Sep 30

Half Baked


Social Carnivore

Originally uploaded by RachelC.

One of the fun sessions this morning was Half-Baked. You’re given 10 minutes to design and plan a new company and then pitch it for prizes. We had mobile trackers, content networks, iPod hiring, recycling and more.

The winning entry was Space RocketCelebrity, a social networking, user generated, voting competition to send you and a celebrity into space.

My team came up with Social Carnivore (tagline – we don’t ask, we just take) a new industry to dis-disintermidediate the social data that is out there, aggregate it all and sell it off to the highest bidder. We were runners up for being the most scary of the ideas and for the best logo, seen here in its glory after Eric knocked it out in 2 minutes.

Sep 30

BarcampNYC2

So BarCamp NYC2 has started. Microsoft have opened up their offices for us, the coffee is here, the bagels and muffins are tasty and the first set of sessions have started. Looking at the attendee list, a cool mix of people.

Sep 29

NextFest Visit

Nextfest is on at the moment in New York and I took a few hours out this morning to wander round. Lots of photos to be uploaded and it’s well worth taking at look at Rocketboom which showcases one of my favourites, the pettable seals. C

ute, soft, furry, big eyes, pitiful sounds, you just want to pick one up and take it home. There were lots and lots of robots of all kinds, musical instruments, games, hybrid cars, and a robotic bartender that only served soft drinks at that time of day. I loved the DiamondTouch table and the demos, using it with Google Earth and having all the people round the table annoting was fun. I can see applications for interactive advertising in this.

I spent my time wondering round with a big grin, as I love this sort of interactive exhibitions (I love good Science Museums). I managed to escape before too many of the school parties arrived and completely crowded out the queues, so getting their early is a necessity. I guess it may be worse at the weekend with crowds.

Sep 28

BarCamp and DRM protest

For people in New York and not going to BarCamp, an alternative is a protest against DRM outside the Apple Store organised by the DefectiveByDesign group.

Kicking of a week of activities to raise awareness about DRM. FreeCulture. and DefectiveByDesign will be teaming up to help organize this action outside Apple’s flagship store in New York. Join us!

Hazmat suits will be there of course, as will special representatives from the RIAA and MPAA, who will help us debate the issues through the techniques of street theatre 🙂

All are welcome to join and make this a huge kick-off event to the weeks efforts against DRM. Add your name so we know you are coming.

Have some fun, and join the Hazmat crew cleaning up the Apple/Disney DRM mess that Steve Jobs has created.

Sep 28

CDX – a Roman game

Whilst in the UK, I ended up playing a BBC game based around their new series on Anccient Rome. The first episode is puzzle based, similar to a locked-room game – find the clues in the right order and work out what you need to do next. Extremly well shot and designed. If you’re in the UK you should give it a go, but it does not work outside due to licence rights.

Sep 27

Corporate Blogging Conference

On Monday, I presented at my first conference, a Corporate Blogging Conference run by BFI. It was more by default then anything else, as the organisers were contacted me originally to try and get hold of someone from the Guinness team who worked on their blog. In the end I gave a talk about the sort of legal things you have to think about when blogging as a corporate, or having employees blogging when they are identifiably working for your company. Overall I enjoyed the experience, now I need to think if I want to do it again.

There were some great talks. JP Rangaswami gave an overview of corporate blogging (It was good to here he’s moving onto what looks like a great job with BT). Alison Watterson reviewed how they established blogging in HP and managed to skillfully deflect a question about the current scandal with their board (she said their bloggers focus on areas of their expertise and board activities don’t fall into their subjects). None of the presentations appear to be online, they were all handed out as part of the pack for the delgates which they then used to follow along and take notes. A different crowd to the conferneces I normally go to, being focused entirely on corporates with some vary big blue chip names in there. I had to double check, just in case I was going to mention one of them as a bad case of corporate blogging. There were no laptops open to take notes (except for a few of hte speakers by the look of it), there was no wireless made available (despite the hotel providing it) and there were no photos being taken. I’d bought my camera along, but ended up not taking any of the attendees, based on my rule of thumb that if there are a crowd of cameras you are OK but if you are the only one, probably not a good idea as no one there expects it.

Sep 27

Cab rides and planning

I nipped back to London for a couple of days to present at a conference. For my trip back, I’d booked a car to pick me up – my normal behaviour the last few trips has been just to get a yellow cab. With the long wait to get through immigration and then a long queue for the cab, it has been taking me nearly 3 hours from landing to get home. Yesterday was completely different. The US immigration queue was the quickest I’d ever seen it, I was asked no questions at all by the agent/officer (whatever they are called); I only had hand luggage so no waiting for the carousel to start and I walked out of the airport to see a long queue of taxis but no people waiting. I was through so quickly that my booked car had not arrived. That’s the way it goes though.

For some reason, I had almost the exact same conversation with the cab drivers at both ends of the journey, all started by the driver,s not by me. This was a commentary (rant?) about the US attitude to cars and driving – they had the same opinion, which was not that complementary.

Sep 22

White and Nerdy

Al Yankovic’s latest song, White and Nerdy, is all over the blogs, obviously hitting a key demorgraphic. AOL pulled the ‘World Premiere’ as it had been leaked online already – there’s currently 21 entries on YouTube for the same video. By looking at the viral video charts today, 2 of the YouTube versions actually have higher links than the ‘official’ one on MySpace.

The video chart itself is interesting in that it often shows up the multiple versions of a single piece of content often on different netowrking sites, so you see stuff being popular on YouTube, then MySpace, then Google video, rolling in waves across the networks and back as different ‘groups’ get hold of them. Some one far better at coding than I could do some cool things with the data, showing the trends across the sites.

Sep 22

Moo Cards

Like many others, I’ve been taking a look at Moo cards and their integration with Flickr. Love the idea so I ordered the 10 card offer that is available for Flickr Pro users to give them a go. My current cards are Streetcards, with a Hugh illustration which always get a reaction. The sample set will give me chance to compare reactions.

moocards.JPG

Sep 19

PhoneCon

Jeneane ran an interesting experiment today…PhoneCon. It was a test of the scaleability of freeconferencecall.com to see if it really did scale up to 96 users for up to 6 hours. I only managed to get into the last 15 mintues but they were fun, with story telling and songs. The system seemed to work OK though.

phonecon-blank-731898.jpg

Sep 18

still alive…i think

I’m still here, although a little bit drowning under around 3000 emails to get through, plenty of blog posts to read, lots of illness and stress of trying to move countries.

Until I catch up, here’s a meta viral about virals. Saying something similar to what I said over here.

ADLAND Viral Cartoon.0.jpg

There’s even a video version. Ina small way, I find it funny.