cubicgarden.com...

Things have gone a bit wrong

[ General computing ]

Ok need to keep this short because I'm typing on the small keyboard of the acer aspire. Its ok for my fat fingers but certainly not like my lovely dell keyboard or even better my ibm keyboard at home.

So I tried to do a few things over the last few days, and maybe wrongly rushed them.

1. I did change the partition on my old dell using the live ubuntu 8.10 cd. Everything worked but i over wrote the master boot record and had to install grub again. My idea of booting into xbmc from the media direct button is put on hold for now.
2. I also somehow while playing with resolutions and multiple screens during a video conference call yesterday, killed my xorg.configue settings and can't seem to get them back to a state where I can actual login to ubuntu. So i'm currently backing everything up (something i should have done when doing the partitions really) ready for a clean install of ubuntu 8.10 tomorrow. This means little email, twittering, etc for the next few days sorry.
3. I decided to upgrade the ram on both the dell and acer. The dell now has 4gig and the acer 1.5gig. It took me 5mins to do the dell and a best part of a hour to do the Acer. I filmed it which I'll put on online later

So I bought one... Acer Aspire A110L

[ General computing ]

150 pounds from Comet in White City, Manchester. The box was opened so I got a discount. Otherwise the machine is brand new. Its the basic model with Linux, 8gig Solid state drive and only 512meg of Ram. I'm expecting once I do the 4gig upgrade on my Dell to pass on the memory to this machine, then maybe stick in a small bluetooth dongle. I'm also checking out how to get ubuntu or xubuntu on it. But generally I'm planning to use this device for im, rss reading, ebooks and general web use.

Emma's guide to great BarCamping

[ Socially Offline ]

I picked this up via a twitter from Nicole Simon and had a quick read while getting ready to go out for a lunch meeting. Emma's at tons of BarCamp including the tiny ones. I'm actually surprised she's not put one on yet.

A couple of comments however. I love step one and that step four cancels it out if needed. Its very frustrating to hear people say, I've got nothing to talk about when your suggesting they fill the board with talks. Sometimes I feel like saying, what the bloody hell are you doing here if your not going to participate. The small group thing is a good idea, or try and go to sessions not run by your friends just because there your friend. Don't get me wrong its nice to support friends but sometimes, they need to get jump in the deepend.

Getting up early (step 3) is painful specially after a conference party the previous day. But Emmas right, from the orgainser's point of view there's nothing worst than people new turning up late who don't know what to do. Us rehular barcampers should also make a effort, to remind orgainsers of certain things they forget.

Step 5 about hijacking or leaving a session is so important and most organisers don't mention it which is a problem. In BarCampBerlin3 I turned up to a session about CSS frameworks and it turned out to be a big plug for a framework the guys was working on. Nothing wrong with that if it was advertised that way but it wasn't and although me and Nicole were the only english speakers and had asked for the session to be in english at the start. We still left because it was putting us (or rather me) to sleep.

Keeping in touch and having no plans is essential. But having fun is so forgotten. Sometimes I look around and think to myself, wow BarCamp is like geek paradise - where else would you want to be? I guess this is why the idea of Geekcamp or Geekholidays is coming back into focus within my mind.

And finally, yes please spend sometime and think about running your own BarCamp. Some people still ask me why I stopped running them in London. Well its because its something I believe other people should experience for themselves. When Ben Metcalfe asked me to be his partner in crime for BarCampLondon1 I wasn't sure what to expect (hell I don't think any of us were) but it worked out really well (some still say it was the best barcamp). But there's new areas and places to try BarCamps in. I'm already getting involved in a possible BarCampManchester2 which might be Backstage funded and a possible BarCampHuddersfield which came about through a discussion with Lisa from Futuresonic. There's also more concerete plans for BarCampNorthEast2 which to date has been the only overnight BarCamp in the north of england! Shame on the north of england... Someone should do something about that. Well if I get either Manchester2 or Huddersfield going, fear not - they will be overnighters....

Print and the internet

[ Socially Online ]

I love what David Sifry and team have done in Offbeat guides.

Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. Our guides scour the web to find the best, most up-to-date information about your destination. You can personalize the information you want based on your travel dates, preferences, and destination. The guides come with local maps, festivals and events going on while you're there, exchange rates, key phrases in the city's language, weather forecasts and more.

