At the ‘Technology in Wartime‘ conference yesterday, what do you think the biggest attention grabber was? It wasn’t Bruce Schneier‘s keynote speech, it was the OLPC! Just like the OLPC spotting at Macworld, everyone was gathering around the device and asking questions.
Last Friday was the 2007 Crunchies award ceremony at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. This was my first time attending the award ceremony, and I had a great time. The Crunchies is an annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. It was hosted by TechCrunch, GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, and VentureBeat.
Some of the award categories were ‘Best new gadget’, ‘Best business model’, ‘Most likely to succeed’ and ‘Best start-up founder’. Congrats to all the winners.
One of my highlights of the night was seeing the Richter Scales perform ‘Here Comes Another Bubble‘. I didn’t shoot the below video, but I found it funny that you can see me running around in the beginning trying to get better photo angles.
My other highlight was when the ‘Best new gadget’ was announced. The winner was the Apple iphone, but nobody from Apple showed up to receive the award. So who filled their spot? The fake Steve Jobs of course with hilarious commentary.
My pictures of the event can be found on flickr here, all tagged with “2007crunchies“.
Update: Sarah Meyers posted links to the video clips from the ceremony, and has a good post on the after party.
Here we go again… today Steve Jobs got on stage and talked about four new things apple users must have. Ars Technica, Engadget, and Tom’s Guide all provided good live keynote coverage, so I wont go into everything Steve talked about.
The new great product that he unveiled was the manila envelope … erm. MacBook Air! It certainly looks sexy as its very slim and sleek, but how would one use it? The only network connection it has is 802.11n. There is no EVDO or ethernet port, but there is usb; so one could say buy a dongle. But still, who is the target for this device? I think it could be a nice companion computer for apple shops. But for a main computer, I am not so sure. What do you think? How would you use this device if you were to obtain one?
The rest of my pictures can be found on flickr.
Update: The keynote can now be viewed at here.
A few days ago I was at a SVASE meeting and the topic was on guerrilla PR. This was my first SVASE meeting, so I didn’t really know what to expect. I felt like I was the only bootstrap startup, as everyone I talked to were funded by angels or VCs.
Here are my notes from the meeting:
Overall, the topics discussed was more about online PR, and not guerrilla PR. The presenter gave some decent information bits, but because I wanted guerrilla PR tactics, so I came out a bit disappointed. And as I was leaving, another person mentioned the disappointment on structure and overall topics. Hopefully the next meeting I attend will be more structured and more on topic.
Update: I took a few pictures at the meeting. They can be viewed at flickr.
This year I am trying something different. I want to experiment whether I can learn everything I wanted to by relying on others and the coverage they provide. And being the information addict that I am, I read over 500 posts related to this years’ CES. Here are my notes.
Overall, I think the experiment went well. While I didn’t get hands on experience with the various devices, the pictures, videos, and write-ups were great. The bloggers and press really did a great job covering the huge event.
As the year end, I like to reflect on what I accomplished this year. 2007 was a great year for me, and I would like to give a big thanks to all that supported me in my ventures.
Here are some of my highlights of the year:
And for the next year, I hope to post more on information addiction / overload and my security research findings.