Tour of first US Web site team up (Stanford Linear Accelerator)

by on February 7, 2007

Today was a lot of fun. Got a tour of master Swiss watch maker Franck Muller. Cheapest watch? About $20,000. Most expensive? A million. Whew. Elton John supposedly owns more than 100 of these watches. Watching them build these watches was like going back in time. No pun intended. One watch has more than 1,000 pieces. I can’t imagine building these buy hand.

Anyway, I have another tour up on ScobleShow. This one is of Stanford Linear Accelerator’s computer team. These guys built the first US Web site. I have three separate videos up:

1) A talk with the team (includes Tim Berners-Lee’s PR guy who didn’t understand what Tim was saying when he came in one day and said “I think I’ve done something interesting.”). These guys are freaking smart.
2) A meeting with Paul Kunz who built the first US Web site. He didn’t think it was that big a deal. How do we know that? Cause he assigned the task to someone else (who didn’t get the job done).
3) Bebo White gave Shel and me a tour of the visitor center and a lesson in particle physics (surprising what they found when they were building it).

Funny enough we ran out of time to actually get a look at the accelerator. Bebo is meeting us later this month to finish the tour.

Hope you enjoy these. The Stanford Linear Accerator is one of the longest buildings in the world. If you visit Silicon Valley you’ll probably drive over it and if you come and pitch a VC here for money on Sand Hill Road you’ll be sitting right next to it.

  • Love Franck Muller. Unfortunately all I can afford was the $30 knock-off I bought in Hong Kong, but I compared it side-by-side with the real one when at the store in Vegas - I saved myself about $6970... :)
  • While in Geneva, you can visit the place the web was born (http://www.cern.ch) and have a look the cool tech tuff they are working on. The LHC project is huge and what they are doing in terms of grid and data processing to cope with the incredible amount of data generated by the LHC is amazing. Let me know if you need a contact.
  • If you got a kick out of visiting Franck Muller you should drop by and visit the Patek Philippe store and museum. Patek is considered the top watchmaker in the world and has the most complex movement of any watch company.

    http://www.patek.com/
    http://www.patekmuseum.com/
  • Charbax
    I went to the CERN visit the LHC ATLAS construction site for Lift07, thanks for checking my 403mb HD video from the CERN at http://charbax.com/2007/02/09/a-tour-at-the-cer...

    I'll try do some more videos at the Lift07 tomorrow. I must say it is very nice to speak to Robert Scoble here at the Lift07 conference, he is very friendly and gives some great insights into the buisiness of video-blogging and how it is with Tech companies, journalists and blogger in California, and I am looking forward to see the panel discussion Scoble is on tomorrow. It's gonna be filmed and put on the Internet the same day according to the people who are filming nicely the whole conference with 3 HDV FX1 camcorders and multi-camera setups at both conference rooms. I also recommend looking for the danish guy talking about crazy enterpreneurship.

    The fondue was great.
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