Friday, September 12, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
15 Entrepreneur Blogs Worth Reading
Posted By Wendy Bounds On June 13, 2008 @ 6:08 pm In Books, Women Entrepreneurs, Leadership, Marketing, Technology, Tools, Video | 41 Comments
The best entrepreneur blogs – and often the most successful ones — do more than just promote the entrepreneurs or their projects. Star power can draw attention, but it won’t sustain it if the blog doesn’’t “give.”
Give is a broad term. You can give tangible tools and information to help build a business. Or a motivational story that inspires someone to try an idea. You can give a laugh. You can give food for thought. You can give debate. You can give of yourself, and if you’re interesting enough, people will come back for more. Below, some examples of entrepreneurs who do this:
Dominate a Niche:
[1] Tom Szaky writes [2] The Eco-Capitalist, a blog about driving profits by being environmentally and socially responsible. Mr. Szaky is chief executive officer of [3] Terracycle, a company that finds creative ways to reuse waste in products like plant food, cleaners and tote bags. Recent posts include: [4] “Will Your Customers Pay to Go Green?”
Ecommerce blog [5] Get Elastic is another example. The blog shares general strategies for selling on the Internet. Recent posts include: [6] “9 Privacy Policy Usability Tips,” [7] “Cart Abandonment,” and [8] “Dads and Grads: Missed Merchandising Opportunities.”
Motivate/Inspire/Teach:
Two well-known bloggers in this category are Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki. Mr. Godin was founder of Yoyodyne, an interactive direct-marketing company, which Yahoo Inc. acquired in late 1998. He is an author, blogger and public speaker, and his [9] marketing blog often inspires by giving broader direction in business and life. (Recent posts talk about [10] serial numbers and [11] financial advice for grads.)
Mr. Kawasaki is a managing director of [12] Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture-capital firm. He’s an author and public speaker and his blog, [13] How to Change the World, also includes a link to a job board, which is a motivator. Like Godin, he often provides usable lists to readers. One example: [14] “The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption.”
Offer Tools:
Most entrepreneur blogs do some of this, though several specialize in it. [20] WorkHappy.net by Carson McComas writes about “killer resources for entrepreneurs,” often calling out new online tools. Anita Campbell pens [21] Smallbiztrends.com with tips and strategies on issues such as business plans, picking domain names and going mobile. So does John Jantsch’s [22] Duct Tape Marketing and Drew McLellan’s [23] Drew’s Marketing Minute.
Entertain and Promote:
The best route to self-promotion is through entertainment. Holly Dunlap fuels marketing of her fashion company with a juicy, photo-laden [24] online diary chronicling her dinners, parties and, sometimes, hangovers. Justine Ezarik, a graphic/Web designer and video editor, began transmitting her life via Internet video last year and has transformed that success into multiple avenues, including her blog, [25] tastyblogsnack, where she dissects technology and entertains us.
“If You’re Interested in My Company…
…maybe you’re interested in me – or more about my company.” These blogs feed loyal customers’ desire to connect with a brand. The founders of [26] Honest Tea, Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff keep [27] such a blog. Craig Newmark of [28] craigslist [29] blogs regularly on anything he finds of interest ([30] finches, [31] politics and [32] “Sex and The City”).
One of the most successful examples is billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban, owner of the [33] Dallas Mavericks. His [34] Blog Maverick waxes on everything from [35] cutting-edge technology to the [36] NFL and salary caps and gets tremendous response from readers.
A warning: Readers have typically already bought your product, so don’t just flog it; give them something new to enjoy.
This list is just a start. We want to know what entrepreneur bloggers you think are doing a great job in a particular arena. What else should people be reading—and why?
Article printed from Independent Street: http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet
URL to article: http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/06/13/15-entrepreneur-blogs-worth-reading/
URLs in this post:
[1] Tom Szaky: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117979361996510232-search.html?KEYWORDS=Szaky&COLLECTION=wsjie/
6month
[2] The Eco-Capitalist: http://blog.inc.com/the-eco-capitalist/index.html
[3] Terracycle: http://www.terracycle.net/
[4] “Will Your Customers Pay to Go Green?”: http://blog.inc.com/the-eco-capitalist/2008/04/will_your_customers_pay_to_go_1.html#more
[5] Get Elastic: http://www.getelastic.com/
[6] “9 Privacy Policy Usability Tips,”: http://www.getelastic.com/9-privacy-policy-usability-tips/
[7] “Cart Abandonment,”: http://www.getelastic.com/cart-abandonment-nipping-fudds-in-the-bud/
[8] “Dads and Grads: Missed Merchandising Opportunities.”: http://www.getelastic.com/missed-event-marketing-opportunity/
[9] marketing blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
[10] serial numbers: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/serial-number-m.html
[11] financial advice for grads.: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/urgent-personal.html
[12] Garage Technology Ventures: http://www.garage.com/
[13] How to Change the World: http://blog.guykawasaki.com
[14] “The Top Ten Stupid Ways to Hinder Market Adoption.”: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/the_top_ten_stu.html
[15] Lifestream: http://kk.org/kk/
[16] Wired: http://www.wired.com/
[17] “Power of Failure”: http://kk.org/ct2/2008/06/the-power-of-failure.php
[18] Bribe Your New Employees to Quit.: http://kk.org/ct2/2008/05/bribe-your-new-employees-to-qu.php
[19] go-to blogger: http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/
[20] WorkHappy.net : http://workhappy.net
[21] Smallbiztrends.com: http://Smallbiztrends.com
[22] Duct Tape Marketing : http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/
[23] Drew’s Marketing Minute: http://Drewsmarketingminute.com
[24] online diary : http://www.hollywould.com/shop/cart.php?main&page=diary
[25] tastyblogsnack: http://tastyblogsnack.com/
[26] Honest Tea: http://honesttea.com/
[27] such a blog: http://honesttea.com/blog/index.php/category/from-seth-and-barry/
[28] craigslist: http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites.html
[29] blogs regularly : http://www.cnewmark.com
[30] finches: http://www.cnewmark.com/2008/06/colorado-finch.html
[31] politics: http://www.cnewmark.com/2008/06/mccain-getting.html
[32] “Sex and The City”: http://www.cnewmark.com/2008/06/sex-and-the-cit.html
[33] Dallas Mavericks: http://www.nba.com/mavericks/
[34] Blog Maverick: http://www.blogmaverick.com/
[35] cutting-edge technology: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/06/04/why-tiered-broadband-is-a-wonderful-thing-and-asivs/
[36] NFL and salary caps: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/05/25/understanding-salary-caps-and-why-the-nfl-opted-out/
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The Web Time Forgot
The New York Times
June 17, 2008
By ALEX WRIGHT
MONS, Belgium — On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.
