I have always had the utmost respect for the law and I know enough to keep myself out of trouble. Besides this basic information, I don’t know much about the practice of law. I was approached by a gentleman lawyer, Shawn Roberts, with a problem and we put our heads together and came up with the simplest solution possible to prove that we had a solution. From that point on we started to iterate and add features to the idea. The idea changed to a tool then to a product. We recruited beta testers and continued to iterate. Finally we reached a point of what we felt was minimal product viability, plus all the testers loved it!

Shawn and I are both proud to announce the launch of our joint venture, Legalized Software. Please take a few moments and check it out. If you know a lawyer practicing in Oklahoma please spread the word to them.

I learned many new lessons with this project and I look forward to many more. I plan to post a few of these lessons here.

I don’t remember who said it, I suppose I could Google it, but I will save that for another time. Those that are in the “know” are the ones with the answers. The more information you have the better the decisions you are likely to make. The thirst of knowledge and power drives many of us.

One of my favorite pastimes is to go to a book store or library, yes they still exist, and pick up a random magazine that I have never read before. By reading the magazine I hope to learn several new bits of information about the topic. This expands my sphere of understanding about our world. The diversity of what we know is just as important as being an expert in a given topic. Learning new things in new fields helps to develop new wrinkles on our brains. It will also help to keep our brains active. You are forcing it to look at things differently and to expand areas that you don’t usually touch. Trying new hobbies will also accomplish this. You should always strive to try something new.

With more and more content online the options of exploring new topic areas is limitless. Sure you can read all the blogs from just about any walk of life of which the merits can be debated endlessly. One thing I have discovered recently is iTunesU. iTunesU is a place where colleges and universities post videos of their class lectures online for their students to access. The neat thing is anybody can access them. You can be watching a physics lecture from Stanford University or a business ethics lecture from MIT and not leave the comfort of your home.

We have entered the information age. Exactly when is not important. What is important is that we have basically unlimited access to just about any information that we want. With great sites like wikipedia.com, about.com, google.com, wolframalpha.com we can find the answers to many questions. Lets not forget social information with sites like myspace.com, facebook.com and linkedin.com we can find out lots of information about just about anybody. Having this type of power to be able access knowledge from anywhere and at anytime is truly amazing especially from such a cheap and portable device like our phones. There are many people working to improve the way we access that information and the way that it is displayed.

I think that the second half of the quote I mentioned at the beginning of this post is “knowledge is free.” I challenge you to learn something new today outside of your area of expertise or start a new hobby. Heck, make it your challenge to learn something new everyday for the new year!

If you find an interesting lecture of class on iTunesU, please comment or email me, I would like to hear about it. What did you learn today?