The future of the Web is Marc Canterâs back fence.
Yesterday I visited Marc Canter who was holding a BBQ. His back fence is, should we say, unique. Canter is the guy who started Macromind, which became Macromedia. He’s always been ahead of the market in recognizing where things are going. Plus he’s just fun to talk with. So, I filmed him showing off his new book and his fence. The neat thing is while we were filming that we had people participating from around the world on my little cell phone. Even now the chat room is open, so you can participate in this fun project called the live web. Sorry about the abrupt end, the 3G went away. 36 minutes, but it’s not boring. How could it be with that shirt that Marc is wearing!
Earlier in the day I got David Schmidt, CTO of PBWiki, to show me his new OpenID keyfob from Yubikey. That thing is very cool. Using that he can securely sign into all his OpenID services (like WordPress, for instance, or PBWiki) just by shoving this into his USB port and pushing a button. No more remembering passwords that are strange and long.
I travel a lot. You might notice that I use sites like TripIt and Dopplr to help me plan my trips, keep track of where I’m going, and share important information with my friends and family and you. I also mostly fly United because I’m a long time frequent flier there (if I was starting fresh I’d focus on Virgin Atlantic and JetBlue because their planes are a lot nicer) and I use its site a lot. I also keep Flightstats.com on my iPhone so I can check if the gate agents are lying when they say the plane is on time.
But I wondered what I was missing, so I asked my Twitter followers what they use. The sites they came up with are very good. Here’s some. Do you agree with these? What sites do you use when you go traveling? Anything different than these?
@bcaudill said “used TripIt for my recent vacation and LOVED it. I’m also a huge fan of TripAdvisor, Kayak and for Europe, Worldby.com.”
@guhmshoo said: “hotwire.com“
@devahaz said: “kayak expedia jetblue virgin.”
@storming said: “Tripit and Kayak.”
@Jimconnolly said “Hi Robert - I use TripIt.”
@cja said “TripIt is pretty cool. use it all the time.”
@TravelMuse said: “also if you want to be inspired check out http://www.travelmuse.com/inspire/ and also plan your trips.”
@BettaSmetta said “http://tripadvisor.com is fabulous. had to find a cheap hotel in Midtown Manhattan, used Trip Advisor, and found an true gem!”
girlgamy said: “I really just use TripAdvisor. I never go to any hotel/resort before checking it out on TripAdvisor first. Invaluable!”
jeffq73 said “tripadvisor, dopplr, book directly with hotels for rooms.”
@dimensionmedia said “Travelocity and Expedia.”
@charnellpugsley said “I used to use Travelocity. Have trained myself to go directly to airline websites since they’re moving away from 3rd parties.”
@JamesOReilly said: “I like kayak.”
@abbashaiderali said: “I use Orbitz primarily or a travel agent (!) on a complex trip that might need 911 help. Tripit does rock pretty hard!”
@petefields said: “am an Orbitz man myself.”
@beatricetarka said “On my most recent trip to Italy I used exclusively search engine www.mobissimo.com. Results 40% of savings over competitors.”
@Jennifly said “I use tripwolf the one-stop travel guide to the world.”
@candees said “I like Priceline … I can almost always negotiate a good price on a great room.”
@rlepold said “I usually check a travel service for available fares, then go to the airlines’ site to purchase. Seems to be cheaper that way.”
UPDATE: there’s a thread over on FriendFeed where they are discussing even more good flight/travel sites.
Alec Saunders, in a comment over on his blog where he said I came off very poorly in my rant about the startups at Demo’s websites questions my “alignment” with TC50. I think that’s worth pointing out here.
I have not shared a meal in the past few months with Mike Arrington. Last time I remember seeing him was at his TC party a couple months ago.
I am NOT paid in any way by TC50. I have absolutely no business dealings with TC50. I have signed no contracts.
“But you’re a judge.” That is true. But so are many other people, including executives and VCs from around the valley. I am NOT being compensated for my time judging the finalists in the rich media category.
I am quite willing to spray my invective toward Arrington and Calacanis. They haven’t been friends to my business interests over the years.
I will be looking for things to both criticize and praise about both conferences this year. Actually I’ll probably be nicer to Demo this week because I’m not there and it’s not really fair to criticize something that you don’t have a personal involvement with. The companies’ websites? Fair game.
Anyway, I’ll be judged at the end of the week whether I was biased one way or another. If I do have a bias, it’ll be easy to see.
I have been more “aligned” with TC50 up to this point for a variety of reasons. Mostly because I think Arrington and Calacanis are outhustling Shipley. But, now, that isn’t really for me to judge. Now it’s YOUR turn to judge which conference did a better job of finding the best startups. I’ll link to the best analysis no matter what side of the fence it’s on.
UPDATE: also, this is true for FastCompany. Unlike other media companies like Mashable or Venturebeat that have sponsored Demo, FastCompany has no business ties to TechCrunch or Demo.
72 Nice Things about Demoâs Startupsâ Websites.
OK, OK, I’ve had my weekend fun when I said, on Saturday, that most of the sites for the companies being shown at the Demo Conference suck. That conference starts later today. I got half the industry to hate me. I have people wondering if I’m a paid shill for Arrington or TC50. Hate mail continues flowing in. Etc. Etc.
That’s what happens when you only look for the bad.
So, what’s the good? Well, let’s go through these and pull out something nice about each one. Keep in mind I’m only talking about the Websites, not the company or the product/service (I should have been far clearer about that on Saturday). Many still don’t have their service or product up, so we’ll have to judge those later in the week. This was a LOT harder than finding what was bad. I’m sorry, but these sites are really hard to praise. Compare this list to the “Gold Standard” list we posted yesterday. The difference is very telling.
