On Saturday, Tyler passed his test for a Yellow belt in Aikido. He was nervous at first but did just fine. More photos here.
Year: 2006
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Tyler gets a Yellow Belt
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Izumi
Went to Mie & Dav’s celebration/baby shower for their baby due out anytime in the next few weeks. Mie literally looks like she ate an entire basketball – she’s perfectly round.
No, they haven’t decided on a name yet but “Tesla” was being mulled over as of yesterday. I’m sure they’ll find the perfect name once they see her.
Dav caught this rare photo of Izumi who always hides from the camera. Isn’t she beautiful?
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Yahoo Hack Day
Nice write up over on TechCrunch on a hack that I worked on with a team of seven other Yahoo’s spread out across the US.
Every couple of months groups of Yahoo’s band together to work on simple prototypes to work out a new concept or feature. Most are simple extensions of existing Yahoo products that extend them in new and original ways, some just use API’s in a way to poke fun and get a laugh, and others are full-blown software or hardware wizadry that blow your mind with their creativity and flash.
The rules were simple. Teams have from noon on Thursday through to noon on Friday to take their project from a concept to a working prototype that can be demoed in front of a panel of judges in 90 seconds or less.
Recruiting for the team took place in the weeks leading up to hack day and as we got closer we had a rough idea of what we wanted to do and emails were traded on how to break up the tasks at hand. We found out that having two members from NYC helped us out b/c the time difference meant that the West Coast team could hand off to them in the early morning and catch some sleep while they carried the torch and picked up where we left off.
I learned many things at Hack Day and am really happy Yahoo gave me the chance to participate. I would argue that I learned almost as much about Product Management in those 24 hours than I did in two years when I was product manager at Factiva.com. 24 hours and a 90 second demo do wonders to focus your attention to the absolute core. What company would give their employees two half days of to scratch an itch and then give you a chance to get in front of folks like the CFO, co-founder, and Head of Product Strategy to let you state your case? What a cool company.
There were lots of highlights, unfortunately I can’t write about most of the hacks themselves but there were some great flashes of personality too. Chad bought a sound level meter to measure the cheers & hoots which were many and supportive. We were all running on fumes so all was forgiven. My favorite demo was the poor man’s karaoke machine (lyrics on the screen set to associated flickr images) which croaked on the flickr image part and just ended up being 90 seconds of Jeffery Bennett singing while he waited for his demo to work.
Jeff’s voice is not half bad either! -
Nokia delivers a podcatcher
I see that Nokia’s shipping a piece of software that in hindsight is so obvious, it’s amazing no one thought of it earlier. As onboard storage gets larger and larger (the new Nokia’s have 4GB!), the viability for the phone to double as an iPod substitute makes more and more sense. Sony played around with their memory stick but it’s a pain to have to copy files from your PC over to the stick in what’s basically a glorified floppy disk.
While I have a pretty steady collection of favorites in my Nano, I primarily listen to podcasts. Basically, updating my podcast subscriptions & recharging are the only reasons I synch up my iPod on a daily basis. What if we were able to break the cord?
MobileCrunch reports that Nokia announced development of new software that will pull down podcast subscriptions into the phone. We all have cell phones charging up on our bedside table. What if you could set it up to make a call in the middle of the night (when bandwidth is cheap and fast) to download your multi-megabyte podcast subscriptions? The phone companies are going to be psyched because they can put their excess bandwidth to use while using up your minutes and you’re going to be happy because maybe you can leave your iPod behind every now and then.
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eBay completes social media troika, message boards, blogs, now a wiki
EBay recently launched blogs for it’s members as a supplement to its very active forum community. While message boards are useful for loosely classified conversations where anyone can start a thread, blogs are better suited for individuals who want to project a voice around an area of expertise. We’re already seeing examples of this as members share their knowledge of things such as eBay-specific HTML tags.Now eBay has added a wiki (powered by JotSpot) to the community area and one hopes that it will become an excellent source of hyper-detailed, domain-specific knowledge about collectibles. Where else (outside the rarified world of Yahoo Groups) can you find a detailed discussion of the net worth of a bag of trolls?
Richard MacManus has a detailed writeup.
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Found with Davy Rothbart
While my normal commute hour is filled with podcasts from the usual tech talk shows and NPR highlights, every now and then I dip into the vast archive of talks over on itconversations.com and pick a few interesting lectures.
Today I found a gem! Davy Rothbart runs Found magazine and speaks at Pop Tech about the weird and wonderful ephemera people find on the streets of America.
Davy Rothbard @ Pop Tech 2005 (about 35 minutes)
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Getting drafted for the Yankees
From mlb.com, reporting on yesterday’s first round baseball draft picks:
Yankees top pick Ian Kennedy was one of four right-handers selected in the first five rounds Tuesday.
I’d like to wish the best of luck to the other Ian Kennedy, I’m pulling for you. I’ve been following his budding baseball career as part of a Technorati search and look forward to his continued success. My friends who follow the Red Sox have already said it’s going to be hard to get used to rooting against me.
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Billboards as Ambient Graffitti
So this is cool. deinde posts a photo (above) of a billboard in Manhatten that you can SMS to register your vote on the live updating counter.
Here’s my idea, add technology that senses nearby bluetooth or wifi-enabled devices and asks permission to read their preferences or log file. The billboard then becomes a realtime, updating display of the aggregated interests of anyone that comes in contact with it.
You could pull the last five songs played and show the album cover art pulled from Amazon.com. You could show a spider-graph drawing six degrees of separation between everyone’s friends network.
Logos of the company domain names on the email addresses in your address book, lehman.com > lehman brothers, ms.com > morgan stanley, etc.
Give the billboard your Yahoo or claimID and it can pull all sorts of information you already publish.
It’s an invasion of privacy if it’s tied back to the individual but it’s a group art project if it’s mixed together and anonymized with everyone else on the big screen like a big, collaborative screensaver.
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Reuters Video Affiliate Network
Reuters is using Brightcove to distribute its video content via an affiliate network of bloggers and small publishers. The network is in the pilot phase now but you can apply here and, if accepted, copy & paste some code into your site to make Reuters Video available on your site via a player like the one pictured above. If you’re a publisher, this is a quick and easy way to add a constantly fresh list of the most important videos of the day from Reuters. If you’re Reuters, it’s a great distribution network that inserts your brand into blogger/reader conversations everywhere.