BibleTech 2010

I'm sitting here drinking freshly roasted and ground Kenyan coffee, listening to Beaming by Reliant K, struggling with an intermittent Comcastic internet connection and finding myself glad to be home again.

I just returned from BibleTech 2010 which was really incredible. Everything from technical linguists, programmers, internet and data architects, database engineers and innovators in technology - all of whom translate and provide access to the Bible in the 21st Century. The promoters did a great job providing a clean, highly valuable conference with little of the wasted time of other networking and innovation meetings. 

We found out that WordBloom is indeed at the cutting edge of Bible data delivery as people across all of the technical disciplines stopped by our display and were blown away by the concept of WordBloom. A few programmers weren't impressed with some of the things that they felt would be easy to code. Some technical linguists saw the information presented as too simplistic for their needs. The database architects wanted to know the secret to the data relations. It was a good debut of the many different approaches to help people see the power of WordBloom. Again and again, we said, "It delivers content immediately - all at once - no clicks" or "we have achieved an 85% click reduction" or "any resource, any time, anything relevant is the focus."

At various times throughout the day, people would visit the booth and say (with a lightbulb over their head), "So you could plug in any resource and any part of that resource is automatically linked and immediately presented? I can see all the Greek, the parallel Bible, the suggested readings, cross-references, everything? No tabs? Cool.  No panes? Cool." Another visitor came to the booth, listened and then walked away. He came back later and said, "So this really is the first ever Biblical thesaurus?" or "So my students just type in Matthew 11:1 and they see everything about the verse? Amazing!"

It was hilarious, fun and made me realize it isn't just the way we comunicate the idea of WordBloom. People in this industry simply have never seen anything like this ever before and it is going to take time for them to realize the power of the product. In a way, it reminds me of my faith. My faith is revolutionary but I have many new friends who just need to be able to see a portion of it, watch me live it out and then chew on it for a while until the light bulb goes off. On my end, I need to constantly show off my faith like the it's the coolest new gadget on the planet. At that point, we are able to meet in the middle and both find a relationship with God.