Accordia Group, LLC; New Rochelle, NY;
NICE? The contact us page has a real phone number.Adapx, Inc.; Seattle, WA;
NICE? Cool pull-down menus.Alerts.com, Inc.; Bellvue, WA;
NICE? The site talks about you and what the service does for you. Nice color scheme.Arsenal Interactive, Inc.; Mountain View, CA;
NICE? Clean uncluttered design. Makes me want to learn more.Asyncast Corp; Campbell, CA;
NICE? Clear call to action “Sign me up!”Awind Inc.; Junghe, Taiwan;
NICE? It was hard to find something nice about this one, but supports multiple languages is about it.beeTV; Milano, Italy;
NICE? Good use of stock photos. By graying them out and animating logos in, gives it a cool feel.Best Buy; Minneapolis, MN;
NICE? Very clear progression of what you’ll get if you try this. Nice use of demos too.BizEquity Corp.; Spring House, PA;
NICE? Sorry, nothing nice to say. Still has a page up that says to check back on Monday, September 8th. Well, it IS Monday.Blue Lava Technologies, Inc.; Honolulu, HI;
NICE? Cool photo and different look from other sites. Plus promises a lot, makes me want to see more just to see if it’ll deliver on the promise of reinventing the way I’ll interact with my media.Cerego; Tokyo, Japan;
NICE? Uses OpenID.Cinergix, Pty Ltd.; Melbourne, Australia;
NICE? Good way to get people to sign up for a beta.Clintworld; Boenningstedt, Germany;
NICE? Clean, professional design.CoreTrace Corp.; Austin, TX;
NICE? Good video demo. Shows the presenter as well as what’s on screen.crowdSPRING, LLC; Chicago, IL;
NICE? The visual aesthetic here is the best I’ve seen in this group.DesignIn, Inc.; Marblehead, MA;
NICE? First site so far that looks like it will show you something different if you’re logged in. This could be a cool product (3D designer for your home) and is one of those I’m looking forward to playing with this week.Dial Directions, Inc.; Alameda, CA;
NICE? I missed the video on this site because I saw the comic and thought that was goofy. But, oh well, the video is nice and I have added this to my phone’s speed dial already.DOCCENTER; Omaha, NE;
NICE? I love the “Subscribe RSS” link. That tells me this site will be updated and if I care about the offerings here I can have that stuff shoved to my RSS Reader. I said three years ago that you should be fired if you are a marketer and you don’t have an RSS feed on your site and I still believe that.Enterprise Informatics, Inc.; San Diego, CA;
NICE? Google ads will fit right in here. Seriously, that’s about all I can say that’s nice about this one, sorry.Familybuilder; New York, NY;
NICE? This genealogy app gets you back to your favorite social network fast.ffwd.com, Inc.; San Francisco, CA;
NICE? Home page said “site is down” when I visited at 1:10 a.m. but it has a very cool color scheme and nice logo design.Fortressware, Inc.; Mountain View, CA;
NICE? Good value statement. A new way to protect my data.Fusion-io; Salt Lake City, UT;
NICE? Aesthetically awesome.G.ho.st; Ramallah & Modin, Palestine and Israel;
NICE? Love the benefit statement, the slight animation, and the product. I should have been nicer to this site on Saturday, it deserved to be pulled out and complimented.Green Sherpa; Santa Barbara, CA;
NICE? Communicates a TON in one screen.Infovell, Inc.; Menlo Park, CA;
NICE? Nice stock photo. This is one that I really had to dig down deep to find something nice to say.Intelius, Inc.; Bellevue, WA;
NICE? Ahh, a search box for people. On the other hand it found something that said I was a founder of Six Apart. Um, you might want to look into THAT. Heheh.Invision TV, LLC; Bethesda, MD;
NICE? This is a demo I’m looking forward to seeing. Nice Flash-based site. Lots of animation and good aesthetic and all that.iWidgets, Inc.; San Francisco, CA;
NICE? Good demo and nice layout.Kadoo Inc.; Washington, DC;
NICE? Nice animation.Koollage, Inc.; San Jose, CA;
NICE? They are revving up their “Kool Factor.” Sigh.Mapflow, Ltd.; Cork, Ireland;
NICE? FAIL. Says I need a username and password just to visit their site.Maverick Mobile Solutions, Pvt. Ltd.; Maharashtra, India;
NICE? Sorry, I’ll wait until later in the week.MeDeploy; Hamden, CT;
NICE? I get the point of what this company does fast.Message Sling; Worcester, MA;
NICE? Nice signup button. Actually, this is one of the companies I’m looking forward to getting a demo of.MeWorks, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan;
NICE? Good “keep me posted” submission box.Microstaq, Inc.; Austin, TX;
NICE? Nice slogan “innovations that flow.” Why? It matches their product line.MixMatchMusic, Ltd.; Burlingame, CA;
NICE? Nice way to let beta users in, while informing others and collecting email addresses. This looks like it could be an interesting music service, so we’ll revisit later in the week.Momindum; Paris, France;
NICE? They integrate with my old company’s products (Winnov) so that’s gotta be nice.OpenACircle.com; Dallas, TX;
NICE? The CEO blogs. I like the human element. Of course this is a social network/collaborative tool, so you’d expect them to get the value of putting humans on your corporate site.Paidinterviews, LLC; McLean, VA;
NICE? Very clear, 1,2,3,4 about how this site will help you. Videos don’t work, but I assume they’ll get turned on later today.Paragent, LLC; Muncie, IN;
NICE? Love a site that has a call to action right in your face. “Watch Demo Now.”Photrade, LLC; Cincinnati, OH;
NICE? Nice, clear representation of value “get paid for your photos.” I love sites with clear, no BS, language.PlanDone, Inc.; Petaluma, CA;
NICE? I love testimonials. By the way, are these stock photos? Or, did they spend real money to shoot unique photos?Plastic Logic, Ltd.; Mountain View, CA;
NICE? Ummmm. Nice super-huge graphics. Oh, wait, I’m supposed to say something nice. Um, gee, er, ahh, well, um, can’t, sorry.Qtask, Inc.; Burbank, CA;
NICE? They have the best video demo/tour I’ve seen so far.Quantivo Corp.; San Mateo, CA;
NICE? This was the one site that caught my eye on Saturday and it, again, is my favorite so far.Radiant Logic, Inc.; Novato, CA;
NICE? Big customers! Tells me this costs a lot of money and probably isn’t sold by visits to the site.RealNetworks, Inc.; Seattle, WA;
NICE? I’ll skip this one, cause it’s not of something that’ll be shown at Demo so I’ll have to come back.Rebus Technology, Inc.; Cupertino, CA;
NICE? It’s blue. The autoplaying music woke me up at 2:24 a.m.RemoTV, Inc.; New Haven, CT;
NICE? Red! Need I say more?Rudder, Inc.; Houston, TX;
NICE? This site, instead of using a stock photo that looks lame, used its product right in your face. Makes me want to try it.Semanti Corp.; Alberta, Canada;
NICE? Tight writing.Sim Ops Studios, Inc.; San Francisco, CA;
NICE? I love sneak peaks.SitScape, Inc.; Vienna, VA;
NICE? Nice arrows.SkyData Systems, Inc.; San Mateo, CA;
NICE? Actually this is a site I could probably have been nicer to on Saturday. Glad to finally see a site talking about price. I hate it when companies don’t tell you what things cost and use that as a lead generation device.SpinSpotter; Seattle, WA;
NICE? I wonder if they’d spot this spin? Hmmm.Telnic, Ltd.; London, England;
NICE? Clean and gets to the point fast.TetraBase, LLC; Boothwyn, PA;
NICE? A non-rectangular design.The Echo Nest Corp.; Somerville, MA;
NICE? Like the design. Looking forward to trying this music recommending service this week.tikitag, an Alcatel-Lucent Venture; Antwerp, Belgium;
NICE? I think this might be most improved site in two days. Nice video that explains what this does.Toolgether; San Mateo, CA;
NICE? Sorry, can’t say anything nice yet.TravelMuse, Inc.; Los Altos, CA;
NICE? I want to go to Hawaii after visiting this site.Trinity Convergence, Inc.; Durham, NC;
NICE? I wanna hear more about their picture frames and what makes them different.TurnTo Networks, Inc.; New York, NY;
NICE? Video demo is good.UbiEst S.p.A.; Treviso, Italy;
NICE? I bet the demo is nice. I want to see if it’ll make my mobile phone more useful.UGA Digital, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan;
NICE? Nice 3D logo. I wish I had a sense of what their photo frame does, though.Unity Solutions, LLC; Clearwater, FL;
NICE? I’m getting sleepy.Usable Security Systems, Inc.; San Francisco, CA;
NICE? Free beer.WebDiet, Inc.; Henderson, NV;
NICE? This site has my name all over it. I’m fat and it’s a service to help me diet.Xumii, Inc.; San Mateo, CA;
NICE? Hey, how did they get a Nokia N96?Zazengo, Inc.; Santa Cruz, CA;
NICE? Now I’m feeling charitable because I get to go to sleep.
