Vidal's Site

I attended Carnegie Mellon's Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI) Adopting and Using Open Source Software Conference 2005 in Redwood Shores, California on September 7, 2005. Open Source is an area that is going to impact every area of software tremendously, and it is trend that every company needs to leverage going forward. It's impressive that CMU has a center and conference on it. If you are not really familiar with open source, I think it is a good conference to checkout next year.
Here is just one small intereting take-away I got from the conference. I learned there are now initiatives like the Business Readiness Rating to rate software in an open and standardized way. As anyone who tries to use open source software quickly discovers, one of the hurdles is evaluating all the different alternatives. Obviously, you cannot use purchase price as a factor or a proxy of value. Now, of course, do things like openbrr need to be limited to just open source software?

We now live in a society where gambling is totally socially acceptable. Poker is on TV all the time. To learn more about this industry, and seek inspiration for my next venture, I attended the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) 2005 at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). This is a huge show with over 25,000 attendees. It mainly focuses on casinos and casino equipment like slot machines, roulette wheels, and table games. Pretty much any equipment imaginable to run a casino was on display. Some of it is pretty cool like the computerized roulette wheels and blackjack tables. No marketing angle to keep people in the casinos was left unexploited...I mean unrepresented.

I was particularly interested to see how computer technology is being used, and to look at online gaming aka "igaming." The area for igaming was relatively small since most igaming is still illegal in the USA. I saw at least 2 tablet PC manufacturers displaying handhelds that could be used by casino staff. There was a really amazing application from NICE in NJ which is the subject of my next post. I have posted 29 photos from the show floor on flickr.

I wanted to share this story. Last week when I attended the G2E, my entrance included admission to the exhibit halls of the F&B (food and beverage) and Fun Expo (amusement park operators) exhibit halls. These area all related to what happens inside a casino. The F&B conference was impressive for its excesses. There was a huge area for wine and alcohol that was totally free. See photo to the right, and the rest that I posted on flickr. Fun Expo was not bad either with its emphasis on amusement park games. If like me, you have been going too long to geek conferences in the high tech industry, it makes you wonder "What have I been doing?"

Today, I attended the Flickr Fiesta at Yahoo!'s main campus in Sunnyvale. This is an impressive facility. Just going through the massive parking structures it occured to me how good it is to be Yahoo! I don't know why I haven't been there before....

I have been looking at new media, social networks and Web 2.0 stuff over the past 2 weeks, and I came to see what I could learn from Yahoo! about flickr. There were several hundred people in attendance including the founders of flickr and many, many Yahoo! employees. Many of these employees were recent hires. The free food and alcohol was nice too. I posted a set of photos on my flickr account, and there are probably another 10,000 photos being uploaded as I post this. By definition everyone had a digital camera with them. From talking with the Yahoo! employees I learned about the flickr business, Yahoo! 360 Beta and other stuff. Just as an example, the Yahoo! team had massive screen where they scrolled in real-time all the photos uploaded to flickr. The rate was 5 new pictures per millisecond on the upload, and 8 times that on the download. There are apparently over 1.3M flickr subscribers and the number is growing 10% per month at least. This is a big hit.

I got to spend a few minutes with Jerry Yang co-founder of Yahoo! I saw him speak a few months back when he came to Churchill Club where Jerry basically put all the other speakers to shame with the impressive collection of gadgets, phones, etc. that he carries. I spoke with Jerry about our common interests in gadgets, and I congratulated him for putting Walter Mossberg and all the other speakers to shame. We commented about how most all the stuff he brought out only six months ago (2GB thumb drive, pocket sized XP PC, etc.) are now pretty much obsolete. I told Jerry about my interests to start another company in new media and web 2.0, and he sincerely wished me luck. Jerry was very gratious to hang around to spend time talking with people at the fiesta. This guy is very cool.

