The second presentation from Mobile Monday was Anita Wilhelm of Caterpillar Mobile. Anita was a student of Marc Davis at Berkeley. Caterpillar Mobile's current product is a cameraphone game called Zooke. Zooke allows its members to create challenges for all members or only members of an immediate social circle. You might be on a mission to find the best George Bush bumper sticker in Berkeley and have other game players rate your findings. It is a community-driven reality play experience that makes everyone's day a little more exciting with minimal effort. I recorded Anita's entire presentation as well as the…
On Monday I attended the Mobile Monday meeting at Microsoft's campus in Mountain View. There was an impressive set of presenters all focused on mobile media. The first presenter was Marc Davis of UC Berkeley and the director of Garage Cinema Research. Garage Cinema Research is interested in adding metadata through context-aware applications. You can infer data about the general location of a cameraphone user from their cell tower triangulation, the time of day, and popular photography subjects in the area. If a user adds a category to their photograph, a server can return a best guess of the object…
Tonight I am hosting a geek gathering at Vino Venue in San Francisco. Anyone is welcome to come check out the intersection of wine and gadgets while socializing with new media types. I start my new job at Technorati tomorrow so this is my last night as a free man. Meet at 6:30 p.m. at VinoVenue, 686 Mission Street, on the corner of Mission Street and 3rd Street. Over 100 wines are dispensed using smart cards, Windows servers, and database technology to suggest new wine types. It's like Attention.xml for your wine habits! They also serve Oprah's favorite teas and…
Last night I attended a Future Salon presentation about digital and online identities. The event was hosted at SAP in Palo Alto. Eric Sachs of Google spoke about Google's relatively new entry into the digital identity realm with services such as Orkut and Gmail. Jeff Hodges of Liberty Alliance talked about identity systems in the enterprise marketplace. Fen Labalme of Identity Commons talked about identity systems built at the grassroots level for non-governmental organizations. I recorded all three speeches as well as the question and answer period using a directional microphone from my seat in the front row. Eric Sachs…
I try to keep track of events in the Bay Area of interest to techies like me. There seems to be enough interest from like-minded people that I decided to publish an aggregated calendar of local events of interest to me. I pull information from venues, local groups, and personal contacts. Cost information will appear at the top of the notes section. Yes, I could output in hCalendar or RSS as well but publishing my calendar on .Mac is just so easy. Click on one of the links below to view my list of San Francisco Bay area events of…
Technorati is hosting a developer chat on IRC this Wednesday night at 7 p.m. San Francisco time (03:00 UTC). If you are working on an entry for the developers contest ending this Friday the chat is a good opportunity to receive live answers to any problems you may have. Join #technorati on irc.freenode.net. I will be in the chat room and try to answer any questions or explain how the site and services work. Any really difficult questions will be left to the Technorati employees to figure out….
The Technorati Users Group went well. Nine people learned new things about Technorati and five Technorati employees had a chance to interact with potential power users. I enjoyed making it all happen. I tethered myself to a projection TV and stepped through my prepared slides — my first time using the S-Video output on my PowerBook. I highlighted some features of the Technorati web site, showed how to create a watchlist, introduced the developer wiki, and showed the API responses. I briefly showed the Java SDK and an application I put together just minutes before the meeting. I did not…
Come drink beer and learn more about the Technorati API next Tuesday, December 21, at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will introduce Technorati API calls, demonstrate some existing applications built using the APIs, and lead you through some sample code using XPath and Java. A few Technorati employees will stop by and provide updates on the developer program and provide the latest company news. If you are interested in learning more about live search, web services, or corporate intelligence this event is for you! The Technorati developer contest ends December 31 so this will be a…
Edward Tufte is giving a lecture at Stanford tonight at 7:30 p.m. about his new book Beautiful Evidence. Tufte will discuss the theory of analytical design and methods for displaying eviidence. He will display the design decisions for reporting tools such as the Columbia shuttle investigation. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is on my Christmas list and I have been wanting to learn more of Professor Tufte's methods for years. If you would like a ride to or from the event I will be driving from San Mateo and returning to San Francisco….
