Silicon Valley Musings

From Obama ‘08 iPhone Application page:
Obama ‘08 is your official, comprehensive connection to the heart of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s campaign, giving you the tools you need to make an impact and stay in the know.
Making a difference takes only moments using the Call a Friend feature. Want to do more? Find your local […]

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.
From Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene

Work on how to transfer photographic qualities such as high resolution, high dynamic range and better lighting from the photographs to the video.

Robert Scoble states: “First of all, Twitter doesn’t store my Tweets 25,000 times. It stores them once and then it remixes them.”
I do not know how Twitter is built. However, “back in the day,” I was the development manager for a real-time, stock quote delivery system, so I do have experience with architectural issues similar […]

I have been thinking about Dr. BJ Fogg’s recent video entitled “Elements of Simplicity.” I have been thinking about capital and tunneling and how they make Web-based products and services simpler.
I would suggest expanding the resource Money to Capital. This would allow other forms of capital to be considered when developing simple products and services. […]

From http://www.sigchi.org/dis2008/
DIS 2008 will be hosted in Cape Town, South Africa from Monday 25 February – Wednesday 27 February 2008. It will be the first DIS conference to be held outside the USA or Europe, and as such aims to challenge participants to reflect on designing interactive systems for users outside these established markets. This […]

Robert compared Microsoft and Google’s automated switchboards.
Several people commented that talking with a person is much preferred. I agree. In this day in age, a company should have all of the information that can be retrieved from an automated switchboard system easily accessible on a company’s Website. All the easily automated transactions (e.g. monthly […]

A month ago Robert came in to work and announced, “Office is Dead.” He went on to write. “Today I saw something that will totally transform my work life. SmartSheet. …. I’m going to use it to totally change how I work with other people.”
Well, It’s been a month. I am still using Microsoft Word […]

Here is a discussion between PodTech’s Dan Hendricks and Kent Brewster, Technology Evangelist at Yahoo!, that I recorded at SXSW.

Very interesting case study on YouTube’s success, YouTube Case Study: Widget marketing comes of age
Excerpts that are relevant to Widget-based embeddable video players:
Viral customer growth due to widget marketing
YouTube allowed users to easily embed any hosted videos on web pages or blogs. This turned out to be particularly popular with social-networking websites, especially MySpace. The […]

Robert asks what is your default browser page.
My default Web page is set to blank.
My portal of choice is still MyYahoo. The problem with this page is that it doesn’t do a good job of letting you know when new features are available on the rest of the Yahoo property. So I occasionally need to […]