It kind of reminds me of Idiomag but the business model is a little more straight forward and I like the fact you only really pay if you want the PDF or book. Unlike Idiomag however there's no APML being built in the background and you can't point to other services you may use. I mean it would be super handy if offbeat guides would look at my dopplr account and see when I'm next going somewhere new and might need a guide. It could also take hints and tips from friends and add those to the list. Can I also say once again, outside the iphone bubble there are many other types of phones which they could also support using textual/tagged PDF.

There's still life in the old laptop

[ General computing ]

So I've been thinking about getting a Netbook (or cloud terminal as I like to call them). Mainly because of weight and portability. The Acer Inspire really grabs me with its cheap price and solid state memory drive. But I started thinking I should invest in something a little more solid like the Dell Mini 9. But after some time I've come around to the fact my Dell XPS M1210, although one of the most heavy 12 inch laptops you can get, still has a lot of life inside of it.

Currently the 9 Cell battery is 2 years old and lasts 2.25 hours on usual operation. If I turn off Bluetooth and Wifi it can go up to 3 hours. But looking on ebay, replacement 9 cell batteries are about 50 pounds. Which means I can go back to enjoying 6-7 hour battery times again.

I choose the 120gig SATA harddrive and to be honest, only fill it up when I'm going somewhere and I pile on podcasts and films. Generally I gave 20gigs left at anytime. I also use to use my laptop for transfering stuff, but now I got the pacemaker with also 120gig of space and I'm only using 15% of that. So I usually have mass storage on me and don't need to use the laptop. But whats also weird is the way Dell partitioned the drive. The first partition is a FAT drive of less that a gig with Dell utils on it. Second partition use to be my data drive for Windows which I recently converted from NTFS to EXT3 and is about 100gigs big. Third partition is EXT3 and is where the root ubuntu install exists, its also about 10gig big. The last partition is 4.5gig and is currently where my swap file sits. Yes thats crazy, I hear your saying. I've only got 2gig of memory and to be fair the swap never gets used even with all the applications I have open at once. The problem with the last partition is it was where Dell MediaDirect use to be. Media direct is a media player which will start if you press the correct button on startup. Its useful if you want to just play a dvd or listen to music without booting up the operating system. Well as you can imagine I've used this option all of twice over 2 years. So what I need really is somehting like partition magic to shift everything around a little. Gpart and a couple other open source utils don't seem to be able to shift around stuff so easily. If anyone knows of something different which will please shout.

I've also been thinking it would be a good idea to replace the dell utils with xbmc, so I could boot into something actually useful even if my ubuntu was broken. I'm not totally sure how to do this yet but I'll have a try.

The last thing I think I need to do to my machine is give it 4gig of memory. Its fine with 2gig but I do sometimes wonder if ubuntu is living within that tight limit. 4gig means things like RSSOwl & Snackr which currently loads 400+ RSS feeds each can be stored in memory rather that cache surely? Eitherway, 4gig is now as low as 40 pounds for the 667mhz type, I opted for the 533mhz version when i was in the states last. Hopefully the extra bandwidth will also help with speed, although I got to say the dual core 2 processors are fast enough for most things I do on it. Even High-def encoding isn't out of the question. I was thinking also if I did get a acer ainspire one I could stick the old memory from the dell into the ainspire to boost its standard 512meg of memory.

Someone was saying to me, I should also clean install Ubuntu on the machine because I've upgrade it since Ubuntu 7.04 and although ubuntu and linux generally is good at cleaning up after its self. I could make all the changes I want and get rid of legacy config files, etc.

So in total the upgrades will be less that 100 pounds and quite a bit of my time. Seems worth it to me.

Twitterank, a social engineering phishing nightmare

[ Socially Online ]

Its been highly talked about. Is Twitterank out to steal your password or not? There is a disclaimer saying there not out to steal your twitterz. But I got to say Brianoberkirch has this right.

Twitterrank is a vast conspiracy I created to steal all of your passwords and shame Twitter into OAuthing. And to make you look vain - Brianoberkirch

We laugh but who knows one day it will happen. Then how foolish will you feel as you put your vanity before privacy

I keed. But you really shouldn't hand out your password to some fly-by-night site. - Brianoberkirch

And he's very right. We're far to ready to plunge our details into a site which has no history, feels dodgy and doesn't use any certificates of any kind. I know the author of the site has gone out of his/her way to alert people to the validity of the site but mistakes can be made too. Such things as poorly configured databases and applications leak user data. Also note, this ticks all the boxes for a scam. Type in your username and password and you will get to see what your ranking is. Social enginnering at its best. Hell send your friend your rating and ask them to join too.

