lisacast

Anticipatory web services

The Anticipatory/Predictive/ Intention Web

We all have silent little conversations with our computers, don’t we? Admit it. “No, that’s not what I meant.” “Go back.” “Are you still alive?” We talk to them like they are pets. We hope they will understand a few words we give them, knowing we will have to remind them again and again to get down off the couch, to stop eating slippers, to sit. We talk to other things too, lots of things, that don’t talk back with us.

Computers (software, web services), however, enable more complex discussions and as technology is taking hold of more and more of our time, there exists the early inefficiencies of any major change. The creation and distribution of information online, your information, and that of everyone else remains for the moment at a pivot point, balancing between traditional media control and a rising of consumer-driven content. The time is ripe for a significant advancement* in the “anticipatory web.” A change in the user experience is about to come.

Sit. Stay. Good Web.

It’s fair to say I have spent a lot of my life on computers, on software development, and the marketing of each. Five years ago, my attention centered on connecting companies with their customers primarily by paying for lead information, casting test advertising nets into the Internet ocean, and mitigating their adoption concerns (i.e. understanding why they wouldn’t buy.) Now, working on our own software (finally) at Grabbit I am thinking more about the intelligence of software to understand a user’s needs, preferences, patterns, etc. (all without endangering their trust.)

The complex equations of algorithms combined with the implicit behavior and data given to us by the user will help developers create next-generation software systems that anticipate more fully who you are and what you want from an end-user perspective. We’ve seen baby steps in this direction for many years online. Auto-fill forms, “keep me logged in” buttons, and so on. But software can take a big step — a step that produces interaction.

Companies can address product or service concerns, or open public discussions about other issues concerning their customers and by doing so, anticipate what user’s want (importantly) based on use AND explicit feedback, for instance. In turn, customers can offer – by way of behavior or explicitly-given feedback – additional information about themselves. Also, because of periodic down economies, lack of capital and simple software that provides basic information, many software companies (especially internal divisions of large corporations and underfunded start-ups) circumvent market research, focus groups and other comprehensive testing techniques for the web services and pay for it in adoption or poor press.

* The term Anticipatory web is not in any way a ‘new’ term. Q. Why now? A. Product and service providers have conglomerated into several the major categories. They have matured enough to offer partner programs, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), and support for these. Concurrently, web service developers are creating sophisticated programs to anticipate consumer behavior, therefor unlocking revenue for many of the software companies who will have otherwise failed. Happy customer. Happy company. Happy investors.

Have an example to share? I’d love to hear about it!

You thought PayPal was it?

Peerpal

Finally, some true innovation for peer-to-peer online payments from a company establishing itself with partners who will really help distribute their service. Partners like AOL and Facebook.

EvolutionMoney?

Jason Hogg grew up in the finance industry, in fact his father works for MasterCard. Jason was a founder of MBNA Canada and served as chief business development and marketing operations for them.

Over a year ago, I met Jason, along with members of his board (Steve Case included) for an intimate briefing to a handful of interest journalists. The parent company Revolution, was premiering a subsidiary of that company called RevolutionMoney. I was in that group, sitting along “real” journalists, with their tattered notebooks, scribbling furiously as Jason spoke. Me, with my iPhone, trying for one of the first times, to type quickly. Unable to keep up, I resorted to jotting down topics, looking with envy to the fast-moving pens beside me on either side. Well, I thought, I’ll get it all in an interview. People tell me Steve doesn’t have the best business sense all the time, but I still have a soft spot for him because of my time at Netscape. Jason sticking it to his dad for the interests rates alone seemed satisfying enough to chase him down for a chat.

And after all, what Jason was doing, seemed like an interesting story — putting the power of money lending, and terms of those relationships into the hands of the people actually at risk. I liked it. I thought it would allow so many people across the world, from those who get caught in the problem of “we can’t lend you money because you need it” to those in 3rd world countries still just hearing rumors of technological advances, sheltered from the knowledge of the opportunities around them.

