SplaTT's Blog

leaving america...

So here i am ....sitting in the lounge at Las Angeles sirport about to get on my plane for sydney,...the just made the boarding announcement for my plane....

This trip was absolutely fantastic.....meet great people....saw some great technology..

time to go...

bye Microsoft...till we meet again....

I've just finished up a fascinating week of meetings at Microsoft's main campus in Seattle, and every meeting I went to was amazing.....the people in each meeting were both knowledgeable and extremely passionate about the products and the space they were working in.

I learnt heaps about new applications and web services and started the groundwork on some great opportunities to merge some of what their doing with some of the things we want to do for our clients. I can't wait to present some of the stuff I saw to staff back home and to some of our clients.

I feel invigorated about the space, and excited about the opportunities we will have to do some amazing ground breaking work....

Thanx to everyone at Microsoft who took the time to allow me a glimpse into their fascinating world....

(oh yeah...phone camera photos of the campus can be found here)

geek dinner wrap up...

I won't go into all the detail here, other than to say a good evening was had by all....

Some of the geeks that attended have posted about the things that were discussed on the night...attendees and blog links about the night below...

Korby Parnell
John Porcaro
Anita Rowland
Robert Scoble
JP Stewart
Jeannie Cook
Raymond Chen
Ken Levy
Jack William Bell

Geek Dinner in Redmond...

If you happen to be in Seattle and are reading my blog (unlikely), Robert Scoble from Microsoft is organising a geek dinner while i am in town for the evening of Tuesday 24th Feb. Details can be found on this page. Hope you can make it.

leaving the city by the bay...

It was great to spend some time in San Francisco....had a few meetings, but managed to squeeze in some sightseeing time as well....

Wandered around SOMA (South of Market), which was home of the dot-com craze in those heady days of the net...

Spent a fair bit of time hanging around Union Square, China town, the embarcadero, Fishermans Wharf (only when i had too :)

Had a trip out to the Rock (Alcatraz) and manged to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge....a 13km (8 mile) hike to Sausalito.....

Also managed a quick look around Palo Alto after i had meeting down there....wish i had a bit more time to wander atround Silicon Valley....maybe next time...

Got tickets to see Matrix Revolutions in IMAX as well....nice.....

All in all, a lot of walking....my feet are killing me.....but i did get some amazing photos....

Bought my fair share of clothes (Gap and Banana Republic) and managed to pick up some great toys as well ;) Some Halo and Tron figurines from a shop in the Sony Metreon complex...A LinkSys WiFi enabled video camera.....and.....<huge grin> a Sony Aibo</huge grin>...i'll blog about my "new toys" later...

The only down thing about the stay in SF, was that the hotel (Hotel Mosser) didn't have broadband internet access..only modem and..get this...high speed interent available on your rooms TV...bit of false advertising....the site says internet dataport available in each room...by dataport they mean phone socket....you would think that in this day-and-age a hotel (especially in SF) would provide high speed net access for guests to plug into their laptops...anyway....

Now i'm sitting in the lounge at gate 24 at San Francisco airport waiting for my flight on Alaskan Airlines to Seattle.....which has been delayed by an hour...grrrr.....oh well, at least their is interenet access through T-Mobile, which has been my saviour because of their access in Starbucks...yeah i know...its expensive....but $39 for a months worth of net access isn't to bad considering the spread of places that have T-Mobile access....you have to remember...this is the US, and Starbucks are everywhere....

Hopefully the plane won't be delayed again, as i have someone picking me up and giving me a lift to the hotel from SeaTec airport....

I am really looking forward to my week at Microsoft, the guys i met at etech from MS, were a great buynch of people and really enthusiastic about this whole space....should be a fun and interesting week...

etech - Catalyzing Collective Action on the Net (keynote)

Marc is a Research Sociologist with the Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group and is probably best know for being responsible for netscan (the site can explain it better than I ever will ;).

Let me start this blog by saying that Marc’s keynote was without a doubt the best keynote of etech.

He raised an interesting point right upfront by stating that society, at some point, created a scale at which one end was “socializing” and at the other end was the idea of “getting work done”, and never the two shall meet. With the uptake of technology and the shifting of social behavior to include connected digital mediums, work and socializing are much closer to being tightly integrated than ever before.

He then ran through a list of books that have influenced sociological, both online and offline, thinking up to now; The Evolution of Co-operation, Governing the Commons, a book by Irving Goffman (didn’t get the title), The Hidden Dimension, Social Network Analysis, Visual Explanations, Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Communities in Cyberspace (which he was a co-editor on). He also spoke about an article or a book called “The value of reputation on eBay: A controlled experiment”

He spoke about how online aggregations resemble voluntary associations far more than groups, and then ran through some points by Ostrum;

Group boundaries are clearly defined

Rules governing the use of collected goods are well matched to local needs and conditions

Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules

Respected by external authorities

Monitoring members behaviors exists

This then led onto a slide about conversation communities and that the key tasks for participants were; discovery, selection, evaluation and motivation.