Update Mashable is covering the story and Rainycat pretty much says the same. OAuth makes all this go away, this is why I'm a big believer in the open social stack.

USBCell sort out your PR campaign

[ Socially Online ]

I've been clearing out my junk box recently and found a number of things. One of them was a email from Diana from Moixaenergy aka USBcell.com.

Good afternoon,

Please find our press release today outlining Moixa Energy’s new Alkaline Awareness Campaign and ‘CO2 Saver’ USB rechargeable battery solutions.

Regards,

Diana

Then there's a few photos and there press release titled Award-winning British company seeks to educate consumers on the dangers of the disposable battery attached.

I'm sorry this is so lame and lazy on so many levels. Its basically spam and its frustrating because usbcell is actually a good product. Hell I actually own 8 of the AA type. If they spent 1min and typed in a query like this. They would see I'm actually a fan of USBcell, and they could have sent me some batteries. I most likely would have been more likely to check out the campaign and in the end blog about it. I'm going to write back to Diana and suggest she reads the Cluetrain and this blog entry. If Sarah was still blogging, I would suggest Diana look at her blog too.

I may just have the next werewolf

[ Science and Theory ]

I have playing with playing cards most of the night. Seems while I was sleeping that I came up with a card game which seems to be like werewolf/mafia but very different. I was reading up about game theory to see if it fit in one of the categories and it seems to fit into reciprocal altruism which is nicely exemplified with file sharing.

Another potential example would be the Internet file sharing communities. The ability to download (receive) a given file (an economic good) directly depends on other people who already possess the same file and share it through allowing uploading it to those who want it (a process which is also called seeding). Those who receive the file and later refuse to share it with others (through seeding) are known as leeches. However, there are methods to ban leechers, ie to deny them further participation in the file sharing network.

I don't want to come across like its totally tied down but the game seems pretty fun and could work with groups as big as 40 or as small as 12. Some other people have spoke to in the past have talked about the notion of a 3rd entity like the vampires. Well although we've not tried it out, I do worry it will just be chaos and there not enough to go on to make it worth doing. Plus vampires would be like a 2nd team of werewolves.

So forgetting vampires, my game is like werewolf as in there is a night and day phase but its more like a change of location with certain characters not being able to see or hear. The moderator/god/voice of the game is required to do a lot more in this game in regards to whos who. It may even require two or a piece of paper. The social notion of cheating and saying whatever you like is still there and is a major part of the game but now there's more emphases on altruism. You also don't need special cards for this game, a standard pack of 52 will scale up to 44 players I worked out. The suits, numbers and royality cards are very important for the game. And I did consider upping the numbers using the joker cards but it got very constrictive. Of course the game works well with drink too. The closes game I can find to the core idea of the game is this invented game called anandis.

I tried to do some probability calculations on who would win depending on how many of each character but it was beyond me. No what I really need is a Card game simulator. Maybe once I get a feel for the maths behind the game, I will write up a complete set of rules and release it to the world under a creative commons attribution licence or something.

User generated remixes

[ All media ]

Community Management

[ Design and Ideas ]

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick over at the Read Write Web, community management jobs are hot.

What kinds of jobs are companies hiring for right now? In the move towards a social media world, we've seen a series of hires in the past week for variations on the theme "community manager." Companies are hiring, candidates are hunting and competition for the best people and positions is heating up.

What's even more interesting is the debate we got into at the Web 2.0 Expo about jobs for woman. Some people were suggesting community management is something woman are dawn too. Although I have to say my job boils down to community management too, which is a term I really hate.

So if you combine the two, what do you get? Maybe a more balanced workforce in the future?

Who knows... But I do agree with the first comment - Seems like a risky job to be in when it comes to a rough economy

Web of Flow

[ The Semantic web ]

I think Stowe Boyd is a very clever man he's thoughts behind social tools run very deep. And rightly so, while the rest of us were trying to grapple with social anything, he coined the term social tools and understood the power of these tools and the conversation. I kind of liken him to people like Doc Searls and Howard Rheningold but instantly more accessible.

A lot of people don't like his presentation style which is more a jumble of mini-thoughts and pointers. So when someone pointed me at Phil Windley's piece about Stowe's latest thought, I knew what the bulk of the post would be about.

Although Phil may not have enjoyed the talk much, I certainly did. It also got me thinking.

