Traveling Geeks

Traveling Geeks Photos on Flickr by Susan Bratton: London and Cambridge #TG2009

Here is a link to all of my photos (please, tag and comment away!) from the Traveling Geeks blogger junket.

Thanks to all whom I met and to the new friendships I’ve made. I have been thoroughly impressed with the tech scene, the quality of entrepreneurs and the start up scene in London and Cambridge.

If you have photos to share, please comment below.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO FLICKR SETS FOR TRAVELING GEEKS

Susan Bratton Traveling Geeks Flickr Sets

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Turning Science into Product: Cambridge Consultants #TG2009

One of our stops on the tour of Cambridge innovation centers included a trip to Cambridge Consultants. This “consultancy” takes new discoveries in science and technology, helps with patents, and envisioning and creating products for companies around the world. The show and tell was intriguing and here are some of the devices showcased:

Holographic Radar

Conventional radar sensors scan the field of view by mechanically rotating a narrow-beam antenaa. You’ve seen them in a million movies. New active phased arrays still capture information from a small area of the wider view. Now, holographic radar covers a whole field of view using many beams simultaneously. This data requires Teraflops of processing, but what it lets you do is actually “see” through solid walls and track multiple moving items. This is an excellent application for SWAT teams to see humans inside buildings in a hostage situation.

This radar was actually created to help air transportation spot the new windpower generators, which look like other airplanes to traditional radar.

Here’s what the device looks like:

Holographic Radar Device

We also saw some wireless medical devices of the future incuding devices that connect to the web and record you taking medicine from an inhaler, activity monitors and prescription dosing tracking systems.  As we age and become more connected, there’s a burgeoning area of technology supporting proactive disease management.

Here are some examples of devices created for Cambridge Consultants’ clients:

Web Connected Medical Devices

Satellite Internet connectivity was another big area for CC. Iridium is their client and they are working on phones and plug in devices for remote locations that allow you to jack into the web.

Iridium Satellite Phone

When we launched @Home Network’s broadband cable modem service here in the Silicon Valley in the late 90’s, we used to create a “Home of the Future” every year in New York and invite our advertisers, the press and our partners in to see what a broadband connected home might be like. Everything we used to show is now in my house, from a celestial jukebox, to WiFi to computers in many rooms. The only thing still missing is the refridgerator that keeps a shopping list. Now at Cambridge Consultants, the focus is on energy management and conservation.

Energy Management Devices from Cambridge Consultants

Another company with whom we met that has a terrific range (see how British I’m sounding?) of home energy management systems is AlertMe.com by founder Pilgrim Beart. After six years working in Silicon Valley in the 1990’s for the likes of Atari and Chromatic Research (now AMD), in 1999 Pilgrim headed back to his home town of Cambridge. Here he founded two companies:activeRF Ltd., an early implementer of asset-location systems, using a variety of short range RF technologies and antenova Ltd., a manufacturer of innovative mass market antenna technology that provides WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity to mobiles and laptops. Now he’s on to saving energy with this terrific bundle of products:

AlertMe.com Home Energy Mangement Systems

Meeting with Cambridge Consultants on the tour helped me see another facet of the Cambridge infrastructure for bringing the innovation from the colleges (did you know there are 31 colleges that make up University of Cambridge and that Trinity, the college noted for science, computer science and technology has had more Nobel Prize winners than any other college in the world?) to the marketplace.

Cambridge is strong in the sciences and computer technology. They have a Angel and VC infrastructure. They have consulting companies to patent and develop products. But what they consistently said they are lacking is “commercialization” skills: PR, marketing and sales. If I didn’t have my own early stage company with Personal Life Media, I would love to move to Cambridge and set up a launch services business. After launching so many companies in Silicon Valley, it would be a delight to bring some of Cambridge’s innovation to market.

Here are two final pics of our time at CC. Thanks to Patrick, Gordon, Duncan, Alastair, Ray and Steven for their gracious hosting of the Traveling Geeks.

