NeoSmart Executive Announcement!

We’d like to take this opportunity to announce something we’ve been planning for the longest time, but never got around to executing.

NeoSmart Technologies is different from most other organizations out there. Our lax and friendly/informal style has served us well for the past year-and-a-half of our existence, but we feel that the world unfortunately isn’t ready to accept an organization under these terms.

This is more of a “self-imposed audit” than it is a restructuring of NeoSmart Technologies, meaning that our focus will be the same, you’ll see the same friendly faces you used to, but there are going to be quite a few changes beneath the surface in the way things work, where each thing is distributed, and the medium of conveying our services to our members and the general public.

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Does anyone remember those machines we used to call typewriters? They’re those really loud boxes with daisy-wheels, clickity-click keys, and frustrating tape-ink rolls.

There’s something special about typewriters that a computer can never replace. I’m normally the last person to get nostalgic all over dead technology, but if there are two things that a computer can never (not yet..) truly replace it’s reading from a real live book in your hand and writing a story or novel on a typewriter.

Yesterday I dug an old Smith-Corona out of the attic while cleaning things up…

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Take a look at digitalfive’s homepage… it doesn’t look out of the ordinary, but underneath the surface something is definitely rumbling – loud too.

For the past couple of days under cover of IRC chatrooms and furtive Instant Messaging conversations, people have been talking. NeoSmart Technologies never publishes rumors as a rule of thumb, but this time it’s digitalfive, our lifetime affiliate and long-time friend in the front ranks of technology reviews and analysis – so we make an exception.

The rumor is that many of the big names in technology have in the past week or so taken a keen interest in digitalfive, and we hear that several of these well-established sites have recently sought to offer digitalfive’s founder and owner Kristan M. Kenney a position in their ranks, but it seems no one really knows.

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Vista is wrapping up.

Like it or not, Microsoft’s latest Operating System is reaching the beginning of the end: the code is complete, the bugs are on their way out, and for better or for worse, Vista is (finally) about to go Gold.

NeoSmart Technologies has enjoyed a front-row seat, and even some stage-time of our own in this big and wonderful show, but it’s time to move on some more. Microsoft’s longest beta to date has taken a lot of our time and effort, but we’re glad for the minor role we’ve played to date. It all came at a cost however: NeoSmart Technologies has always been short on staff and money, and it just meant that there wasn’t enough of either for us to focus on both Vista and other projects and techno-news at once – that’s about to change.

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