Traveling Geeks

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

Traveling Geeks… scandal!

My God, Scoble, Did You Think We Wouldn’t See These?

What happens in London when a group of American blogger types heads over to geek out? They get drunk, put on wigs and get friendly with the locals, apparently. Former Guardian columnist Paul Carr (@paulcarr)
sends us links to a disturbing group of photographs, likely taken about
five minutes apart. What was Scoble, the poster boy for RackSpace’s new
Building 43 project, thinking?

“Because Content is the new Electricity, Open Source is the new Power Grid & the UK is the place to build it!,” John Newton, Alfresco #WDYDWYD #TG2009

John Newton, Chairman and CEO of Alfresco at Accel Partners London Traveling Geeks meeting.

John Newton, Chairman and CEO of Alfresco

My Traveling Geeks Meme: WDYDWYD? What is it?

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Will BT let JP create the first open network operator? One scenario for the mobile Web

The Web exists because Tim Berners-Lee didn’t require any network operator to rewire its central switch. Google exists because nobody has to ask permission to create a new way to use the Web. These affordances for innovation are no accident: Sir Tim could give away the Web and Larry and Sergey could make billions of dollars for themselves because the architects of the internet’s original protocols were wise enough to reserve innovation for the edges, not the center of the network. The authors of what has become known as the internet’s realized that control of the network – technical, economic, political – could be radically decentralized, and that by enabling anyone who played by the TCP/IP rules to connect anything they wanted to the network, future media that they didn’t even dream about in the olden days would one day become possible. So the Web, cyberculture, the dot com economy, digital media, the refashioning of global economic production by digital networks, grew extremely rapidly.

The merger of the mobile phone and the internet has not grown anywhere nearly as rapidly as the web precisely because there is someone you have to ask for permission in the mobile world – the network operators. And network operators evolved from regulated monopoly telephony providers, who have done their best to prevent, rather than to facilitate, an internet-like ecology of small and large businesses, heterogeneous media, decentralized control, and a rising economic tide that lifts small boats and threatens huge ships that take a long time to turn. We have yet to see an owner of significant telecommunications network open their network by providing an open application programming interface (api)

Which brings us to JP Rangaswami:

JP Rangaswami talks to the travelling geeks

(Source: JD Lasica)

JD Lasica’s photo was taken atop BT Tower in London, when British Telecom’s CIO of Global Services invited the Travelling Geeks to dinner in a private, revolving dining room in BT’s high-security antenna tower, a landmark on the London skyline I’ve often wondered about. How that dinner came to be is a story of how life happens online these days. A link from another blog brought me to JP’s blog, Confused of Calcutta, years ago; I read it via RSS regularly, and when I saw that the blogger was on Twitter, I started following him. When JP used Last.fm, it tweeted what he was listening to. I couldn’t help noticing that he listened to a fair amount of Grateful Dead music. So I started to correspond with him. When he visited the San Francisco Bay Area, he invited me (via Facebook) to join him for dinner. He had more than a few interesting things to say about the way media infrastructure might evolve in the future. So when I knew we were going to London, I introduced the Travelling Geeks to JP. He, in turn, invited us to dinner. It dawned on me that my blogger thinker Deadhead social media acquaintance wielded some clout at BT when we were greeted for dinner by the CEO of British Telecom.

It was probably JP’s idea to seat me next to Ted Griggs, the founder of Ribbit, a company JP had acquired. The seating was probably no accident. Here’s Ribbit’s elevator pitch. (Another way of describing Ribbit’s product, Griggs told me, as London revolved below us, would be “open API’s for [now BT’s] networks.”)

I’ve been writing about the future of digital media for a while now, and I think I’ve developed a pretty good spidey-sense for something that could change everything. When I met the people JP had collected and saw what they were doing (during a morning of demos after our dinner), I was reminded of nothing so much as the time I got to know Bob Taylor at Xerox PARC and started to realize that what they were doing on Palo Alto’s Coyote Hill Road with personal computers, networks, graphical user interfaces way back in the 1970s was going to be the foundation of the 21st centuries fundamental structuring technologies.

But Xerox management, of course, thought they were in the copier business and failed to take advantage of the fact that their research arm invented the GUI, the Ethernet, and the laser printer.

Will BT management realize that they aren’t in the telephone network operator business, and that someone in their midst has invited not only their future, but everyone else’s? Stay tuned.

“As tech & product developers; I get access to amazing stuff in the lab long before it gets in the outside world, AND get to work with the people that make this stuff real,” Patrick Pordage. #WDYDWYD? #TG2009

My Traveling Geeks Meme: WDYDWYD? What is it?

Patrick Pordage, Marketing Communications Director, Cambridge Consultants

“As tech and product developers; I get access to amazing stuff in the lab long before it gets in the outside world, AND get to work with the people that make this stuff real.”