He shows his desktop: Snackr, Friendfeed flow UI, Flickr, Twitterfox, and so on. These are all flow apps. There are dozens of streams now and there will be lots more in the future. These differ on the basis of the social interactions they enable. There will be 5 or 6 themes, but lots of implementations.

This leads to a model called “lifestreaming.” People are continually broadcasting their life to groups of friends and even strangers. People know where you are and ask you questions about things in your life because of life streaming.

If you take a look at one of my desktops from yesterday when I was watching the us elections (go obama). You can clearly see some common elements between Stowe's and mine.



In Stowe's talk and screenshot he's got the friends activity stream as a page up on the right but using rss there's no need to have that at all. Actually I noticed my microblogging client Gwibber supports not only microblogging services but also Facebook and Flickr. I think with some hacking around in the Python code I can get it to have a generic RSS input too. Another interesting element is snackr, which is the scrolling rss driven marqaue at the bottom. If we could get Gwibber to spit out rss too, that would be cool for snackr. But I can't help but feel the guys are Faradaymedia have already venutured into this area before with Touchstone/Particls. Unfortuelly having the attention engine on your machine wasn't the best of ideas. Which is where a combination of something new I also heard about at Web 2.0 expo could come in useful in relevency area.





Not one to hide my ideas but this time, I want to try hacking around with some software to see what I build either into Gwibber or Snackr.

Torrent Freak TV starts slowly

[ All media ]

‘TorrentFreak TV’ is a biweekly recap of some of the best, most interesting or remarkable stories from the wonderful world of BitTorrent. Its quite a basic show but what got me blogging was the Torrent ratings vs TV Ratings. Its at the end of each episode and shows whats the most popular TV shows are based on torrents and the other based on Neilson's rating. There not even close, which shows once again the change of behaviour people have once they have access to anything and everything. I mean why would you settle for crap like Dancing with the Stars when you could watch Heroes or catch up on Dexter? I do wonder if any British shows will break into the chart? Subscribe to this feed for updates.

Obama just took Ohio and New Mexico - its over!

[ Culture and politics ]

The polls currently say McCain 90 and Obama 200.

I go to bed knowing the world is finally a safer place, now Obama will be the next American president.

Don't say I didn't tell you so...

[ Web 2.0 ]

Oh lovely another screenshot and example for my presentation about data portability in cloud computing.

Yes Yammer went down yesterday and worst still seemed to be throwing out data all over the place. A work mate of mine reported getting some email from Yammer when he's not even registered with the system. I assume the email address came from when someone else request you join Yammer.

The cloud is great, but examples like this are really worrying!

Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10, thumbs up

[ General computing ]

I upgraded on my laptop with no problem using the network update. Since the upgrade I've noticed a couple of things. One the memory usage is much lower, things seem to be hovering around 1.2gig and I have Firefox 3.03 (28tabs), Evolution, Hamachi, Gossip, Specto, RSSOwl (400+ feeds), Gwibber, dropbox, rescuetime, etc all open and active.

Secondly 3g and phone support is much better. I plugged in the Nokia N80 today on the train and it picked it up and suggested using it as a 3g modem. The windows mobile phone is once again simply plug in and go. No settings needed. I've tried to do both over bluetooth but the Nokia ran out of battery (tipical) and Ubuntu for some reason does not see my Windows mobile phone.

Thridly things seem just faster and smoother. I'm using compiz-fusion and the community have added some nice effects which flow along smoothly using Open GL 2.0. But everything seems more responsive that before.

Its not only the upgrade which has made my laptop happy recently. I found a really good twitter client called Gwibber. It works with almost everything including Twitter, Jaiku, Indent.ca, Pownce, Digg, Flickr, etc. No Plurk, friendfeed or Ping.fm support however. But I was thinking if I look into it, I might be able to alter the flickr or digg option to support RSS feeds generally. Or alter one of the others to match the friendfeed api.

Glyn, sent me a email to finally solve my problem with there being no RSS screensaver. This Ubuntu forum has everything you need to get going, but basiclly you install xscreensaver then configure it for fliptext with the url option enable a rss feed. Its like the Tiger screensaver but with less style.

I've also just discovered Pidgin has tons of plugins including a Skype and Facebook one. The skype one only works if skype is also running and the facebook one does odd things to your contact list. For example if you have requests to be a friend it will throw up a alert for each one for you to accept or deny. This is painful when you  Its a nice idea but very buggy in practice.

A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

[ All media ]

No of course not mine... You think I'd just put that out on my blog one day. Not a chance.