There was something I liked too, about what Jason must have learned from his father. The enormous interest rates and late fees credit card companies change consumers is a large problem. So many people are in debt, or have debt war stories. RevolutionMoney was sounding like EvolutionMoney. Terms negotiated directly between two (or more) parties. I thought more than once about my Indian friend Arijit, with whom I would trust to back for a business initiative he may have, regardless of his resources.

I called RevolutionMoney’s press contact a couple of times. She didn’t return my calls. I tried email, finally she told me she was no longer with the company and gave me a new name. I tried the new name, to the same end. Eventually they told me that Jason was too busy for an interview, and now I know why.

American Express bought them! What a sell out. Back to Paypal and looking into services like Kiva.org.

Sigh.

Jeff Robbins, from Lullabot on Drupal (Podcast and Interview Transcription)

Recorded during an earlier interview.

Related blog post.

Drupal is often referred to as a content management system but it’s also a web framework. It’s basically a PHP web application framework in the same way that Rails is a web application framework for Ruby, Drupal is a web application framework for PHP. But it’s really focused on CMS that’s built on top of it but it’s really, really flexible. And so there are all these modules out there that can add, basically sort of fundamentally change the way that Drupal works.

Lisa Padilla: Hi, it’s Lisa Padilla. Welcome to Lisacast, another episode. Today’s guest is Jeff Robbins who is Co-Founder and CEO of Lullabot. And for those of you who don’t know Lullabot, Lullabot is all about Drupal and Jeff is going to talk a little bit about that. Jeff Robbins, are you with me?

Jeff Robbins: I am, are you with me?

Lisa Padilla: Yes, that’s great. Could you also just say before we started that you do your weekly Drupal Podcast on BlogTalkRadio?

Jeff Robbins: No, we do it a little more home-brewed, yeah, no, we –

Lisa Padilla: Do you guys edit first before or do you do live shows?

Jeff Robbins: No, we do a lot of edit. We do a lot of editing and make ourselves sound smarter, although, I guess there is only so far that we can go with that. But yeah, the live thing is exciting, it’s very exciting.

Lisa Padilla: Yeah, I still get excited right before shows start and I think it’s because of the live act and because there have been a couple of times when I interviewed Rafe Needleman, he was actually tied up with his toddler and he was a few minutes late and so we just started without him. But it does offer spontaneous conversation to start to and maybe the show goes the different direction. So there is that. But you are here and let’s talk about you. Let’s jump right in and talk about your background.

Jeff Robbins: Okay. What would you like to talk about?

Lisa Padilla: Well, our listeners here might not know that you have an always been an entrepreneur that you’ve had around in the music industry.

Jeff Robbins: Well, I guess, yeah, just sort of a different type of entrepreneurship I guess but yeah, my sort of previous career was as the front person for a band called Orbit. We were on A&M Records for most of the 90s and did the Lollapalooza festival and had top 10 modern rock song and stuff like that. So, yeah, did that. Well, I started a web company, I actually worked at O’Reilly in like 1991, ‘92, ‘93 when the web was kind of coming into being and I actually started one of the first web development companies. But when my band got off for the record deal, I was happy to go do that and stop explaining to people what the Internet was and why they should have a web site and that kind of thing. Everyone eventually figured out what the Internet was and why they ought to have a web site. But meanwhile, I was playing rock shows.

Lisa Padilla: Yeah, that company was Liquid Media in 1993, right?

Jeff Robbins: Yeah.

Lisa Padilla: So, you have done quite a bit of web development too and have done Ringo Starr site, is that right?

Jeff Robbins: That’s true, yeah, I got to spend some time talking to Ringo onto the phone and helping him with his various technical computer problems. He is a lovely man.

Lisa Padilla: You must have started with music then, and how did you come to start at O’Reilly?

Jeff Robbins: I just was doing various temp jobs to, I was playing in my band and was looking for jobs that were paid well but didn’t tie me down too much and I ended up getting a job, a temp job at O’Reilly doing illustration work for some of their books. And they liked me and I really liked them and so they kept me on and I worked there probably two or three years or something like that till I left to go do the web stuff which happened relatively briefly and then my band got signed.

