From nanoscale processing to measuring and simulating crowds, from phone calls inside your browser with Adobe’s Flash-based Pacifica service to Google on your phone with Android, from Google predicting the future to the Department of Defense taking nine months to build a wiki to speed up procurement, ETech looked at what might emerge next.
And yes, he's going; the vote was just in his favour and someone from Microsoft either lost or gave up their place for him. It's very Microsoft; there will be a fixed process but if it bites you, the 'softies will work very hard to work around it and get you what you need. It's like running any other conference or convention; something unexpected will come bite you a few days or hours before the event. And it's very blogosphere; the blogging vs traditional journalist polarity is very much in evidence this month.
April 30 - May 3
MIX and MEDC in Las Vegas
May 4 - 7
Zion National Park and environs
May 8 - 10
Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando
May 11 - 17
Los Angeles - Windows Hardware Engineering conference and meeting time
May 18 - 21
Possibly the ITU Identity workshop in Mountain View
San Jose
Maker's Faire in San Mateo
May 22 - 25
Future in Review in San Diego
May 26 - June 3
San Jose
(May 29 - 30
Where 2.0 in San Jose)
June 4 - 8
TechEd in Orlando
June 11th
London
Do get in touch if you have projects, clients, lunch ideas or events you think we'd be interested along the way
Windows Vista for mid-size business
Office 2007: software you'll recognise, productivity you won't
Outlook and Exchange: all-in-one communication
In the interests of full disclosure (and given some recent discussions), I'll say I am being paid for the Webcast because i am, after all A Business - but they know they're paying for my time, not my opinion. There are issues with all software and I already have a list of complaints and requests for the next version of Outlook and OneNote, and a few ideas for PowerPoint and I still want the Excel clipboard to work like the clipboard in every other application... but I can also honestly say that the new Office makes me more productive and if you can take advantage of the backend servers, your business can get a lot more out of it than a lone worker like me can. I want Exchange 2007 as soon as we can install it (for one reason I can't yet talk about and for several reasons that I can, but then it's
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sbisson who'll get to beat that into shape. I don't think Vista is a panacea - and I think we should have had what it delivers two years ago, and would have had it if more people could tell the difference between an alpha and a Flash presentation. I haven't had time to upgrade my laptop (we've been travelling and my mother isn't well) but a dozen times a day I do things and think 'that would be easier in Vista'. Will I be criticising Microsoft in the Webcast? No. Will I be mentioning areas where there are issues to be aware of? Of course. And I have to say I love the bio line that the editor has given me. "Mary Branscombe has been reviewing hardware and software since computers ran on elastic bands and good luck".
Yes, we are pretty much always travelling and yes, we're off again ;-) The late Spring US tour kicks off next month...
May 3rd - 6th New York - Microsoft Office
May 6th - 10th San Francisco - HP's mobility summit and possibly an Ajax conference
(May 10th - 14th) - not sure whether we'll stay in the Bay Area or drive down the coast; wineries and friends in the Bay Area tempt us!
May 14th - 17th San Diego - for the Future in Review conference which I'm very excited about because of the fascinating people we'll get to meet and talk/listen to. I interviewed Mark Anderson a couple of years ago, I read his Strategic News Service newsletter every month and I think he's very smart and nearly always right, plus the gathering of CEOs and others who also read the newsletter and turn up to talk about the issues he raises have had me wanting to get to the event for a while.
(May 10th - 14th) - not sure whether we'll go back to the Bay Area (friends, wineries etc, see above) or head straight up to Seattle
May 22rd - 28th Seattle - for WinHEC, plus meeting Marc Smith's team at Microsoft Research to see what's happening with SNARF
May 28th - 29th New York (and then home) - go back to New York because that's what our plane tickets do, see that nice spride in situ, get to be tourists!
As always, we're hoping to make business travel more fun by seeing friends along the way - if we're hitting your town, let us know when you're free! If you have ideas about nice cheap places to stay in New York, please let us know! I already have a couple of things I'll be trying to pick up to take to friends (lavender soap, rose wine...); if there's anything else you'd like us to bring you, let me know ASAP and we'll try to pick it up over the weekend.
- Music:Jann Tierson - La Releve
spride will be leaving the country even more emphatically than I do soon, and because I like sushi... while sbisson jets off to Florida tomorrow, spride and I will be holding court at around 7pm, starting in MyHotel Bloomsbury (I can do endless jokes of the 'who's on first' variety about 'meet me at my hotel' 'where are you staying?') and then next door at Yo! Sushi. If you're in reach of London tomorrow, do come!- Mood:party
Use a discreet recorder. When casino security fusses about photography and recordings, a tablet PC or a memory stick recorder that looks like a phone is less likely to attract attention.
Water. You need more than you think.
