Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com Every once in awhile you find yourself in tough spot of needing immediate alterations to commissioned work but are not able to meet in person. If you find yourself in this sticky situation right at a deadline sometimes the only solution is to walk through each edit step-by-step. 10 years ago this would have been one of the most painful phone calls of your professional life, but today due to screen sharing technology it is but a minor inconvenience. Free screen sharing software has been around for over a decade. Baked into every Macintosh computer is the easy to use and cost-free Messages, formerly iChat, and on the PC side Microsoft owns and gives away the most popular personal video conferencing tool in Skype. Both Messages and Skype offer the same basic tool of full screen sharing along with it's video conferencing and texting platform, but if you’re looking for more collaborative features you’re using the wrong se...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Headphones have come a long way. From decades of soup on the endless of a metal headband to tiny, wireless hearing aide like ear inserts the innovations continue to shrink and astound. Everyone has their preference and while audiophiles may tell you there's only a few  headphones truly worthy of listening to music through, audio quality is not always the point. While they've been around for nearly as long as recorded sound has existed, it wasn't until the last decade or so that headphone style erupted into consumer war. The first truly mass marketed as “cool” headphones were the expensive and style Beats by Dre. Founded in 2006 by hip hop legend Dr Dre and music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine, Beats by Dre became so stylish that less than a month later and acquisition by Apple made them both multi-billionaires… Problem Beats headsets are primarily about style. A quick Google search about Beats by Dre audio quality and bui...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com Getting honest feedback from loyal customers and employees is practically gold. While your knowledge and ambition may drive your business, thoughtful, outside perspective can be the fuel that makes sure your doors are open for the long haul. But what is the best tool to reach your invested followers? Right away we can discount direct mail. Unless it's a package, bill or birthday card almost no one cares about the mail. So don't waste your money on postage. If we also discard all passive and intrusive survey methods such asin-person point-of-sale surveys, comment cards, and polling phone calls what eventually are left with is online surveying. Amazon product reviews, Yelp, TripAdvisor- these are all wildly popular because they are a public social platform to vent frustrations and for consumers to act as food critics. Still all too often these platforms are not constructive for improving a business. Direct onli...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com Let's say you operate a dental practice in Clive named “Clean Teeth.” You have a decent number of clients but you have the capacity to take on many more. The first moves are always the same: circulating ads in print and potentially local radio or TV. Next comes social media with a Facebook page and ads. The problem is advertising is great for market awareness but doesn't always convert to sales and social media is a bottomless ocean your business might drown in unless you are a particularly savvy poster. To take your fate into your own hands you need a tool that generates continual visibility with little work from you. This is the perfect situation to employ Search Engine Optimization. Best known as SEO, search engine optimization takes your businesses website and tailors it so sticks out to search engines. Without SEO in place a customer searching the web for a dentist in Clive may completely miss Clean Teeth. F...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Oh my word, did you see what the new iPhone can do? It can wirelessly charge! It allows users to create custom emojis! You can edit screenshots! It has a processor five times as fast as lightning! THE SCREEN GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE EDGES! The new iPhone has pushed us literally to the edge of technological innovation. This truly is the greatest time to be alive! Except it is not. All the things Apple unveiled last month at their giant promotional event for the brand new iPhone 8, 8s, and iPhone X have been on the market for years. No they haven’t been available in iPhone form, but Samsung, LG, HTC, and Motorola –basically Android carrying phones– all offered one or all of the latest and greatest iPhone tricks. So why is the market reacting like Apple has flipped the tech world on its head? 10 years ago when the iPhone came out Steve Jobs truly revolutionized the tech world. There had been smartphones before, there had been pi...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Automation is an incredible gift to the modern society. The most menial of tasks have been passed off to soulless robots and machines. No more drilling holes in license plates or tightening screws on car chassis after car chassis. While a godsend to industrial production automation has also killed hundreds of thousands of jobs and become a political landmine in the modern economy. So what do you suppose the effects will be when artificial intelligence comes to fruition. For those who don’t understand the difference, artificial intelligence is automated devices and machines that also have the able to make decisions about their actions instead of following a single programmed routine. Artificial intelligence has all kinds of practical applications from computer programs that could decipher human actions and anticipate what next moves, to devices that autonomously scan human bodies, diagnose, and prescribe courses of treatment wi...

For Tiny Explosions ' 6th bout in the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project  we lucked into the opportunity to make either a "Road Movie" or Sci-Fi short. We decided to kind of do both, and the result was a film worthy of screening, titled  Snap Back . Required Elements for this year's film included: Character : Freddy or Fiona Brown, poet Prop : Rubber Band Dialogue : "You heard what she said" While we did screen at Best of City this year, we didn't win any awards. A head-scratcher because why would our film screen again if it didn't receive any specific acclaim? Maybe we Being There'd ourselves . In the long run awards (outside of the overall winner or runner-up) are no big deal as you don't know how the judges graded and the recipients are almost always puzzling. As an example a couple of Tiny Explosions' past award wins have been confusing. The important thing is we're all exceptionally proud of the film and I don'...