Instead a complete history of my sexual failures is a candid and slightly humorous look at a guy (Chris Waitt's) past and present attempts at a relationship. Some of it is cringe worth and some of it laugh out loud bad but overall its a film worth watching at some point in the future. He's a review I got from IMDB.

Meet Chris Waitt. He's a thirty-something auteur and amateur, who embarks on a project to catalog his past girlfriends following in the footsteps of Jim Jarmusch and "Broken Flowers" featuring the middle-aged Bill Murray. The end result is funnier and different in other aspects, too. Waitt comes off as a Kurt Cobain lookalike, whose toilet floor is carpeted in pubic hair w/ used toilet paper rolls in the corner unlike a furniture catalog by IKEA. He walks around carrying his furry microphone and baggy-saggy pants like a leftover grunge-wars survivor. His "Swedish" face is, however, only the surface, because things are boiling beneath it. As the events that unfold testify, he's got enough balls to visit a dominatrix, test his street-credibility vs. women, serenade a psychotherapist citing "crack-whores" and "religious virgins" and trip on Viagra like we've never seen it happen. The movie suggests that in the lives of most/many GenXers, there are four recurring factors apart from differences in personal hygiene and CV: a) A lost loved one is a mental skeleton in the closet b) (S)he is targeted at least once for reclamation c) Inevitable failure on this front may lead to creation of wicked senses of humor (as a defense mechanism) and d) other people and one's own projects claim the (wo)man in the end. Lived life and history can not be changed. If our relationships are like bridges, we almost always burn them after saying cogently goodbye. Because of these strengths, I was mildly indignant that the audience seemed to revel only in Waitt's failures and shortcomings on the sexual front. I could think of many girls who wouldn't be his match or worthy of him as a date

Email is broken

[ All types of Social Software ]

I'm so close to giving up on Email all together.

I have many email accounts and they all do different things. Everything was cool till Evolution (my mail client) started being selective about what email it would download from the server. Before that I started noticing a load of email on my personal email address, so I was having to add spam control to that account.

Don't get me started on my work email. My BBC email is like the remains of a atom bomb. I blame Outlook 2003 for a start, add limited spam control and the fact my email address is everywhere online. You have a recipe for another atom bomb. Ideally I would use another mail client like Thunderbird but thats only half of the story. The out office no longer works, mail rules like automaticly forward messages are disabled and usually when I got time to reply to emails like at home while watching tv is made very difficult using a windows only VPN solution or hourly webmail option.

Yes its bloody frustrating and I can't help but think I'm much more productive when using social software. Hell even instant messenger is better for me that email.

Suw's talk from Fowa and Web2.0 Expo about the problems people have with email was only the start. I was seriously shaking my head up and down like a nodding dog when I heard Luis Suarez from IBM talk at the Web 2.0 Expo Europe. The talk was about his battle with giving up on email. People said he would be fired but 37 weeks on, he's still working for IBM.

I think theres something about this and the slow movement which fit really well. Its not simply junking your email, its about applying the right amount of effort at the right point. I looked at my stats for working in Rescue time and seriously the amount of time I spend in Outlook or Evolution is just wrong. My Efficiency is very high but its all happening within email.






Its time to sort all these things out once and for all.

A professional camera setup using one Sanyo Xacti?

[ All media ]

When I first saw the Sanyo Xacti HD1 I thought wow you could film a movie on this easily. Some people totally disagree but I felt the quality was good enough to pass for most things online and even offline. But to be fair the mpeg4 codec wasn't quite good enough and the lens wasn't big enough to get lots of light down it. So when I first saw the Sanyo Xacti HD1000, I started thinking hey this is the revision which could be the break through camcorder.

Well it seems I'm not the only one, thinking this way. I met a startup company doing interviews with people all over the place using simply a Sanyo Xacti HD1000 with a radio mic and large light. It was perfect, the presenter would move the medium hand mic back and forth between himself and the person being interviewed. While the camera man would hold the camera generally quite still and check the levels on his in the ear headphones.

I grabbed a few minutes with the camera man and asked him about his setup. He said he use to walk around with a Canon DV camera but its too big and heavy plus the "downtime" of encoding footage was costly. He said the camera is great but the light makes all the difference to the footage. He also said he'd considered the HD1010 but he's waiting for the 3CCD version before upgrading.

I have more photos of course...