In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.
Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”
Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life’s work.
But in recent years, a small group of researchers has begun to resurrect Otlet’s reputation, republishing some of his writing and raising money to establish the museum and archive in Mons.
As the Mundaneum museum prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary on Thursday, the curators are planning to release part of the original collection onto the present-day Web. That event will not only be a kind of posthumous vindication for Otlet, but it will also provide an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in Web history. Was the Mundaneum (mun-da-NAY-um) just a historical curiosity — a technological road not taken — or can his vision shed useful light on the Web as we know it?
Although Otlet spent his entire working life in the age before computers, he possessed remarkable foresight into the possibilities of electronic media. Paradoxically, his vision of a paperless future stemmed from a lifelong fascination with printed books.
Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children’s natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm.
When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. “I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle,” he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.
In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world’s published knowledge.
Even in 1895, such a project marked an act of colossal intellectual hubris. The two men set out to collect data on every book ever published, along with a vast collection of magazine and journal articles, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera — like pamphlets — that libraries typically ignored. Using 3 by 5 index cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries.
Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to support their project, proposing to build a “city of knowledge” that would bolster the government’s bid to become host of the League of Nations. The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance.
As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however, Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether.
Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.
Tragically, just as Otlet’s vision began to crystallize, the Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after financial struggles had to close it to the public.
A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1940. The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man.
After Otlet’s death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of Otlet’s work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where he discovered a mausoleumlike room full of books and mounds of paper covered in cobwebs.
Mr. Rayward has since helped lead a resurgence of interest in Otlet’s work, a movement that eventually fueled enough interest to prompt development of the Mundaneum museum in Mons.
Today, the new Mundaneum reveals tantalizing glimpses of a Web that might have been. Long rows of catalog drawers hold millions of Otlet’s index cards, pointing the way into a back-room archive brimming with books, posters, photos, newspaper clippings and all kinds of other artifacts. A team of full-time archivists have managed to catalog less than 10 percent of the collection.
The archive’s sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet’s original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web.
“I think Otlet would have felt lost with the Internet,” said his biographer, Françoise Levie. Even with a small army of professional librarians, the original Mundaneum could never have accommodated the sheer volume of information produced on the Web today.
“I don’t think it could have scaled up,” Mr. Rayward said. “It couldn’t even scale up to meet the demands of the paper-based world he was living in.”
Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet’s version of hypertext held a few important advantages over today’s Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.
Otlet also saw the possibilities of social networks, of letting users “participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.” While he very likely would have been flummoxed by the anything-goes environment of Facebook or MySpace, Otlet saw some of the more productive aspects of social networking — the ability to trade messages, participate in discussions and work together to collect and organize documents.
Some scholars believe Otlet also foresaw something like the Semantic Web, the emerging framework for subject-centric computing that has been gaining traction among computer scientists like Mr. Berners-Lee. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just to draw static links between documents, but also to map out conceptual relationships between facts and ideas. “The Semantic Web is rather Otlet-ish,” said Michael Buckland, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
Critics of the Semantic Web say it relies too heavily on expert programmers to create ontologies (formalized descriptions of concepts and relationships) that will let computers exchange data with one another more easily. The Semantic Web “may be useful, but it is bound to fail,” Dr. Buckland said, adding, “It doesn’t scale because nobody will provide enough labor to build it.”
The same criticism could have been leveled against the Mundaneum. Just as Otlet’s vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world’s knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale.
The curators of today’s Mundaneum hope the museum avoids its predecessor’s fate. Although the museum has consistently managed to secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors.
“The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,” said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. “People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?”
Striving to broaden its appeal, the museum stages regular exhibits of posters, photographs and contemporary art. And while only a trickle of tourists make their way to the little museum in Mons, the town may yet find its way onto the technological history map. Later this year, a new corporate citizen plans to open a data center on the edge of town: Google.
June 17, 2008
By ALEX WRIGHT
MONS, Belgium — On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology’s lost pioneers: Paul Otlet.
In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.
Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”
Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life’s work.
But in recent years, a small group of researchers has begun to resurrect Otlet’s reputation, republishing some of his writing and raising money to establish the museum and archive in Mons.
As the Mundaneum museum prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary on Thursday, the curators are planning to release part of the original collection onto the present-day Web. That event will not only be a kind of posthumous vindication for Otlet, but it will also provide an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in Web history. Was the Mundaneum (mun-da-NAY-um) just a historical curiosity — a technological road not taken — or can his vision shed useful light on the Web as we know it?
Although Otlet spent his entire working life in the age before computers, he possessed remarkable foresight into the possibilities of electronic media. Paradoxically, his vision of a paperless future stemmed from a lifelong fascination with printed books.
Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children’s natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm.
When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. “I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle,” he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.
In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world’s published knowledge.
Even in 1895, such a project marked an act of colossal intellectual hubris. The two men set out to collect data on every book ever published, along with a vast collection of magazine and journal articles, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera — like pamphlets — that libraries typically ignored. Using 3 by 5 index cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries.
Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to support their project, proposing to build a “city of knowledge” that would bolster the government’s bid to become host of the League of Nations. The government granted them space in a government building, where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance.
As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however, Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper altogether.
Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the 1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934 book, “Monde,” where he laid out his vision of a “mechanical, collective brain” that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.
Tragically, just as Otlet’s vision began to crystallize, the Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after financial struggles had to close it to the public.
A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1940. The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man.
After Otlet’s death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of Otlet’s work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where he discovered a mausoleumlike room full of books and mounds of paper covered in cobwebs.
Mr. Rayward has since helped lead a resurgence of interest in Otlet’s work, a movement that eventually fueled enough interest to prompt development of the Mundaneum museum in Mons.
Today, the new Mundaneum reveals tantalizing glimpses of a Web that might have been. Long rows of catalog drawers hold millions of Otlet’s index cards, pointing the way into a back-room archive brimming with books, posters, photos, newspaper clippings and all kinds of other artifacts. A team of full-time archivists have managed to catalog less than 10 percent of the collection.
The archive’s sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the limits of Otlet’s original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos of the Web.
“I think Otlet would have felt lost with the Internet,” said his biographer, Françoise Levie. Even with a small army of professional librarians, the original Mundaneum could never have accommodated the sheer volume of information produced on the Web today.
