Another year, another Menorca TechTalk hosted by Martin Varsavsky at his farm. Josh, Ribot, and I arrived on Friday night only to find the hotel we booked online wasn’t open until July, however all ended well (I suppose with 3 guys in an industry of “expect the unexpected” our chances were high).
On Saturday the quick sessions started with Joi Ito talking about the history & future of the internet in Japan. I found it really interesting that he said privacy for kids is hiding under their bed cover with their mobile to avoid passing eyes. Martin then called on Jacob Hsu & Thomas Crampton to talk about China; propaganda; opportunities; government; great firewall and all. Having been in Beijing recently I found this an interesting topic.
Andrew Mclaughlin, who heads Global Public Policy at Google talked about legislation and how the internet is in danger with talks of old-school regulations being “ported” online. Michael Wolf talked about the future of TV, how MTV has used virals and how it aims to pass viewers over to VH1 around a certain age- when they no longer “get it”.
Marko Ahtisaari talked about Blyk, parts of this were interesting (the advertising, the stats, infrastructure) however personally I found it a little too much about his company rather then those concepts. Martin decided a panel was in order and pulled together Zaryn Dentzel who’s moved from America to Spain, Loic Le Meur who’s moved from France to America, and Ola Ahlvarsson who helps companies go international to talk about their international experience as entrepreneurs.
Stefan (of Soocial) finally joined us after being delayed at Barcelona airport. That evening we went to Cova den Xoroi which is possibly the most amazing club I’ve ever been to- it’s in a cave, on a cliff, overlooking the Mediterranean sea. Although arriving back at the hotel in the early hours of the morning we were up, fresh and ready for lunch at Martin’s, and although I’m a vegetarian I must say the meat looked impressive.
Much relaxing, chatting and demoing each others projects- both public & private commenced, ending another amazing event. Thank you very much Martin & Matias for organizing everything.
Location Based Services (LBS’s) for the most part are still trying to find their feet, nothing has really taken off- at least in the social network space. Late last week I was all over the place; Brighton on Tuesday & Wednesday; London on Thursday; Menorca on Friday; and I arrived back last night. All perfect situations to use LBS’s, but nothing. Dopplr and Google Maps on my iPhone was the closest to an LBS that I used.
I was wondering why the lack of traction among LBS’s and I decided it’s because so far they all suck (please prove me wrong). The biggest reason for them sucking is their proximity intelligence- or lack of it. Enter what I’m calling Location Proximity Intelligence, LPI.
LPI is about contextual proximity. If you live in San Francisco and visit London, and I live in Brighton (an hour on train from London), I want to know. You are not in my proximity, but you’ve covered probably above 99% of the distance to my proximity. The Location Proximity Intelligence concept is based around this proximity increase percentage. There very well might be something out there like this already under a different name, if so, I couldn’t find it.
Once social Location Based Services seriously understand Mobile Attention Profiling [1], and Location Proximity Intelligence we might have something cool to play with. Until then it seems they’ll carry on sucking.
[1] I couldn’t find anything about Mobile Attention Profiling, if you know of anything please let me know.
I make a point to signup to most web startups I come across. I also archive the emails I receive from them in Gmail. If you’ve ever added me as a friend, sent me a direct message, tagged me in an image it’s all logged here.
It’s very unscientific & each company emails you on different notifications, however it is directly related to the people I know and what social networks we use. I don’t log the data from my browser but I’m pretty sure Twitter is my most visited site. Seems to me that Twitter is doing something right…
I couldn’t help but reply to Will with a little more then a list of tracks, it just seemed a little lacking. I’d never looked at the last.fm API but I figured I could probably throw something together quickly.
A quick page that gets your last.fm friends top 3 tracks.
I believe it’s actually a bad solution to the question, the 3 tracks you believe every iPod should have are probably not your most listened to tracks, but because I could, I did. Check it out:
Yesterday I enabled video comments on this blog via Seesmic. One of my first thoughts was why should my viewers be limited to posting videos when on my blog. I do most of my blog reading in Google Reader, and have wished for comment integration, and it stands the same would be true of video. So I twittered to let Loic know:
@loiclemeur do you plan to do Feedburner integration? i.e. leave video comment from inside Google Reader
But, then it dawned on me.. why should your video comments be restricted to blogs with the Seesmic wordpress plugin installed. Why just comments? Why not any blog? Why not any website? How cool would it be to leave video’s that are in some way linked to BBC news articles, or Wikipedia, or …?
So I prototyped it. Check out my Seesmic Bookmarklet, install it and leave a comment from any URL. I’ve messaged Loic, and Johann (Seesmic’s CTO), hopefully I can get it to the point of viewing videos others have left at the same URL. I’m open to other suggestions so please leave them here. Here’s my video announcing it on Seesmic:
Update: I’m already noticing some issues with finishing the post. The interface implies it hasn’t completed, but it has. I’ll get on it.
If you’ve not already heard of “join the video conversation” Seesmic, you must have been hidden under a [virtual] rock. It’s Loic’s current startup and they’ve released a WordPress plugin that allows you to leave video comments on a WordPress blog.
While I still have my doubts about Seesmic (it hasn’t grabbed my screen time [..yet]), I’m happy to support in anyway I can. So taking this “why not” attitude you can all leave video comments on my blog. If I don’t know you please introduce yourself in a short video.
Another year, another Menorca TechTalk hosted by Martin Varsavsky at his farm. Josh, Ribot, and I arrived on Friday night only to find the hotel we booked online wasn’t open until July, however all ended well (I suppose with 3 guys in an industry of “expect the unexpected” our chances were high).
Stefan (of Soocial) finally joined us after being delayed at Barcelona airport. That evening we went to Cova den Xoroi which is possibly the most amazing club I’ve ever been to- it’s in a cave, on a cliff, overlooking the Mediterranean sea. Although arriving back at the hotel in the early hours of the morning we were up, fresh and ready for lunch at Martin’s, and although I’m a vegetarian I must say the meat looked impressive.
Yesterday I enabled 