Geeks Hanging with Cambridge Consultants

Suz at Cambridge Consultants

Backstage Pass- Real Customer Service

Customer service takes dedication, and Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s list, takes this to a degree you won’t see many places. Every day, whether he’s at home in San Francisco or on the road in England, he attends to his half-time position as customer service rep for the institution he founded.

Each night, as we’ve been winding up or down the evening activities, Craig has bowed out at a reasonable hour to go online and attend to customer issues as they come up. Being +8 hours from San Francisco’s time zone has helped, but it’s still a remarkable thing to see this kind of dedication.

Tweet This Post

Be Everywhere! My Secret Stash of Social Media Meta Tools for Easily Syndicating Your Work

[This has no text appearing on the page, so until we get this solved we shouldn’t have a headline with no blog entry. – jd]

Whether I’m keynoting or participating on a panel or even at a party, socializing and talking business, I get the same basic question over and over.

“How do you manage to be everywhere at once?”

They are not talking about my physical body, which is mostly planted in my Aeron chair moving Personal Life Media forward. What they are talking about is the level of conversation I keep up online via Twitter, on Facebook, in my LinkedIn page, on my blog, with my weekly podcast. And everyone wants specifics. Exactly what do I use and how do I connect all the disparate services together?

I use a couple of really good meta-tools that lay on top of the various social nets, allowing me to write once-post many with my written content and my photos/videos/images. This syndication is at the core of my work and simplifies and radiates my work to my friends and followers across multiple networks.

My constellation of tools includes:

1. MobyPicture for syndicating my photos from my iPhone and Mac across ALL my socnets simultaneously (kicks TwitPic’s booty) Read my Post Once Appear Everywhere review of MobyPicture here.
2. TweetLater Professional (there’s a free version) for pre-scheduling Tweets to come out over time about my DishyMix podcast episodes, other shows on Personal Life Media and some of my better blog posts, of which I hope this is one
3. Trackur for online reputation management and social listening. It’s superior to Google Alerts
4. I’m also testing uberVU in their private beta as it’s a threaded listening/commenting system, because once you syndicate your content across multiple networks, you get comments coming in from all those places and you need a single UI in which to manage the conversations
5. and a Twitter Custom Search bookmark on my Firefox browser toolbar that @DaveTaylor taught me how to do: “dishymix” OR “susan bratton” OR “@susanbratton” OR “personal life media” OR “talk show tips” (learn how from Dave here)

Image of Dave Taylor

Note: MobyPicture is a Dutch company, founded by Mathys van Abbe. More about MobyPicture here. TweetLater Professional is a Canadian company, founded by Dewald Pretorius. Trackur is a US company, founded by Andy Beal. uberVu is a Romanian company, founded by Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca. We met an amazing number of social media start ups on our Traveling Geeks tour which you should check out.

This post will focus on how I use Tweetlater Pro to schedule and use “spinnable text” so that I’m promoting my work over time across Twitter. I do link my Tweets to Facebook, so they appear there as well.

This is an excerpt from my elearning system, Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret Master Host Techniques in which I teach you how to prepare for a conduct interviews but also exactly how I use social influence marketing to promote my shows. TweetLater Professional is a mainstay in my strategy.

Image by adria.richards via Flickr

Using TweetLater Professional to Manage Your Twitter Schedule
I am so glad Dewald Pretorius (love that name!) had the organizational foresight to invent TweetLater Professional. I follow him on Twitter @dewaldp. I want to be in the Twitterverse on a consistent basis, but I have a business to run and a life to lead. TweetLater Professional “TLP,” for which I pay $29.97, a month is completely worth the price for its time-saving features.

I have a lot I want to Twitter about. I blog, I have my podcast, we do 39 other interesting shows on the network, I find other blog posts and articles I want to share, I like to post about where I’m speaking, I want to “crowd source” answers to my questions…I love to interact on Twitter.  I take a proactive approach to much of what I Twitter. I like to write a whole series of Tweets and then schedule them to appear at times when I know my East and West Coast friends are most likely to see them. Then I supplement those pre-planned Twitters with all of the spur of the moment things about which I want to communicate by Twittering on the fly.

