The Triumphant Return of Guy Kawasaki
After securing his place in history as the world’s foremost software evangelist, Guy Kawasaki went on to build a superlative personal brand, enchanting millions of fans with his endless wit, wisdom, and appeal to common-sense values and virtues. And that was just by the year 2011.
Jump ahead 25 more years to 2036 and as you might expect, Guy is on top of the world and more popular than ever. But what you may not know, or want to believe, is that in the years just before this, Guy was totally lost. He hadn’t written a book in three years, he was adding no new stories to his speeches, his tweets were all retweets from the past, and his Google+ entries were nowhere to be found.
Disclaimer: As it is with all FIB Wire posts, this blog contains no meaningful facts, truths, or intelligence of any kind (future or otherwise). It’s pure fiction.
Guy’s downward spiral did not go unnoticed and it caused widespread concern, speculation, and even pity. Some people blamed this debilitating funk on everything from male menopause to hockey-induced head injuries. Others believed it was burnout after fifty years of non-stop travel, speeches, book signings and tweeting.
But no one, not even Guy himself, really understood what was happening. All he knew was that he had to shake it off and move on if he was to survive. Feeling helpless, Guy went to his massive fan base to rekindle his missing mojo. But this time he wasn’t giving advice, pitching a book, or talking about the next cool thing on the Internet. With remarkable candor and humility, he admitted his inability to chart his own future and begged the crowd to tell him what he should do next.
With help from a team of friends and supporters, Guy sifted through nearly a million replies that ranged from the silly to the sublime. One of these hit him as hard as a freight train. It was a haunting three-word phrase from an anonymous fan that simply read, “Do it again!”
Puzzled but intrigued, Guy pondered his past accomplishments and got to work. After three days and nights he emerged exhausted but exhilarated holding a plan for the ultimate “Evangelist’s Revival.”
The plan was a simple list of his favorite personal pastimes that he would combine into a brand new venture.
The Top Five
- Read comic books (for inspiration and excitement)
- Make jewelry (I love small objects of great beauty and value)
- Evangelize the Macintosh and software (duh!)
- Start a new company (and following my own advice)
- Give lively presentations (using my new invention)
Guy assembled a team of his favorite developers to design and build a new product that would embed these five passions into a wearable device the size of a quarter. Six months later he unveiled a stunning prototype at DEMO SPRING 2036 that stole the show.
Within a few weeks, Guy’s new product, the Mac O’Lantern™ ring, went into full production and became a top seller and a runaway success. And best of all, after years of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, Guy was back and at the top of his game.
How He Did ItGuy’s new product is a technological masterpiece that marries the worlds of computer and social networking into a seamless presentation platform. The following is just a glimpse of how it works.
The Product
Guy is a Green Lantern comic fan and while giving his speeches he often fantasized about being able to project his PowerPoint presentations directly from his fist using a really cool superhero ring. As the world’s smallest wearable video projector, Guy’s new product, named the Mac O’Lantern, fulfills this dream.
On the outside, the ring is an elegant piece of jewelry. The front is sculpted to resemble the original Macintosh and its historic beige enclosure. The Jobsonian aesthetic reveals no external moving parts or any apparent user interface. But on the inside, the Mac O’Lantern is a modern marvel crammed with technology.
Guy Kawasaki’s Mac O’Lantern projector is barely the size of a quarter.
The “Macintosh screen” is actually a crystal lens with automatic zoom and focus capable of projecting high definition images from distances of 1 inch to 5,000 feet. Its primary limitation is the non-negotiable 30 point minimum font size imposed by Guy himself.
Guy collaborated with filmmaking legend Ken Burns to develop the sophisticated pan, tilt, and zoom (PTZ) interface that translates the changing tension of nearby tendons into highly expressive lens control. Ken was so impressed he ditched his own million dollar robotic cameras in favor of using the Mac O’Lantern for his newer projects.
Multi-Lantern (Network) Mode
Although classified as a personal projection system, the Mac O’Lantern operates equally well in a networked, multi-lantern environment. Special Mac O’Lantern flash mob server software, modeling the “school of fish” phenomenon, synchronizes the gyroscopes and pixel assignments of up to 100,000 rings on a wireless mesh network to create breathtaking views that can be projected on low flying clouds or national monuments such as the Hoover Dam.
Don’t worry, The Hoover Dam is safe! This is just a flash mob having some fun projecting with the new Mac O’Lantern network.
Audio as SoftwareGuy claims the Mac O’Lantern can deliver sound anywhere in the room without any loudspeakers and it does this completely with software.
A proprietary algorithm encodes complex brain signals onto an “audio beam” track mixed with other PowerPoint images and projected as light by the Mac O’Lantern. Although visually imperceptible on the screen, the track enters the body via the eye’s optic nerve and is translated by the brain into rich surround-sound audio that even people without hearing can enjoy.
Power
Despite the considerable power requirements for its lamp and internal electronics, the Mac O’Lantern has no batteries or external electrical connections. Instead the ring is fueled by body heat using patented HotFlash™ technology Guy discovered while researching male menopause.
Technical Details, Celebrity Users, and More ImagesCLICK HERE to find out more about Guy Kawasaki’s amazing Mac O’Lantern.
This post is dedicated to Steve Jobs.