Lisa Padilla: And it’s no coincidence probably that you have authored a book under the O’Reilly name?

Jeff Robbins: Yeah, our book is called Using Drupal. It’s the first O’Reilly book about Drupal and they came out just about a month ago, something like that. It’s been selling very well. It looks like we are going to do some more stuff with O’Reilly. I am not quite sure what yet but we were having a good time together.

Lisa Padilla: Okay, and this book is really wonderful just from a person who is interested in learning new web 2.0 class systems but having a limited amount of time and meeting to get the biggest thing out of that for my time. You really turned around my thinking on Drupal and something that looked daunting to me and I had heard colleagues that cursing not having in-house Drupal specialist and then hearing sporadically that somebody would pick up a book and figure it out and sort of inspire me to drill down to that book, and now I am total convert.

Jeff Robbins: Oh that’s great, yeah, I mean that’s kind of why we started Lullabot. So, my band got robbed in 2001 and I started building web sites with my wife who is also an O’Reilly author, Jennifer Robbins. She has written Web Design in a Nutshell and Learning Web Design. And so, we did Ringo site and kept building other sites. And eventually, I was kind of looking for something to kind of integrate the needs of all these people that I was building sites for and I ended up finding Drupal in building a big web project using Drupal. And it was really frustrating, there is a lot of promise in Drupal, there is a lot of hoops and dreams and it’s really cool, there is all these modules, there is like I don’t know probably I haven’t looked recently but last time I looked, there were about 3,000 different modules for Drupal that like various I don’t know pick a web feature and there is a module for it, there is eCommerce and buddy lists and rating systems, and whatever is out there, tutor integration and there is modules for it. But when you actually sit down to do it, it’s not always really clear how to do it, which modules to choose, what’s the best way to do it, or any of that kind of stuff. And I basically got about half or three quarters of the way through the project that I was doing, I mean this is years ago. And I had no idea how it’s going to finish the project and [Full article]

Elad Yoran, KoolSpan (Podcast and Interview Transcript)

Recorded during an earlier interview.

I was lucky enough to interview KoolSpan at the RSA Conference. Elad Yoran, Executive Chairman, joins Lisacast to discuss TrustChip technology and recent financing of $7.1 million (What? I thought there was a recession!.) KoolSpan’s crypto engine is a self-contained authentication, encryption and key management platform. That’s right, I said ‘crypto engine’. Tune in to learn more.

BlogTalkRadio

Lisa Padilla: Hi, and welcome to the show today. This afternoon, we are broadcasting, we have this BlogTalkRadio at the RSA Conference in San Francisco where Elad Yoran who is from KoolSpan is going to talk to us a little bit about their technology and the crypto engine and a recent about financing that the company received that was announced this week I believe. And Elad, are you with me?

Elad Yoran: I am with you Lisa and delighted to be here.

Lisa Padilla: Thank you. I am sorry to cut you off as our show started. But we were talking a little bit just a few minutes ago about the significance of receiving some funding in this day and age when the economy is purposively a bit shaky or we are supposed to be concerned. I think we still see a lot of activity around technologies that really shows some values. So, maybe you can talk a little bit, Mr. Yoran, about your background and your post as a chairman of KoolSpan and about your recent funding.

(Informal talk)

Elad Yoran: First, there was an article on the front page of the business section in today’s new York Times that talks about Silicon Valley funding being impacted by the economy. And so, I think that getting funding today well may be a little bit impacted by the economies for companies with strong prospect. Funding is still available. And for us, in a personal sense, getting the funding was critically important and that it enabled the company to go forward and do the things that it needed to do in order to meet the demand for its product for the TrustChip. So, we raised $7.1 million. It’s a significant amount of money and the lion’s share of the funding will go towards things like demand fulfillment as well as of course to continued research and development.

Lisa Padilla: And so, if you get one step back anyway in this sort of way the groundwork for products, when it started and how it started.