First TC50 Suckage: Wifi at conference?.
@matteofabiano writes “TC50 wifi overloaded. Way too slow.”
It’s not the only note I’ve seen already about the Wifi sucking and the show hasn’t even started yet.
Jason Calacanis, co-founder of TC50, wrote last night: “â90 mbits of bandwidth at tc50 location. Roof antena and wire line. Wifi for 1500 devices. I hope we stay up!!!â
Has anyone figured out how to do good wifi for an event this size yet? I heard that TC50 spent $50,000 on the wifi. When I was at the IFA show last week in Berlin the Showstoppers co-founders told me that figure isn’t out of line. They told me that wifi is one of the great headaches of putting on a show.
TechCrunchâs startupsâ web sites suck too.
OK, I just visited the companies Web sites of the finalists for TC50. They mostly suck too. But this time I’m going to put the blame on the conference holders. Why do they suck? Because lots of them are like this one, which just has a form up because they can’t reveal anything about themselves before they get on stage.
This makes me realize that it’s the conference organizer’s fault. They should work with the startups to make sure that the startups’ web presence — when the list goes out — is top rate and reflects well on both the startups and the conference itself.
So, in this first competition between Demo and TC50 both get a failing grade. I don’t think this helps any startup to have such a bad foot forward as first impression. Will everyone revisit this list on Wednesday? I don’t think so. We all have ADD and by Wednesday we’ll be waiting in some line at an Apple store for whatever Steve Jobs announces tomorrow.
That said, TC50’s site is better than Demo’s site because they took the time to explain a little bit about what each company will do and also how they’ll fit into the conference. I’m off to go to TC50, see ya from there if I can get Wifi.
TC50 will be live streamed as well. That’s a win for startups because you can watch along from home. The show starts in a few minutes. Unfortunately Demo’s sessions won’t be live streamed. That’s too bad.
Lessig on USA CTO position video now up.
Remember when I kicked off a firestorm about whether America needs a Chief Technical Officer, after a conversation with Creative Commons’ founder and Stanford law professor Larry Lessig? Well, the interview that started that conversation is now up. I could listen to Lessig for hours. The dude is smart.
He also talks about how to change the political system to remove corruptive influences.
CERN: Congrats for powering up LHC.
Congrats to all the physicists at CERN for getting the Large Hadron Collider up and running. Twitter and FriendFeed are going nuts.
Earlier this year physicist Frank Taylor gave me a tour of the LHC, which is up here.
Just look at the home page of Twitter’s search engine to see the trending topics are all about LHC right now. Even Google got into the act and changed its logo worldwide to one depicting the LHC. Here’s FriendFeed’s search engine for LHC.
In startup success blogs donât matter, paradigm shifts do.
What’s the most successful new company out there of the past two years?
I’d argue it’s iLike, a music sharing and discovery service that came out on Facebook first, but has moved other places.
When I quit Microsoft they had no users.
Today they have 30 million.
How did THAT happen? It wasn’t because they got bloggers all hot and bothered about them. They didn’t win any contests. I don’t even think they showed up at Demo or TechCrunch or other industry conferences. If they did, they didn’t cause any headlines on blogs about how they were going to be THE next hot thing.
What did they do? They were first out the gate on Facebook’s application platform. That was a real paradigm shift. It was the first application platform I remember where I could see the apps YOU had loaded.
Second datapoint?
Yesterday I ran into the founders of Posimotion. Their company didn’t exist a few months ago, but today they are seeing 50,000 downloads a day of their iPhone apps. I don’t remember THEM being talked about anywhere, or on any famous tech blogs, but they are kicking but and well on their way to being a dominant software firm. How did they do it?
They were first out of the gate on the iPhone.
By the way, talking about the iPhone, Posimotion has some awesome iPhone apps.
Almost all of their apps are NOT free ones, so you can guess how much revenue per day is flowing into this very small company (which isn’t venture funded, by the way). Here’s my favorites from their 12 apps:
A level is a leveler which uses the iPhone to level picture frames and stuff like that. It’s a very cool use of the iPhone’s accelerometer.
Ever forget where you parked your car? If you used G Park you’d never forget again (it uses the GPS to memorize where you parked).
Golf Flyover is for golfers who want to know where to play golf and it uses the GPS in the iPhone to tell them information about the courses they are playing.
Pool is a fun game and well done using iPhone’s touch surface.
Well, since I’m irrelevant, I think I’ll take the rest of the day off! Heheheh.
Use Twitter or FriendFeed and win a new Seagate Drive.
Disclaimer: Seagate is one of my sponsors and this post is part of that sponsorship.
Next week Seagate will announce some new hard drives on Tuesday — they are pretty cool drives, I got a preview under embargo that’ll run on Tuesday, September 16th 2008, on FastCompanyTV. Bill Watkins, CEO, will ring the bell at NASDAQ. But here’s a way you can win one of these new drives by doing nothing but using FriendFeed or Twitter.
On Tuesday at noon Eastern I’ll be standing by the Kodak sign in New York City’s Times Square (on side of Marriott Marquis hotel). I’ll have 20 drives. First 20 people to show me what Twitter or FriendFeed account they learned about the contest from will win a drive. So that’s one way you’ll win a drive, but that requires you to be in Times Square on Tuesday at noon. Not that easy for most of you.
But, not only will those 20 people win drives, but the 20 people who they learned about the contest from will also win a drive (we’ll send those to you).
All you need to do is Twitter or FriendFeed about the contest, tell your friends who’ll be in New York on Tuesday to come by and pick up a drive and you’ll win a drive too (these are cool drives, by the way, more about them on Tuesday).
Oh, and what happens if one of the 20 say they learned about the contest from me? Well, we’ll put that drive in a pool and randomly give it away to someone who Twittered or FriendFeeded about it.
Why only Twitter or FriendFeed? Because they both have great search engines that we can use to track your Tweets or FF items.
Make sure you include the word “Seagate” in your post. Also, yes, lawyers are involved and Seagate will have some rules and regulations up shortly and I’ll link to those on Monday.
Some ideas to help you win? If you have friends in NYC, make sure they know about the contest. Blog about your Tweet/FF item. Digg your Tweet/FF. Email your Tweet/FF around.
Any questions?
I just visited the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon today and the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.