Microsoft embraces the cloud and its technologies

[ Web 2.0 ]

So I did say in a few presentations recently, that I'm dying to replace my slide of Microsoft Livemesh and Ray Ozzie's thoughts about cloud computing with something more cloud like. Well yesterday Microsoft unveiled Azure, a operating system for the cloud. From my understanding, its like Google App engine but using .net instead of python. They do say Python, PHP, Ruby, etc are coming soon.

I did sit and watch the Channel9 video where he explains the whole thing over 40mins and it does sound good but not ground breaking in my own mind. Could be useful for the backstage wild west server but I expect the community would litch me before I got close to suggesting it.

So after the cloud computing announcement of Azure, Microsoft went on to surprise us all with a consumer facing announcement that Windows live ID will OpenID 2.0.

Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider. You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

I wonder if they ever plan to support access to there own services via openID?

But the biggest announcement was of course a demo of microsoft office live which is like google docs but microsoft office. Unsuprisingly Microsoft will still be selling copies of Microsoft Office 14 in shops.

So Microsoft have certainly put a foot in cloud computing but between livemesh, azure and officelive I'm not exactly wow'ed. More me too that trailblazing.

Web 2.0 Expo Europe, a review

[ Socially Offline ]

Yes! The O'reilly team have finally got it going on in Europe. Last year's Web 2.0 Expo somewhat sucked, but for the wrong reasons. The venue was terrible , I mean worst that anywhere else I've been. They placed the expo in the middle of this huge lifeless exhibition centre and the staff made everyone feel like a alien. Some people say the Excel Centre can feel like that sometimes but honestly you have no idea how lifeless thing really can get till you see this place.

Anyway those days are forgotten now, the BCC is right in the middle of town and a short walk from Alexandplatz which meant more Sbahn riding for me that last time but it was worth it. 3 Levels, lots of space and helpful staff made already good conference really very good. So to get all the moans out of the way first and to be fair to the barcampberlin post I just wrote.

The programme for the conference was a little scatty, so yes there were interesting talks but it seemed like sometimes you had to choose between 3 really good sessions and sometimes settle for one. The quality of the speakers were variable sometimes too, but I think thats mainly down to language that anything. For example I was in the OAuth talk and by the time the presenter had explained a typical Oauth transaction as such, I was getting bored and started falling a sleep. It was about 15mins too long. The transaction could have been explained in less that 5mins I felt, specially because most people in room already knew how permissions and OpenID worked. That certainly reminds me that next time I should put a presentation in about something.

Food wasn't bad, a little basic but filling enough. I found the Wifi actually not bad but they seemed to be blocking ports, so Jabber didn't work which meant no Jaiku, Yammer, etc access while at the conference without going to the webpages. The web access was very slow but twitter perfectly usable. I wouldn't have wanted to upload any pictures while there because that was very slow.

Tim Oreilly came out and gave a keynote pretty much about what he had said in New York a while back. It was all about the downturn and what this means for web 2.0. Tim's been talking about it for a while anyway. This was also picked up by many other speakers so there was a sense of doom and gloom surround the conference but people were also telling us to do something meaningful. Great stuff but then again, there was 2 fireside chats with one Yossi Vardi and second Martin Varsavsky




Both talked about how they started and sold there startups. Which seemed very strange when you got all this doom and gloom happening. I guess it was all planned that way to break up the doom and gloom? Maybe?

Anyway, I attended a lot of sessions and although being pretty tired from overdoing it on the night. What I found interesting was the amount of value you got for the 13 euro expo only pass. The obvious stuff like the talks, parties and food/drink were not included but most other things were fine (even the keynotes were included)

On the Startup Ignite front, I liked aka-aki, Amazee and Soundcloud. But really didn't see the point of the others, specially iDesktopTV in the face of things like Boxee. The Berlin Girl Geekdinner was a blast and really started off the web 2.0 expo in the best of ways. I believe that night I stayed out with a small group of people including Nicole till 4am. I also did get into a conversation with Stephennie Booth about the subject of quotas or as I wanted to call it affirmative action. She had some really interesting things to say about it which I'd hoped to catch at the session Suw and Steph ran later but it didn't quite happen. Actually I have the recording of that session which need to upload I've uploaded to Blip.tv (mp3) (ogg).

Rather that turn this entry into a massive long one, I'll end it by saying it was a really good conference. Everyone knew it and felt a lot happier about it that last year. I think next year, there should be a attempt to bring back web 2.0 open again (that worked well from last year) but in the same space of the berlin congress centre. Good Work Oreilly and Techweb, see you next year.