Locate the restrooms. Due to Water and the coffee you need to stay attentive from 9am to 9pm.
Wear comfortable shoes. The Venetian was too pricey so we're at the Imperial Palace - only two casinos away but add in the size of the casinos and the fact that the conference space is behind the casino floor and it's a half hour walk from the room.
Put your camera, business cards and the other things you want to grab often in a pocket. Put them in the same pocket each time.
If the schedule is available in advance try to prepick sessions but expect them to change. Add the sessions you're interested in to your calendar and synch that to your phone. My Vario has the conference sessions in because I used the iCal links on the MIX site to put them in Outlook. I had to update the times by hand - RSS simple list updates now please! - but I have the descriptions to hand, and I get alarms for sessions.
Go party. I grab people at the end of sessions when I can but I also look for them at the party and in the labs and chat slots. And now - I shall go party
Social networking sites are so last year, events sites are very this year - and intown2 is trying to cover both bases. If you're in London, or Seattle, or San Francisco or wherever for a day or so, and a friend of yours happens to be there too, why not meet up? Well, usually because you don't know they're there at the time. Put your address book and your calendar into intown2 and as long as they do the same, you'll be able to catch up with people.
This has the same barriers to entry as any other social networking site: you have to put in all your friends (by hand or by importing a CSV file) and so do they, plus you have to enter your travels one at a time. Obviously there are privacy issues with importing your address book and calendar into a public site wholesale, but there has to be a better solution.
- Offer the service as an add-on for existing social networking sites like Linked In, where you can cross-check against your address book, you've already done most of the work and where there is a big enough pool of other people who have too.
- It would be a natural add-on for Plaxo, where you're already trusting them to keep addresses up to date.
- Offer to scrape your address book in the same polite way Linked In does rather than making you export a file by hand, and offer to scrape the calendar for multi-day events as a starting point (always with the option to leave an event out).
- Or go the distributed route like FOAF; when more people have calendar info published on line, a site could aggregate it and help you find passing friends that way.
It's quite late to start a social networking site from scratch, even with a clever idea like matching locations. If a lot of people have to do a lot of work for an non-deterministic reward (you might not find any travelling friends going your way), even a free site has a high cost.
And the free account only allows you to add 10 friends; I think I can keep in touch with that many people by email, actually. The public events categories are an odd mix of sport, theatre and gay pride marches. The site asks for the cities you visit most but doesn't offer those as quick options when you create a trip. There's no widget to put on your web site encouraging people to click through to intown2 to check if they're going your way. It's a nice idea, but there are a lot of rough edges.
sbisson ranted about the poor adoption of universal event formats, I've been keeping an eye out for calendar sites that list events and I've found a couple more. I don't think they're going to compete with Upcoming.org or Eventful because they're much more focussed. zvents is very pale-blue-and-orange-with-white-space Web 2.0, similar to Eventful: I'm seeing this look a lot at the moment. Unlike , it only covers the Bay area. You can search by events, venues, tags, groups or people, and when you get the results you can switch the list to a map view or a calendar view. With a lot of results the map and main calendar view show you the number of results rather than the individual events, but you can get a 1 day, 3 day, 7 day and 30 day view as well. Here it's the guided tours that dominate rather than the bookstore events, but when you get down to individual events they're very well presented with maps, times, repeat events, similar events, other events at the same venue... More useful details than Eventful.
AllConferences has a hierarchical drill-down of categories and an advanced search, though you can only search by one condition and picking March 2006 without a date produces events from June 2004 as well. There are conferences going back to 2001 and those are what you see when you search by City; the general search box does a better job. Look here for commercial and academic conferences.
These sites tend to be better for finding a specific event on a specific day than browsing through the possibilities for a longer period of time. For that, I want to be able to start with a large pool of results and filter them. The best filtered view of search results I can think of - and it has deficiencies still - is the hotel map view in Expedia; you can zoom in on the map to refine the list of hotels, or remove hotels from the list to clear them from the map view. I'd like the same for events; let me zoom in to an area, or a category of events, or a smaller date range, or to a time range across several days (what's on every evening next week?). Let me remove all the sports events and everything that's recurring rather than a one-off and trim down from any day in March to just these 9 days. It's all about underlying hierarchies of logical units: know that a week is a logical unit of a month, know that Kirkland is within the greater Seattle area. Some of this you can do with a folksonomy, but a categorised hierarchy is going to help for geography, discrete units (today/tomorrow/this week/next week/this month/next month/this year) and distinguishing between broad tags (music) and specific tags (baroque). Organic tagging can define a problem space, but it doesn't structure it well.
Do we have these kind of detailed schemas for describing not just the obvious properties of events (date, time, venue, organiser etc) but also the range of values so we can build the filters?
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