Those experiences, among others, have led me to this note.
To everyone else, sorry, this is one of those times I’m going to get into politics. If you don’t like that, come back tomorrow when I’ll be at AT&T and talking about the cool technology they are showing me.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My fellow Democrats,
I keep seeing you, and the press, taking pot shots at Sarah Palin. I’ve taken a few myself, if you’ve been over on FriendFeed the past couple of weeks.
You also know that I’ve been demoralized lately and believe that John McCain and Sarah Palin have, through the changing of the framing of the imagery presented to the American people, have already won the election.
But today I’m calling on you to be better than the Republicans.
Instead of aiming at Palin’s groin, let’s aspire to be better.
This is America. When we aspire to be better than we are, we change the world.
When John Kennedy asked us to go to the moon, we did. When Martin Luther King said he has a dream we’ve made his dream happen. When Ronald Reagan told the Germans to “tear down this wall” they did.
When we try to make the world better, we often do!
It’s time, my fellow Democrats, to start living that change.
Instead of blogging about our political opponents, can you learn about one issue that you care about and blog about that?
My issue is that I’m seeing high tech jobs leaving America for a variety of reasons.
1. Our education system. Today’s CEOs say they aren’t seeing the quality of graduates that they need to make the next big scientific and technological breakthroughs. After the cameras are off I keep hearing about the better graduates in places like Israel, China, and India.
2. Our taxation and infrastructure. When I went to Israel I interviewed Gil Shwed, CEO of CheckPoint. They have offices in California and Israel. You should listen to the video because he tells how it’s easier for him to get stuff done in Israel than in California.
2b. Our infrastructure is wacked. When we’re 19th in the world in broadband and way behind even China in the use of IPTV and other technologies that can be used to wire new R&D workers together, that tells me we’ve lost leadership and that it’ll take a concerted effort to get it back.
3. Our health care costs. CEOs are telling me they are drowning in the costs of our health care system and that’s pushing jobs overseas. Not just those manufacturing jobs, either (many of the people reading my blog are geeks and can’t relate to people who work on factory lines in places like Detroit, let’s just be honest) but the jobs going overseas are our R&D jobs that pay $150,000 a year. Lose rafts of those and you see entire economies changing.
4. Our immigration policies. It used to be that our best workers and best ideas came from people who moved here from somewhere else. But in today’s America we’re angry about immigrants who come to America to take our jobs. That anger, while justified, is causing us to close down our borders to even the smartest who come here for an education and then are forced to leave to go back home. Guess what, our globalization can’t be stopped, so every job that leaves our shores is $150,000 that will never come back (and probably more, because of the trickle down effects of our economy).
5. Our anti-science and anti-technology discourse and beliefs. In the Republican America today we are seeing a debate, not about whether science should drive our national debate, but whether religion should and, let’s just be honest, religion is winning. Stem cell research is being forced off our shores. That research will still be done, albeit now it’s done over in some other country. More $150,000 jobs down the drain. Plus, will we really invest in the right energy technologies? Who is best suited to decide those? A scientist? Or someone who lives close to an energy pipeline? We need to do better and aspire to be smarter.
6. An anti-technology and anti-science stance by those who fear government. When I wrote about America getting a CTO, I was amazed at some of the pushback I got in comments. Driven by fear. An inefficient government is a good thing, quite a few said. After getting out of the Holocaust Museum today, I understand where that fear comes from, but it’s misplaced and misguided because that fear will cause policies that cause us to lose more and more of our $150,000 a year jobs.So, my fellow Democrats, can we have a debate about what government should DO over the next four years? What, my fellow Democrats, can we do to be better than ourselves? To make the world a better place?
We have only a week or two before the debates to give Barack Obama some real, tangible things to call us to aspire to.
If he aims for the fences and calls on us to build a better world, then we have a shot November 2.
If we only aim for Palin’s knees we play into the Republican’s game and we’ll end up with more of the same for the next four years.
It’s all up to you now. Every post you make. Every conversation you have. They all add up to what will happen November 2.
Will you call on your fellow Americans to be better? Or will you point out what a wacky lady Palin is.
The more you point what a wacky lady she is, the more likely you are to help Republicans win. After all, we’re all wacky and we all love to vote for someone like us: unless someone is calling on us to be better.
So, my fellow Democrats, I hope you’ll join me in focusing totally on building a strong economy for the future for the next four weeks. That’s our only hope.
Thank you, your friend and supporter, Robert Scoble
UPDATE: Over on FriendFeed they are discussing this post and imran stated that the trillion dollar war with Iraq is also draining our resources and making it hard to compete on a global stage. Good point.
AT&T sees iPhone/voice controlled world.
That’s Mazin Gilbert of AT&T showing off a research project to John Biggs, who runs CrunchGear, one of the best blogs that cover consumer electronics. You’ll notice the research project is running on Gilbert’s iPhone.
ComputerWorld wrote up the event and you’ll see that iPhones played a key role in a lot what was demonstrated.There CTO John Donovan showed me around, and in between a cool lab project that uses Second Life I kept noticing a trend. I visited the living room of the future (that’s what I called it) and they showed me a remote control that I could talk to “turn on CNN” and it did. But then they said “and you can do the same thing with your iPhone.”
Next to that was a cool search engine. “You can use your iPhone to find pizza.” And it worked. I want that!
Across the room was an online shopping service. Yes, you guessed it, you could use your iPhone to look up lots of things about the products you were thinking of buying.
Now, I’m being a bit over the top. It wasn’t all about the iPhone. Lots of stuff about videoconferencing and telehealth technologies too.
But I kept coming back to the iPhone-based world. It’s one that resonates with me.
Now, I think it’d be pretty weird for most people to talk to their iPhone to switch channels on their TV, but I could see a world where I could get rid of all my remote controls and that I could completely control via voice.
“Switch to ESPN.”
The demos they showed me worked pretty well. The living room scenario has a lot of edges that the engineers haven’t thought about yet. You can’t turn up the volume yet, for instance, because the prototype was actually a set top box that voice could control.
“Record ESPN.”
But think about the kind of world we’ll have when more and more of our services are available to be controlled by our voice.
“Turn off stove.”
To have such a world we’ll need devices that have been “IP-ized.” That way a voice controller could understand your voice (that part is getting very close to being done) and send your commands over via a, say, REST interface to the device.
That is further off. I know Dave Winer has had a Denon receiver for quite a while that’s had a Web server embedded inside of it (if you knew the IP address of Dave’s receiver and knew his password, you could turn on and off his receiver from anywhere in the world).
“Make it warmer in here.”
Imagining such a world where everything is controllable via voice. It’s an interesting idea, but the industry has a long way to go, even to just “IP-ize” all the consumer electronics hooked up to my TV.
That’s why the one thing I think you’ll see out of the research projects we were shown on Monday is a new search engine that uses data that AT&T has access to. An iPhone-based Yellow Pages.
“Order a pizza please.”
Oh, well, I’ll take my pizza, even if I won’t be able to control my TV anytime soon.
Avoid the âfail whaleâ webinar.
