Christine

Sobering, Joyful Life Lessons: Last Lecture of Prof. Randy Pausch

"We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand." So speaks Carnegie-Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch, who delivered his final lecture in anticipation of dying next month from pancreatic cancer. "I'm in excellent health right now -- It's the greatest thing of cognitive dissonance that we will ever see...I'm in better shape than most of you." Prof. Pausch, who is the 46-year-old director of the Alice Software Project, co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center, a husband, and a father of three, has lived life both richly and well.

Keeping Track of Personal Data is Biggest Problem Solved at TechCrunch40

Continuing yesterday's blunt force approach to filtering the offerings launched at TechCrunch40, here's a final wrapup of the actual problems being solved by the demonstrators. Interestingly, although the session categories varied between Monday and Tuesday, the problems did not for the most part. Here's an update of yesterday's interim list, with final 'pain rankings' based upon how many of the TechCrunch40 companies were dealing with the issue.

Startups Solve Problems at TechCrunch40 (Day One)

Set aside your normal business model skepticism and proof-of-efficacy needs for a moment. Wait for it...that done, here are five themes of problem-solving that were recurrent at TechCrunch40 on Monday:

Mashups go Mainstream: Online Content Tools Stretch Offline

For the past two years, it's been common practice for Web 2.0 mashups to enable users to mash personal content into customizable templates. Recently, however, there's been a noticeable evolution of this space: 1. integrated marketing campaigns are more and more frequently using online or mobile interaction tools; and 2. online content is reaching offline mainstream media.

Dave Sifry Steps Down as Technorati CEO

Just heard over the twitterwire: Dave Sifry has stepped down as CEO of Technorati, though he'll remain chairman of the company's board of directors. Dave lives and breathes from the green fuse of the startup, and I don't think that many would argue that Techorati is that any more. His post on this passion - and why it can make sense for a founder to move on once growth has taken hold - sets the tone just right:

Virtual Worlds Competition Results in Consumer Segment Expansion

Open platforms, more flexible graphics, cheaper storage, faster connections, more 'socially educated' consumers, and more international audiences are enabling a next-generation virtual landscape. Rather than proving that virtual reality is technically possible, these new competitiors to the space are expanding virtual worlds into a traditional consumer technology segmentation. This sampling of virtual businesses showcased at Under the Radar provides an illustration:

Lijit Displaces Technorati as Best Search Widget

Several months ago, I ran a complete review of easily available search widgets for my Typepad blog. At the time, Technorati provided superior results and ease of use. Today I've replaced my Technorati search with Lijit.

New Facebook Apps Review: Batting .400

I logged in to Facebook today to find a number of 'application invitations' on my requests page. Based on this small sample, it's apparent that I am unlikely to adopt the apps that are either (a) advanced navel-gazing or (b) gushy new random friend-making. Instead, I was drawn to those applets that enabled me to leverage or deepen the existing connections on my Facebook network, or that hinted of secondary platforms. It's also clear that if you were to actually accept all of the invites, your profile page would be cluttered and unreadable beyond belief.

Here's the ad-hoc review of the F8-inspired applications that I was invited to this morning, and my gut reactions:

Day Two Snippets from Foo Camp

As the Sebastopol darkness deepens and I sit awaiting the end of Werewolf (this time, I was an unjustly accused villager) - here are my favorite snippets from Day Two of Foo Camp:

Chumby Reveals Inside Beta at Foo Camp

At this year's Foo Camp, Chumby Industries CEO Steve Tomlin and co-founder bunnie huang revealed the highly anticipated, pre-beta chumby. The chumby is a small, wifi-enabled, Linux touchscreen device designed for "people who want the Internet around them all the time." Applications include social networks, blogs, auctions, and so forth - essentially, anything that you want to include in your Internet highlight reel.

Digg Shares Lessons on User Revolt Management

Over time, it's been primarily civil within the digg community. Recently, however, there was a minor furor around the HD-DVD encryption key being distributed via digg. Visits to the site were dominated by a vocal minority on one side, regulators on the other, and digg stuck in the middle with its hijacked home page. Digg CEO Jay Adelson hosted a conversation today at Foo Camp to discuss their experience.

