This is the blog of Ian Mercer, Serial entrepreneur, Digital Mapping Pioneer, Inventor of Windows Movie Maker, Microsoft Producer, HighMat, SnapTune, … Patent holder, Guinness world record holder, and founder and CEO of SignSwift, LLC,

Here you’ll find my thoughts on Home automation, Energy Conservation, Programming, Operations, Entrepreneurship, Business, Startups, Quality, Agile, Optimization, .NET, Natural Language Processing, Digital Signage and more.

My home automation system recently won 1st and 3rd place in the international, Microsoft MyDotNetStory competition.  You can view a demonstration of it under the home automation menu above.  I believe that it is the world’s smartest house because I haven’t seen anything smarter.  It controls lights, heating, sprinklers, audio, and more; it has hundreds of sensors including PIR, strain gauges, door switches, and more; it interfaces to Caller ID, PBX, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Email, NOAA, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Traffic, Podcasts and more. For the most part it works autonomously doing the right thing and reducing our energy consumption by over 40%.  You can control it using a web, voice or chat interface.  It has a unique Natural Language Interface that understands sentences and can hold a two-way conversation with you.

Under the SEO menu you’ll find my SEO keyword mapping tool; it can untangle a list of keyword phrases and volumes (like you get from Google’s Adwords tools) to give you a clearer picture of the keywords you need to put on your pages.  Using variable sized boxes and lines it shows you which words are the most important and how they are linked.

Thoughts under programming are mostly related to Microsoft’s .NET platform and the C# language but there are some that are more general in nature.  I’ve been using Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 extensively recently including the Entity Framework, WCF, WPF and Silverlight.

You can view my professional profile on Linkedin or follow me on Twitter.

I’m also an avid photographer and videographer and I’m in the process of adding a few of my favorite pictures to the site.