Cambridge Consultants

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UK Diary: Tuesday – Back To Soho and Dinner With Agency.com

[Being a Traveling Geek takes stamina. I challenge any traditional journalist to keep up with our daily agendas. Not only are we interviewing people and staying up late writing, editing video and posting but we are also being interviewed by others, taking part on panels, and reporting on the same panels, and taking part in lots of other inside-out media activities.]

Our fourth event for Tuesday was dinner with Agency.com and assorted clients and friends — in Soho at Soho House. It was great to be back in this vibrant part of London because this is where I got my start in journalism in 1982.

It was a great place to work and a great time to be a young man around town, with plenty of small bars, restaurants, cafes, and after-hours clubs.

We sat at a very long table and we introduced ourselves and spoke briefly about what it was that attracted us to social/new media. I managed to get video of most of the replies, my apologies because I missed a couple of people.

http://www.blip.tv/file/2353961

Please also see Susan Bratton: DishyMix: Susan Bratton Podcasts & Blogs Executives

UK Diary: Tuesday – Guardian Newspaper Media Panel . . .

We left BT and managed to hail a few black cabs amid the rain and made our way over to the Guardian newspaper for a panel on the future of media.

I was thinking that maybe the death of newspapers is just nature’s way of helping us all to reduce our carbon footprint.

Some of our fellow Traveling Geeks were on the panel, our Geeketes were at the front of the room, which must have had a distracting effect (see photo – by JD Lasica) while the rest of us were mostly at the back Twittering onto a big screen at the front of the room.

Here was my take on it, an extract from: A Guardian Newspaper Media Panel, Twitter, From Back to Front And Beyond…

The Butcher of Fleet Street

I was sitting at the back of the room next to fellow TGer Craig Newmark of Craigslist. And inevitably, the panel’s moderator couldn’t resist asking him to stand up and explain himself for killing the newspaper industry.

Craig is mightily fed up with this question. And I agree. It is not his fault that the newspaper industry is in trouble. But Craig handled it all very well, throwing in a line “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” which drew laughs and distracted the panel from further pursuit of a tired line of questioning and drew the discussion back to the favorite subject of the day: Twitter.

Ayelet Noff posted a video of the event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FUs9acyk4o&feature=player_embedded

Here is JD Lasica:

The podcast just went live. Stream or download (Time 51:13):

(You can also listen to it, naturally, on the Guardian site.)

A few highlights

The entire 51 minutes is well worth a listen — I think it’s one of the smartest podcasts I’ve been a part of. A few snippets:

• I returned to the problem of newspaper culture that punishes, rather than rewards, experimentation, innovation and failure (without which innocation is impossible). But harping on newspapers’ failures is like shooting dinosaurs in a barrel.

• Sarah Lacy suggested that we may see 10 metropolitan cities without a daily newspaper by the end of the year. (I think the time frame is more likely on the order of two to three years.)

Time for innovative news models

Here is Jeff Saperstein:

…The Barbarians are at the Gates in every sector of the communications industry. Advertising agencies are being decimated by the Google model, Encyclopedias and paid resource media have been annihilated by Wikipedia, Network television conglomerates have been supplanted by Cable subscription channels and digital narrowcasting, and the movie studios are enraged by You Tube and other web sources to download feature films outside the movie theatres, on and on with the music industry and I-Tunes , etc.

In other words, the journalism industry is not unique in its economic viability being challenged. The Internet/digital media content delivery model is not just a hiccup, but a tectonic shift. Our Traveling Geeks are players and informed commentators in that shift.

The Guardian Dialogues « Traveling Geeks in London

Here are some of my Tweets during the event:

– Blogging and traditional media have a lot in common – lack of a viable business model 🙂

– Paper or electron is shouldn’t matter. Newspapers need to transition into news services imho…

– The media is dead long live the media! We have more media in more forms today than at anytime in history!

– Newspapers have been communicating in 140 characters or less for hundreds of years: In news headlines!

– The panel has seems to have an “us verus them” attitude. Surely media today is about “us and them” which is a good thing

– If a blogger blogs in the blogosphere does anybody blog it? Takes time to build an audience

– Blogs build credibility over time, they don’t get it just by being. It takes time to build a media brand

– Bloggers aren’t all very free wheeling, they have reputations to defend just the same as regular media

– News has always been a collaborative venture, taking the story further. Why should it be a problem today?

– Why is there a distinction being made between blogger media and newspaper media? It’s all media.

Next stop on this rainy Tuesday: Soho and Agency.com dinner

“Because I don’t do average :),” Errol Damelin. #WDYDWYD? #TG2009 @ed_wonga

My Traveling Geeks Meme: WDYDWYD? What is it?

Errol Damelin, Founder, Wonga.com @ed_wonga

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