“I don’t think it could have scaled up,” Mr. Rayward said. “It couldn’t even scale up to meet the demands of the paper-based world he was living in.”
Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet’s version of hypertext held a few important advantages over today’s Web. For one thing, he saw a smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.
Otlet also saw the possibilities of social networks, of letting users “participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.” While he very likely would have been flummoxed by the anything-goes environment of Facebook or MySpace, Otlet saw some of the more productive aspects of social networking — the ability to trade messages, participate in discussions and work together to collect and organize documents.
Some scholars believe Otlet also foresaw something like the Semantic Web, the emerging framework for subject-centric computing that has been gaining traction among computer scientists like Mr. Berners-Lee. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just to draw static links between documents, but also to map out conceptual relationships between facts and ideas. “The Semantic Web is rather Otlet-ish,” said Michael Buckland, a professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
Critics of the Semantic Web say it relies too heavily on expert programmers to create ontologies (formalized descriptions of concepts and relationships) that will let computers exchange data with one another more easily. The Semantic Web “may be useful, but it is bound to fail,” Dr. Buckland said, adding, “It doesn’t scale because nobody will provide enough labor to build it.”
The same criticism could have been leveled against the Mundaneum. Just as Otlet’s vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world’s knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale.
The curators of today’s Mundaneum hope the museum avoids its predecessor’s fate. Although the museum has consistently managed to secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors.
“The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum,” said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. “People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?”
Striving to broaden its appeal, the museum stages regular exhibits of posters, photographs and contemporary art. And while only a trickle of tourists make their way to the little museum in Mons, the town may yet find its way onto the technological history map. Later this year, a new corporate citizen plans to open a data center on the edge of town: Google.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Re: Gordon director notes/letter here, please post
That's a good place for the letter---
please use this version below, thanks
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Apple Hiring for Advanced Multi-touch Displays
Written by Arnold Kim
A new job description posted by Apple on Monday, May 12th reveals that Apple is seeking an engineer to "lead the engineering activities to develop the new process and design for the multi-touch panel used in Apple products. This individual will serve as a focal point in the designing and the process development of advanced multi-touch panels from the concept to the product ramp."
Responsibilities include designing and developing new multi-touch panels for high volume production, and the candidate should have experience in the flat panel industry. Another job description reveals that some of these hires are entering into a newly created "Panel Process & Optics Group" at Apple which is responsible for future flat panel designs.
While the fruits of these specific employees' efforts won't likely be seen for years, it has been well established that Apple has long been been working on advanced multi-touch displays. Based on this job description and previous patent applications, it is clear that Apple's intentions are beyond the multi-touch display that currently resides on the iPhone and iPod touch. Advanced multi-touch gesturing patents have shown Apple's efforts to incorporate new gestures into Mac OS X itself. Simple multi-touch has already made its way into the trackpad of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.
Apple has also been rumored to be working on a mini-tablet project which may incorporate more advanced multi-touch recognition over the existing iPhone and iPod touch.
U. of Okla. freshman, 19, elected mayor of Muskogee
MUSKOGEE, Okla. (AP) — A 19-year-old freshman at the University of Oklahoma was elected mayor Tuesday of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in the northeastern part of the state.
With all precincts reporting, John Tyler Hammons won with 70 percent of the vote over former Mayor Hershel Ray McBride, said Muskogee County Election Board Secretary Bill Bull.
"The public placing their trust in me is the greatest, humbling and most awesome experience I've ever had in my life," said Hammons, who is from Muskogee but attends the university in Norman.
The two candidates squared off in a runoff election for the nonpartisan post after neither secured 50 percent of the vote in a six-person election April 1.
Hammons, who will be sworn in next week, said he plans to continue his college education but expects to transfer to a school closer to Muskogee.
"Being elected does not change my desire to continue my education," he said. "We will schedule our time in an appropriate fashion so that I can be mayor and stay in school."
Hammons replaces Wren Stratton, who decided not to seek re-election after one term.
The mayor leads the nine-member city council and serves as a voting member. Hammons said a key to his platform that resonated with voters was openness of government and keeping citizens better informed of city operations.
"I think that's been a detriment to the trust of the citizens of Muskogee," he said. "Once we have that trust, we can solve any other problem."
With all precincts reporting, John Tyler Hammons won with 70 percent of the vote over former Mayor Hershel Ray McBride, said Muskogee County Election Board Secretary Bill Bull.
"The public placing their trust in me is the greatest, humbling and most awesome experience I've ever had in my life," said Hammons, who is from Muskogee but attends the university in Norman.
The two candidates squared off in a runoff election for the nonpartisan post after neither secured 50 percent of the vote in a six-person election April 1.
Hammons, who will be sworn in next week, said he plans to continue his college education but expects to transfer to a school closer to Muskogee.
"Being elected does not change my desire to continue my education," he said. "We will schedule our time in an appropriate fashion so that I can be mayor and stay in school."
Hammons replaces Wren Stratton, who decided not to seek re-election after one term.
The mayor leads the nine-member city council and serves as a voting member. Hammons said a key to his platform that resonated with voters was openness of government and keeping citizens better informed of city operations.
"I think that's been a detriment to the trust of the citizens of Muskogee," he said. "Once we have that trust, we can solve any other problem."
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Re: Somebody lost their hat playing Hold Em
Oh. That's mine!
Sent from my iPhone
On May 14, 2008, at 6:36 PM, iPhone Miguel <i3128042440@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Last time we played someone left their stocking cap (and their
> cash). Does this belong to anybody? Next poker night soon... Please
> forward to those not on this email... Cheers everybody
>
> Peace.
>
> /\\/\\
>
> <photo.jpg>
>
>
>
> /\\/\\
>
> Sent from iPhone
>
> i3128042440@gmail.com
>
> +1-312-804-2440
>
> Chicago IL
>
>
>
> Querer es poder.
Somebody lost their hat playing Hold Em
Does this belong to anybody? Next poker night soon... Please forward
to those not on this email... Cheers everybody
Peace.
/\\/\\
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Earthquake?