Elad Yoran: Well, KoolSpan was founded five years ago by a gentleman by the name of Tony Fascenda. He is actually the company’s CEO and media visionary in the world of wireless and mobility. He has been an entrepreneur for the last 35 years and has developed paging systems and two-way paging systems and handheld forms long before our it became really a consumer market or a market in which every person really had a wireless handheld device like a cell phone. So he has been doing this for years. And sometimes I joke around with Tony and tell him that it took somebody with his background and his perspective on mobility and wireless to come up with a solution as innovative for the security industry. So it is really an out-of-the-box and creative thinker here.

Lisa Padilla: And give us one example of how like TrustChip would be implemented, what’s your case study about that.

Elad Yoran: So, if we think about what cell phones are today, they have evolved a long way. Cell phones aren’t just for making telephone calls, I mean they are really little computers. And we use them for today a wide variety of applications, obviously still to make telephone calls but also for e-mail and for all of the PDA functionality. And now, we see all kinds of other applications rolling out into the cell phones. Now, the thing to keep in mind is that cell phones were designed to be mobile, they were designed to easy to use, they were designed to be a lot of things, just not secure. And now that, we are using cell phones to do so many things, of course one of the most important of which is still making a telephone call that security has to be elevated and brought into the equation. So it’s not just about mobility and ease of use, all those things are still critical, but another critical dimension or characteristic that we have to add to that list is security. And so, you have to question what’s an application, I will give you a very simple one that we all do every day and that’s making a telephone call. When we make telephone calls on landline phones, we have very strong sense that the conversations we have are secure and we know who we are talking to on the other end and we know to a great extent that the conversations are not being eavesdropped. [Full article]

Dr. Zhong Lin Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology (Podcast and Interview Transcript)

Recorded from an earlier interview.

Select, related slides are Slides from Georgia Institute of Technology.

BlogTalkRadio

Lisa Padilla: Good morning. It’s 08:32 AM Pacific Time on Friday, narrowly escaping Friday the 13th today so 12th 2008 and we are talking with Dr. Zhong Lin Wang today who is Regents’ Professor of the School of Materials Science and Engineering for the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. And he is joining us today to give us his thoughts and ideas about biomimicry and the future of technology. And I see on my switchboard that Dr. Wang has called in so let’s see if I can bring him in. Dr. Wang, are you there?

Dr. Wang: Yes. Can you hear me?

Lisa Padilla: I can hear you just fine. Thank you very much, it works out very well that you can call me. We are actually doing a dual live broadcast because the phone call is another audio technology that doesn’t do live videos but does fantastic audio and I just have to give some — to those guys just. This is going to be a show about technology and I am comparing Ustream versus the audio platform BlogTalkRadio. And Ustream has some very attractive features to it and you can see the UI feels comfortable and they are meant for live broadcast but definitely more on the video side. So Dr. Wang, enough about that, let’s talk about you because I know we are riding a little bit late and I want to be sure that if we run past let’s see what is noon your time that–

Dr. Wang: Okay I have till 2 o’clock.

Lisa Padilla: Okay no problem. One second, okay. So are you on the Ustream site now?

Dr. Wang: Yeah you mean the video right?

Lisa Padilla: Yeah the video. Why don’t we go ahead and start the broadcast?

(Informal Talk)

Lisa Padilla: Okay. So let’s start with you introducing yourself and then I can just step through these questions with you. How does that sound?

(Informal Talk)

Lisa Padilla: Okay so go ahead, let’s just get started. Why don’t we start by having you introduce yourself.

Dr. Wang: Okay. My name is Dr. Zhong Lin Wang, people normally call me by my two initials ZL Wang. I am Regents’ Professor at Georgia Tech, and my expertise is in nanotechnology nanomaterials. My personal background is in physics. I received PhD from Arizona State University in 1987 and I have been a professor at Georgia Tech for the last 15 years, and my main research is on nanotechnology and some related to energy research in Biotechnology.

Lisa Padilla: Fantastic. And you are widely cited as an expert in this field and involved in many projects globally and there is a couple that we will get into. And maybe it will be most natural to talk about those two projects that I mentioned earlier after we sort of investigate the question about your inspiration for studying in this field and your work in biomimicry?

