In Search of “Hairy Basil”
Wednesday we said goodbye to the last of our guests who flew over to discuss collaborating on applications for language development on low-power computers. Everyone seems to have had a good time, or at least have a lot of good Thai meals.
Berm not only to time off from his real job and young family to come and help us work through a bunch of user interaction issues, but he even showed up with T-shirts bearing the WeSay logo. Thanks!
I gave a presentation on the first day of the meetings, covering the following topics:
- Our Customers
- Goals
- Architecture
- Status as of July 2006
You can get it in pdf format here.
The attendees at the meeting have spent time in several different cultures, including Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and some countries in Africa. They all felt that the needs, motivations, and environments we are targeting describe pretty well the situations they have found in their travels. In other words, the customer we are trying to serve is found all over the world.
We’ve been needing a good name to describe applications which works similarly and collaborate together on low-power computers for language development. Names are always hard. Thanks to a good laugh we all had over the medicinal vegetable juices offered at a local noodle shop, we joked about “hairy basil” applications for a day and then settled on “Basil” as our cover term. We will be writing more about Basil applications in the future.