My radio-alarm clock reported it to my sleepy head. I thought I was still dreaming. Usually the snooze button gets hit pretty good within 10-15 seconds, but in this case I had to give WBBM more air time as I poorly rearranged my bed sheets to cover myself, and feet. The news continued to talk of the number 5.2. 5.2!?! What? When? Last night? I couldn't remember. It did not seem possible. Callers called in with their own accounts of "picture frames flying off the wall" and "mattresses rumbling off the bed" and blah blah blah. I'd never slept better. Curiosity got the best of me and I inspected all glassware around the house. Nothing seemed to have moved at all. A day passed. And again, I tried to remember if I felt anything. Perhaps I may have had a nightmare. Though I always have nightmares. All of a sudden, an image popped in my head. It was an image of our nice rug we have at home, and it was torn at the edge, burnt to a singed crisp at the ends--ruined forever. A family heirloom, gone. My heart sank at the thought of this image. Again, and with the thought of this image, I had a moment of deja vu. I have 'thought' this before! But when? Where? How? Ah yes! It was from a day ago! At 4 am! ...or whenever it was... When the earth decided to rumble a couple hundred miles south of Chicago! This is my (lame) account of the Chicago Earthquake. I should have hit the snooze button, as I always do. Though, I must admit, I am now just about ready for anything. I just hope I am awake when it happens. Take care everybody and watch out for wide open gaps in the earth.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Friday, April 11, 2008
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Friday, March 21, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Room for bigger Panel
about organic foods/eating well, and advertise HB.com web offerings
(tbd)
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Stick em up !
Introducing the world's smallest gun that fires deadly 300mph bullets - but is just TWO inches long
Last updated at 16:39pm on 5th March 2008
Meet the pistol that fits in your pocket - and packs a hell of a punch.
The SwissMiniGun is the size of a key fob but fires tiny 270mph bullets powerful enough to kill at close range.
Officially the world's smallest working revolver, the gun is being marketed as a collector's item and measures just 2.16 inches long (5.5cm). It can fire real 4.53 bullets up to a range of 367ft (112m).
The stainless steel gun costs £3,000 although the manufacturers also produce extravagant, made-to-order versions made out of 18-carat gold with customised diamond studs which sell for up to £30,000.
It cannot be imported into the UK, and buyers in Switzerland and Europe must produce an import permit from police to obtain one.
The gun is banned from being imported into the US - because it's barrel is less than three inches, meaning it is deemed too small to qualify for sporting purposes.
Jonathan Spencer, consultant forensic scientist and firearms expert, said that although the gun, which fires bullets at a speed of 399 feet a second, was tiny, it could still prove fatal and in the eyes of the law was as dangerous as a machine gun.
He said: "The general threshold for perforating the skin is about 330 feet a second.
"Apart from bone, skin offers the greatest resistance to penetration. If it can pass through the skin it is potentially lethal, even if the bullets are small.
"If you shoved something 3mm across into someone's chest you could kill them. It's the same with these bullets, they could penetrate the heart.
"It is capable of killing someone. Under section 5 of the Firearms Act it would be a prohibited weapon. It would be on the same scale as a machine gun."
The gun shoots 2.34 mm calibre rim fire ammunition especially developed for it as the smallest rim fire ammunition in the world.
It weighs in at just 0.7oz (19.8grams) and fires live and blank ammunition.
The gun is the first product of the SwissMiniGun company, a gunsmiths based at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
Owner Paul Erard said that since the product's launch three years ago, the firm had sold around 300 of the guns, mainly to collectors in the Middle and Far East.
He said: "We are producing in very small quantities - perhaps 25 gold guns and 100 steel guns a year, and there is a six month waiting list to get one.
"We will make whatever the customer wishes for. The most expensive version we have sold cost £30,000 and was covered in diamonds and came with a gold chain."
Other bespoke finishes available include ebony grips, hand engraved grips, gold grips with diamonds or collared precious stones.
Mr Erard said that although the double action revolver is similar in appearance to a Colt Python full-size weapon, it was actually based on a Swiss-made revolver.
In September 2006 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives(ATF) in New York issued a warning about the gun after being alerted by a police officer who spotted it on a website.
Special Agent William McMahon said the gun was so small it could pass for a key fob, and warned it made the perfect stealth weapon for serious criminals.
But Mr Erard denied the gun was deadly and said it was only a tenth as powerful as some air guns.
"Since September 11 there has been a lot of paranoia in America", he said.
"It is ridiculous. Why would criminals want my gun when you can go out and buy a Kalashnikov there already?"
A Guinness World Records spokesman confirmed the gun held the record as the word's smallest working revolver.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Do you love Facebook? Well, they're hiring.
http://www.facebook.com/jobs/index.php
- Medical, dental and vision plans with no premium for employees
- 401(k) plan
- 21 vacation days per year, plus 8 company holidays
- Day care subsidy for parents
- Complimentary catered breakfast, lunch and dinner daily
- Dry cleaning and laundry service onsite
- Free downtown parking permit
- Subsidized gym membership
- $600/month housing subsidy if you live within one mile of the office
- Up to 4 months paid parental leave
- Your option of 15" Apple MacBook Pro or IBM ThinkPad with large screen LCD monitor
I like this position (too bad I am a writer):
Product Designer
Facebook is looking for an experienced Product Designer to be a key member in a very small team of designers. This position is part of the engineering organization so candidates must be able to write the code to build what they design. The position is full-time and reports to the Director of Product Management. The position is based in our main office in downtown Palo Alto, CA.
Responsibilities:
- Be at the intersection of product and engineering to prototype, design and build new features for an audience of millions
- Design and ship products of the highest quality with the clean consistent style that Facebook is known for
- Implement and extend the style guidelines with the rest of the design team
Requirements:
- Strong portfolio featuring interaction design samples
- Expertise in PHP, Unix, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX
- 3+ years of experience building web or desktop applications
- Clear verbal communicator and detail oriented
- BS or BFA in any field
Bonus Points:
- Experience with user testing and complicated workflow design
- Portfolio includes self-started personal projects
- Solid taste in music a plus
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Monday, March 3, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Shopping for the Baby
As my wife shops online in search for the perfect wallpaper to adorn our soon-to-be baby room, I was also compelled to begin the search for those baby necessities, like wallpaper.
Check out this sweet pacifier I found on the interweb, got a good deal on that sucker too.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
.jpg)
Friday, February 22, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Future of video game industry taking shape at GDC
Posted by Daniel Terdiman @ c|net News.com
If ever there was a time for a famous futurist to be giving a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference, this is it.
When Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near and one of the most noted futurists around, takes the stage at GDC 2008 in San Francisco on Thursday to talk about "the next 20 years of gaming," he'll be weighing in at a moment in the industry's existence when the lines between games and Hollywood and advertising are blurring, when the term "gamer" encompasses 75-year-old grandmothers and when the barrier to entry to being a developer has never been smaller.
"I think the Kurzweil keynote should be very interesting," said Ron Meiners, community manager for the virtual world platform developer, Multiverse Network. "He's a very original thinker, and I'm curious as to his take on the gaming industry, how games fit into people's lives, (and) how games are changing people's lives."
