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Friday May 17th I took the day to meet some of the interesting tech companies present in New York. There are over 1,200 tech companies in NY (including CodeAcademy, KickStarter, Foursquare, MakerBot, ZocDoc, Guilt, AppNexus, Tumblr, Etsy, KickStarter, Automatic… and mine!), most between the Flat Iron and SoHo areas of Manhattan (Silicon ALley). So I chose a few that, for one reason or another, I was interested in meeting and talk to their founders.
Carna botnet offers us this amazing 24 hour visualization of relative IPv4 utilization observed using ICMP Ping requests.
Look at the data, just look at it! Dont you see peoples sleeping patterns, internet usage patterns, eating schedule habit, cultural differences, urban influence, regional inequalities…?
After playing with it for a while, beyond it limitations (light, format, movement…) here are the two biggest pitfalls with the Lytro camera:
It is still for Mac OSX only. They NEED to come out with Open Source / Free Software (both their software AND platform support for GNU/Linux).
Picture library size and location. BIG unresolved issue.
As I mentioned in my previous post, at IBM Innovation Center in Chicago they have a Watson (more info here) interactive kiosk with which to play an interactive game of Jeopardy. In case you have been living in a cave for the past few months, Watson beat Jeopardy human champions on live TV, the significance of which can not be overstated.
Now, remember: this is a “small version” of Watson, and a “self-contained” version of Jeopardy.
Although I can not embed it (the author has disabled the option) this video by Japanese performer and CGI artist Kagemu is really worth looking at. Enjoy. (Via Nebula).
A couple of weeks ago I received my new Lytro camera. Although it is an incredible technology, and allows things that were unthinkable until now, so far I am mixed.
Pros:
Compact and discreet Extremely easy to use New ways of taking pictures Novelty Supercool “focus later” Cons:
You have to get used to a different way of thinking and framing a shot (square! and distance) Low performance under low light (although better than my crappy Samsung Galaxy IIS camera) Check out this online gallery.
On Tuesday I went to New York University for a nice conversation in the Inside the Internet Garage series, with journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (AllThingsDigital, Wall Street Journal, etc).
Besides the very interesting bio/background overview of them that the interviewer did, here are some quotes that caught my attention.
Walt Mossberg:
IT departments are the most regressive force in tech, blocking new tech adoption
The story goes that Larry Page asked Steve Jobs for advice, he said “Find the 5 things you do best, and focus on it”, which its what hes doing
