My Past and Calculation’s Future: A Teaser

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I have spent my professional career in the depths of numbers and formulas, financial, scientific or otherwise. It is an odd thing as I was never really a math guy but I always loved numbers, especially when I was a kid. Before I learned to program at age 13 I would create sports games with paper, pencil, and dice. Sometimes those games used baseball cards with statistics on them, other times they didn’t, but I was always striving for a real world approach to those games.

I wrote numerous baseball games, increasing in complexity over time, and even wrote a simple football game. As mentioned, some times these games were stats based and sometimes they were just luck of the roll or draw kinds of games. I always started with a handful of teams — and the Cleveland Indians as my favorite team were always among them. Then I would take the rest of the league, throw every player not already on a team, and let the five or six team league draft. The 1986 Indians just beat the snot out of everyone. They had such amazing hitting and that pitching staff with Bret Saberhagen, Jack Morris and Roger Clemens (Hey! They were drafted fair and square!) was unstoppable.

I programmed through high school but quit for a couple of years in college before I came back to it. While running numbers was apart of my undergraduate business classes and the idea for the template format came from that work, I never dreamed of spending the next 14 years working with calculators and numbers and formulas.

The interesting thing is that as the market has changed from disconnected handhelds to connected smartphones and tablets, as the market has evolved from $160 software to $5 apps, as market leadership moved from two platforms to eight, my ideas around calculation have evolved as well.

The days of large software applications like powerOne that takes six months or more to move across platforms, is a thing of the past*. My thoughts over the last few months have turned to new ideas, light-weight ideas, that we can bring to market quickly and evolve rapidly on multiple platforms. And yes, they still involve calculation.

I hope you will stay tuned.  We have some great things coming that I am particularly excited about!

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* Before I get an avalanche of emails and comments, it doesn’t mean we are stopping work on powerOne or not considering Android. Just working on some other ideas right now.

4 thoughts on “My Past and Calculation’s Future: A Teaser”

  1. Hi, I’m sorry to say I don’t agree. Light and quick apps look the way to go, yes, but…Powerone Graph is unique: that’s its strenght, which no template or quick app can ever dream of replacing. I just bought two Palm Tungstens for my sons in order to be able to run it: no other app, on any platform, can claim that. You just don’t get that graphing and matrix calculus even in a full grown full screen computer program. (I sometimes prefer it even on Mathematica). So if you don’t port it in its enterity to iPhone (or Android, or new Palm (…)) even at a high price (but look, you pay high price also for navigation programs in the AppStore) you are going to lose you faithful basis…and finding yourself lost amid a pletora of quick nd fast and so-and-so programs.
    With much respct.
    Regards, Paolo

    • I love this! I am amazed at how those who used powerOne Graph use it forever, buying old devices on eBay to do so. You are not alone, my friend, in your sentiment and I can’t tell you enough how much I appreciate it. Thanks, Paolo!

      I will say that just because it is simple does not mean it isn’t powerful. I hope you will stay tuned. In some ways this new app is specifically for folks like you.

      Elia

  2. Yeah, yeah, you don’t want a deluge of comments. Good luck with that.

    My experience is similar to Paolo’s. I used my Treo until it just completely died before getting an iPhone, and then it was painful as PowerOne for iPhone slowly gained capabilities.

    Now when I whip out my iPhone in front of a customer, start up PowerOne and use one of my custom templates, I am more often than not asked where I got that app and what does it cost.

    Now if I could just ditch this damned iPhone and get an Android…

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