One thing that strikes me about how video games are intersecting with people's lives in 2008, and it was made abundantly clear over the Christmas holidays, when it was simply impossible to find a Nintendo Wii for sale anywhere, is that finally, the medium is truly mainstream.
And while there will always be a significant segment of the industry that caters to and is serviced by hard-core gamers, what's becoming evident is that there's almost no one who is left out of what video gaming is today. And for those who are left out, that may not be true as the years progress. I suspect that that is something Kurzweil will touch on, at least briefly.
"It's a very exciting time in the game industry, in that we have this growing recognition of the important of casual and family-oriented content," said Jamil Moledina, the director of GDC. "You're seeing it in the $60 packaged (games) and in the $10 downloads. It's a perfect storm of factors poised to really expand the game industry."
One example of that, Moledina suggested, is the explosion of gamer-created content and social networking in online gamer communities like Microsoft's Xbox Live.
That rationale may well be why GDC's first keynote speaker, on Wednesday, will be Microsoft corporate vice president John Schappert, who will give a talk titled, "A future wide open: Unleashing the creative community."
For Moledina, organizing what is almost certain to be the biggest GDC ever--last year's event drew 16,000 people, he said, and it is expected to grow this year--is a huge job. There are hundreds of panel discussions scheduled, a huge trade show and, as always, GDC will actually be made up of several different events that are linked together throughout the week.
On Monday and Tuesday, the events will include several "summits," such as those on casual games, independent games, game outsourcing, and virtual worlds. As well, there's GDC Mobile, which focuses on games for mobile devices.
GDC: "Now there's a circus that goes on"
But with the demise of E3--formerly the world's biggest video game show--as a major event, GDC is now taking on an increasingly important role to publishers as a place to showcase their games, even if they do it outside the auspices of the conference itself.
"It used to be that GDC was just about going and listening to developers talk about the craft of making video games, said Brian Crescente, the editor of the influential video game blog, Kotaku.com. "That still happens, but now there's a circus that goes on, a halo, that surrounds GDC. It's essentially like a mini-E3."
That means many publishers and hardware developers are scheduling events in venues near GDC's home at San Francisco's Moscone Center that are unofficial but hard to ignore for game journalists or analysts who need to keep up on the latest and greatest.
"They're contacting me and saying, 'You're going to GDC,' they know journalists are going to be there, and they're taking advantage of that," Crescente said. "From my perspective, it's nice, because I get to see these things, but it also waters down the message of GDC."
For its part, he added, GDC organizer "CMP is sort of fighting to prevent that from happening, but it's hard."
Another interesting phenomenon, at least to longtime GDC attendees, is how the conference's now-permanent move to San Francisco has affected the social dynamics of the event.
For years, GDC was held in San Jose, Calif., at that city's convention center in the heart of its downtown. For the last few years, the conference has bounced back and forth between San Francisco and San Jose, but is now settled in the former.
"It still feels transplanted and uprooted after leaving San Jose," said Michael Steele, vice president of product development for C3L3B Digital (pronounced "celeb"), a start-up working on online games for the entertainment industry. "It will be a few more years until the new social patterns are established or settled. That makes it a little more exhausting and harder for the social connections to happen. (There's) no Fairmont (hotel) lobby, multiple buildings are far apart, multiple hotels are far apart, (and the) hustle-bustle of downtown (San Francisco) versus the relative quiet of San Jose."
And that's vital because GDC is always as much about the relationships and deals struck in the hallways and hotels as about what goes on inside the convention itself.
The Hollywood angle
Still, to Steele--who in addition to being a longtime GDC attendee is also among the guiding forces, as an advisory committee member, of the Austin Game Developers Conference, which is held in the fall--the content at GDC is very much indicative of the state of the video game industry.
"I see a trend that is continuing," he said, "the maturation of the game industry, and the cross-pollination with other industries as our target markets evolve...We used to have a lot of cross-pollination with Hollywood. It's still there, of course, but now we're seeing (that) with Madison Avenue...As games achieve more cultural relevancy in the West, we're getting the ad folks stepping in and learning about how we do things--e.g., how they can reach our audience. So GDC tends to be a nice place to see where those bellwethers are going."
To Moledina, two of the major industry bellwethers these days are Nintendo and Harmonix, the companies behind the Wii and Guitar Hero, which have both introduced new game controllers that have lured in huge new audiences.
"During the (recent Hollywood) writers' striker, we saw late-night hosts playing Guitar Hero," Moledina said. "There's certainly a greater knowledge and understanding that games can be a much more diverse art form. And that's the thing that the Wii has so successfully demonstrated....Harmonix and Nintendo are changing the perception of what hardware and casual accessories can do."
Yet some of the most impressive innovations on display during this year's GDC are likely to be aimed at the hard-core gamer market.
The one I think I'm most excited to see is LucasArts' forthcoming Star Wars: Force Unleashed, which is said to feature several ground-breaking technological advances that herald a future in which video games are more realistic than ever. Among them are technologies that make physics more life-like, as well as artificial intelligence that makes game play different every time.
As always, I'm also excited about this year's Game Design Challenge, a panel during which leading developers face off with concepts for a new game based on an unusual topic. This year, the topic is an "inter-species" game, that is, one that could be played by humans and another species. Past topics have included games about love, games that could win the Nobel Peace Prize and games based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
In some ways, it's hard to know before heading to the conference what will be the best events and content, as there is simply so much. This will be my fifth GDC, and I'm always excited to talk to the friends I've made during the event in years past, and to attend the best panels.
Of course, it is nearly impossible to attend everything, as many of the best sessions are scheduled against each other, and then there's the small matter of eating--and sleeping, since some of the best get-togethers are in the evening.
But as thousands and thousands of game industry people flow into San Francisco this week, there can be little doubt that the ideas that will dramatically change the way people the world over interact with games--and entertainment in general--will be in evidence. And that makes GDC among the most relevant conferences still going today.
Still, as the industry prepares to head to GDC, there's one well-known member of the community who won't be there.
To Peter Moore, formerly the head of Microsoft's Xbox division and now president of Electronic Arts' EA Sports division, GDC, while a vibrant event for industry innovation, is hardly the place for executives like him.
If ever there was a time for a famous futurist to be giving a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference, this is it.
When Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near and one of the most noted futurists around, takes the stage at GDC 2008 in San Francisco on Thursday to talk about "the next 20 years of gaming," he'll be weighing in at a moment in the industry's existence when the lines between games and Hollywood and advertising are blurring, when the term "gamer" encompasses 75-year-old grandmothers and when the barrier to entry to being a developer has never been smaller.
