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  • 1 min read

You say tomato – I say tomahto

The street filled with tomatoes, midday, summer, light is halved like a tomato, its juice runs through the streets. In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen, it enters at lunchtime, takes its ease on countertops, among glasses, butter dishes, blue saltcellars. It sheds its own light, benign majesty. Unfortunately, we must murder it: the knife sinks into living flesh, red viscera a cool sun, profound, inexhaustible, populates the salads of Chile, happily, it is wed to the clear onion, and to celebrate the union we pour oil, essential child of the olive, onto its halved hemispheres, pepper adds its fragrance, salt, its magnetism; it is the wedding of the day, parsley hoists its flag, potatoes bubble vigorously, the aroma of the roast knocks at the door, it's time! come on! and, on the table, at the midpoint of summer, the tomato, star of earth, recurrent and fertile star, displays its convolutions, its canals, its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns, the tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness. By Pablo Neruda Technorati Tags: interesting, poetry

  • 2 min read

Pop!Tech Memes

Pop!Tech 2005 was a great conference, again. I made notes only when something struck me as interesting or memorable or quotable, so this list of memes is very quirky just based on my in-the-moment reactions!

  • " Barcode of Life" - Robert Hanner. My summary of this is that it is a specific gene sequence that can be found across a very wide spectrum of organisms, which has the characteristic that it is more or less the same in individuals from a single species and very different in individuals from different species. Such a sequence can be used to establish the borders between species. See Barcode of Life.

  • " Buy something, and get not only the thing, but the factory with which to build it." Robert Hanner. A metaphor for thinking about what makes life special - the thing can reproduce itself, hence it also acts like a factory. His company is ProtoLife.

  • " A right handed person, if they lose their right arm, will quickly become a left handed person. They will have no problem learning to use their left hand as well as they used to use their right hand."Todd Kuiken, discussing amputees and prosthetics. Also remember Jesse Sullivan, the patient who demonstrated an amazing new kind of prosthetic.

  • " Backing up the Biosphere" - Peter Diamandis, impresario extraordinaire, director of the X Prize. Describes vividly why the human race should work on establishing a presence in places beyond earth. It's the ultimate off-site storage for life. Also, take a look at the X Prize Store

  • " The day before something is a major breakthrough it was a crazy idea that would never work."Another meme from Peter Diamandis.

  • " Methane Hidrate", the ice that burns!

  • " Soon there will be more people living in Bombay than on the whole Australian continent.", Suketu Metha

  • " In Bombay there are sections with more than 1 million people per square mile!, also Suketu Metha.

  • " That's not a vision… that's a hallucination!", Bunker Roy, founder of the Barefoot College in India.

  • " Indians are the second smartest people on earth … after the Chinese!" - According to Bunker Roy, supposedly a comment made by Bill Gates in India. See Christian Science Monitor.

  • " Go from the Aha! to the So What?" Slogan of the Push Conference, a conference that some people are describing as the "new Pop!Tech"

(By the way, different folks blogged Pop!Tech in gory detail. Check out the front page for a list of bloggers.) Technorati Tags: poptech

  • 1 min read

It’s not all love and kisses

We all love Wikipedia - I know I do. I've sung it's praises to lots of people and have personally often looked stuff up in it and been satisfied. Still I can't help but be impressed with an article I came across written by Robert McHenry former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He's sick and tired of it and not going to take it any more :

"The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him." (from TechCentral Station)

Check it out, it's worth a read. What do you think? Technorati Tags: wikipedia

  • 1 min read

Apple Video iPod Strategy

For you Apple and iPod afficionados, here's an interesting article about what Apple might be up to, tying together various tantalizing hints into a good story:

"Apple's a shrewd operator. First, its spreads misinformation from the top - like how Steve Jobs famously slagged off media centre PCs in a conference call with financial analysts last year. "We might as well make it a toaster too," he said. "I want it to brown my bagels when I'm listening to my music," he said at the time. "And we're toying with refrigeration, too." (from APCMag)

  • 1 min read

More iPod stuff

Continuing my iPod thoughts, today I read that a lawsuit has been brought against Apple on the iPod nano screen scratching situation. So maybe there really is something going on. On my (recently dead) iPod, I did have plenty of mild scratching - I don 't know if the problem on the nano is any worse. I got to see one of the new Video iPods here at Pop!Tech. Another very impressive device from Apple. The screen is larger than you expect and the picture, watching a sitcom and listening to the audio over the ear buds, was remarkable! (BTW, in case you missed it, Walt Mossberg himself commented on my post recently about the iPod nano, clarifying that he didn't write about it because of my post. Duh.)

  • 1 min read

I am my own PR agency

Over the last week or so I've been working around the clock preparing for BlogBridge's appearance at the BlogOn 2005 conference in New York City. Contemplating this at the end of the first day, I have to say it's been a blast although quite different from what I've done in the past. This morning, before 7:00am I left my hotel on 23d Street for the half hour walk to the Copacabana. In my backpack was a computer, power supply, 250 1 page "sales sheets" (color fliers) and a bunch of business cards. I was headed for a 2 day conference where BlogBridge is being highlighted as one of Chris Shipley's BlogOn 2005 Innovators. An honor for us, and great visibility for BlogBridge. But the feeling was, "I am my own PR agency." Today was preceeded of two weeks of scrambling, tightening up the web site, the positioning, the FAQs. Pushing to get some last important refinements into the product. Finalizing the sales sheet, getting it printed at VistaPrint, dealing with a misprint and re-order. Preparing a series of Quicktime self running demos for when I wasn't at the demo station. Oh, yes, and it sas just me at the demo station the whole time It was a great day. I spoke with influential people. They listened and took notes. We had a big day of downloads. And I got universally positive feedback on what we are doing. Feels good!

  • 2 min read

Thinking about business models

Inquisitor is a really cool program that augments the search box in Safari (which for you heathens out there is the default Mac OS X web browser.) It's kind of hard to explain just what it does - it's kind of a magical word completion thingie that guesses, based on other searches and who knows what else , what you are going to search for. But I am not writing about Inquisitor, although I recommend it highly. Here's a post by it's author, Dave, who is trying to figure out how or whether he can make some money with his creation.

"Why am I considering pay-per-download? Well, one advantage is that it's far easier to do than a full-blown registration system. While the levy is very small, if everyone gives a little then everyone benefits. It seems more equitable that way. Alas, it is true that there's no solid way to enforce the levy. The software could be traded easily between friends or posted on an unauthorized website. The former I view as a form of viral marketing and the latter is traceable and can be dealt with as a clear-cut breach of license." (from David Watanabe's blog)

The question of when and how and how much to begin charging users of BlogBridge occupies me from time to time. Our core objective right now is to get BlogBridge into everybody's hands - everybody in our target market that is - so called "Infojunkies" or "Professionals." But this won't be forever. The beauty of a project such as this is that we can be clever, innovative or at least experimental so all new and different ideas are worth thinking about. Technorati Tags: blogbridge, businessmodel