Coolest thing at MIT conference is the badges?

September 25, 2008 By

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.

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Canon takes good PR and throws it in the trash

September 23, 2008 By

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.

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Gadget lust in times of economic troubles

September 23, 2008 By

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.

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Blogging, changing every day

September 23, 2008 By

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).

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The new blogroll

September 22, 2008 By

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?

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2,000 “no’s” a year

September 20, 2008 By

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.

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