Dr. Wang: We have several projects going on and the first one is related to energy holistic and the second project that is biomimetic applications, and let me come to the first project for the energy. I have been involved in nanotechnology over last 15 years, we build all kind of nano-devices for biological sensing, gas sensing, chemical sensing, and various devices. One key challenging question came to my mind a few years ago that if you build those devices, how are you going to power that because these devices are very small, power consumption is extremely low. So the key question is that can we have energy from environment so that we don’t need to use a battery so this little device can be sustainable working, wireless remotely for whatever time you expect it. So with this in my mind we started research in energy harvesting and that’s one of my major research project today. The second project is related to biomimic. We utilize biological species to fabricate new materials and let me probably use a couple of photographs to show you our research. And what I have here is if you can see this is a butterfly wing, right. Do you see the butterfly wing? And if you see this picture here, this is a scanning electron microscope image of the butterfly wing. This has unique colors and what we try to do is that can we replicate these butterfly wings to make new photonic devices. And biological species have the most advanced, most unique and most optimized structures that have photonic, many, many different properties so I will go can we replicate this to make new photonic devices that we are unable to fabricate by our own. So that was one of the inspiration to do this biomimic studies. So that would be a very brief overview of the two topics we do now, and let me elaborate a little bit on the energy side. Why do we need a small power source for applications involved? If you have a biological (Indiscernible) sensor, cancer detections, biological species detections, you are unable to have a battery to run in your body to drive these devices. Over a big scope, can you replace the battery that run the pacemaker by the energy generated from your heart beating, from your blood flow, from your body movement, your muscle movement. If we can have this energy, you can power some biological sensors, and this is one of our motivations to develop this energy harvesting technology.

Lisa Padilla: And Dr. Wang can you elaborate a little bit on application of being able to replicate how replicating the colors in those wings and in optical splitters might switch us from computer chips that are predominant today? [Full article]

Danny Glover, AirCongress (Podcast and Interview Transcript)

Transcribed from a previously recorded interview.

BlogTalkRadio

You are listening to Lisacast on BlogTalkRadio.

Hey welcome to the show the second one today. If you are a host on BlogTalkRadio, this is a new feature that not only can you do more than one show a day but also you can do longer shows. We have been responding to some future requests and we will continue to do so. It’s a big week for us. We just launched our revenue and sharing program for host which shares a piece of the advertising that runs on host profile and show pages. A big week for us and a big middle of the day for Lisacast. Today we have AirCongress gentleman Danny Glover is with us today. Danny, thanks for joining me.

Danny Glover: Thanks for having me on the show.

Lisa Padilla: And this is not your first time on BlogTalkRadio, right I didn’t bring you on first, right.

Danny Glover: No, I have actually been on Ed Morrissey’s show a couple of times, the most recent time was when we were talking about BlogTalkRadio’s partnership with AirCongress a few weeks ago.

Lisa Padilla: Okay very exciting for us and the BlogTalkRadio platform in general is very interesting to political talk-show hosts and listeners interested in that programing. As that as Ed Morrissey’s is well aware his sight Captain’s Quarters and headingright.com we also do headingleft.com and if you look under political categories on our website you will see hundreds of shows there on politics so these things seem to go together pretty well. So Danny, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the background of AirCongress and then with the present day state of poling and voting nomination, candidate races and so on and then we will ask you a couple of other questions.

Danny Glover: Okay sure. Well AirCongress is kind of an outgrowth of another blog that I started a few years ago called Beltway Blogroll for nationaljournal.com and when I was dealing with Beltway Blogroll I was tracking the impacts of blogs on politics and policy issues. And that was a big thing back in 2004. I started Beltway Blogroll in 2005. By 2006 the world was moving toward audio and video so it just seemed to me a natural outgrowth to start tracking audio and video and I decided to launch AirCongress this particular one is a private venture of my own I am doing in my spare time and it’s really just to track audio and video in the political and policy scene that includes videos by law makers who are producing them, our think tanks by campaigns by journalists and by bloggers who like it more. See anyone who is producing content out there I want to find it and create and views AirCongress as a portal for people who want to come to one spot and find all of the best audio and video. And I am trying to bring some of my journalistic instincts to bear there by basically saying I follow this kind of news for a long time now. Here is what I think is the most important.