He created his link between the research carried out by netscan and the move to a mobile tool by saying the netscan has used over 1 billion message headers to create the meta data for its results and that recently the Chinese Microsoft publics newsgroups are growing larger than anything else.

The next slide spoke about social community being implicit (Technorati) vs. explicit (eBay and Amazon) and how information which used to be “a place apart” is now “everyplace” and that as a result, we are seeing the cell phone turning into a mouse.

He spoke about a number of social mobile apps, including; Ntag - people networking, Spotme, Barpoint, Air click, Sem@code and Trepia.

All this was a nice lead into a Microsoft project called AURA.

AURA is about making tag driven applications simple to build, linking people through to shared object / places and building collective knowledge about things and places.

In a nutshell, AURA’s an interesting system which allows you, through the use of a barcode reader which is attached to a PocketPC device, to scan barcodes in a retail environment and have information on that product or company come back to you via GPRS/WiFi signal. He finished up by mentioning that their is an AURA portal being finalised along with some enhancements to the application they have currently built.

He finished up by mentioning two other systems being developed by Microsoft Research; John Krumm’s "Locadio" and Ken Hinckley with "click and pur".

I’ve got a whole day at Microsoft Research next week and have managed to grab whatever time Marc can spare me to go to have a chat about AURA and anything else he can let slip….

Posted by Mick (SplaTT) Stanic at 10:30 AM | Comments (0)

etech - Untethering Social Networks

This sessions was made up if a panel of well known people (if you a netizen). Howard Rheingold (we are not worthy), Mizuki Ito, Scott Fisher, Danah Boyd and of course, Joi Ito.

Howard spoke about a number of things which were essentially elements out of his book SmartMobs.

Mizuki (who got me interested in Joi Ito and all the things that includes :) spoke about how mobile email and picture messaging are essentially major elements of the new social technical systems. She mentioned how kids in Japan have upwards of 200 contacts in their mobile phone address books and that how people in Japan live in-between the mobile and real space. IF your interested, Mizuki has written some amazing papers about mobile culture in Japan.

Scott Fisher spoke briefly about the WorldBoard Project and then ran through a list of locative based services currently available, including; Goopas (english press release), R-Click - an RFID system (english press release), the Environmental Media Project (featuring a video with Howard), Chusazaku, the Murmure Project, Campus Aware, City Poems, Urban Tapestries, PDPAL and the Locative Network.

Danah explained about social hacking mobile phones and the issues around social hacking versus technical hacking.

Joi then finished up the panel discussion by talking a bit more about mobile vs. computer social hacking, the ability of mobile devices to access IRC, Technorati and how it shows the gaps between power blog’s (the A-List) and blog’s of small communities (viewed regularly by no more than 4 to 5 people). He also touched on ENUM, Geo-coding and, of course, Orkut.

The highlights of the question time included; Kevin Marks asking about consoles and the addition of internet connectivity to them. Danah answered by saying that consoles are social devices and therefore an important part of peoples every growing social network accessible devices. Mimi threw in that was interesting to watch the migration of networks to portable devices.

Mimi also used a line that will become part of my vocabulary; “Weblogs and moblogs are about marketing intimate moments”.

Another great session and it was a “can’t miss” opportunity to see so many of the worlds leading internet and mobile voices up on stage at the one time.

etech - Leveraging RSS at Disney

Michael Pusateri (Vice President, Engineering, Disney Channel), Elisabeth Freeman (Walt Disney Internet Group) and Eric Freeman (Media Systems, Disney Internet Group) presented a fascinating session on how Disney is using RSS both externally in the go.com portal, and more importantly, internally behind the Disney firewall.

The external RSS part of the session was mostly about the go.com portal (including abcnews.com) and how the news team is taking wire feeds, pushing them through XSLT templates (which includes rights and clearance processing) and then finishing up by putting them into a template processor. The template processor then spits out content in whatever format is required; primarily for the web, but also into Wireless WML for mobiles (as well as AvantGo and PocketPC formats).

The content can then be syndicated to the Disney Enterprise portal or through to the general public (via RSS feeds), which will hopefully end in driving traffic back to the go.com sites, which is their intended purpose. The areas that are causing them issues are; standardization, separating the presentation from the client and educating the producers at Disney about the whole RSS thing.

The other area they covered was in relation to “massive content via RSS”. This was all about enabling rich content payloads in RSS feeds using an enclosure tag. In other words, a way to download content asynchronously and have it pre-cached, waiting fro the user to hit the “play” button. It was interesting to hear how they are using this type of content delivery in Japan already (of course), Spain and soon Latin America, as well as caching at the edge of the network in Japan. From what i gathered, this is primarily done through the use of the Disney Motion plug-in which you can experience at the Disney Channel.