Ahh, here’s a free webinar coming up on October 9th: “Avoiding the ‘Fail Whale’.”
Speaking?
* Matt Mullenweg: Founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.
* Paul Bucheit: One of the founders of FriendFeed and the creator of Gmail.
* Nat Brown: CTO of iLike, a music community service that had one of the first Facebook apps.Aimed at entrepreneurs who are trying to plan their systems and avoid architectural problems like the ones that Twitter went through.
For those who don’t know, iLike had to scurry to find enough server space as they got millions of people in just a few days. Automattic is the publisher of WordPress and hosts this blog. FriendFeed is my favorite new service and I reload it hundreds of times a day and I can’t remember the last time I couldn’t get to the service.
Looking forward to this.
Visiting the Library of Congress and Meeting the Flickr team.
I’ve always wanted to visit the Library of Congress (I shared a car once with THE Librarian of Congress, James Billington and he invited me to come and get a tour). If you haven’t been there, it’s the largest library in the world and their collection has about 14 million images.
But today was even better than just that. I met the team who manages millions of photos and images. You can even see a very small part of their work on Flickr.
I did some cell phone videos, which you can see here.
Part I. Meeting Helena Zinkham and introduction to prints and photographs division and discussion of how they get those images onto Flickr.
Part II. Meet the blogger from the Library of Congress. Now read his blog. He gives us a verbal tour of what is cool at the Library of Congress.
Part III. Stereograph collection (they have about 100,000 3-D images, I could spend hours just looking at these).While there I learned about Flickr’s “commons,” which includes images from many of the world’s best public photo collections.
You can see thousands of images from the Library of Congress at its Flickr account, too.
Thanks Helena Zinkham for giving me a great tour and introducing me to many of the interesting images on Flickr.
Oh, before I forget, there’s a point to this post.
By opening up the images to Flickr they’ve gotten a ton of information about the images that they didn’t know. In my HD interview, which will be up in a few weeks, she shows me how people from around the world add onto the images with their own stories (one of the granddaughters of one of the photographers, for instance, gave the library a lot more details). This is a great example of what happens when you use these tools to open up items to discussion by everyone.
It’s so sad that there are still millions of photos that we can’t look at yet unless we visit Washington DC. The stereograph collection alone is unbelieveable. Hundreds of thousands of images — all categorized. I was lucky enough to take a look at a few and realized I could spend hours just looking through all of these.
I’m glad there are people who try to save all this stuff for future generations, though.
It also makes you realize just how far we are from getting all of the world’s knowledge and information available to us online.
I interviewed Brian Dexheimer who works for Seagate. He’s worked there for 24 years.
He told me that when he started working for Seagate selling hard drives the devices were as big as a file cabinet, only held 300 megabytes, and cost $12,000.
The drives Seagate started selling this week are about the size of a paperback book, hold 500 gigabytes, and cost $200 retail.
I love this industry, don’t you?
I’m so glad Seagate sponsors my show over on FastCompanyTV.
Coolest place to do an Enterprise interview: HP Garage.
I’m convinced the coolest place to do an interview with an HP executive is the original HP Garage. Robin Purohit, HP’s General Manager of Information Management, invited me over to talk about information overload inside Enterprises and what HP Software is doing for Enterprises to help them manage their email.
Allegis Capital says no to 2,000 companies a year. Since I was on stage at TechCrunch 50 seeing a bunch of startups, I wanted to have a conversation with one of the top venture capitalists in the world. Here’s the founder of Allegis Capital, Bob Ackerman, who gives me a 34-minute rundown of his view of what’s happening in the capital markets today.
My best question? “How do you earn a no?” After all, his firm says no 2,000 times a year. His answers are fun (that part of the interview starts at about 19 minutes into the video). After the camera was off he told me the best way to earn a no is not to try at all.
If you’re thinking of starting a company you should listen to this video, it’ll help you get your plans ready so you don’t hear “no” when you ask for capital.
I also ask him why, when companies like SmugMug are doing well and haven’t taken venture funds, should I take VC at all to build my company?
Oh, and don’t miss why he turned down Akamai. That’s a hillarious story, starts at about 25 minutes into the video.
I used to have a blogroll. In the early days of blogging (I started in December of 2000) most bloggers would have lists of links to their favorite blogs. Usually that was placed on the side of their blog.
Eventually there were too many blogs. Or they got stale. So they became pretty useless. Then they started getting removed from many people’s blogs and getting replaced with other things (For instance, Dave Winer (the guy who was one of those who got me into blogging) used to have a nice blogroll, now he just has lists of magazines that have written about him). UPDATE: funny, he just added something called “Newsjunk” which is an aggregator of current tech news, similar to what I’m talking about here.
Then came Technorati, which searched blogs and many of us just put a link to Technorati, or their top 100 page, just to help our readers find other blogs that might be interesting.
Tonight I was talking with Twine’s CEO, Nova Spivack. Twine is a new way to keep bookmarks and other data from around the Web. I will talk about that when it comes out of public beta in October sometime, but talking with him I realized that I have a new blogroll that’s always up to date and always evolving and that’s far more interesting than the older static ones, or the ones that just show popularity like Technorati showed.
Here it is. How is it done? I watch thousands of people’s input. Their YouTube videos. Their blogs. Their Flickr photos. Their music. Their events. Their Tweets or microblogs from Tumblr, Identi.ca, Plurk, etc. And much more.
But not everything gets onto that page. Only things I comment on or click “Like” on.
Why is this better than the old blogroll?
Well, for one, you get a lot more “new” voices. Thanks to “Friend of a Friend” feature I see a lot of new people every day and if I like what they’ve done (I usually do, if the people on FriendFeed recommended it) then I click “Like” and add a comment.
Two: instead of just having a blog post and a URL, you can see why I liked that post. You can also see how OTHER PEOPLE liked that post (and who, and how many).
Plus, you can search, even on my comments that I added seconds ago.
Have you found a better way to share your favorite people’s stuff that’s coming through your screen?
Interesting to see the reactions to Technorati’s latest “State of the Blogosphere” post. My reaction matches Duncan Riley’s.
I’ve been investing nearly all of my available time on FriendFeed lately, which is why my blog has slowed down to a mere trickle compared to how often I used to update, say, four years ago (on some days back then I’d post 20 times in a day). Today I am rotating my content development between a number of places. Flickr. Dopplr. Twitter. Upcoming. Google Reader. Kyte. My blog. But mostly over on FriendFeed. (None of those existed back when I started blogging).
Most of my blogger friends think I’m nuts focusing so much effort over on FriendFeed.
But when you see co-founder Bret Taylor’s post on the growth FriendFeed has seen this year you’ll see exactly why I’m spending so much time there.
On the other hand, I’ve been missing writing longer pieces about what I’m seeing in the world.
Today, for instance, I’m off to visit Nicholas Negroponte and the One Laptop Per Child project, among other things here in Boston. It’ll be interesting to see what I learn there about how the project has been going (it’s been bumpy, according to my research tonight).