Lisa Padilla: Right and by following this for a long time tell our listeners a little bit about your background in journalism and your experience in DC?

Danny Glover: I have been in Washington since 1991. I started Congressional Quarterly as a reporter. Congressional Quarterly coincidentally National Journal was started by people who used to work at CQ and they are direct competitor with Congressional Quarterly. So now I work for the competition. But I worked at CQ for about 6 and half years then I went over to an Internet publication that was kind of their op-ed page on the web it was IntellectualCapital.com. Worked there for about 3 years, 3 and a half years before it folded amongst the many dotcom folding in 2000 and then I came on at National Journal and I have been here at Technology Day ever since. I was the managing director at Tech Daily for about 6 years and then became the editor last fall.

Lisa Padilla: Okay and speaking of new media in Washington I have a clip from the last presidential radio address that I am going to play for us here.

Audio clip:

“The AMT was designed to ensure that the wealthy paid their first year of taxes. But when Congress passed the AMT decades ago, it was not indexed to for inflation. As a result the AMT’s higher tax burden is creeping up on more and more middle class families. To deal with this problem Congress has in recent years passed temporary legislation that prevented most middle class tax payers from having to pay the AMT. But this year Congress is yet to pass this legislation. A failure to do so would mean that 25 million Americans would be subject to the AMT, more than 6 times a number that faced the tax last year.”

Lisa Padilla: Okay and you know I played this quickly for two reasons. First is it’s interesting that the president is podcasting. Second because you can’t get the presidents radio address as a feed on the way out what say. But also secondly because we can talk about the democratization of media and I am sure you do often and the wide and less biased and more transparent distribution of news and opinion. But it’s a sweet and sour situation and so also is hoping that you would touch on some of the barriers, these conditions you know face now and in the future with regard to politics and the contribution of you know everyday job.

Danny Glover: It is interesting that the president’s podcasting, he is actually been doing a quite a while and the weekly radio address that you played a portion of that’s not the only thing he does. They have the White House Press Briefing, they put up as a podcast.

Micro-spamming backlash

I’m pretty open about accepting friends on Facebook (unless your avatar is Marilyn Manson-esque…just kinda freaks me out.) But, as everyone is complaining these days, junk mail has made it into the real-time web. Generic product-driven replies when adding Twitter friends, “Become a fan of this page” suggestions, as if the value of micromedia wasn’t already under attack.

Could someone please provide a short, concise example of how Twitter is useful to anyone other than teenagers and uber-bloggers? I fail to see how this is even remotely useful to the rest of the world. — TechCrunchIT

My policy if I don’t know someone but they want to be my friend on Facebook? I send them a message first which asks them NOT to spam me. Most people say, sure I won’t. Some tell me they have automatic announcements, so they would remove me if I would like. Candace Breen did this, who has a great radio show for women. I asked her to remove me though, because I can take only so much feminism. I overdosed on it growing up in Marin County. In anycase, she politely removed me. Not true for everyone. Today, I inadvertently offended someone with my method.

I said:

I will add you as a friend, but
Between [name deleted] and You

Do NOT spam me with page fans or game invites, etc.

Thanks,
Lisa

and she replied:

[name withheld] September 25 at 11:22am Report
Hello Lisa,
I’m not into spamming nor time for games, I leave games to the kids,
I have a team of professional people with many talents that bring some sort of value to the table and leave it up to others if they want to network togather or ask questions of others about what they do or if it can help them in their journey.

You have offended me with your statement I don’t need a fb friend that bad or need the negativity in my circle.

I will be blocking you from the team and I would want you to block my name from your list as well.

Have A Fantastic Weekend.

Thanks,
[name deleted]

Ouch. Sigh. Well, what do you think? How do I expand my network without offending someone?