Foo Camp, Day One: Personal Highlights

Last night marked the opening of Foo Camp: O'Reilly Media's annual get-together of technologists, futurists, cultural creatives, artists, and other folks wonderful. Here's a quick snapshot of memorable bits from last night:

Facebook Launches f8, and Catalyzes Growth of Social Applications

I spent some time last week at the jam-packed launch of f8, which platform has now been pushed live to the Facebook site. (My sister's wedding madness unfortunately kept me from getting online to post until now!) Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (Flickr photo by phil-it) focused on Facebook's 'social graph' as the reason that Facebook has enjoyed success. Zuckerberg is thinking ambitiously - he believes that just as the launch of the Web browser served to catalyze the growth of the Internet, Facebook's f8 platform will catalyze the growth of social applications.

Four Recommendations Paradigms to Watch

What's the best logic model to use for a recommendations engine? Builders of popular music recommendations services shared the pros and cons of their own - and each other's - approaches to matching people to the music that they'll love. These four paradigms for recommendations engines came out of the conversation. Most recommendation services will fall into one of these models, but the 'best approach' would undoubtedly vary based upon the subject matter.ight expect, MusicIP licenses its technology for pushbutton playlists on many consumer devices.

Full Circle Fund Seeks Nominations for Digital Inclusion Grants

The Bay Area's own Full Circle Fund (of which I recently became a proud member) is seeking grantee nominations for the Technology Impact Circle. The TIC is focused on "digital inclusion" and supports organizations whose work is aligned with the TIC's own theory of change. The five core tracks include:

Joost Moves the Needle for Internet TV

Joost is a free, full-screen television application that you download to your PC. The programming guide and on-demand controls behave much the same as does a cable set-top box. An embedded web browser can be brought up for more detail on a particular program.

Spock is Tops at Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad

The Web 2.0 Expo organizers took a page from American Idol today and encouraged the audience to vote for its favorite of three pitches:

Jeff Bezos Touts Amazon Web Services

Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com hopped up to the Web 2.0 Expo stage to pitch Amazon's new web services: SQS (Simple Queue Service), Mechanical Turk, S3 (Simple Storage Service), and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).

Nonprofit Technology Conference Names Award Winners

The Antonio Pizzigati Prize

The Antonio Pizzigati Prize, awarded by the Tides Foundation, recognizes outstanding public interest computing. Specifically, the award process seeks open source software developers that help nonprofits to be more effective in their efforts for social change. The first annual winner of the prize (and its $10,000 honorarium) is George Hotelling of CitizenSpeak. (Flickr photo by kathryn.) CitizenSpeak is a free e-mail advocacy service for grassroots organizations, and is available for download as a CivicSpace module at CivicSpace Labs.

March of the PICnet Penguins

Making an encore appearance at this year's Nonprofit Technology Conference....the PICnet penguins. Lucky attendees woke up this morning to find a bouncy inflatable penguin waiting at their hotel door, with an encouraging note to bring their new friend to open source sessions. A great way to start the day!

Bruce Sterling Rants, and Valleywag Dishes

At last year's Etech, I was punch-drunk after swimming in Bruce Sterling's river of rant language. I missed Sterling's rant at SXSW Interactive today, but it's available here courtesy of Valleywag's Nick Douglas. (Naturally, this comes with a good dash of Douglas' salt.)

Thanks, Nick! It's delicious.

5 Reasons that Bust 2.0 Will Hurt Less

Why won't the current boom have as big a bust as the dot.com bubble? Sifting through this wide-ranging conversation at SXSW Interactive results in 5 key reasons that 'Bust 2.0' should be less painful to the market:

Kathy Sierra Teaches "Human-ness" at SXSW

Kathy Sierra took her theme of passionate users to the next level at SXSW Interactive. Specifically, Sierra posed this question: Why do people go in person to a presentation that's being blogged live, twittered, and videotaped? Why are we all here?

On the Road with Darth Tater

...heading to the SXSW conference. 'Nuff said.

Broadband Wireless Seeps Into Vacation Getaways

As friendly naggers noted, I wasn't blogging for the past couple of weeks. I actually took a disconnected vacation, visiting lovely Isla Mujeres down in Mexico for a couple of weeks - most of which time was spent at a yoga retreat, allowing me to guzzle down guacamole and margaritas guilt-free while getting tan and bendy. I do have one work-oriented anecdote from the trip, however: