Well, I couldn’t live blog because the stupid theater didn’t have good reception. Bastards.
Anyhow, the Stevenote was fun and entertaining, as you’d expect. If you’ve seen it on the webcast, its a lot like that, except with other people around you, and you know, he’s there in person.
The meat of it is: the Ipod Video and I think the hidden thing is: Apple is entering the Living Room.
The video iPod first: it is amazing. I got a chance to play with one and it feels solid, the screen looks amazing, it plays video smoothly, etc. Just perfection in every format. I will have one, like, right now. It is a bit wider and taller than the standard iPod, but as its thinner it feels smaller and more lithe.
The other thing is the new iMac and its remote control and Tivo like features: Front Row. It is a gorgeous interface, and works so seamlessly its a wonder no one has done anything close before, third party or otherwise. However, being that it only works on the iMac, it is of little utility to me.
Now, this is where I think Apple is going: imagine a Mac Mini, with Core Image support and this remote interface…… Hot. Imagine an Airport Express like device with this interface connecting to your G5 as a media server…. hot x 2!
Apple is going to enter the living room. This is the first step and after playing with it a bunch in the demo area, it is going to be massive.
tagged: web2con
Something that JotSpot’s head man said: we don’t do beta anymore, we go straight into GA release. I like that, but you can’t do that too early!
My goal with the stuff I do is to be quick and agile and not overthink things. I used to do software that was all designd, never actualized. I stopped doing that when I was at the Makrolab in Venice. I just sat down and started programming, kind of like sitting down and just painting.
Since I started WBR though, I haven’t had time to do that. I’m going to try to get back to that point, and program instinctually. I do wish that I could design instinctually though.
About hiring: No false positives hiring philosophy: I agree with this as well.
Never get anyone in the company who is not successful. Even if it means rejecting a lot of candidates that would work.
It is like our philosophy: We only hire rock stars.
Interesting point just made: Venture Capital is not always the best option. I agree with this as well. Why inflate something that is essentially only a feature, or a single product into a company? It need not be. Target getting acquired, be flexible, be agile. Does a single feature need a sales and marketing VP? Does a single product need an entire business devlopment team?
tagged: web2con
They are doing some cool shit. The Mindset search is great. Search with a metric applied as to teh intent of the results. I can imagine that if we had this with a collaborative filtering mechanism and maybe a self-organized map, search could be entirely predictive toward the intent of the results.
I would like that!
Google
Scale people, scale things.
Google announcing another labs.google.com thing….
Google Reader.
How to deal with all the blogs in the world? Google Reader is a blog aggregator with the personalization twist. All AJAXy and shit.
A fast way to iterate through items that you are interested in.
Its essentially an RSS aggregator integrated with their blog search and contextual search capabilities. It has some interesting features with sharing, to make it a social software. Gmail it, blog it, etc.
Labs has it
tagged: technology
It looks like someone created a GSM/VOIP gateway. It is crazy expensive, but that is still pretty cool. I’ve been VOIP only for three years now and I’m not going back to a standard pots line. It’d be great if our phones would auto-negotiate to VOIP whenever they could, as packets aren’t individually commodified.
Here’s the thing though: we still have stupidly finite bandwidth in the states. I pay 110 bucks a month for a 6 down, 768 up line from Speakeasy. It’s a crazy fast line, but I still have audio problems on Vonage when I’m downloading from torrents on the G5.
I want fiber to my curb (or apartment building). I want cheap, commodity communication to the point where bandwidth is an insignificant concern. 20 mbits per second? That would be nice. We’re getting there. I live in an urban environment, and if I moved 5 miles I’d have Verizon’s fiber product.
Anyhow, back to this technology: it is cool. It’ll be very cool when I can move through the world and my devices could automatically keep themselves on the fast connection available without any user action.
tagged: web2con
There is this awesome video running with music that is somehow getting digitally distorted to sound like a transmission from Mars. It sounds like a bad country singer singing while an alien transmission comes through. I love it so much.
Anyhow, Phil PA did free wireless around their entire city.
Wow, audience disconnect! I don’t think the music “resonated.”
Lets move to New York. New York just had Penn station shut down because of a can with “sodium hydroxide” in it. That’s baking soda. Some idito made a “volcano”device and caused the Amtrak terminal to be shut down.
Back to Phili.
The crowd is getting restless, there is murmuring and furious typing. I think I just heard a Nextel chirp. The issue is: this woman does not know our culture. She said “focus groups” without a trace of irony. The guys from 37Signals just had heart attacks in the back of the room.
My lord, “business plan!” Run for the door!
OK. I’m bored, I’m going to get soda.
tagged: web2con
Identity = “who you are”
Nice run down of all the identity crisis points in our life. We are our data, our likes, our dislikes. Identity is social construction, self construction and an implicit construction.
It’s a pretty good presentation, using quick cutting, like an MTV video, without dancing people and bling. Well, maybe there is bling, but he has a New Media Blue shirt on (true!) so that hardly counts.
New Media Blue shirts? Didn’t they die?
digital identity
Idenity is not what you give to the site, its what the site gives you. Closed systems (reputation). Silos, site centric identity. What we want to move in is user centric identity, where we can move the identity from any site to any site. Why will it happen? Simple and open wins.
From any site to any site is Identity 2.0
OK, this whole slide to word ration thing is getting irritating. I thought it died with ZooTV.
Regardless, Identity 2.0 is interesting.
tagged: web2con
Stewart is showing a live feed from Flickr. 8 photos uploaded per second, 3000 downloaded per second. That is pretty cool.
It’s kind of like music Improvisation, flexiblity, playing with people who know more than you.
They hired some PhD students to do some insanely cool visualization of the Flickr-verse. The visualizations aren’t very different from other scale-free network visualizations, so I’m not that impressed. I just like pretty visualizations. They did however do a visualization of friendship clusters that has a two degree fractal.
“Those patterns tell us something, but I don’t know exactly what it is.”
Visualizations are cool, but “pretty” does not equate to information.
“It’s made of people”
What the fuck?
More is more. One of the reasons that Flickr caught on was its wilingness to not be too in love with people. It’s nice to hear someone say that they’re wrong 96-97% of the time.
Ethan says…
I think the refreshing thing about Flickr is that they don’t overthink things to the extent where their interfaces become convoluted, and features feel arbitrary. What makes it through the winnowing process is deliberate and intentional, which I think is a fundamentally different thing than the Web 1.0 (if I may use that term).
