David Beach's Blog

SXSW Withdrawl

I got sick the day after I got back from SXSW. At first I thought it was lung burn from the pipe smoke, but it turned into a full-blown cold with all the fun of fatigue, aches, sore throat, and congestion. Since I was only at SXSW for two nights instead of five, I didn't get as much out of it as I hoped. Yahoo decided that it didn't want to pay for my room (after it had been booked and planned for months), so I was left high and dry and at the mercy of my good friends. So this meant that I couldn't really go until Sunday. Whatever. It worked out.

I went to a few panels on Monday and Tuesday, met with many friends, and met several new friends at all the parties. Hanging out with Sol was the highlight. He let me stay with him and talked me out of abandoning the trip altogether.

The Santa Cruz Geek Dinner was last night. I showed up for the first part even though I wasn't feeling well. This movement is very important to me. Jon Luini was there along with a super old friend from grammar and high school, Dave Marsh. Things are really starting to happen that will turn a lot of heads. Santa Cruz is the perfect size with the right kind of people and the right kind of talent. A movement of this type can happen there much more easily than almost anywhere else. There will be top tier startups calling Santa Cruz home within a year.

I changed up my Tumblr page. It's now associated with a domain name http://b3ach.com. I love that service.

That's it. I'm tired. I have lots to do this weekend and I start a new Job at Yahoo on Monday. But I need to get rid of this illness.

Bruce Sterling Speech @ ETech 2006 v2.0

Here lies some video I shot from the ETech conference of Bruce Sterling giving his great speech about The Internet of Things. In this section he is discussing the nature of Web 2.0 and quoting Alan Liu who wrote the book "The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information." Bruce is a great speaker. I love his style and his use of language. He's a master. It's about 10 minutes and totally engaging... (I'll comment later on my VideoEgg experience...) Enjoy!

Update: Sean Coon has a terrific post about Bruce Sterling's speech at SXSW (I had to miss it as I was on a flight home...) He also links to audio and video: Check it.

ETech Thursday & SXSW Friday

I'm here in Austin. But first let me talk a bit about the final day at ETech. It really was a mixed bag. On the positive, it had some of the best presentations of the event, including one by Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz. I had many people come up to me and tell me how impressed they were with him and Yahoo as a platform. I also had some more good conversations with the Plum folks. Hans Peter, Julie, and Margaret.

On the negative side, things got messed up. First ETech had to move locations within the hotel because of another event coming in over the weekend. We were crammed into these very small meeting rooms instead of the nice big ballrooms as before. But worse than that was the wi-fi connection. I've hesitated commenting on it all week, but it was pretty bad. Actually it was non existent on Thursday. Of all places to have a sucky Internet connection.... All week presenters were making excuses, they couldn't show proper live demos, it was embarrassing. People paid a ton of money to be there and possibly a ton more to present... the fact that the wi-fi wasn't available is inexcusable. Hopefully they'll fix it for next year.

All in all it was a good show, great people were there and I came away from it inspired.

Now I'm in Austin. John C. Riley (boogie nights and chicago) was on my flight. I got to my hotel late. The hotel has spotty internet as well. Right now I'm in a cafe trying to catch up on two days of email. I don't have a car and I'm not certain if I'm going to regret that. The Convention Center is a couple of miles away and it's already pretty hot (at least it is for a Santa Cruz type). I understand that the have free public transportation, but I'm not sure if I'm going to have time to grok the schedule.

Tomorrow is a packed day. A full day of meetings. I'm going to as many social network and folksonomy presentations as possible. There's nothing here about e-commerce which should tell you about the state of things. (nothing at ETech either).

Comparison shopping is a commodity. It's our job to build a killer distributable platform and then layer on top the right differentiating technology. That's where my head is at...

more later.

ETech 2006 (Tuesday)

  ETech 2006 (Tuesday) 
  Originally uploaded by Laughing Squid.

Scott Beale took this. Catching up with Bruce Sterling.
Using flickr's blog post tool to push this. First time.

By the way, someone needs to invent all day batteries for laptops. please! Everyone here is craving juice. Several circuits have been blown because of all the plugging in. It really does not seem right.

ETech Day Two... Electric Boogaloo

Day two here in San Diego. There are a few ongoing themes... let me list them.

• Please God someone find a way to simplify my life!
• Information overload
• Smaller is better
• Organize this mess for me
• Mashup or shutup

The best speech today was by Linda Stone. It was about how we pay attention to each other. Do we really pay attention anymore? She calls what we do "partial attention."  We are inundated with information and we pay more attention to our tools that deliver us this information than we do real life. The next generation of successful services will help us find a way to better our real lives, not necessarily better our online lives.

Here's a quote from her as best as I can remember... paraphrasing. When developing our services; "Ease of use is not enough anymore! We must ask ourselves if what we are doing improves our quality of life. The only way the next generation of products can differentiate themselves and be successful is if they can answer yes to this question."

I hope she publishes her words online.