Why do we all have funny Twitter nick names?

21:30 mareku 0 Comments


During the last week the several speakers showed us how we could contact them by email (which is almost always made up by their name plus organisation .com) and their twitter adress. What strikes me as really funny that almost everybody has a funny or creative twitter username. My friends as well Eddie has EPFAP, Marijn is rain, Eric is Cyberic and I am Mareku (which actually translates as little mark in Czech) I guess that nobody took twitter really serious when they invented their username. Now that is is a major force will we see some changes? I hope not - I really do like creative names!

Don Reisinger on Cnet came up with a couple of suggestions:
1. Don't be afraid to use your real name.
2. Don't use curse words or obscenity in your username.
3. Do tell us about your profession or your interests. 
4. Do be creative.
5. Do distinguish yourself.
6. Don't look like a bot.
7. Don't use a celebrity's name unless it's your name too.
8. Do consider its impact.

If you need to you can change your username here
@mareku

Cabsense app

21:17 mareku 0 Comments

 
Cabsense uses GPS data of New York taxis to locate them and so to direct you to the nearest available taxi. It has a cool RADAR interface and even predicts future possible free taxis...

A last day to contemplate

20:42 mareku 0 Comments




 
We used our lat day in SF to evaluate all that we have learned this week and we thought that Tiburon was the place to do that. (It's a 30m ferry trip from pier 41). As we made our Keynote Slides on our iPads in sunny Tilburon (one way or the other it seems that we always need keynote to structure our thoughts), the iPad got overheated! Normally one of the nice things of the iPad vs. a laptop that it will not heat up - but it DOES overheat. After  minute or so - things went back to normal.
On the way back I couldn't resist taking yest an other picture of the GG bridge (I must have a zillion by now). Every time it looks magical spanning to two hills across the bay.
On pier 39 I showed a street dancer some new moves - hope he"ll have success with them...

Day 3 - The Internet as a platform

20:51 mareku 0 Comments





Tim O'Reilly (the founder of O'Reilly Media - creator of this conference and of concepts like "the net is the computer" and "Web2.0" had a keynote talk about The Internet as a platform. Again it is all about DATA. According to him we still have to invent for the world to come, not for the world as it is now. I fully agree :-)
Also the future is in how to add value to other websites / parties (like Facebook / Twitter) - and not to try controlling everything yourself (like Google or Apple) Microsoft is moving more and more in the sharing directions by the way.

Next was Jeff Pierce of IBM research. he is working on a mobile email triage system. If you get up in the morning and you check your mail on your iphone - usually you decide at that moment to read a message, delete it or save it for later. (Actually I sometimes click on message to get rid of the notification that it is unread - your just the other way round forward a read message to myself so that I don't forget to take action on it). Usage of mail on an iPhone is different then on a iMac - so IBM came up with a triage system. With this system you can immediately decide what to do with which message and even import it in tasks. Unfortunately IBM owns Lotus Notes - so they are working out the system to work with LN. And as we all that that LN really stinks I guess we have to wait for other parties to come up with a similar system for Apple...
When I thought about all the startups I saw this week I had to think of the concept of Steve Blank: A startup is in search of a (new) business model, is agile, is taking risk while large established corporations are looking for the best execution of existing business models and focused on efficiency, processes and to avoid risk. This is one of the reasons why so little innovation is coming out of these large corporations.

Dinner with Richard

17:29 mareku 0 Comments

I definitely need a new digital camera - it is almost impossible to take pix without flash...
We invited our friend Richard Sommers for dinner at AME (japanese fusion). He is very insightful on what is going on in the valley and a truly great friend above all :-))

Loopt pulse - very good interface for local data

17:23 mareku 0 Comments

Loopt was one of the first to come up with an Ipad app. Alok Deshpande showed us this and the user interface design it is brilliant in its simplicity and usefulness. It's really the next level for Yelp, Foursquare and such. Let's see how they react. In the mean time download the app (it's free)

Brad and his vooks

17:17 mareku 0 Comments

We had lunch with our old friend Brad Inman who is now the owner of (yet) an other start up vook. Vooks are Video Books for the iPhone / iPad. They try to enrich existing content with propriety video content. It was interesting to hear his learnings and the way the are experimenting to find the best concept and business model.