"I think the Kurzweil keynote should be very interesting," said Ron Meiners, community manager for the virtual world platform developer, Multiverse Network. "He's a very original thinker, and I'm curious as to his take on the gaming industry, how games fit into people's lives, (and) how games are changing people's lives."
One thing that strikes me about how video games are intersecting with people's lives in 2008, and it was made abundantly clear over the Christmas holidays, when it was simply impossible to find a Nintendo Wii for sale anywhere, is that finally, the medium is truly mainstream.
And while there will always be a significant segment of the industry that caters to and is serviced by hard-core gamers, what's becoming evident is that there's almost no one who is left out of what video gaming is today. And for those who are left out, that may not be true as the years progress. I suspect that that is something Kurzweil will touch on, at least briefly.
"It's a very exciting time in the game industry, in that we have this growing recognition of the important of casual and family-oriented content," said Jamil Moledina, the director of GDC. "You're seeing it in the $60 packaged (games) and in the $10 downloads. It's a perfect storm of factors poised to really expand the game industry."
One example of that, Moledina suggested, is the explosion of gamer-created content and social networking in online gamer communities like Microsoft's Xbox Live.
That rationale may well be why GDC's first keynote speaker, on Wednesday, will be Microsoft corporate vice president John Schappert, who will give a talk titled, "A future wide open: Unleashing the creative community."
For Moledina, organizing what is almost certain to be the biggest GDC ever--last year's event drew 16,000 people, he said, and it is expected to grow this year--is a huge job. There are hundreds of panel discussions scheduled, a huge trade show and, as always, GDC will actually be made up of several different events that are linked together throughout the week.
On Monday and Tuesday, the events will include several "summits," such as those on casual games, independent games, game outsourcing, and virtual worlds. As well, there's GDC Mobile, which focuses on games for mobile devices.
GDC: "Now there's a circus that goes on"
But with the demise of E3--formerly the world's biggest video game show--as a major event, GDC is now taking on an increasingly important role to publishers as a place to showcase their games, even if they do it outside the auspices of the conference itself.
"It used to be that GDC was just about going and listening to developers talk about the craft of making video games, said Brian Crescente, the editor of the influential video game blog, Kotaku.com. "That still happens, but now there's a circus that goes on, a halo, that surrounds GDC. It's essentially like a mini-E3."
That means many publishers and hardware developers are scheduling events in venues near GDC's home at San Francisco's Moscone Center that are unofficial but hard to ignore for game journalists or analysts who need to keep up on the latest and greatest.
"They're contacting me and saying, 'You're going to GDC,' they know journalists are going to be there, and they're taking advantage of that," Crescente said. "From my perspective, it's nice, because I get to see these things, but it also waters down the message of GDC."
For its part, he added, GDC organizer "CMP is sort of fighting to prevent that from happening, but it's hard."
Another interesting phenomenon, at least to longtime GDC attendees, is how the conference's now-permanent move to San Francisco has affected the social dynamics of the event.
For years, GDC was held in San Jose, Calif., at that city's convention center in the heart of its downtown. For the last few years, the conference has bounced back and forth between San Francisco and San Jose, but is now settled in the former.
"It still feels transplanted and uprooted after leaving San Jose," said Michael Steele, vice president of product development for C3L3B Digital (pronounced "celeb"), a start-up working on online games for the entertainment industry. "It will be a few more years until the new social patterns are established or settled. That makes it a little more exhausting and harder for the social connections to happen. (There's) no Fairmont (hotel) lobby, multiple buildings are far apart, multiple hotels are far apart, (and the) hustle-bustle of downtown (San Francisco) versus the relative quiet of San Jose."
And that's vital because GDC is always as much about the relationships and deals struck in the hallways and hotels as about what goes on inside the convention itself.
The Hollywood angle
Still, to Steele--who in addition to being a longtime GDC attendee is also among the guiding forces, as an advisory committee member, of the Austin Game Developers Conference, which is held in the fall--the content at GDC is very much indicative of the state of the video game industry.
"I see a trend that is continuing," he said, "the maturation of the game industry, and the cross-pollination with other industries as our target markets evolve...We used to have a lot of cross-pollination with Hollywood. It's still there, of course, but now we're seeing (that) with Madison Avenue...As games achieve more cultural relevancy in the West, we're getting the ad folks stepping in and learning about how we do things--e.g., how they can reach our audience. So GDC tends to be a nice place to see where those bellwethers are going."
To Moledina, two of the major industry bellwethers these days are Nintendo and Harmonix, the companies behind the Wii and Guitar Hero, which have both introduced new game controllers that have lured in huge new audiences.
"During the (recent Hollywood) writers' striker, we saw late-night hosts playing Guitar Hero," Moledina said. "There's certainly a greater knowledge and understanding that games can be a much more diverse art form. And that's the thing that the Wii has so successfully demonstrated....Harmonix and Nintendo are changing the perception of what hardware and casual accessories can do."
Yet some of the most impressive innovations on display during this year's GDC are likely to be aimed at the hard-core gamer market.
The one I think I'm most excited to see is LucasArts' forthcoming Star Wars: Force Unleashed, which is said to feature several ground-breaking technological advances that herald a future in which video games are more realistic than ever. Among them are technologies that make physics more life-like, as well as artificial intelligence that makes game play different every time.
As always, I'm also excited about this year's Game Design Challenge, a panel during which leading developers face off with concepts for a new game based on an unusual topic. This year, the topic is an "inter-species" game, that is, one that could be played by humans and another species. Past topics have included games about love, games that could win the Nobel Peace Prize and games based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
In some ways, it's hard to know before heading to the conference what will be the best events and content, as there is simply so much. This will be my fifth GDC, and I'm always excited to talk to the friends I've made during the event in years past, and to attend the best panels.
Of course, it is nearly impossible to attend everything, as many of the best sessions are scheduled against each other, and then there's the small matter of eating--and sleeping, since some of the best get-togethers are in the evening.
But as thousands and thousands of game industry people flow into San Francisco this week, there can be little doubt that the ideas that will dramatically change the way people the world over interact with games--and entertainment in general--will be in evidence. And that makes GDC among the most relevant conferences still going today.
Still, as the industry prepares to head to GDC, there's one well-known member of the community who won't be there.
To Peter Moore, formerly the head of Microsoft's Xbox division and now president of Electronic Arts' EA Sports division, GDC, while a vibrant event for industry innovation, is hardly the place for executives like him.