Oh, how else has blogging been changing? Last week I hung out at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. It was shocking to me to see just how many people were on Twitter (in the sessions I attended nearly 100% of the bloggers were on Twitter).
Gadget lust in times of economic troubles.
Damn you Canon. Check out this post from Don MacAskill, CEO of Smugmug. It has all my photographer friends slobbering over themselves over Canon’s new $2,800 DSLR. Me too. I want one of these in the worst way.
Problem is I can’t afford one. Neither can a lot of people. I blew my gadget budget a year ago when I bought last year’s model of the same camera. My credit cards can’t take this abuse. Not while banks are getting wiped out. My friends are losing their jobs. Etc.
This is one reason why I like covering web stuff. For the most part the cool new things, like Fotonauts, a cool new photo sharing site, on the Web are free. Or pretty low cost.
But damn, look at that video. Slobber. Slobber. Slobber. Oh, sorry.
I think this is what’s wrong with our country. We get lust for new toys, or things we can’t afford, and decide to put them on our credit cards and we all get into trouble. I’m not going to do that this time. Sorry, Canon. We’ll have to earn this the old fashioned way: save, save, save.
Canon takes good PR and throws it in the trash.
Amazing, remember last night when we were all slobbering over the new 5D MKII’s video capabilities? Well, today Don MacAskill, CEO of SmugMug, wrote that Canon had forced him to take down the videos. Why? He doesn’t quite know, but says it seems to be around the fact that SmugMug’s HD video was far better than the one Canon is able to host and SmugMug was making someone look bad at Canon. Don talked more about it on his Twitter account. Either way they took what was extremely good PR and decided to trash that for some reason. I’d sure like to know who made this decision and why.
Coolest thing at MIT conference is the badges?.
I’m still getting around to see a bunch of cool things here in Boston as I attend the MIT Emerging Technology conference but the coolest thing just might be the badges. They are electronic devices made by nTAG Interactive. First of all they got the visual part right. You can read people’s names from a good way away. It’s amazing how many conferences get that simple thing wrong.
Underneath the name badge is a device that’s a little longer than an iPhone. It is connected via wireless to a home server. They know which sessions you’ve attended and they can ask you survey questions (speakers can use the devices to get feedback in real time from the audience). But you can also use them to exchange an electronic business card. My device shows me I’ve exchanged cards with eight people so far. It’s weird, I don’t like using the device for that as much as just gathering a paper card. Partly because you have to hold the devices together to exchange cards.
Anyway, the coolest thing is that you can study how audiences interact with each other. Over on the NTAG blog they have interesting posts about whether men or women are better networkers or how people from the same company hang out together at events around the world and lots more.
They’ve also done a quick analysis of the people at the MIT conference.
Also on the device you can send messages to other attendees, plan your schedule, and more.
The one problem is that events are too short. Just when you figure out how cool the device is and how useful it might be you need to turn in the device and head to the airport, which is what I’m doing after I finish this post. We’re flying from Boston to San Francisco tonight.
Oh, and why doesn’t this add data to Dopplr and other services? Also, any photos I took could be matched up with data from this device to make tags on Flickr or other photo sharing service. My friends think I’m geeky when I ask for such things, but someday our devices WILL talk to such services.
One last thing: privacy is dead. Get over it. Off to the airport now.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with saying less and seeing where that takes us. Today’s two word blog? Depression and Fear.
In a world of information overload maybe two-word posts are going to be a trend. Who knew that two words could kick off so many more words? :-)
Chalk this up to my laziness. I could have woken up early and documented what Microsoft’s CTO said, like CNet’s Dan Farber did. But I didn’t.
Shoot me.
OK, I’m over at TechMeme where there is a TON of tech news today. I can’t keep up.
Let’s run through the headlines and see how much of it you can use.
1. Next-gen MacBook, MacBookPro spotted in matching outfits. Can’t use. (They aren’t out yet).
2. Apple’s iPhone Developer NDA Kills Book for iPhone Developers. Can’t use. (I haven’t signed the NDA).
3. Initial Thoughts on MySpace Music. CAN use!
4. SDK shoot-out: Android vs. iPhone. Can’t use. (Android now out yet).
5. Eee PC to Feature 3.75G for Internet Access Anywhere. Can’t use. Not out yet.
6. Hands on with the Slingbox PRO-HD. Can use. Units just started shipping. I want one.
7. Adobe Talks Open Source, Innovation and the Future of Flash. Can’t use.
8. Yahoo Overhauls System for Selling Display Ads. Can use, but not for consumers, so earns an asterisk.
9. Is Chrome a security risk? Can use.
10. China Mobile Seeking Cut-Down Version of Apple’s iPhone. Can’t use.
11. Announcing the Virtual Earth Web Service and Virtual Earth Map Control 6.2. CAN use!
12. BoomTown Decodes Jerry Yang’s Here-Comes-the-Weasel-Consultants Memo. Can’t use.
13. Y Combinator’s SocialBrowse Launches to the Public. CAN use!
14. Microsoft’s Mundie outlines the future of computing. CAN use!
15. Introducing Google Moderator on App Engine. CAN use, but only for developers.
16. Apple proposes improvements to Safari browsing experience. Can’t use.
17. RWW Interviews David Tosh of Elgg The Open Source Social Networking Platform. Can’t use.
18. Layoffs at ad network Glam Media. Can’t use.
19. Apple Seeds iPhone Firmware 2.2 Beta1. Can’t use.
20. Activity Centered Design. Can’t use.
21. Yahoo Buys Site for Nebraska Data Center. Can’t use.
22. Schwarzennegger outlaws text-messaging while driving. Can’t use.
23. China space mission article hits Web before launch. Can’t use.So, what can we learn from this?
Well, most of the news we can’t use.
But even more. We as bloggers aren’t looking at how to really put any of this new stuff to use in our daily lives. That’s a change for the blogosphere. I remember when Dave Winer and Mike Arrington were always telling us how to use this stuff to make our lives better. I miss that kind of blogging, and probably explains why I like Lifehacker so much.
Tomorrow on WorkFast.tv we’ll get back to news you can use. We’ll have Sumit Agarwal, product manager for Google Mobile, on the show and we’ll talk about some ways you can use your mobile phone to actually do more business (that’ll be shared live at 10 a.m. Pacific Time and after the show we’ll be on my Kyte channel so you can ask him questions ). Later in the afternoon we’ll also have the CEO of TripIt on a separate show where he talks about services to help you travel better.
These kinds of things might not get hundreds of thousands of visits. They won’t get on Digg. Won’t get on Google News. Won’t get on TechMeme. But I think they are more useful and in these days shouldn’t you get something useful out of your news? I should start a new site called “tech news you can use.” I’m shocked no one has already.
One other example? Check out the video of MoneyAisle. If you are looking to invest money in CDs (lots of people are lately because you need to make sure you don’t have any more than $100,000 in any one account since so many banks are close to failing) then this service will get you a much better rate (they do auctions with 80 different banks). Now THAT is cool news to me (a longer video shot with our HD camcorders will be up soon where we dig into the very cool technology behind this service).
