Brady Forrest
Brady Forrest is Chair for O'Reilly's Where 2.0 and co-Chairs Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC. Brady writes for O'Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He started Ignite, a geek event which has spread to over a hundred cities worldwide (including Seattle). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds robots and cars for Burning Man and competes for Mayor of finer establishments. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey or @brady. Recently, he has started blogging about Burning Man & desert fashion.
RFID Fun at PICNIC 2009
I just left Amsterdam with Geeks on a Plane. We were there for PICNIC, an annual technology-art conference in Amsterdam. One of the highlights of the conference are the RFID projects. Each attendee is given an RFID tag (an ik tag) that can be linked to their conference social network profile (we modeled our own RFID experiments at ETech…
A Computing Future from Microsoft: Large and Cheap Displays
Chris Pratley, the head of Microsoft’s Office Labs, gave the PICNIC audience a peek into the future they envision when planning their products. What is that future? It was encapsulated in the above video that they made a year ago. Some of the technologies (Augmented Reality and realtime language translation for example) have already come to the fruition (and they are going to need to make a new video soon before it all happens).
Geeks On a Plane Head To Berlin and Prague
The Geeks on a Plane group has left London and is currently in Amsterdam attending PICNIC. On Saturday we'll be headed to Berlin. On Monday we'll be in Prague. If you're in those cities consider coming by our events. In Berlin we will be at Atoms&Bits, an unconference, on Saturday night. This Sunday we will be hosting a Startup2Startup…
Ignites Around the World: Amherst, NYC, SLC, Portugal, Austin, Prague and PICNIC
Ignites, where speakers get 20 slides and just 15 seconds a slide, have spread to almost 50 cities since starting in Seattle. Some of them are helped, sponsored, or coordinated by myself or other O’Reilly employees, but most of them are run by a local community. There are at least twenty Ignites happening around the world in the next two months (and I know of several that are in the planning stage). Check for one in your city.
Startups! Enter the Web 2.0 Expo Launchpad by 9/25
Startups provide the lifeblood (and R&D) for the web. Each year at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC (and SF) we celebrate their collective accomplishments by highlighting a few of their number during the Launchpad. This year’s Launchpad will occur the morning of 11/15. We are looking for five great startups to demo onstage and handle questions from our judges like Nate Westheimer. I’ll be hosting the event. I also spend time with each startup before the event reviewing and critiquing their demo. Past Expo Launchpad participants include 80Legs, Nitobi’s PhoneGap (SF 2009 winner), and Triggit.
Ignite Show: Mehal Shah on Winning At Scrabble
Scrabble isn't a game of who can get the best 6 letter words. It's a game of points and squeezing 2 letter terms into corners. In this week's Ignite Show Mehal Shah takes us through clean and sometimes dirty ways to win at Scrabble. Some of his tips include: Thinking of Scrabble as a numbers game, instead of a…
Submit a Talk For Ignite at PICNIC
This year we are going to Ignite PICNIC. PICNIC Network is an excellent conference in Amsterdam that is happening September 23-25. I attended last year and got a lot out of the combination of technology and art (Radar post). Other speakers this year include Nicolas Negroponte, Linda Stone, Kevin Slavin and many others.
Watch Burning Man From Home
Video streaming by Ustream Burning Man has started. You can watch the tech-art festival via its live uStream feed. They will be switching between Center Camp, the gate (where there was recently a white-out) and various art projects. I wrote about some of the tech at this year's Burning Man (including a new geodata API) last week. Jeffrey Johnson,…
Join Us For Geeks on a Plane: Europe Edition 2009
Even though the economy is down there are still new technologies to explore, people to meet and ideas to exchange. To facilitate this Dave McClure and I are hosting the first Geeks on a Plane: Europe. We are inviting Silicon Valley & US entrepreneurs, technologists, investors, and bloggers (you!) on a 14-day tour of Europe’s top technology cities, events, and people featuring stops in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Paris, plus a kickoff event in Washington, DC.
Ignite Show: Jeff Veen on Great Designers
Good designers copy. Great designers steal. In this week’s Ignite Show Jeff Veen, well-known for his design work on Google Analytics, Wikirank and Typekit, lays out a strong argument for why iPhone imitators are the cargo cults of the digital era. The people building touchscreen knock-offs don’t understand what makes the iPhone great. So instead of creating an end-to-end service they attempt to imitate it’s flashiest features – kind of like Pacific Islanders who built “planes” out of bamboo.