I also know that any one follower may not likely be watching their Twitter stream when I’m Twittering about a specific subject. For important things, like my weekly show, I want to be able to Twitter about it more than one time.  I will write 4-8 different versions of a Twitter about a single episode and schedule them to appear over a 1-3 week period. That way, if one post doesn’t catch your attention or your fancy, another one about the same show just might.

Here is what the basic TweetLater data entry screen looks like.

TweetLater Main Entry Screen

Here are examples of four Twitter posts I scheduled through TweetLater Professional (using Spinnable Tweet Text – more below)  to come out in one month about one single episode of DishyMix:

Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/
Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/

Notice that they all have the same TwitPWR url?  That way, which ever ones get RT’d, give more power to that single url and reinforce my standing at TwitPWR. I also save draft tweets that include text and a TwitPWR url in it if it’s a really good episode and I’ll want to promote it for weeks afterward.

Spinnable Tweet Text

My very favorite feature of TweetLater Professional is not just scheduling tweets that will be published every X number of hours, days, or weeks. The “Spinnable Text” feature is BRILLIANT. To avoid having the tweet say exactly the same thing every time it is published, you can provide alternate tweet text options (multi-level spinnable tweet text) from which the final tweet text is compiled every time a recur is published.

My Spinnable Text post for the above four Tweets about Bill McClosky’s interview on DishyMix looked like this in the entry box:

{Pivotal Veracity. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. McClosky recommends cool email tools. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|The Jazz Club Dolphin on Text Vs. HTML http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|40,000 Email Marketing Campaigns Later, The #1 Piece of Advice Emerges http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/|Shy? An incredibly convoluted but elegant solution to networking from Bill McClosky. http://TwitPWR.com/7wt/}

Note: You can always cancel or pause these kinds of recurring Tweets if they become noxious or are no longer viable. Also, the directions for how to do Spinnable Text are very well done on the TweetLater console.

In addition to the advanced scheduling, another feature I like in TLP is the ability to schedule for multiple accounts. I manage my own Twitter account @SusanBratton, I also manage the Twitter stream for @PersonalLIfe and I contribute to the Association for Downloadable Media’s Twitter feed, @ADMTweets. I can write any Twitter and decide to post it to one, two or all three of my accounts using TLP.

TweetLater Pro Accounts

Note: I also own @TalkShowTips and @DishyMix and send potential followers to @SusanBratton to follow me there.

Track Your Keywords on Twitter with TweetLater Professional
I have set up alerts and track a list of keywords using TweetLater Professional too. I use it like I do with Trackur, which I view about once a week. I like getting the Twitter digest every day in email so I can discover new people to follow or who I can tell about TalkShowTips. You can also use this feature to track your @replies, though I keep up with them through TweetDeck when I’m at my desk and Twitterific on my iPhone. It feels more timely to me to get them at those places, than TweetLater Professional.

I am actively looking for Twitterers who are posting about their latest show, so I can ping them about this book or respond to them in general. Here are my current list of keywords and phrases I track:

“latest podcast”, “my podcast”, “my show”, “new episode” ,”new podcast”, “new show”, “personal life media”, @susanbratton, #adtech, #TG2009, dishymix, podcast advertising, show host, susan bratton, susanbratton, talk show, talk show host, talkshow, talk show tips, talkshowtips, plm

This is how the email digest of results from your Keyword Tracking in Tweetlater Professional looks. These are a few Twitters, mostly from others, about DishyMix:

TweetLaterPro Keyword Digest

The Big Brouhaha About Twitter Automation
I must warn you. There are some features of TweetLater Professional that are unpopular with the “Twitterati*.”

You can set Tweetlater Professional to automatically follow anyone who follows you, even with a 72 hour window to manually review your new followers before you confirm them. Turn about is fair play. You can also autmatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you. Fair enough. You can also automatically send a message to anyone who follows you. I like to thank my new followers, but a LOT of big name Twitters do not agree with me. They feel it’s spammy. They hate what are callled “Auto DM’s.” It’s a personal choice. If someone is really going to unfollow me because I thanked them for following me, then OK. I can live with that.