Game creators look to the future
By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website
The developers of some of the world's most popular video games are in San Francisco this week to discuss the future of the industry. They will look back on one of their most successful years and discuss tackling the challenges ahead.
Jamil Moledina, director of the Game Developers' Conference said: "We had an incredible banner year in 2007 with games like Bioshock, Halo 3 and Uncharted.
In the US the industry's revenues grew 43%, with software sales up a third on the previous year.
Speaking to BBC News, Mr Moledina said: "It's often dangerous to make predictions about the future but the industry has taken on a sense of casualisation."
In this sense casual games are those that people can play and complete in minutes rather than hours and are aimed at children, women and older people. Many of the titles prepared for Nintendo's Wii are casual games.
He added: "There's definitely an increasing interest in approaching that larger audience of media consumers."
New markets
Traditionally the games industry has concentrated on its core audience. Titles like Halo 3, which pulled in the biggest ever earnings for an entertainment release in a single day, showed that the hard core gamer remained a potent market.
FROM THE DOT.LIFE BLOG
How on earth will the games industry surpass last year's commercial and critical high?
Darren Waters, technology editor BBC News website
Read Darren's thoughts in full
"But the success of the Wii, RockBand, Guitar Hero and casual games point to new areas of growth," added Mr Moledina.
For instance, he said, Guitar Hero games made more than $820m at retail, a record for any single franchise in any one year.
Mr Moledina added: "The Wii has re-proven the point that five to 95 year olds like playing games."
Veteran game designer Sid Meier will speak at the conference to shed light on "the key things you need to capture the interest of the public at large".
"We have Facebook here talking about how they have managed to get so many eyeballs playing games in such a short space of time," he said.
Developers and publishers were looking at this area very closely, he added.
But, he said, these new developments would not change everything. "Not all games are going to be casual. There's still going to be a huge market for the core base which drives everything."
One of the games aimed squarely at the core audience in 2008 is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which will be demoed at the week-long conference.
Gaining control
The event will also feature talk about the future of the human computer interface.
"Game worlds are a fairly complex universe, however the controllers we have are often a bit intimidating," said Mr Moledina.
Emotiv systems will be showing off its latest headset that uses sensors to detect brain waves to allow gamers to control characters and objects in a game world.
Mobile gaming is starting to be taken seriously
Israeli firm 3DV will be demonstrating its camera technology that can detect depth of movement.
Gamers can swing an imaginary golf club or interact with a 3D world just by using their hands and arms and without the need for a controller.
"A lot of people experiment with different ways to get into the game; to convert a fairly complex way that humans think and behave and have that map in a natural way to a complex game world," explained Mr Moledina.
The conference also features a strong mobile gaming element.
"We are seeing more and more big game companies take the space seriously. The sea change is that traditional game developers are less snarky about mobile and casual than they were because of the power of phones today."
Microsoft's head of Live services, John Schappert, will give one of the conference's keynotes, where he is expected to unveil new features for the Xbox Live service.
"Microsoft hasn't delivered a keynote for two years so it will be interesting to see what they have for us," said Mr Moledina.
Technology editor, BBC News website
The developers of some of the world's most popular video games are in San Francisco this week to discuss the future of the industry. They will look back on one of their most successful years and discuss tackling the challenges ahead.
Jamil Moledina, director of the Game Developers' Conference said: "We had an incredible banner year in 2007 with games like Bioshock, Halo 3 and Uncharted.
In the US the industry's revenues grew 43%, with software sales up a third on the previous year.
Speaking to BBC News, Mr Moledina said: "It's often dangerous to make predictions about the future but the industry has taken on a sense of casualisation."
In this sense casual games are those that people can play and complete in minutes rather than hours and are aimed at children, women and older people. Many of the titles prepared for Nintendo's Wii are casual games.
He added: "There's definitely an increasing interest in approaching that larger audience of media consumers."
New markets
Traditionally the games industry has concentrated on its core audience. Titles like Halo 3, which pulled in the biggest ever earnings for an entertainment release in a single day, showed that the hard core gamer remained a potent market.
FROM THE DOT.LIFE BLOG
How on earth will the games industry surpass last year's commercial and critical high?
Darren Waters, technology editor BBC News website
Read Darren's thoughts in full
"But the success of the Wii, RockBand, Guitar Hero and casual games point to new areas of growth," added Mr Moledina.
For instance, he said, Guitar Hero games made more than $820m at retail, a record for any single franchise in any one year.
Mr Moledina added: "The Wii has re-proven the point that five to 95 year olds like playing games."
Veteran game designer Sid Meier will speak at the conference to shed light on "the key things you need to capture the interest of the public at large".
"We have Facebook here talking about how they have managed to get so many eyeballs playing games in such a short space of time," he said.
Developers and publishers were looking at this area very closely, he added.
But, he said, these new developments would not change everything. "Not all games are going to be casual. There's still going to be a huge market for the core base which drives everything."
One of the games aimed squarely at the core audience in 2008 is Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which will be demoed at the week-long conference.
Gaining control
The event will also feature talk about the future of the human computer interface.
"Game worlds are a fairly complex universe, however the controllers we have are often a bit intimidating," said Mr Moledina.
Emotiv systems will be showing off its latest headset that uses sensors to detect brain waves to allow gamers to control characters and objects in a game world.
Mobile gaming is starting to be taken seriously
Israeli firm 3DV will be demonstrating its camera technology that can detect depth of movement.
Gamers can swing an imaginary golf club or interact with a 3D world just by using their hands and arms and without the need for a controller.
"A lot of people experiment with different ways to get into the game; to convert a fairly complex way that humans think and behave and have that map in a natural way to a complex game world," explained Mr Moledina.
The conference also features a strong mobile gaming element.
"We are seeing more and more big game companies take the space seriously. The sea change is that traditional game developers are less snarky about mobile and casual than they were because of the power of phones today."
Microsoft's head of Live services, John Schappert, will give one of the conference's keynotes, where he is expected to unveil new features for the Xbox Live service.
"Microsoft hasn't delivered a keynote for two years so it will be interesting to see what they have for us," said Mr Moledina.
Navy Scores Direct Hit on Spy Satellite
Navy Scores Direct Hit on Spy Satellite
Feb 21 07:01 AM US/Eastern
By ROBERT BURNS and LOLITA C. BALDOR
Associated Press Writers
HONOLULU (AP) - A U.S. Navy cruiser blasted a disabled spy satellite with a pinpoint missile strike that achieved the main mission of exploding a tank of toxic fuel 130 miles above the Pacific Ocean, defense officials said.