This weekend I attended Webzine 2005 a 2 day conference in San Francisco about independent online publishing. I was totally blown away by this conference. I felt like I was back in college (I think the average age at the event was less than 25), and I realized that while I have been sleeping the past few years, the world of online publishing and the Internet has been transformed. The energy at this conference was great and the people were all very cool. The conference only cost $22 (!) which I think was an unbelievable value for the level of information provided. I highly recommend this conference to anyone next year.

There were sessions, workshops, and panels on podcasting, video blogging, building communities, etc. One speaker had just come back from Iraq and New Orleans and showed some incredible raw pictures. I got to meet a lot of bloggers and learn about their projects and websites. I posted some photos from the event here, and you can also find more under tag "webzine2005" on flickr, or technorati "Webzine 2005". By the end of the conference, I got really excited about video blogging, and so I am going to transform this website in a video blog going forward. Text is so 90s. I will be working on that this week.

I went to CTIA in San Francisco today to connect with some friends, and see the Windows Mobile Treo 700W. Even though I have a lot of experience with Treos, I have chosen not to write anything about Palm’s move to Windows Mobile on this site. It was interesting to see Bill Gates at the Palm booth, sort of. They had a video of him running from the press conference. What was disappointing to me was that the Treo 700W was not available. The only model at the Palm booth was a non-working model, and there was another non-working model under glass at the Microsoft booth. People told me that it will not be available until 2006. My random photos from the tradeshow floor can be found here to save you the $80 cost of admission.

The Internet boomlet is here! This week I’ve been attending Web 2.0 in San Francisco. This conference is totally jampacked with sessions and people! There’s obviously a tremendous amount of interest all things Internet again. And there’s clearly a tremendous amount of possibility and creativity emerging. The Web 2.0 conference covers a lot of ground, including Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using Ajax or Flash, new ideas in search, mash ups, open source, video games, online music, and online advertising, etc. A lot of really great demos are being shown. Some of the speakers are real characters including Barry Diller, president of IACI, John Battle, journalist who is like the MC of the conference, Reed Hastings, the president of Netflix, and even Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead! I recorded some of their talks and will post later.

I will be at the Handango Partner Summitt and CTIA in Los Angeles next week if anyone would like to meet and catch up. And while I am there, I might have to stop by the Commerce Casino.

Here is my first YouTube video. Which actually turns out to be two videos as you will learn in a moment. The specific content of this video may not be interesting to you unless your kids also go to the same school as mine. I took this video at the dedication ceremony for my children's new school DIscovery Charter School. What I found interesting is how difficult and how time-consuming it is to upload something like this to the Internet. There were no completely free tools to do this acceptably either that I could find. I started by taking this video using my Samsung Digital camcorder which has the great advantage of capturing video directly to AVI files. The dedication ceremony was 18 minutes long and at highest quality that resulted in an 872MB file. My first problem was to reduce this to a manageable size. I attempted to load the video into Apple QuickTime Professional but it would not accept the large original file and just died. I could watch the video in Windows movie maker but they were reading the options that I found useful to export it to a better format. I often go to YouTube, a popular video sharing site, so I decided to try to upload the file there. You cannot upload files that are larger than 100 MB or longer than 10 minutes. YouTube also prefers 320x240 videos in MPG format. My video was very different so knew I had some serious work to do. I searched and downloaded a variety of video conversion tools attending to find one that would resample the video into something manageable. After much searching I settled on Ulead Video Studio 10. First I had the video converted to iPod format but this was still too large. So after some tweaking using the custom save as option I was able to get the right format file and make the entire video under 100 MB. Unfortunate still too long for YouTube, so I had to cut the video into two pieces. For me, Apple QuickTime professional was the quickest way. These conversions all took a long time, and I have a very fast PC with a lot of RAM. Finally it took over half an hour to upload the pieces on to YouTube site. Part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOLlWMTlOc Part two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXxyCZ-w_XY

I will be heading to RailsConf 2007 in Portland this week. If you would like to meet up, drop me a line.