Michael then got up and presented a fascinating insight into the internal uses of RSS, WIKI and blog’s.

This focused on a number of different internal uses including;

Shift logs, which are used to report to the next shift of engineering staff what happened during the previous shift. This used to be done in a FoxPro db (with minimal features) and they had email notifications to keep people updated. Now they have given all of the staff NewsGator, which not only integrates seamlessly into Outlook but also makes the incoming RSS feeds look just like email.

Ratings info is also available as an RSS feed for people who need it. Original ratings information is taken from Nielson ratings, converted, and pumped straight to NewsGator. Nice…..

Discrepancy reports are also being done via RSS which is allowing for detailed info and reports to be created which are then available to everyone….no more worrying about if you sent the email to all the right people. It also dramatically reduced the movement of email which can result in a lot of savings, including cost.

In the future they are looking at using RSS or ATOM type technology for a news clipping service, intranet portal modules and having media content for review.

The conclusions they have drawn since using RSS feeds is that it is useful for businesses where information flow is critical and that it’s inexpensive compared to other solutions. Integrating the RSS feed reader into Outlook was critical to its uptake but they do have a need for authentication of feeds.

They went into a bit of detail about the use of WIKI and blogs in DIG (the Walt Disney Internet Group) and how people use them to get notifications quickly and how they are easy to update and contribute to. They are also using an RSS plug-in for the WIKI as well.

There are currently six blogs being used in operations/engineering with about 100 users, one blog in the DIG with 50 users and the WIKI has over 200 users.

This was a great session and was the first time I have heard anyone explain a really good sanctioned business implementation of RSS, WIKI and blogs.

This was definitely one of my favorite sessions of etech.

etech - Macromedia FlashCast

The etech session by Jim Morris from Macromedia (VP Product Development, Device Solutions) was based around presenting an interesting addition to the current batch of mobile phone content playback applications.

Their new application, FlashCast, allows you to author rich-media content in Flash MX on the desktop, and to then transfer it to a mobile phone client which is essentially a beefed up version of the flash player the released a while ago called Flash Lite. The original mobile flash player, which was found on a number of Japanese DoCoMo i-mode handsets, is already being replaced by FlashCast which is already being rolled out onto the DoCoMo 505i (link to 505i info on this page) and 500 series handsets.

According to Jim, the fact that you can interact with content not only by the keypad, but also with voice and SMS is what will allow the next breed of interesting applications to be built. Combine it with the ability to utilise XML through HTTP, giving you access to XPath, XSL and RSS, and the alpha geeks (particularly those at etech) will be able to hopefully build some cool connected applications.

What would be really cool is if you could build FlashCast components as Macromedia Central channels….that would be nice….I have a meeting with Jim on Tuesday while I am in San Francisco, so hopefully I’ll come back with some answers and cool ideas for its uses…

time to write about all things etech..

I suppose I should start…

Here start my notes and thoughts on some of the sessions from the 2004 O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies Conference held in San Diego. This is going to take a while, even with the fact that I used OneNote to keep track of everything, I have a lot of notes to go through…plus...it doesn't help that the hotel room i have at the Mosser Hotel in San Francisco hasn't got a broadband connection in my room....:(

Stick with me …

is it a MacGyver bar or a Top Gun bar????

On my last night in San Diego, i tagged along with the last remaining geeks from etech to a final dinner.....Ewan (geek in kilt) and Chris had stumbled across this little bar whose claim to fame is that the sleazy bar scene in Top Gun was filmed inside its "sleazy" little bar....

Now that was pretty kewl....but the kewler thing was that they had a signed picture of MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) up on the wall.....now thats really kewl.....

Photos at the moblog

etech photos

all my etech phone pics can be found here....

just hanging out....

Hanging out at etech the last couple of days has been amazing.....

Their have been some amazing sessions that i have been to and i have met some amazing people as well.....i'll be typing all my notes and info up over the next day, or so, so you can expect a big burst of blogs real sooon.....

Nokia GPS add-on...

ooooo......Nokia have announced a GPS add-on for the 5140...this would make it really nice to integrate with WWMX....

Look into this more and post later...

howdy pilgram....that looks like a mighty fine design you've got there....

Just finished up the "UI for Alien Cowboys" session at etech which was run by Matt Jones who used to work at BBCi on iCan and is now over at Nokia doing concept development.

The session wsa primarily on User Centered Design and its always interesting to see how other organistions/people go through the initial stages of concept development and the user lead design process. The session was interesting because it was partly hands-on....breaking down into groups of two and stepping through the actual process (all be it a quick, shortened down version), and involved the use of....wait for it....paper. A few people walked out at that point as if they were completely against having to do any work..or were just waiting for moses to hand down the 10 commandments....a good user design process needs to not only be explained but actually experienced.

