Heh… I think my heart is just starting to stop palpitating. I was getting up from my desk to throw something away and my foot must have been wrapped around my headphone chord.
My work MacBook Pro went flying and shut in the process. Because Apple makes resilient products which are amazing, the computer is fine. Thank God!
When can I get my MagSafe headphone connector?!?!?
Anyone else almost had a fatal laptop emergency?
Here at Clearspring, some of our developers did a proof-of-concept using YouTube’s player user interface API and the Clearspring’s Launchpad Advanced to see what YouTube would look like with our share menu. It’s pretty sweet. Check it out.
So Twitter was a big success at SXSW for bringing people together. As was laid out by Jeremiah Owyang, it was used to revolt against the Zuckerberg/Lacey interview, improve panels, and to find/start parties.
But what empowered Twitter to be so helpful? Most of it’s users were in the same geographic area.
I have Twitter friends from all over the country… all over the world. There are times when I want to be able to see what everyone in my “global neighborhood” is doing. That is fine.
There are other times when I want to go grab a beer and I’m curious what everyone else is up to. What my friends in Boulder, Colorado are doing doesn’t help me find beer drinking company here in Washington DC.
It’d be cool if there was a mobile app that would append my geo-location or maybe just my zipcode on to the end of all my and my friends’ Twitter messages.
In addition to saying I always want to get SMS messages from certain twitter users, I could get SMS messages when tweets happen in my same geographic location. Seems like this would be useful.
This make sense?
I’m excited about the recent release of the Web browser standards test Acid3. Now lets encourage the browsers to do it. Sounds like the WebKit crew is already working on it, which is awesome. What about Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Opera?
Tonight I was on my way to church for an event they were having and wanted to stop by Port City Java in Eastern Market to grab a coffee before I went over. I had to get the coffee to-go because the coffee shop closed at 7pm.
Coffee shops really shouldn’t close at 7pm.
In today’s society, seems like the only place you can go to hang out after work is a bar. Don’t get me wrong. I have no problems with beer or wine, in moderation but there are plenty of times I want a place to hang out after work that isn’t a bar.
It will be 9pm. I’ll be doing work from home and I’ll kind of have an itch to get out. But where do you go?
If Port City Java were to stay open later, the coffee shop could become a center of the neighborhood. Instead of folks staying home, they could come out at night to a safe community centric place.
What if you brought in local musicians? What if you had a little movie screen? What if you had talks or poetry readings? All of a sudden the coffee shop is the hip and cool place to be. You’re selling more coffee and making more money.
Importantly, people would be getting out of their houses and hanging out with their neighbors in community.
When I live in Lansing, Michgan, every so often I’d meet my friends for coffee at Beaners (now called Bigby’s) in East Lansing because it was open late, well actually all night (i think). It was a happening place. It was always packed full of people. I want something like this in DC.
What do you think? Would you go to a late night chill coffee shop?
At WidgetDevCamp, I floated the idea of doing a iPhone SDK Dev Camp. Seems like there was some interest for it then.
Now that the Apple iPhone SDK is out, I’ve already gotten a few folks asking about it. One of the reasons I thought this would be cool is because it’s so new we’d all be starting at the same place.
Drop me a comment if you’d wanna attend this event.
It seems like this year the DC tech community was at South by Southwest (SXSW) in force.
As I mentioned before, when I got into town on Saturday after just walking the conference halls for 5 minutes, I ran into sooooo many DC people.
Other folks were noticing the massive Washington DC presence. I’d meet people and mention that I was from DC. They’d say “DANG, I’ve run into a ton of DC people here.”
The lyric from the Bob Dylan song “Ballad of a Thin Man” is so appropriate.
Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
Something is happening here in Washington DC.
His tech excellency Leo Laporte just posted a twitter message:
Getting ready to speak to radio executives at the Radio Ink conference. Q: Is radio dead? Discuss!
Heh… I honestly don’t remember the last time that I listened to the radio.
The radio just isn’t useful for my life. One, I don’t own a car. I miss out on that opportunity to listen the radio. Even if I did have a car, I’d probably get a car adapter for my iPhone.
When I’m at work or a party and we need music, no one says “Hey turn on the radio.” Someone will get speakers and hook them up to an iPod.
I don’t listen to talk or news radio. 95% of the time it’s just blather or useless soundbytes.
There is too much content that I can listen to when I want and where I want. Why would I force myself to have to listen to the radio just to hear a specific show?
Do you listen to the radio? Is it dead or dying?
Well I have to say that among the conferences i’ve been to this has by far been one of the best. South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive is AWESOME!
Among the conferences that folks go to, it seems like most go here. The first hour I was here I walked the halls and ran into so many friends of mine. It’s great! The Web community is so much fun.
Man and the Web community knows how to party. There were lots of parties, like 5 or 6 a night. It was a great chance to meet people I didn’t know. Probably some of the best parties were the adhoc ones.
Next year I definitely want to do more. I think any company could get a lot of mileage out of having a presence at this event. You can gain a lot of awareness pretty quickly.
Seems like every year there is a company or app that gains a lot of attention which everyone is excited, last year it was Twitter… I’d posit that this year it’s Gary Vaynerchuk and Wine Library TV. I went to a panel and 3 out of the 5 members were wearing Wine Library TV wristbands. He also threw an adhoc wine party that everyone was talking about and made some news.
Well… I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts to share later.
Did you go to SXSW? What was the highlight for you?
Steve Rubel has a great blog post – “Startups That Fail to Invest in Trust Will All Die“…
Web startups need access to talent. Often they need capital too (and a smart strategy for managing it). But I am going to argue here that their most essential currency is trust. However, a lot of emerging companies in particular tend to ignore it.
Great post… I think he’s right on.
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 