You don't have to do laser shows to make money in this hobby. How much do you think DrLava has made on FlexMods? I'd imagine a whole lot.Originally Posted by buffo
Senior Member
You don't have to do laser shows to make money in this hobby. How much do you think DrLava has made on FlexMods? I'd imagine a whole lot.
Last edited by JohnYayas; 06-16-2016 at 14:00. Reason: Fixed punctuation.
Probably not enough to cover the thousands he lost on the 445 nm blue diodes though.
Adam
Senior Member
Ouch! That's gotta hurt.
Yeah, pretty much the worst possible outcome... He bought 8 of them just a week or two before the story broke about the Casio Slim-green projectors. Had he waited, he could have gotten those diodes for $50 each. Instead he paid something like $800 each. And then he couldn't sell them.
It was a good idea in theory, since those diodes were selling for close to 3 grand if you tried to buy them direct from Nichia in small quantities back then. He planned to mark them up a little and sell them for just under $1000, and had things worked out he would have sold them all really fast and had the money to develop more products. But it all fell apart in the span of a week or so.Poor guy...
Adam
In only two short months.... I'll have been back to work for four days following SELEM, and be in the painful process of counting down the long 350 odd remaining days 'til SELEM 11. Life is cruel.
PM Sent...
This year I'm proposing everyone download the app: GroupMe. It's cross-platform and free. I'll be creating two groups within called "SELEM Announce" and "SELEM general" with the goal of providing better comms for participants.
GroupMe, if you're not familiar, is a free group messaging application that allows groups (up to 500) to all be part of a "chat room" and communicate. I'd ask that everyone please either submit their phone # or email address (privately) to me so that I can add you to both the groups.
The reasoning behind two groups is that there is no ability for a group owner or moderator to restrict who can post to a group, so one group, the "Announce" group would be used by organizers to send out real-time messages such as, "X show is starting in the Main Auditorium in 5 minutes" or "Auditorium raffle starting in 10 minutes!" to help keep people on track since I know it's easy to get lost in conversation/wonder during the event. Since we'd like to keep the noise to a minimum on the Announce group, the other group would be for all other comms and open for all to post. The app also allows for direct messaging between individual members, and the creation of sub-groups if desired.
For those that are leery of using something like this, I can attest to the app's usefulness as I've been using it for a couple years now, and I promise you won't see any spam nor will I do anything other than add you to groups once I have your info. With that in mind, if you'd like to get in on the action early go ahead and PM me your phone # or email address and I'll get you added. Just make sure and use the same information you give me when you download and register the app.
Their website is: https://groupme.com/en-US/
edit: I'll also take information for people that can't make the event and want to be a part of the General group as attendees may want to snap photos or videos and share to the group. Live vicariously!
Senior Member
That's an awesome idea. I really like the announce group idea for broadcasting live announcements.
Rick, this is a great idea! I can see this being very helpful. It's so easy for people to get distracted and miss things at SELEM...
I was speaking with Hank about this the other day, and we were trying to figure out some way to control all the replies. Basically, for the SELEM Schedule Announcements channel, we really only want a few people to be able to post things, where as on the other SELEM discusssion group we would want anyone to be able to post. Unfortunately, GroupMe does't allow for moderation like that. But Hank did some checking, and there is an app called GroupNote that is one-way only. So you can push messages out, but the people in the channel can't reply.
So maybe we should look into using GroupNote for the announcement channel.?. How about you and Hank get together via PM and see what you can come up with?
Adam
Senior Member
One added benefit of GroupNote is that the moderators can turn on "Debate Mode" (not a great name, it should just be "chat mode") that would allow for *Temporary* input from the attendees, say if you needed to get quick feedback on something, and then turn it off. You can also post survey buttons (like a Poll) so people can vote on options ("do X or do Y?") and the admin can get feedback and see how many clicked on which button. Maybe these features are not needed, but they seem neat..
Even though it seems like a good solution, I have not used GroupNote before, so I'm fine with whatever app/platform Buffo and hitekvoop chooses.
Hank,
Great find, exactly what I was looking for. We have a couple options, it seems. We can try to use GroupNote, again with two groups one in "debate mode" permanently and the other not as I'd like to preserve both use cases. I have so far a total of just 4 people in the GroupMe groups and now I'm torn between using GroupMe as outlined above with a nice "Please don't post in Announce unless you're one of these people..." and trying out GroupNote. Just thinking aloud, if my only hesitation with GroupNote is a lack of familiarity, perhaps we should beta test it for a month or so, see if it meets our need and then make a selection. I'll go ahead and download GroupNote and if Rodman and DZ want to do the same we'll use both apps in parallel for the next month before making a determination.
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