BloggerCon took place yesterday at the Stanford Law School and was described by Dave Winer as the "unconference," where everyone is equal and participates in a university setting as users. During the Information Overload session led by Robert Scoble there was some vendor identification beyond the rules of the conference, and the response to the vendor violations set a tone for the conference that left many participants on edge and caused some audience members to get up and leave as an act of protest. The discussion focused on what features users would like to see in the feeds they used…
Feedster is hosting a blogger dinner on October 19 at Vino e Cucina at 7 p.m. Scott Johnson, Scott Rafer, and François Schiettecatte will be in attendance. I will be there as well. Should be an interesting crowd….
On Saturday I attended the second meeting of the Bay Area Mobility Forum. Ray Rischpater spoke about BREW development and how to get your application into the carriers' mobile shop. I learned there are a lot of gatekeepers in the world of BREW and as a result individual developers usually do not have the financial resources to develop for the platform. You need to purchase a VeriSign document ID, submit your code for independent testing, and convince the carrier your application is unique and worth inclusion in their mobile shop. Some applications receive special placement and reap the rewards of…
There are a lot of cool technology events in San Francisco this Saturday. I plan to attend the Bay Area Mobility Forum and the geek dinner. At 2 p.m. the Bay Area Mobility Forum features a presentation by Ray Rischpater on BREW development. At 4 p.m. the San Francisco WordPress Meetup may be happening at Cafe Royale. So far the event has no confirmed attendees. Michael Creasy and Robert Scoble are hosting a geek dinner at Barney's Gourmet Hamburgers in Noe Valley. These geek dinners are always a fun and informal way to get to know other technology folk in…
Tonight I attended The State of Online Journalism event hosted by the Online News Association and held at CNET headquarters. I recorded each presentation and took a few pictures. The audience was a mixed crowd of technical knowledge. Jeff Veen made a comment about DRM and a few audience members were not sure what that term meant. I uploaded my pictures of the speakers to Flickr. The first presenter was Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path. Jeff talked about weblogs and personal publishing as a distributed and real-time news source. He used an example of his personal investigation into the source…
Benoit Mandelbrot, Yale professor and inventor of fractal geometry and the Mandelbrot Set, will be speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on August 19 at 6 p.m. Mandelbrot's new book, The Mis-Behavior of Markets, applies fractal theory to financial markets. Should be an interesting event!…
Scoble is organizing a Silicon Valley Geek Lunch today at Buck's of Woodside at noon if you are in the area and would like to attend. There will probably be a small group, and that worked well last time….
Tonight was the Corporate Blogger's Dinner. The attendees, starting to my right: Don Park Jay Fienberg Rauno Saarinen John Dowdell Russell Beattie Phil Stanhope Venture Frogs had a strong wireless Internet signal. The conversation did not focus on corporations or weblogging but instead flowed, as it should, from one topic to the next. I learned that Microsoft showed off some new mobile weblogging software today at Mobile DevCon. Rodney Brooks has a robot summer camp for kids. We also discussed the weblog echo chamber, what do readers expect, do we care about those expectations, and what are the next big…
Tomorrow night, Wednesday, at 7 P.M. is the Corporate Blogger's Dinner at Venture Frogs in San Francisco. I view corporate blogging as a marketing tool to a user base in search of something more trustworthy than a PR spin. Mark Cuban's blog is corporate blogging. Why? It makes you more interested in the Mavericks. You fee involved, part of the action. Even if you have never been to a NBA game. How do you put a face and a name to a product people love or will grow to love? Weblogs help establish a community around your product(s) or company…
Robert Scoble and Ross Mayfield put together a geek dinner tonight at the Palo Alto Cheesecake Factory. We all braved the rain and even as our party grew from 8 to 12 to 20 we still were able to stay as one long table. Below is a list of all attendees, approximately in the order they were sitting, starting to my left. Niall KennedyScott RaferPeter KaminskiPatrick ScobleAlex ScobleGretchen HundlingCourtney PatuboLisa CanterMarc CanterMimi CanterAndy RuffSteve SloanRoss MayfieldMike MasnickMark FinnernWendy SeltzerEnoch ChoiRobert ScobleMaryam ScobleTantek…