Can you hear me now

As the weekend warms up to TechCrunch50, 2009, my mind is bubbling with anticipation. One of the lucky ones to get to upgrade my iPhone, I’ve been enjoying faster speeds and more storage. I almost wet myself like an excited puppy when I saw the image/video slider. And now the iPod Nanos have video, FM and a pedometer that transmits wirelessly to Nike. I guess big brother plays basket ball.

Providing coverage at TechCrunch events is always interesting. Jason’s dogs are wandering around on a leash behind him, in bows, something that seems more at home LA than here in SF (here they hold deeper connotations.) Some celebrity is there. MC Hammer. Ashton Kutcher. This year, Penn and Teller. Hoping for some new tricks. Arrington is spotted periodically back and forth through the venue, usually trailed by nervous, pubescent CEOs and his own posse (kickin’ up dust) — truly he can’t stand still for long without being surrounded. It’s packed. Hard to find a seat. A little warm. Wifi spotty. Thinking about that ice cold water in the hallway. Step outside to get it. Run into your next partner or VC making himself some tea, completely unattended. Held hostage in a new city, entrepreneurs from all over the world are rubbing elbows at the parties, and forming alliances. An intense two days, well worth the ticket cost for anyone who wants to do business in the new world.

It’s a good time to get off that cell phone and talk face to face. After all, web innovators care less about the pitfalls and dangers of creation, than they do about potential brain cancer. Solutions to those problems are likely to be found with computing power, both human and machine.

Micoy furthers 3D

From The Des Moines (Iowa) Register
(http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050422/BUSINESS04/504220381/1029/BUSINESS)

Economy

Ames firm immerses itself in 3-D technology

Micoy develops a camera that takes viewers from ‘watching to experiencing’ as videos will surround them.

By FRANK VINLUAN
REGISTER BUSINESS WRITER
April 22, 2005

Ames, Ia. – Everyone knows what it’s like to watch an image on-screen. Joe Stevens can make people feel as if they’re in the middle of it.

Stevens’ company, Micoy , brings new meaning to 3-D video. A Micoy camera can capture multiple angles in everything from sports to museum exhibits, yielding a field of vision up to 360 degrees.

“It’s just like being there,” Stevens said. “The difference is (going) from watching to experiencing.”

The 3-D images come from a patented sphere-shaped camera comprising 84 lenses. Stevens calls the technology “true immersive video.” It’s the visual equivalent of surround sound, Stevens said.

On Lisacast today is Don Pierce from Micoy! Listen in and log in to chat live with me.

DrupalCon and eComm

Lisacast is covering two exciting conferences upcoming — DrupalCon and eComm

DrupalCon is the official Drupal unconference that attracts the most talented open source developers and innovative web shops in the world and brings them together to share knowledge, make decisions on the future of Drupal, and get to know each other in person.

It’s also the premiere opportunity for Drupal users to learn what they can do with Drupal, find partners for future projects, and meet the people behind the code.

The conference is designed for both developers and Drupal users. The first three days of the conference will be about learning, while the last day will be about doing – that’s when everyone works together to push code and documentation forward.

DrupalCon is a volunteer run, nonprofit conference. Here’s an interview with Lullabot’s Jeff Robbins.

Last year’s Emerging Communications conference (eComm) broke new ground and created a revitalized forum attracting 300 people and 80 speakers from 15 countries. The upcoming eComm promises to build upon that foundation to create the only forum dedicated to defining and profiting from the post-telecom era.

Topics (so far) will include:

* Voice and Video Evolution
* Open Spectrum
* Communications Enabling Business Processes, Especially B2C
* New Forms of Contactability and Connectability
* Mobile Social Networking (MoSoSo)
* Open Handsets & the Open Ecosystem
* Social Computing and the Social Web
* Convergence of Media with Personal Communications
* Open Communication Platforms
* Leveraging Cloud Computing
* Towards 4G Wireless
* Emerging Markets

Hear an interview with the conference organizer, Lee Dryburgh.