Anyway, hope that’s useful. Now we’re off to catch a flight home to San Francisco from Boston.
The Scoble Top Tech Blogger/FriendFeed/Social Media List.
This is my hand-picked list of the people who provide the most interesting tech blogging/tweeting/FriendFeeding. All of these point to FriendFeed. If you know someone who deserves to be on this list, please post their FriendFeed URL. Mine is: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer
I watch this list very closely and put the best stuff from these people onto my FriendFeed “Like” and “Comment” feed here: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/discussion
I will also add a few notes here and there so you can understand how these people got on my list. They aren’t all techies. Jay Rosen, for instance, is a journalism professor, but he puts enough tech news that’s different from anyone else into my feed to have caught my eye.
This list is also being discussed over on FriendFeed.
Aaron Brazell Founder and lead editor of TechnoSailor.
Adam Lasnik Google search evangelist.
Alana Taylor She did the Twitter song, and brings me fun tech news.
Alan Lee Lead Developer/Designer of Witty twitter client.
Alex Albrecht One of the co-hosts of Diggnation.
Alex Williams Geek from Portland who hosts Podcast Hotels.
Allen Stern Founder of Center Networks, one of my favorite tech blogs.
Andrew Baron Founder of Rocketboom, which is still one of the best online video shows and led the way for a whole bunch of us.
Andru Edwards Founder of Gearlive, a consumer electronics site out of Seattle — lately he’s been breaking a lot of iPhone news.
Andy Beal Internet marketing consultant specializing in search engine marketing, online reputation management, and business blogging
Andy Ihnatko Technology journalist for Chicago Sun Times, among other things.
Anthony Citrano
Ars Technica. Great tech blog.
Atul Arora
Benjamin Golub Works as a dev on FriendFeed.
Ben Metcalfe Worked at BBC, now works at MySpace.
Benjamin Higginbotham
Beth Kanter
Bhaskar Roy Founder of Qik.
Bret Taylor Co-founder of FriendFeed.
Brian Shields Tech journalist for KRON-TV (San Francisco TV station).
Brian Solis Mr. PR.
Charlene Li Social networking analyst and expert.
charles cooper Tech journalist for CNET.
Charles Hudson Worked at Google and hosts Virtual Goods Summit.
Charlie Anzman Charlie Anzman is the founder of SEO and Tech Daily, a popular news and opinion blog.
Chris Brogan Everyone knows him in social media world.
Chris Messina Was a dev for Flock, major proponent of microformats.
Chris Nuttall Tech journalist for Financial Times.
Chris Saad Started the Data Portability.org.
Christopher Allen Entrepreneur, leader in iPhone dev camp.
Christopher Galtenberg site & tech lead of Gaia.com
Chuq Von Rospach Used to work at Apple.
Colide81 (James)
Corvida
Craig Eddy
Craig Newmark Founder of Craig’s List.
Chris Sacca Used to be an executive at Google, now does investing.
Cyndy Writes a good tech blog.
dan farber Runs CNet’s tech and blogger journalism. One of my favorite tech journalists, too.
Dan Fernandez Works at Microsoft on PopFly.
Daniel J. Pritchett He’s an SAP Business Intelligence solution developer building data warehousing solutions for a Fortune 100 manufacturer.
Danny O’Brien He is the International Outreach Coordinator for the EFF.
dannysullivan Search engine expert.
Dare Obasanjo Works at Microsoft as a dev.
Darren Barefoot A technologist, writer, marketer and miscellanist who lives in Vancouver, Canada.
dave mcclure Does a whole bunch of stuff, teaches a Facebook class at Stanford.
Dave Morin Runs Facebook’s developer platform.
Dave Zatz
Dave Taylor Runs “Ask Dave Taylor” website.
Dave Winer Brought us XML-RPC, RSS, and was the father of blogging, in my mind at least.
David Armano VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass
David Sifry Founder of Technorati and Offbeat Guides.
David Swain PR for Facebook.
david weinberger One of the authors of Cluetrain Manifesto, and smart dude.
debbie landa. Co-founder of Under the Radar, a conference for startups.
Deborah Micek She is a new media marketing strategist.
DeWitt Clinton Works at Google.
Dion Almaer He is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading source of the Ajax community.
Doc Searls One of the cofounders of Cluetrain Manifesto, and now a Harvard Berkman fellow (IE, smart guy).
Don Dodge Works at Microsoft in M&A group.
Don MacAskill CEO/founder of SmugMug.
Duncan Riley Founder of Inquisitor, one of my favorite tech blogs.
Dwight Silverman Tech journalist for Houston Chronicle.
Ed Bott. Long-time Microsoft expert (wrote big books about Windows).
engadget. If you are into gadgets you probably visit here a lot.
Erhan Erdogan Writer/Analyst at Webrazzi
Erica Baker. IT field technician who works at Google.
Eric Eldon tech journalist for Venture Beat.
Eric @ CS Techcast
Eric Rice The guy who first gave me a tour around Second Life and he hasn’t lived it down since. (He answers: Ugh, I’m on the list as Second Life-related and that’s the last f***ing thing I’m paying attention to. I’m about 42 steps beyond that and constantly have to PR my way out of it. New urbanism, game design/development, AI/AGI, augmented reality, architecture, cybernetics and such. Design, media, art, and fiction.)
Erin Kotecki Vest. Political blogger, but covers tech too.
Evan Williams. Guy who started Blogger and Twitter.
Francine Hardaway smart entrepreneur and investor.
Fred Wilson famous VC in tech industry.
Gabe Rivera Runs TechMeme.
GigaOm. One of my favorite tech bloggers.
Glen Campbell Was lead tech for Yahoo.
Hacker News.
Harry McCracken Writes “Technologizer” but used to be a tech journalist at PC World.
Hutch Carpenter One of my favorite tech bloggers.
J Phil Glockner
James Kendrick Tablets and gadgets and more.
James Urquhart
Jason Falls
Jay Rosen Journalism professor, but who keeps me up to date on tech advances in that field.
(jeff)isageek He’s a geek, what else do you need to know?
Jeff Jarvis One of the leading political bloggers, but brings tech into things often.
Jennifer Leggio Social media; security research; analyst relations; market share reporting and competitive analysis; crisis management and ZDNet blogger.
Jeremiah Owyang Social Media analyst for Forrester.
Jeremy Toeman One of the smartest marketers around. Launched BugLabs and got the CEO on CNBC’s Donny Deutsch’s show.
Jesse Stay Develops apps for Facebook/Twitter, etc.
Jessica Guynn Tech journalist for Los Angeles Times.
Joe Wilcox Tech blogger for CNET.
John Furrier Entrepreneur, was my boss for a couple of years at PodTech.
John McCrea. Heads up marketing at Plaxo who got me in trouble with Facebook.
Joi Ito CEO of Creative Commons, among other things (Japanese VC).
Joshua Dilworth
Josh Bancroft. Most interesting blogger at Intel.
joshua schachter Founder of Del.icio.us.
