Traveling Geeks

a Perfect Duck, on the River Cam

(yes, I'm still on GMT)

Punting on the Cam: Grand finale of Travelling Geeks trip

A great finale for an intense week with the Travelling Geeks in the UK: I streamed video from the Nokia N79 phone I had on loan while I punted on the Cam River with TG organizer JD Lasica and his family in Cambridge, UK:

A duck, with attitude, on the River Cam

Cambridge’s Nokia Labs Key Research Areas

I’m at Nokia Labs in Cambridge England looking at their latest innovations under the hood. Four Key research areas for them include: rich context modeling, new user interfaces, high performance mobile platforms and cognitive radio.

We looked at smart surface materials that externally control color change as well as nano sensing in future mobile devices.

Consider the mobile opportunities with over 3 billion mobile subscribers today. The Labs folks tout an outstanding statistic: up to 90% of the 6 billion people on earth will have mobile coverage by 2010. Note the adjective coverage, not mobile phones.

We also covered physical and digital worlds from personal to global sensor information.

Below Nokia’s head of social media worldwide: Mark Squires in Cambridge.

“Saint Omobono is the future Saint of Business,” Ben Dansie.

“Omobono creates tools, apps and services that help large business build better relationships with customer,” Ben Dansie, Omobono.com.

Ben Dansie, Omobono.com

“I share what we do so we can do it the way folks want to use it – better/together,” Mark Squires, Nokia.

Mark Squires, Global Social Media, Nokia – Cambridge, England

Britticisms: What’s the deal with “punter” …?

Okay, for me to get the British fiction I read, I gotta figure out:

punter — which I think is basically Everyman

tosser — not so good, a little rude

wanker — worse, very rude

Do I have it right?

Is journalism dead in the 21st Century?

This is a re-post from Techcrunch Europe.

The Traveling Geeks gathered together for a great turnout (despite the torrential downpours) at the Guardian’s Media Talk (live) podcast. Our agenda was to discuss journalism and it’s rapid change in the 21st Century. Listen here.

While more and more newspapers lose their audience and their advertisers, print is quite quickly, becoming obsolete. In the video below you will see Sarah Lacy, JD Lasica and Robert Scoble discuss and confirm this theory.

In the second video, I asked Howard Rheingold to further extend the conversation into a video discussion about the journalism course at Stanford and the method of dragging people into the 21st century:

Europe no longer leads in mobile

When I first started visiting Europe about 15 years ago Europeans used to love taunting me with their wonderful new phones that were, back then, years ahead of the devices we’d get in the United States.

It was a point of regional pride that even though Silicon Valley and Microsoft had thoroughly run away with the technology industry that Europe still had one industry that they could point to and say “you can’t take it all.”

Today that no longer is true and, worse, Europe is stuck in a texting rut.

What happened? Europe started buying its own hype and today its citizens are stuck using phones that are way behind those from Google, Apple, and Palm. (more…)

Phone video interview with founder of Moby Picture

The sound isn’t great, and I didn’t use a tripod so it is a little shaky, but I was streaming video from a Nokia N79 from a balcony overlooking the Thames (in a restaurant in the Globe Theater) when Mathys van Abbe, founder of Mobypicture came along — he had some good things to say about the future of digital storytelling.