Thursday, June 30, 2011
Visited Vizio
visited Vizio (you already saw that visit in a previous post) to learn more about 3D, then visited Oakley to learn more about the latest in 3D glasses (hint: they are selling far better than they expected, I learned from execs there, which shows that 3D TV is indeed taking off, just not with the tech press). While there I got a good look at a new custom printing technology they built, which shows how custom products can be in the future.
If you were watching my wife’s Facebook feed you’d know that we got lots of beach time, along with time at LegoLand and Disneyland too. Great times and my brain is buzzing with new ideas to bring back to my work at Rackspace.
Visited Dan Meis
He’s a world-famous architect who designs sports stadiums around the world. You’ll know his work if you see a baseball game in Seattle’s Safeco Field or a basketball game at Los Angeles’ Staples Center. I always am inspired by how big he thinks, which is why I started the conversation asking about something small he designed lately. Of course he switched the topic to discussing what he’s working on now: a soccer stadium for a future World Cup in Qatar.
TEDxBloomington -- Robert Scoble -- "The 2030 Class Is Arriving"
Robert Scoble co-authored Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers and is a well-known technology blogger/evangelist. He is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. He currently works for Rackspace where he is building a community called Building 43.
At TEDxBloomington, Scoble talks about how, today, we're about midway between his graduating class from the mid 1980s and that of babies being born today, that of 2030. Reviewing all the current technology that was unavailable during his education, he asks what the future will look like for these new babies, and suggests a series of ideas so we can help our children better prepare. He says "The future belongs to the geeks" and asks "Are we preparing our kids to be the geeks of the future?"
About TEDx In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxBloomington, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxBloomington event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.
Talkwheel: roundtable
One problem with many of the most popular social networking sites is that conversations are displayed linearly. This breaks up the discussion and can make it difficult to locate specific parts of a conversation. Talkwheel is changing this with its new user interface.
"Talkwheel is a real-time collaboration platform built around group discussion," explains Jeff Harris, Founder and CEO of Talkwheel. "We believe at Talkwheel that the core of collaboration is actually the discussion. All these companies out there are building a bunch of bells and whistles around the discussion model, but all have really neglected the actual discussion area. In the real world when we're with a group of people, we don't stand in a line and try to talk to each other. We sit around a roundtable and try to create this circular dynamic to get everyone involved...Talkwheel is really trying to keep this round table design and really capture the real world dynamic online."
In Talkwheel, each "wheel" has its own specific group, and you can filter the wheel by topic, time or users (coming soon). This eliminates the need to search through emails or scroll up and down forums to find the information that is most relevant to you. Groups can be private or public, and users can comment to the entire group or send individual, private messages to one other within the groups.
Talkwheel offers both a free social site as well as a version it hopes to sell to businesses. One feature set that has been particularly appealing to business users during beta testing is real-time analytics on all the information shared. "You can get sentiment analysis—what users like and what they don't like about different issues going on," says Harris, "so it's very helpful for HR. Companies are also using this to engage their customers on different focus groups, so you can get a really deep insight on what your employees and customers feel on different issues and topics."
Users can upload photos and videos to a discussion, and these items can be opened within the app, so users do not have to hop from page to page during a discussion. Talkwheel also plans to go mobile soon with apps for iPhone and Android devices.
"We wanted to make Talkwheel very, very viral," explains Harris, "so when you create a wheel, you can invite users who are registered or are unregistered. If I invited an unregistered user, all they have to do is click accept and it automatically registers them. They just type one password, and they're into Talkwheel.
Plizy
With so much video content online, navigating among all the options and choices can sometimes be overwhelming. Plizy recognizes this and is providing a solution that may change the way you watch and discover video on the Internet.
"We are a video discovery platform, so everything is cloud-based," explains Jonathan Benassaya, Founder and CEO of Plizy. "We have a cloud with a recommendation engine able to understand, from your video habits and your interests, [how] to create automatic channels tailored to what you do and what you like."
Plizy uses a variety of factors to learn what you like and recommends videos based on that information. "We have a patent pending recommendation engine," says Benassaya, "where we use three kinds of information. [We use] the social graph, obviously, but also we create your interest graph based on your Facebook and your Twitter account. So we try to understand if you like tech, if you like sports, if you like baseball, if you like Asia, etc...and above that, we use some algorithms. The most well known is collaborative filtering, which is the ability to recommend content based on your habits. It's a hybrid recommendation engine, so we don't use only your social graph."
The content that the service provides comes from a large and growing list of providers that Plizy hand picks—both public sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, and sites that provide original content, such as Revision3.
"As of today, we have more than 300 channels that we've picked on the web," says Benassaya, "which are the best web content so far. You can enjoy TED, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook at the same place. And we are adding something new in the coming days, which is the ability to download some content, so you will be able to download TED videos [for example] and watch them on the plane or the bus or in a train. So we're trying to push the experience, the discovery, and the access to the best content."
The company is also working on technology that will allow you to push content to just about any device you would use to watch videos. Unlike when using AirPlay, you will be able to continue using your tablet for other things while streaming content. "[The system] is cloud-based," explains Benassaya, "and the cloud can control two screens. That's why you have an entire communication between two screens."
Plizy plans to roll out a wealth of new features over the coming months as it expands from its current iPad app to other devices. "We help people discover the right content," says Benassaya, "because they want to discover things, but they don't have time for that. Plizy is here for this."
Viral Video: “The Muppets” Are Back (and I, For One, Am Thrilled)
As with my deep adoration of Barry Manilow, I am a closet fan of “The Muppets.”
They’re back in a new movie and, apparently, it’s still not easy being green.
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