Justin Korn
kamla bhatt
Kara Swisher. Runs the D Conference with Walt Mossberg and generally beats me to all the good stories.
Karim Always has a fun comment.
Karsten Januszewski One of the smartest devs I worked with at Microsoft.
Keith Teare Investor in Silicon Valley.
Ken Camp
Leo Laporte runs this week in tech, my favorite tech podcast.
l0ckergn0me Chris Pirillo, founder of Gnomedex conference and Lockergnome newsletter/blogs.
laura “@pistachio” fitton One of my favorite Twitterers.
Laurel Papworth
Liz Gannes She writes for GigaOm, covering the new video market.
Loic Le Meur. Runs the Le Web conference in Paris, France and is founder/CEO of Seesmic.
Long Zheng Student in Australia and gives good insights often.
Layne Heiny. The smart one in the Tablet PC family (he teaches, and all three of the Heiny’s are whip smart).
Lora Heiny She works on Tablet PC team at Microsoft.
Loren Heiny Builds software for Tablet PCs.
Louis Gray The guy who got me into FriendFeed.
Marc Canter founder of Macromind, which later became Macromedia. Now founder of Broadband Mechanics and is one of the leading thinkers on the Web.
Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins Tech blogger at Mashable.
Mark Krynsky Web producer for X PRIZE Foundation and author of Lifestream Blog.”
Mark Trapp One of my favorite FriendFeeders.
Make Magazine The best magazine for people who want to do it yourself.
Marshall Kirkpatrick One of my favorite tech bloggers.
Mashable One of the most famous tech blogs.
mathew ingram Writes one of my favorite tech blogs.
Matt Cutts Google’s most famous blogger.
Mediabistro.com Covers intersection of media and technology.
MG Siegler Good video blog.
michael arrington/TechCrunch The Techcrunch feed, which is my favorite tech blog, according to FriendFeed.
Michael Krigsman Enterprise blogger I like a lot.
Michael Wesch A cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction at Kansas State University (made the famous Web 2.0 video).
mike “glemak” dunn
Mike Butcher/TechCrunch UK
Mike Cannon-Brookes CEO of Atlassian.
Mike Cassidy
Mike Doeff
Mike Fruchter One of my favorite FriendFeeders.
MikeAmundsen Longtime developer, I’ve been following him since mid 1990s.
Mitchell Tsai Out of 19,000 following me on FriendFeed he’s my biggest fan.
Molly E. Holzschlag She helped form Web Standards Project now works at Microsoft.
nateridder. Web application developer, database administrator, project manager, and product manager in a wide variety of business applications.
Niall Kennedy. Operates StartupSearch.org, an analyst site for web technology startup
Nick O’Neill Facebook expert.
Nir Ben Yona Lawyer and Internet saavy
noah kagan Used to work at Facebook, now runs a variety of conferences in tech industry.
Nova Spivack Founder of Twine, semantic bookmarking service (among other things).
Omar Shahine Works on Microsoft’s Hotmail team.
Ontario Emperor
Orli Yakuel
Ouriel. Writes TechCrunch France and Israel.
Patphelan CEO of MaxRoam in Ireland.
Paul Buchheit Co-founder of FriendFeed.
paul mooney I have been meeting him at tech conferences for past few years.
Paul Stamatiou Skribit Co-Founder known for his prowess with all things tech.
Paul Thurrott Microsoft journalist.
Pete Blackshaw Worked at Procter and Gamble and is the most interesting marketing guy out there.
Pete Steege Works at Seagate.
Peter Semmelhack Founder of BugLabs, one of my favorite consumer electronics products of 2007.
Rachel Clarke Web marketing expert in UK.
Rafe Needleman Founder of Web Ware and one of the best tech journalists out there.
Rebecca MacKinnon Worked for CNN in China, started Global Voices online.
Richard Binhammer Marketer at Dell.
Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web.
Rob Bushway Writes about Tablet PCs and Netbooks.
Rob Diana
Robert Hof Tech journalist at BusinessWeek.
Robert Sanzalone
Rodney Rumford Writes one of the best Facebook blogs out there, now starting a new company.
Roger Kondrat Writes for TechWinter a European Social Media and Mobile blog.
Ryan Block Used to run Engadget.
Sanjeev Singh. Dev who works at FriendFeed.
Sarah Perez
Scott Beale Founder of Laughing Squid.
ScottBourne Co-host of This Week in Photography, works at Photrade now.
Sean Alexander Microsoft guy in the Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft. Worked on many digital media efforts including Silverlight, Media Center, and Windows XP.
sean percival I met him when he was a dev at Mahalo.
seth goldstein
Shel Israel My former partner in crime (we wrote Naked Conversations together).
slashdot The famous tech blog.
Steve Broback I worked for him back in late 90s, now he runs a variety of blogs and conferences.
steve clayton Works at Microsoft in UK.
Steve Garfield. Video blogging expert.
Steve Gillmor Runs Gillmor Gang.
Steve Lacey Used to be a dev on Flight Sim team at Microsoft now is doing some weird stuff at Google that no one understands.
Steve Outing Journalist/entrepreneur at intersection of media & Internet
Steve Rubel VP of Edelman, but I knew him back when he was merely a blogger.
Steven Hodson
Stowe Boyd Social media expert.
Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
susan mernit I met her when she worked at Yahoo, always shows up in interesting places.
Susan Scrupski
Svetlana Gladkova Writes a great tech blog.
Tamar Weinberg
Terry Heaton
Thomas Hawk My favorite Flickr-famous photographer.
Thomas Vander Wal
Tim O’Reilly The guy who coined term “Web 2.0.” One of the smartest people in tech, runs O’Reilly Publishing.
Todd Cochrane
Tom Foremski Tech journalist at Silicon Valley Watcher.
Tom Merritt
Veronica Belmont Co-host of Revision3’s tech-centric show, Tekzilla, and Qore on the PlayStation Network
Warner Crocker Tablet PC freak.
Werner Vogels CTO of Amazon.
Woody Pewitt Was an old school VB programmer that I’ve known since early 90s.
Yaron Samid
Zee from WeDoCreative
zefrank Funny. Enough said.
Zoli Erdos
~C4Chaos
A tale of two photos on Flickr.
Last night I uploaded two photos at the same time.
As of this posting one had 96 views on Flickr and the other had 1,389 views.
Some other facts:
The photo with 96 views used a fisheye lens that cost 4x more than the other photo. (Thank you to Pro Photo Rental for coming along on the Las Vegas Blog World Expo photo walk and bringing $40,000 worth of equipment for all of us to try!) Shows that exotic equipment isn’t guaranteed to bring in views.
The photo with 96 views required better camera technique to make than the other photo.
The photo with 96 views is of a far more recognizable landmark than the other photo (the Bellagio in Las Vegas).Yet one photo has gotten more than 13x more views.
Why?
A few things.
1. Promotion. I Twittered the photo that got a lot of views and kept the conversation going on both Twitter and on FriendFeed throughout the evening. Also,
