a backup for your brain. Here’s how Evernote describes itself:

 

I have Evernote on my personal Mac, my work Mac, the Mac in our kitchen, my iPhone, and my iPad. Plus Melanie has Evernote on her Mac and her iPhone. It’s everywhere. (And if you use Windows computers or have a BlackBerry or Android phone, you can get Evernote there too.) So how do I use it?

For one thing I clip webpages I want to keep into it. Every time I do a web search for something I think I might need to find again, I clip it into Evernote. They have extensions for all the major web browsers that make this easy. It’s especially nice in the Chrome browser because it will offer to save just the URL, grab the whole page, or intelligently clip just the relevant data. In addition, whenever I do a Google search, the extension also searches Evernote for the same words and lets me know if I’ve already got notes that match my search.

Evernote synchronizes my data between my local software and company’s servers so that it can then automatically send that data to all my copies of Evernote. They also add search data for any images in your notes. That’s right, Evernote doesn’t just search text, but also searches photos and PDFs. When I get business cards I take a picture of them either with my phone’s camera or my Mac’s webcam and save them to Evernote. When I need to find that person’s phone number later I just type their name in to Evernote’s search and up it comes.

I have a document scanner at home and often scan bills or other important correspondence that I need a record of, but don’t need to keep the physical copy, and then put that in Evernote. Then I shred the paper and keep from having an overflowing file cabinet.

Here are some other ways I use Evernote:

Evernotesite

  • I use the webclipper to save recipes I find online to a certain notebook.
  • We keep our grocery shopping list in an Evernote notebook that is shared between me and Melanie. We record items to buy on the kitchen Mac and then the list is always on on our phones. (At least theoretically: shared notebooks don’t work on Melanie’s iPhone 3GS, although apparently they’re working on a fix in the software to do it.)
  • We have a shared notebook called “Household ToDo & Wish List.” As we think of stuff we need to buy, projects that we’d like to do, and items that need to be fixed, we put them here.
  • I keep a “Takeout orders” notebook. Every time we order takeout I record what our order was. Very often Melanie or her sister will ask, “What did I get last time? That was so good.” Now we know.
  • Classic children’s stories are often in the public domain on various websites. So are the lyrics to many classic ditties and children’s songs. I’ve clipped them and now they’re always at the ready when I need to entertain a child.
  • Story ideas and blog posts in progress go into a notebook for that purpose.
  • Meeting notes from work get typed into a notebook.
  • When I travel I email my itinerary to a special secret email address that every Evernote user gets. I also clip information related to my destination, hotel reservations, etc.
  • Receipts from any online shopping and serials numbers for software purchased online get a notebook.
  • When I’m at a store, I often take photos of items that I’m thinking of buying, perhaps for a home improvement project, and save them in Evernote for later comparison shopping or planning.
  • I have a notebook full of magazine clippings from various camping and backpacking magazines that I’ve collected over several decades that I’ve scanned into Evernote.

The possible use cases go on and on. The best part is that Evernote is free, but not in the “free, but not useful until you pay” manner. The premium, paid version gives you even more awesome features, but the free version is completely usable. The difference is that for $5 per month, you get 1GB per month of uploads, instead of 60MB; You can put any kind of file in Evernote, whereas for the free version you can only attach images, audio, or PDFs; you can read and edit shared notebooks on the website instead of just read; The maximum note size if 50MB instead of 25MB; and your scanned PDFs are searchable.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of what Evernote can do. They have something called the “Evernote Trunk”, which is a program in which they’ve partnered with many third-parties to integrate Evernote into their hardware, software, or web-based products and services. The Evernote blog is also a great repository of tips, tricks, and use cases to inspire you.

Th whole point of Evernote is let you offload from your brain the stuff you need to remember, but have trouble keeping track of. It’s worth trying it out and seeing if it can fit in your life. I think you’ll find it can.

 

My first Kickstarter purchase: PadPivot

Pad pivot

Today I received my first Kickstarter project to result in an actual product. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a unique way of providing seed funding for entrepreneurial projects that would otherwise never see the light of day. Let’s say you have a great idea for a new beer-fetching robot. You get together with an engineer friend and you come up with a design, you build a prototype, and you work out the kinks. You’re ready to build your new robot, but it costs tens of thousands of dollars to buy the raw materials and hire a factory. In the past, you would go to your friends and family to chip in, you’d mortgage your house, and if you were lucky you got a bank loan or venture capital investment.

But Kickstarter allows you to crowd-source your production costs. With Kickstarter, you put your project online and you tell the story. You set a dollar amount to raise and deadline to raise it by. Then you offer a return on investment. Say, for $50 you get a robot t-shirt; for $100 you get a robot; for $175 you get two robots; for for $500 you get your name engraved on the side of your robots, etc. If the project gets fully funded by the deadline, you go to production. If not, nobody gets charged any money and you move on.

The great part is that the inventor can gauge if he really has a market for the device and if demand is high he can raise a lot of money. Some projects have raised 10 or 100 times more money than the initial request.

I’ve backed several projects on Kickstarter. I’ve backed the recording of a new CD by jazz-folk singer Burke Ingraffia, who I went to Franciscan University with. For $10, I get digital downloads of the tracks on the date of the CD release. I’ve also backed coffee joulies, an ingenious product that immediately cools coffee to the right drinking temperature and then keeps it there for an extended time. I recently backed Red Pop, a gadget that attaches to an iPhone and works as a shutter button. It interacts with an iPhone app to make picture-taking better. And then there’s the one I got in the mail today.

The PadPivot works with my iPad or Kindle or even my iPhone to do several things. When I’m sitting on the couch, it’s has a nice curve so it fits right over my thigh, keeping the iPad secure and positioned so I can use it. The Pivot comes with an elastic cord to secure the Pivot to my leg if I want to be extra-safe. The PadPivot can also hold my iPad on the desktop in either portrait and landscape orientation. Yet it folds up into a small portable size. The PadPivot holds onto the back of the iPad with a non-slip dust cover, but if I want extra security, the dust cover peels off and there’s a sticky yet re-usable surface to grab it. I wouldn’t use in a car on a bumpy road without a hand holding the iPad, but for all normal use it’s great. On the couch, on the plane or a bus or train, in an auditorium, laying in bed—all great uses for the PadPivot.

So I’m excited not just to use the PadPivot, but also because I had a hand in bringing it to market and learned a little bit about what it takes to create such a product. It’s the great American story.

Pad pivot

The PadPivot, folded up and upside down

Pad pivot

iPad on the PadPivot

Pad pivot

iPad on the PadPivot as a desk stand.

Pad pivot

Bare PadPivot strapped to my leg

Pad pivot

iPad on PadPivot strapped to my leg

(At this point, you may be asking where you can buy one. They’re now accepting pre-orders on the PadPivot website.)