Translating “Nerd Word” or “Geek Speak” for the Masses
When I was the Supervisor of Management Development at Caltech, I had to translate for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the famed technical university. No, they weren’t speaking a foreign language. They were speaking a specific kind of English that had the audience dazed and confused. This is the language of science and engineering.
This kind of jargon led to the Challenger Disaster, and it is probably one of the most problematic realities in every large corporation that has IT and Engineering divisions. Unless the other departments can understand these nerds, many jobs do not get done, and many advanced systems do not get implemented.
For example, in my present occupation as President and CEO at EMRE Publishing, I have a brilliant young developer named David Rhoderick, and he is of the same left brain types I worked with at Caltech and JPL. However, we were trying to communicate what our new digital enhanced eBook application technology could do for our clients, and it was getting pretty dicey. I wanted to be able to write a translation of what he was telling me so that CEOs could understand it. Many CEOs come from Sales and not from Engineering, so they need to have an easy way to understand “geek speak” or “nerd word.”
Here’s what I was trying to translate. This is Dave’s explanation of PhoneGap software, which is the way we distribute our digital titles over many different platforms. I must state that Dave is better than most engineering types, and he admitted that he was the “communicator” while he was working at various development projects in college and in the working world. Don’t be surprised if you can understand him when he explains:
PhoneGap is simply a wrapper that makes any website into a mobile application. It is done using web views mostly, but nowadays, I believe it also has access to some native APIs that might run it better than an online site (plus everything will be local so loading is instantaneous).
My steps are as such: I’m going to take the HTML that I use (which links to the real workhorse Javascript code) for our Embellisher eReader online and put it into PhoneGap. Then I’m going to optimize it as much as possible for each device (minimizing image sizes for each screen size, using different operations that may be faster depending on device, removing unused functionality) so it runs better than it does online. Then we do a little testing and we should be golden.
As for location, I think we can add that as a simple Javascript test at the beginning of the application load. Basically anything we can test for including membership, location, device type, we can use to control the functionality of an application. I believe we can offer apps to only users from certain places, but I think that might only work for countries, although I’m not sure.
And, here is his explanation of how our Embellisher eReader app would work:
The good part of our potential app is we can create almost any incantation of our app. We can create one-off apps, we can make every title into an individual app, just like Inkling does, and we can limit the library to one author. We can also always put publications in a master reader app like ours. Once we have the master build, I can tweak almost any setting, even publishing some books as apps but only from some platforms. Anything is possible, and most of the work would be done for the first version of the app.
My translation of what PhoneGap will do for our clients? Read for yourself:
PhoneGap will not only put our enhanced digital content into more mobile reading devices (cell phones, tablets, iPads, etc.), it will also be able to pinpoint the client’s niche audience so that their content gets the most “bang for their marketing buck.” More readers will be able to view our digital content with a minimum of formatting errors and few technical glitches. Reading content with embedded videos, music soundtracks, sound effects, Google maps, and animations will revolutionize mobile publishing. There will also be no streaming problems because everything will play on a local server.
What about the Embellisher app by EMRE Publishing?
Our Embellisher eReader application can convert any digital content you have and make it readable on a mobile device. If you own a bunch of newspapers or magazines, you can put your entire collection inside our app, including your back titles or archives, and your readership will grow by the millions (90% of all Americans own a cell phone). We can also market one eBook or two million eBooks depending on our client’s wishes. We can include samples, preorders, and complete online reading for a subscription price. We can include promotions, ads, and any other marketing creation the client has. It all can go inside our Embellisher app—and it can include all the multimedia one needs for a most creative and entertaining read.
