I’ve been (and so has the rest of the team here) pretty quiet during the last few months. Mostly because we were pretty busy working on Totspot (blog), which we launched with a group of really smart people. Totspot is a social publishing platform for parents and their kids. It’s a pretty niche market, but an exciting one too.

Totspot started out as client work and it became our single focus for months - definitely worth it, for several reasons. One: it’s pretty cool to be working on something that’s usually not your core audience - as you may know, we build solutions for teams much like our own who work on, with and for the web. Second: it gave us an opportunity to engage deeply with an idea. As a team, we usually focus either on planning, or on execution - and we don’t often get the chance to deep dive into a product like we did with Totspot. It was good to get back to thinking exclusively about one core problem, like we had before with Bell Canada, and with our own product, Goplan. Third: kids are awesome.

So I’m pretty excited about this launch. Totspot is now in a private beta stage and we’re slowly inviting moms and dads to check it out - if you want in, head out to Totspot.com and leave us your email address (we respect your privacy, your email address is safe with us). There’s more exciting stuff to talk about really soon, so keep an eye out - I promise I’ll be posting more often (especially next week from Vegas)

Note: Mike over at Techcrunch wrote about Totspot too, and Techmeme’s caught up to the story, so head over there and read up on what people are saying. Oh! And obviously there’s the official Totspot blog, where we’ll post product updates - go check!

Next month I’m hitting Las Vegas for MIX08. March is a pretty good conference month with ETech in San Diego (holy crap, what an ace program this year), MIX in Vegas and SXSW in Austin and although I’ve been pretty unimpressed by conferences as of late (one of the exceptions being Reboot which I was lucky enough to be a speaker at) I’m still looking forward to meeting some of the people attending Mix08.

It’s my first time at the conference so I don’t really know what to expect although I’m curious about the news on IE8, the new interactive work Microsoft has been doing on Surface and the conference’s new User Experience track, that has a few familiar faces. That, and a week in Vegas should be pretty interesting.

I find that some of the best ideas I get are on travel days (odd, I know), and I hope to catch up on some thinking and reading - the result of which should be a handful of posts, both about Microsoft and MIX as well as other stuff. Anyway, if you’re going to be in Vegas from the 3rd to the 8th of March, get in touch - I always love to meet up with some of the people reading this blog (maybe we can face-off on Guitar Hero or Rock Band, too).

This post is philosophical and doesn’t necessarily carry solutions to the problems it presents. I know it’s not my usual kind of writing, but hey, it’s better to get ideas out there than it is to keep them to yourself. Tread carefully.

Brian Oberkirch just posted about the flow of information and where we’re heading to by connecting the web to the objects we carry with us daily. This topic has been on my mind since when I first heard of the Chumby about 2 years ago. Connected devices like the chumby, stuff by Ambient Devices (that I’ve never seen live, unfortunately), the iPhone and Arduino bring us closer to data that we generally pay little attention to.

These days the web isn’t something we’re always plugged into or connected to. We just tap into it when we want information - still some of us do it more than others. The web is leaking into the real world (as Matt Webb hinted at in his Movement presentation) through connected devices and services like Twitter, Dopplr (or Birdie, which we’re building around here - more on it later, promise).

There’s still barriers between now and a future where the online world and the real blend into each other completely. Brian mentions some of the problems we’re solving now like identity and usability. A lot needs to happen in the interaction world as well. The way we connect to the cloud (cloud being online data) is still open, vastly unexplored territory. We’re building devices that get us closer to the data, but I keep feeling like our use of screen-based media is often limiting. We’ll see a lot more of products like BUG labs than we will of services in the future.

My guess is we’ll have specialized devices connected to specific bits of data - much like we use our cellphones to connect to GSM networks and call people. What those will be and how they’ll look is still unknown, but it’s an exciting time to be working on platforms, devices and the web.

And so it happens - Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion dollars this morning at $31 dollars a share (considerably above yesterday’s closing price for Y! stock). But this is not a post about economics but innovation, company mindset and culture. Microsoft and Yahoo are two very different companies - and having visited both their headquarters in the past in Redmond and California, it is hard for me to imagine how things will evolve if the deal goes through.

Microsoft is a huge company, with a culture that’s very different from Y!s. It offers products that fit into a very traditional mindset, whereas Yahoo was trying to change from that into a culture based on innovation, more in touch with its hacker roots. The Yahoo Brickhouse effort (which I’m a huge fan of) in particular, was a great example of that shift.

How companies react to mergers, acquisitions and new additions to teams has been one of my interests for a while. In theory, diversity fuels innovation because each company will have it’s own set of practices and answers to problems. This fuels discussion and hopefully the emmergence of a new set of signature practices on the new - and definitely more purple - Microsoft. This is quite likely a good thing for them.

What I wonder about though, is how some of the people now at Yahoo - who don’t particularly enjoy the Microsoft mindset - will react to this piece of news. Or how the stockholders will react. I guess we’ll see, but it’ll be an interesting next few days.

If you want to read up on the news of the acquisition bid, check the press release, the coverage at Techcrunch, or Techmeme, that will likely be on fire today.