All in all, it was a pretty good session, but these things tend to all flow from the same point....a little bit of light humour involving Jakob Nielsen, lots of little bits of paper being written on and then organised into interaction flow...its comes down to if you've seen process...you've seen them all..

With my current obsession with all things IDEO, you can see how they take this standard idea and really flesh it out, though it does help that they obviously have a larger budget and an amazing group of talented people to throw at the projects that they work on.

It was a good session and Matt pulled it of well, keeping peoples attention focussed and in the end, everyone who stuck around was really taking it all seriously...

Photos on the moblog

putting faces to the names....

Back in my room after having a good catchup and dinner with Sean Bonner (seanbonner), Michael Pusateri (Argyle) and James McMurry (mcunixjr) from #joiito as well as Ernie Svenson (Ernie the Attorny)...bumped into Joi Ito while we were in the lobby before dinner and saw a few other people from the #joiito channel as well.....putting faces to names is always an interesting experience.....photos at the moblog...

Interesting conversation at dinner about all the blog and community stuff happening around the lead up to the election in the US at the moment....i wonder if it would be much different if they had the same setup we have in Austrlia where it is compulsory to vote....

I'll be keeping an eye out to see how much of the US style campaigning will happen at the next Australian election and how it will be utilised (if at all) by the advertising industry.....though i don't any of our politicians having the nerve to expose themselves to the public the way that Howard Dean has done in the US....i just can't imagine John Howard or Mark Latham running a blog or getting donations from a community based ground swell....

these things rock....

Finally got one....had to travel 10 miles out of Sand Diego to a CompUSA store to find it....but i got one.....

I am now the proud owner of a Fossil Abacus SPOT watch....

Just finished setting it up, so haven't had to much time to play with it....full report in a couple of days....

i finally made it...

Well....here I am.....in my hotel room in sunny San Diego...the weather here is beautiful at the moment....

13 hour flight between Sydney and LA.....wait nearly two and a half hours at LA airport for a connecting flight, which only took 25 minutes to fly from LA to San Diego.....hmmm.. should have hired a car...

And after everyone had told me that it would take ages to get through customs with all the new security....it was no more difficult or lengthy then going through Sydney or Melbourne airport....then again.....maybe that's only the security measures I saw....probably a room full of secret squirrel type people keeping an eye on everything 24/7...;)

Anyhow....I'm here and I'm hungry...so I'm off to check out the shopping thing/place next door....may even come back with a SPOT watch.....

Oh yeah....photos starting to go up on my moblog....back soon....

goodbye Australia...hellooo America...

The moment is nearly here...in about 12 hours, i leave for my three week trip to the US :)

• Sat 7th Feb - Leave Sydney for San Diego via LA
• Sat 7th Feb till Sat 14th Feb - San Diego. A whole week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference at the Westin Hotel...
• Sat 14th Feb till Sun 22nd Feb - San Francisco. Meetings, meetings and more meetings...well, a little time of to do the tousist things ;)
• Sun 22nd Feb till Sat 28th Feb - Redmond. A whole amazing week at the Microsoft campus where I have some amazing meetings set up with some amazing people talking about some amazing technologies...
• Sat 28th Feb - Seattle, LA and back in Sydney on the 1st of March..

In the words of Homer Simpson....woo hoo....

For the next three weeks i'll hopefully be keeping a pretty busy blogging schedule both here and on my moblog....

See you on the flip side...

webcamnotes test blog...

blogging at Davos...

Loïc Le Meur has posted a series of video-blogs from the "Will Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs and the Internet?" session at the recent World Economic Forum held at Davos in Switzerland.

I love the fact that Joi not only looks like he's blogging whats going on a round him onto his powerbook, but about one minute into the panel 7 mpeg (16MB),he pulls out his Nokia 6600 and takes a photo of the audience...I think this may be the image that he mobloged later but i'm not sure...

Links: Joi's davos related posts, International Herald Tribune

OneNote and its development...

Chris Pratley a Group Program Manager at Microsoft for the Office Authoring Services team has set up a blog and his first series of posts has been all about the development process for Microsofts OneNote application.

As a user of OneNote on my TabletPC, i have to give credit to the guys for creating a great app, and his blog provides an interesting window into the process and issues that come up with developing a 1.0 application.

I always wondered why they created OneNote when the Journal application is so similar, his explanation covers the logic well....While Journal is specific to the Tablet, OneNote is an application that can be used not only on a TabletPC but also on a standard desktop or laptop. Come to think of it...i was using OneNote on my IBM laptop before i got my Toshiba Tablet and it was still a great app to use.

If only i could blog directly from it.......then again...my handwriting is no where near as neat as it should be.. ;)