I am a mannerly woman and I like to say thanks. You should choose what feels best to you. Here’s a post I did on a dozen things to know about managing your online reputation. Always go with your gut. Here’s my SXSW interview with Guy Kawasaki where he says if he’s not pissing somone off, then he’s doing something wrong. With 150,000 followers, he can afford a few unfollows.

Twitter is a big social experiment and you have to have the confidence to feel your way through, apologize for mistakes and try new things! I find an apology is all it takes if you cross someone’s boundary.

Now you know the set of tools I use to “be everywhere” and a bit more detail about how I leverage TweetLater Professsional. Let me know what additional questions you have and tools you like for managing across social nets.

* Twitterati means the celebrity people on Twitter who have a large share of voice. Like the Glitterati or the Digerati… They can wield a big stick with their opinions.

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What’s After MoshiMonsters and WeeWorld? MovieStorm and Stupeflix. #TG2009

The real-time web. The semantic web. Augmented reality. It’s all happening right now. And for most Boomers not in the tech world, most of these new technologies will pass us by. But not so our progeny.

Taylor, my 12 year old daughter, like your children, has been raised on Nintendo, creating virtual worlds to pass time in the car. Today there are next generation online worlds like WeeWorld and MoshiMonsters from MindCandy, that are a new breed of stimulating, mentally challenging game environments. And as our kids grow up, they will be creating their own 3D movies with MovieStorm and promulgating their customized online videos with Stupeflix.(yeah, I know, bad name to translate from French into English)

These four companies were just a few of the extraordinary organizations with whom I met during last week’s Traveling Geeks tour of London and Cambridge.

Jeff Zie, Founder, Movie Storm – Cambridge, England

I have a rule with Taylor that she can spend as much time online as she’d like, as long as 50% of her time is focused on content creation, rather than content consumption. After growing up steeped in the dimensionality of computer games, I hardly think she’ll be satisfied with photo montages set to music. She’s on her second Flip Video camera and prefers to create her own movies.

Tay and Maddie Making a Movie "The RatSkat"

With the advent of MovieStorm, her generation won’t be satisfied with anything less than the ability to generate 3D animated movies like this.

MovieStorm 3D Room

Stupeflix was another impressive player on our trip, allowing one to go beyond creating a simple slide shows set to music ala Animoto. Instead Stupeflix  leverages the beauty of XML to allow you to create a standard templated video that can pull files into it to mass customize as many versions of the video as you need.

One application Nicolas Steegmann demoed at the Seedcamp event was a weather video that showed a US map, but filled in the local weather from a feed. Here’s a great article from BoxofTricks on how to use Stupeflix.

If these companies seem “far out,” they are not. They really get where the online users are going. The only question is will they able to reach scale and drive profits fast enough? The Mattels of the world should be investing in them now, because they are the future.

Coming up on DishyMix is my interview with Jack Lang, Cambridge Angel investor who has put money into MovieStorm.

Jack Lang, EIR, Judge School of Business, University of Cambridge with Susan Bratton, Host of DishyMix

Seedcamp Details for Stupeflix:

Twitter: @stupeflix

Email: nicolas@stupeflix.com

Website: http://www.stupeflix.com

Company Description
Stupeflix is a web service aimed at people and companies that want to generate massive amounts of videos automatically from their pictures, music and videos.
It comes as a fully customizable REST API and an embeddable online video editor.
Stupeflix uses unique technologies allowing faster than real time video rendering, as well as the generation of 10,000’s videos a day using one server only.
The public API that Stupeflix offers to developers is pretty much unique in the flexibility and level of control it allows.

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“I love helping an entrepreneur make something big out of nothing!!!,” Sonali De Rycker. #WDYDWYD? #TG2009

Sonali De Rycker, Accel Partners London

My Traveling Geeks Meme: WDYDWYD? What is it?

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Huddle Integrates Humanity into Next-Gen Collaboration Tool #TG2009

Andy McLoughlin (@bandrew @huddle) and Alastair Mitchell asked this simple question:

What happens when the MySpace gen goes to work?

