You don’t build a startup with one big gigantic brain on the top, and a bunch of lesser brains obeying orders down below. You try to get everyone to have a gigantic brain in their area, and you provide a minimum amount of administrative support to keep them humming along.

Creative teams (dev, design and content) are a unique form of thought in its all and as that, they deserve a different way of managing.

How do you motivate them? - which most of the times is not around money... How do you go about empowering them to create and develop the best of themselves? How do you make them shine?... these are all valid questions for both making your team succeed, as to make your endeavor succeed as well.

It's funny how the self motivational speech of last decade doesn't apply to these subjects anymore, in the moment there is a leader, in that moment there is an inherent responsibility to facilitate and motivate, to embrace the best of everyone and provide the right spaces and tools to make up for the areas that need to be improved. Leaders should manage the skills and resources available through their team to make the most of their mix towards a common goal.

Managing rocks stars shouldn't be that different... they are the ones that excel at making the boat roll, the ones who mentor the ones starting and most importantly, they are ones who keep bringing back their bag of tricks for you to manage. Your goal?... to nurture these tricks and help them create more: with respect, honesty and clear paths to build the road together, as a team effort.

The post above excels on this call: Managers should focus on building and managing great teams of contributors; and the rest... will follow... now go read it.

This morning Helguita sent me a link to the new Lego Life of George experience and got to say it made me smile and more than that it put me mind to fly.

This hybrid game combines the physical task of assembling legos with that of a virtual-checking using an Augmented Reality app for the iPhone.

Wit this app you can go against the clock with the models the app suggests, while you can also start building your own stages as well, saving them, sharing them and exploring new ones.

Now imagine if we could take this experience and apply it to more complex tasks, verification processes in real time and with the tools with have at hand today.

I think we are living in exciting times of innovation and as I noted yesterday on my Google Profile, it is in the exploration of this new experiences, the key eye to forward thinking and the inherent value for the aesthetics in today's toys that we are setting foundations for a creative society that will move the needle forward in very revolutionary ways in just a few years.

With only a couple of days into February and the diversity of slate offerings is just starting to spice up and with that the diversification of offerings, flavors and most importantly, experiences start their lineup to bloom.

So what's in for us? Let's just take a look at the infographic above which pairs up some of the known offerings available until now; as for concerns in design and implementation the lesser common denominator for all of them comes to be Webkit, which means that more and more HTML5 will become the de-facto technology we will catered to if we want to target all them as one as we wait to see how they penetrate in the consumer world individually.

These are interesting times and I'm exited to see how the slate market will evolve. Android is probably the platform with the biggest opportunity to make a dent in Apple's reign, specially given Apple's almost dictatorial behavior as of late and Google's non-stop grow in mobile.

In the mean time Google has a lot to catch up to in terms of facilitating the making money process to developers, if they expect more and more developers to make the jump, which as of now has remained below expectations.

The show is not over and the war of slates will just get hotter as the days advance, next week HP is set to unveil their line up of WebOS based devices, which has been creating a lot of expectation lately, same goes for the iPad 2 whose announcement is eminent and as for Microsoft, well... we'll have to see what MIX '11 has to offer in this arena, since their strategy is still quite vague. 

The pastures for us creators is greener than ever, imagination is at bloom and the displays are opening up... democratization for content, experiences and more is becoming reality one bit and pixel at the time... at a very fast rate.

Exited?

As the year comes slowly to its end, the pase of work also comes slowly into the holidays and even though this should be a time to relax and meditate, we geeks always come up with some free time and look out for something new to put in our toolbox, well look for it no more and enter ONTWIK.

Ontwik aims to provide the web community with a hight quality, latest, and best web development lectures and conferences from the best web developers and designers.

I don't know how long has this website been up for... but for what I can see there are quite a few jewels hidden inside.

So don't waste time looking around, now you know what to do with those free hours!

Happy holidays everyone!

I came across this project just a few days back and today it came the chance to put it to use.

Honestly I'm amazed at the level of quality and variety of icons available, it's just amazing!

The project’s mission is to collect, organize and make available an extensive library of free pictograms/icons for common nouns and concepts that make up the universal visual language, and best of all, all icons are guaranteed to be free.

Wether you are working on a new project or thinking in redesigning your current project, take a look and if you use what it's there remember to donate a couple of bucks!

I've blogged about several AR projects before, including the SLARToolkit, a Silverlight port of the now famous ARToolkit.

When SLARToolkit came out I thought it was great and a natural fit for the capabilities that Silverlight 4 was enabling back then... now, fast forward to November 2010 and we finally have a true competitive mobile OS supporting Silverlight out of the box... but! there is catch, the framework is crippled with a few key limitations... or is it?

Today I want you to take a look at what my friend Kevin Marshall put together thru some of his tea-leaf-reading skills... the video above is of his WP7 phone running the SLARToolkit with not too many problems... this is a hack, and I don't think it's encouraged by anybody in Redmond, but clever nonetheless.

This small app is enabled thanks to the interop hack found a few days back so don't expect to see similar implementations in any comercial app any time soon... but it's good to know it's possible.

Be sure to follow Kevin on twitter as he is a true wizard of Silverlight and, without knowing, you might have been experiences some of his work already on your WP7 phone.

Cheers for this dude and again... happy birthday!

Where the iPad made me say Meh, it's just a big iPod... where the Samsung Galaxy Tab made me thought of the average experience I've had with the Galaxy S here in Korea and how raw Android still is... the PlayBook made feel like I wanted one.

It might be the good ad above, the great set of features, it's connectivity options or the fact that I can use HTML5, Java or Flash to build apps... but it just looks like it has everything we have been wanting from a tablet device and we haven't got thus far.

I know it's early to tell... I still want to see what HP will bring to the table with WebOS later this year, but now I can say Apple has got some good competition... and the fact that it is "enterprise" ready... makes it even more appealing.

What you guys think?

Update: you can register now to get access to the Table SDK.

In just a few weeks time I'll be attending the ISMAR Conference 2010 here in Korea and I'm exited!

My research center is part of the organizer committee and I'm helping one of the PI's here to co-organize one of preliminary workshops along with Christine Perey, of Perey Research Consulting.

The video above is just one of the cool implementations Augmented Reality is seeing in the last months and with the power of mobile architectures, matching that of our computers just a few years ago, the limit of possibilities is just growing exponentially.

One of coolest parts of this conference for us is that we will be showcasing Discovr Places along with our first public client, Discovr Korea, for the first time in it's full and, even though it's not an specific implementation of AR, we hope to see a few AR partnership opportunities coming out as aftermath.

So stay tuned, watch the video above and keep happy!

Microsoft might not be known for its focus to design, at least not until now. On the other hand that's not to say things have not been changing and if I'd have to point at 2 guys who are pushing for this change within and outside the company, they will be Bill Buxton and my pal, Chris Bernard.

Both of them are awesome at what they do and a big part of that is to inspire.

I meet Chris a few years ago back in Chicago, his home town, while I was participating of Silverlight DevCamp and Adobe Max there, and after talking to him over a couple of beers, I knew Microsoft was into something.

In the talk above Chris show us his vision on how design is changing and he does it from the point of applicability of software. He goes to compare the design process with that of filming and goes to a great extend to make us, developers, understand why and how design fits in our process.

This video is taken from TEDxPennQuarter and it will only take you 17min after that you can go grap the slides or go buy his book, seriously this is a new light in the way we do software.