Have Fun out There

Yesterday, I talked, in part, about how we can, if we choose, work all the time, from the moment we open our eyes, until we close them for sleep.

So today’s as good a Friday as any to remind you to balance all that work with some fun.

We here at the AppsLab are big proponents of enjoying what we do, and today reminds me of that. Here’s a sample of what Anthony (@anthonyslai), Raymond (@yuhuaxie) and Tony did today.

Here are Tony and Raymond showing the IoT Nerf gun to a group of dTech (@dTechHS) students attending an Oracle Education Foundation (@ORCLCitizenship) workshop.

And here’s Anthony showing our Gadget Lab demos to some kids on Spring Break.

We make a conscious effort to take time out and show our fun stuff to kids. Why? Because fun is important.

Back in 2012, I pondered what I could show at Kscope12 that would spice up my presentation. I wanted to add something fun to my session, and after chatting with Noel, we settled on the Rock ’em Sock ’em robots controlled by text/phone as a fun way to keep people’s attention.

During the conference, I stumbled upon something. Turns out when you show people something fun, their creative juices flow, and you get lots of cool ideas. Like this:

I’m not an expert in every functional area of business. I may know some Financials from my years as an E-Business Suite product manager, but I don’t know much about sales or HR or supply chain.

So, when we have something we think will be important for users in the not-so-distant-future, i.e. an emerging technology, we often build a fun demo to help those domain specific uses rise to the surface.

People play with the demo, they have some fun with it, and we talk about ways that particular technology could apply to their everyday work.

This works, believe it or not, and we’ve been repeating that formula with great results for several years. It’s part of our strategy.

For example, robot arms and race cars to investigate gesture as an input device, Internet of Things for when things happen and for connecting dumb things to the Internet, and using your mind to control to drive a robotic ball.

It’s become an annual team activity to come up with the year’s fun demo, and everyone loves the fun demos, building them, showing them, playing with them.

So have fun out there. We will.

Now, if only I could talk Noel into resurrecting those Rock ’em Sock ’em robots.