If Andy and Alastair have the answer, it’s “use Huddle,” their collaboration service that succinctly integrates file management, file sharing, permissions, whiteboards, task management, and online meeting tools into a clean interface that comes to you, in your social environment.

Huddle Workspace

One of the first companies invited to integrated into LinkedIn, Huddle is next launching within Ning – to bring group collaboration tools to groups, where than hang out.

I’ve used Basecamp and Lighthouse among other collaboration tools and Huddle looks like a definite improvement for a few reasons. First, the buddy list brings humanity into an experience that’s previously been “document” or “project-focused” rather than people-focused. Secondly, there’s web conferencing built right in. Third, you can live edit documents together, which I find I do often. And you can manage tasks for multiple projects in your account.

At Personal Life Media, though our experts are mostly in NY and SF, our production group is in Florida, we have developers in Chicago, New York and Chennai. All businesses are moving to global collaboration and Huddle is the next generation of collaboration tools. And there’s a Freemium business model, so you can try out a free account.

Replace Basecamp, GoToMeeting, Google Docs and your Chat ap with Huddle.

Andy McLoughlin, co-founder, Huddle

These co-founders have a great personal interaction – a good sign for success.

Andy and Alasdair Speed Dating with Howard Rheingold

From the Seedcamp Profile:

Andy McLoughlin     Alastair Mitchell

Twitter: huddle

Email: hello@huddle.net

Website: http://www.huddle.net

Contact Phone: +44 (0)7811 103 540

Company Description
Established by Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin in November 2006, Huddle.net is a multi award-winning network of secure online workspaces where users can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organise virtual meetings.
Its customers include P&G, Pearson, Nokia and UNICEF, hundreds of thousands of small businesses and a number of UK and US government departments. Huddle’s API enables developers to integrate their applications and build new services on top of the Huddle platform.
In October 2008, Huddle.net launched on the LinkedIn application platform as the only non-US company, alongside Amazon and Google. In February 2009, the company partnered with InterCall, the world’s largest conferencing provider, to provide services to theit 1M+ customers. In June 2009 BusinessWeek called Huddle.net one of their ‘50 most promising startups’ globally.
Huddle.net’s 30 staff are headquartered in London with sales offices in Chicago. A San Francisco office will open in September 2009.

If CardScan, CaptureTalk and MagicSolver Had a Baby…

Pokens, CardScan and My Business Card Dilemma

I returned from the Traveling Geeks trip to London and Cambridge with over 100 business cards and more emails streaming in with contact information. I spent a couple hours scanning the cards into my CardScan scanner. If my computer hadn’t needed a hard restart, I’d still have that data, but I had to reboot and lost everything! That’s not the worst, as if a couple hours of tedious work wasted wasn’t enough, even when I do rescan them, I must laboriously go to LinkedIn and Facebook and “friend” each person. This could take me another 2-3 hours. I just can’t take it anymore.

Here’s what I want.

I meet you. You have a simple business card you carry with you that I take a photo of with my iPhone. It uses mobile OCR technology to automatically add you into my Apple Address Book (a piece of crap that thing, but Apple and databases is a whole other bitch session) which backs up virtually to my MobileMe account.

Next, this ap you are creating for me (thank you so very much!)  takes all the new contacts and automatically friends them on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and anyplace else I’ve selected in my settings.

Then it tags each person in my Trackur online reputation monitoring (like Google Alerts but better) account so I can see if there’s anything interesting about them anytime I communicate with them on any of the social services, including surfacing their latest online breadcrumbs in my Apple Mail as I’m writing to them.

My friend, CC Chapman, bought me two Pokens to play with. These are little automatic data exchangers that you can take to events and exchange info with friends, come back and upload via USB to your computer. But nobody has little Pokens. Everybody has a mobile phone!

So, if CardScan and CaputuraTalk and MagicSolver had a baby, they could create what I need. (I met Iansyst (CapturaTalk’s maker) and MagicSolver in Cambridge – they are part of the tech start up world in England.

