Happy New Year from Audacious Software!

It’s been almost a year and a half since my last blog post when we were looking at the passive data disclosures deployed in the Fresh Comics app using Passive Data Kit.

What’s been going on since then? In short, the answer is 64.7%.

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In a prior blog post and in numerous in-person conversations, I’ve spoken about my goals for Passive Data Kit, the open source framework Audacious Software is producing to serve as the foundation for a new generation of sensor- and service-aware applications. Unlike similar frameworks, Passive Data Kit tries to balance the developer's need for passive data with the user's need to understand and control how that data is collected and used by third parties.

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It's pretty amazing that it's been over three months since I updated the company weblog. The lack of updates is a good indication that Audacious Software has been quite busy during that time and there has not been much time available to pen updates.

That said, here are a few things that have happened since the last post…

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I just wanted to post a quick note letting folks know that I’ll be presenting at a symposium at the 8th Scientific Meeting for the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions (ISRII) from April 7 to 9 in Seattle. My presentation is titled “Scalable Data Collection in the Wild: Clinical and Practical Challenges” and will discuss some of the challenges researchers face when doing smartphone data collection in the wild. The abstract of the presentation is included below.

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I'm a long-time Mac OS X developer, going back to the Mac OS X 10.1 Puma fourteen years ago. While my earliest app was a book-cataloging app (R.I.P. Books.app), I've continued to develop for the platform, with some of my latest projects being internal tools to assist Fresh Comics weekly data updates. However, during that period, I remained a staunch Objective-C developer, operating under the theory that I didn't need to jump into Swift until the language progressed to a point that I was being left behind feature-wise with Objective-C. However, given some iOS projects in the pipeline, I decided to give the language a try this evening. I've recorded some thoughts within.

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For the past decade, I have been building systems that use automated means to gather data about end-users by leveraging the growing amount of sensors and other options to gather passive data available on modern computers, smartphones, wearables, and devices in the environment. In this post, I describe my personal history with this kind of technology and how that history is leading up to Audacious Software's most important project: PassiveDataKit.

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In addition to positioning Audacious Software as a business that delivers data-driven solutions, I've been working hard to make sure that the business itself is as data-driven as it can be. This means that determining the overall health of the company, tracking progress on deliverables, and monitoring sustainability are at the top of my priority list.

In this post I'll describe how I'm applying a data-centric approach towards time and effort tracking.

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A couple of weeks ago, I picked up Microsoft's latest flagship phone, the Lumia 950. I've been a fan of Redmond's mobile platform since the Windows Phone 7 days and after a couple weeks of constant use, I have a few impressions and thoughts to share.

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Welcome back to the next iteration of Audacious Software. The world looks a good bit different than when it did when I put my full-time consulting on hiatus, and I'm optimistic that there are plenty of opportunities to create value and spend time and effort to make each day a bit better than the one before. As car companies have recently learned from Alan Kay, the best way to predict the future is to build it.

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