Destroying the satellite's onboard tank of about 1,000 pounds of hydrazine fuel was the primary goal, and a senior defense official close to the mission said Thursday that it appears the tank was destroyed, and the strike with a specially designed missile was a complete success.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered the shootdown, which came late Wednesday as he began an eight-day, around-the-world trip on which he likely will face questions about the mission.
The elaborate intercept may trigger worries from some international leaders, who could see it as a thinly disguised attempt to test an anti-satellite weapon—one that could take out other nation's orbiting communications and spy spacecraft.
Within hours of the reported success, China said it was on the alert for possible harmful fallout from the shootdown and urged Washington to promptly release data on the action.
"China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at news conference in Beijing. "China requests the U.S. to fulfill its international obligations in real earnest and provide to the international community necessary information and relevant data in a timely and prompt way so that relevant countries can take precautions."
While Pentagon officials stressed that the satellite strike was a one- time incident, it certainly will spin off massive amounts of data and research that can be studied by the military as it works to improve its missile defense technologies.
Officials had expressed cautious optimism that the missile would hit the bus-sized satellite, but they were less certain of hitting the smaller, more worrisome fuel tank.
In a statement released after the satellite was shot, the Pentagon said, "Confirmation that the fuel tank has been fragmented should be available within 24 hours." But a short time later, several defense officials close to the situation said it appeared the fuel tank was hit. One said observers saw what appeared to be an explosion. Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the results had not been formally documented at the time they spoke.
Because the satellite was orbiting at a relatively low altitude at the time it was hit by the missile, debris will begin to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere immediately, the Pentagon statement said.
"Nearly all of the debris will burn up on re-entry within 24-48 hours and the remaining debris should re-enter within 40 days," it said.
Gates approved the missile launch at about 1:40 p.m. EST, while en route from Washington to Hawaii. Within nine hours—at 10:26 p.m. EST—the USS Lake Erie, fired the SM-3 missile originally designed to knock down incoming missiles rather than orbiting satellites.
It hit the satellite about three minutes later as the spacecraft traveled in polar orbit at more than 17,000 mph.
The Lake Erie and two other Navy warships, as well as the missile and other components, were modified in a hurry-up project started in January. The missile alone cost nearly $10 million, and officials estimated that the total cost of the project was at least $30 million.
The operation was so extraordinary, with such intense international publicity and political ramifications, that Gates—not a military commander down the chain of command—made the decision to pull the trigger.
Gates had arrived in Hawaii less than two hours before the missile was launched. His press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said Gates had a conference call during his flight with Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of Strategic Command, and Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They told him that "the conditions were ripe for an attempt, and that is when the secretary gave the go-ahead to take the shot, and wished them good luck," Morrell said.
At 10:35 p.m. EST, Gates spoke to both generals again and "was informed that the mission was a success, that the missile had intercepted the decaying satellite, and the secretary was obviously very pleased to learn that," said Morrell.
Adm. Timothy J. Keating, chief of U.S. Pacific Command, told reporters shortly before the strike that he made calls to a number of international leaders to alert them to the mission. He said none said they had concerns, but he acknowledged he did not speak to the Chinese.
China and Russia both expressed concerns about the shootdown in advance, saying it could harm security in outer space.
The government organized hazardous materials teams, under the code name "Burnt Frost," to be flown to the site of any dangerous or otherwise sensitive debris that might land in the United States or elsewhere.
Also, six federal response groups regularly positioned across the country by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were alerted but had not been activated Wednesday, FEMA spokesman James McIntyre said before the missile launch. "These are purely precautionary and preparedness actions only," he said.
President Bush approved the shootdown mission last week, deciding it was important to destroy the toxic hydrazine fuel to prevent any possible injuries if the satellite came down in a populated area.
The three-stage Navy missile used for the mission has chalked up a high rate of success in a series of tests since 2002, in each case targeting a short- or medium-range ballistic missile, never a satellite. Modifications to the missile for the mission were completed in a matter of weeks, and Navy officials said the changes would be reversed once this satellite was down.
The government issued notices to aviators and mariners to remain clear of a section of the Pacific Ocean beginning at 10:30 p.m. EST Wednesday.
Having lost power shortly after it reached orbit in late 2006, the satellite was out of control and well below the altitude of a normal satellite. The Pentagon determined it should hit it with the missile just before it re-entered Earth's atmosphere, to minimize the amount of debris that would remain in space.
Left alone, the satellite would have hit Earth during the first week of March. About half of the 5,000-pound spacecraft was expected to survive its blazing descent through the atmosphere and would have scattered debris over several hundred miles.
___
Robert Burns reported from Washington, Lolita C. Baldor from Honolulu. Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Emotiv Company Overview
Emotiv Systems was founded in 2003 by four award-winning scientists and executives: internationally recognized neuroscientist Professor Allan Snyder, chip-design pioneer Neil Weste, and technology entrepreneurs Tan Le and Nam Do. These founders all shared the same inspiring vision: to introduce the immediacy of thought to the human-machine dialogue. Together they have developed a technology that utterly transforms the way we interact with computers.
While Emotiv is currently focusing on the electronic gaming industry, the applications for the Emotiv EPOC™ technology and interface span an amazing variety of potential industries -- interactive television, accessibility design, market research, medicine, even security. Plans for introducing Emotiv into these and other broad realms are already in the works.
It's an ambitious plan, and to back it up, Emotiv has assembled an outstanding group of people for its Board, Advisors, and Staff.
Brain-Reading Headset to Sell for $299
Wednesday February 20, 5:25 PM EST
NEW YORK (AP) — Hands cramping up from too many video games?
How about controlling games with your thoughts instead? Later this year, Emotiv Systems Inc. plans to start selling the $299 EPOC neuroheadset to let you do just that.
The headset's sensors are designed to detect conscious thoughts and expressions as well as "non-conscious emotions" by reading electrical signals around the brain, says the company, which demonstrated the wireless gadget at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
The company, which unveiled a prototype last year, says the headset can detect emotions such as anger, excitement and tension, as well as facial expressions and cognitive actions like pushing and pulling objects.
The headset will be sold with a game developed by Emotiv, but it can also be made to work with existing PC games, the company said. Users will also be able to access an online portal to play more games, chat or upload their own content such as music or photos.
Emotiv plans to work with IBM Corp. to explore applications beyond video gaming. The "brain computer interface" technology could transform not only gaming, but how humans and computers interact, said Paul Ledak, vice president of IBM's Digital Convergence business.
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