Day 2 - the day of the start ups

16:50 mareku 0 Comments





The day started with a demo of the parrot drone helicopter. This is a quadricopter with can be controlled with an iphone or even better ipad. It has 2 build in cameras for augmented reality purposes. It was very cool to see. Wondering how much it will cost and how long it will take other to use the sensors of the ipad for remote controlling.
Next to the conference there is the WEB 2.0 expo on which we saw many new interesting start ups. Lot's of them based on social data and mashing up data in on or the other way.
A panel discussion between the development managers of the leading browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome) made me realize how extremely difficult the talks about standardization are at the moment - and that these discussions really are dragging the innovation of the web.  This together with backwards compatibility issues for the hundreds of millions of users of IE6 - makes it very difficult to move ahead. No wonder that the iPad or Android Apps are so popular: you have no legacy there (yet). Maybe an other reason for the idea that browsing as we know it could be dead in a couple of years...
Next to services in the cloud - we see all kinds of (social) data sharing popping up. Slideshare is moving into video, scribd into presentations. Both are using HTML-5 by the way. The whole flash discussion is over I guess: HTML-5 a clear winner.
We saw some nice start up presentations:
askyourtargetgroupmarket.com
engleasy.com
pearltrees.com
rhomobile.com
strings.com
stupeflix.com

The day I realized that actually The Internet is invented for CATS...

16:41 mareku 0 Comments


Search on Youtube for funny cats and your will find some of the most viewed clips ever. What is it with cats and the Internet? Is there a secret conspiracy going on in which Cats aim for world domination through the Internet?

Day 1 - continued

16:34 mareku 0 Comments

In the keynotes there was a consensus that we have to aim to more and more "lightweight" social feedback tools. The instant success of Facebook "like-button" is an example. It has a very low level of interuption.
Ge Wang (Smule / Stanford) told us the story behind Smule and the reason of their many successes on the iPhone  - and now iPad with magic Piano. A nice insight of him is that the laptop is a tool, while the iPad is an extension of your self, far more personal.

Day 1

02:50 mareku 0 Comments




 
The WEB2.0 conference has started!
It seems that every year more and more people attend - I guess there are about 4 .000 people here from over the whole globe gathered to discuss new ideas and trends in Internet. What strikes me first is that everybody has an iphone, 80% a macbook and almost half of the attendees an iPad (!).
Mobile computing being one of the main topics of course. (Raven Zachary had a nice view on this: the nineties was about desktop computing, the last decade about laptop computing and now starting in 2010 we really set of with mobile computing.) Actually Apple is one of the first mobile device companies. We quickly learn in conversations that consensus is that work is laptop, home and travel is iPad. 

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the future of browsing (more about that later this week) and I am convinced that the days of naturalness of using a browser to access data are gone. We are using more and more apps already and other forms to unlock data will emerge. 
Christian Crumlish made a case for allowing users to play with the information / website we give them.  The curation of datafeeds of twitter / facebook / foursquare etc. So more then a retweet or a facebook liking.

Next to that the computer gives us a sort of "mask" to hide our identity in the world. We can takethat idea a step further a give people a whole new identity? :-)

It was also the day we heard of the petabyte age ( that is a 1000 terrabyte). When will we have a petabyte drive at home? 3 years?

This conference is all about the Web as a platform with social and geo analysis, real time. We will hear a lot more about that the coming days.

Microsoft Dallas labs showed some very interesting concepts like odata which immediately gave me all kinds of new business ideas.

Berkeley University

16:21 mareku 0 Comments



 
One of our first meetings here was at the Information Technology Center at Berkeley University. We are especially interested in the use of visualization to enhance comprehension and analysis of structured and unstructured information. More and more technics are becoming available and it was good to have some learnings about what is happening in their labs and what to expect of these technologies in the near future.
After Berkeley we took the "long way home" and spend some time in Muir Wood Park and contemplated about things to come walking along thousand year old, 100 meter tall trees.

The Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo

16:16 mareku 0 Comments



Did I mention that Clint Eastwood was mayor of Carmel at one time back in the eighties? LOL
Anyway Carmel is also famous for The Mission of San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo.  This is one of the prettiest churches in California. The day we visited a holy communion celebration was going on and although some liked that very much, other were not so happy ;-)

flowers along the way

16:12 mareku 0 Comments





2

The 17 mile drive and Pebble Beach

16:06 mareku 0 Comments



Still a little bit groggy of the time difference we drove to Frisco along Highway 1: a beautiful road along the pacific coast with big waves, lot's of birds and other animals - thousands of motor bikes and small coastal villages. The famous golf courses of Pebble Beach are all in immaculate condition and the houses seem to be twice as big as in Carmel. Lush green vegetation - it is a sort of paradise and I can understand why people pay a lot to be able to live (and play) here.
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