CardScan has the business card OCR technology. CapturaTalk has mobile OCR technology. MagicSolver uses neural networks and vision technologies to solve Sudoku puzzles by taking a picture of the puzzle with your phone. Surely these companies can come together to solve the massive problem we all have keeping track of our contacts and connecting with them in social nets?

Emmanuel Carraud, Founder, MagicSolver.com at Cambridge Entrepreneur's Traveling Geek Event

What do you say Mark Ketchum of Newell Rubbermaid (owners of Cardscan)? The last CEO was ousted after 10 bad quarters. You are in charge of the turn around. The CardScan as a stand alone item just doesn’t cut it. Why don’t you aquire some of these amazing technology companies and get with the program? We want to bridge from handing out business cards to digitally exchanging information that automatically syncs with our socnets.

It’s time for a new ap! And don’t forget Symbian and Nokia – the iPhone is still just a small part of the global business grist.

CapturaTalk Cambridge England

From Iansyst:

Please find below details about our mobile OCR and text-to-speech solution for people with learning difficulties. Please find below a link to the BBC website where you can see a clip about capturatalk: What is Capturatalk? CapturaTalk is an innovative software package designed to operate on a range of Windows Mobile phones to access information and to support anytime anywhere learning. This is ideal for people who require literacy support for disabilities such as dyslexia, or for those learning English.

Capturatalk v2 uses proven leading technology to deliver the following quality features:

·Scan and recognise text using Abbyy Mobile OCR.

·Deliver text-to-speech with natural-sounding voices by Acapela.

·Understand what words mean using the concise Oxford English Dictionary.

·Capturatalk v2 supports mobile learning by reading out text from most applications on your Windows Mobile Device including:

·Email ·Tasks ·Reminders ·Appointments ·Pocket Word ·Notes ·Pocket Internet Explorer

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UK Diary: Wednesday – Time-Off For Good Bad Behavior

Following lunch with Skype, the Traveling Geeks have the rest of the day off.

I spend a good chunk of my free time posting and catching up with my online persona. Then I’m off to the Southbank Centre for a cup of tea and a couple of glasses of wine with some friends from my university days.

In the evening Renee Blodgett invites me to “Calendar Girls” at the Noel Coward theatre just off Piccadilly Circus. Robert Scoble and his sidekick, producer Rocky Barbanica, join us part of the way through the play.

Afterwards, Renee complains of a scratchy throat and heads back to the hotel. (We learn later that one of the panelists at the Guardian media event the prior night came down with swine flu. Renee and fellow Geekettes were sitting in the front row.)

Robert and Rocky head off for a taste of the old country (McDonald’s) then come back and join me for late night drinks with an old pal from San Francisco now living in London, Heddi Cundle (@HeddiCundle).

I like to say that Heddi makes you dizzy. After the initial shock of contact it doesn’t take long before they are big fans of the Cundle experience.

After closing down one pub we walk the cobbled streets over to Covent Garden where we find another one that’s still open.

The next morning, a rather slower moving Robert says to me “I’m blaming you!”

—

Don’t miss Thursday on UK Diary: The absolutely mental experience of the “Europas Awards.” All hail Mike Butcher!

UK Diary: Wednesday – Humpday – Lunch With Skype

It’s Wednesday and all we have on the Traveling Geeks schedule today is lunch with Skype then we get the rest of the day off. Phew!

That’s a welcome break after our hit-the-ground-running start to our trip since Sunday.

Even better, lunch with Skype is in our own hotel.

I wander down into the basement dinning room of the Malmaison hotel and sit next to Sky. Already, he has accumulated several of our laptops and wireless comms dongles, and is trying to figure out some of our connection problems.

I pay particular attention as he attempts to debug Susan Bratton’s dongle because I have the same connection problem.

Renne Blodgett says that top executives from Skype were scheduled to join us but had to rush off at last notice for a board meeting. I wonder what’s brewing.

Renne Blodgett has an interview between fellow TGer Robert Scoble and Skype’s top blogger Peter Parkes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8-p_X8p-dQ&feature=player_embedded

Renee Blodgett interviews Peter Parkes and Neil Dodds, Windows Experience Manager at Skype:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yz8Bp774-s