Chris Pirillo » gnomedex-8.0

John Malkin – Vocal Joystick

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:59:06 +0000

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Jon Malkin is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. Jon’s current project, and the topic of his talk, the Vocal Joystick (VJ), an assistive device for individuals with motor impairment. The VJ provides speakers with continuous control of devices such as mouse pointers or simple robotic arms using non-speech vocalizations.

The goal of this project is to develop a novel system that we call the Vocal Joystick (VJ). This device will enable individuals with motor impairments to use vocal parameters to control objects on a computer screen (buttons, sliders, etc.) and ultimately electro-mechanical instruments (e.g., robotic arms, wireless home automation devices).

Standard spoken language can be quite inefficient for such continuous control tasks and is often recognized poorly by automatic speech recognizers. The VJ system, in contrast, will allow users to exploit a large and varied set of vocalizations for both continuous and discrete motion control, and its selection will be optimized for high discrimination ability and low communication bandwidth. Furthermore, the users are able to perceive visualized feedbacks from the system and make adjustments on the fly. This may include regular speech sounds, such as vowels and consonants, but the primary focus will be on the variation of individual acoustic-phonetic parameters like pitch, energy, vowel quality and voice quality.

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John Malkin – Vocal Joystick

Ethan Katz-Bassett – The Hubble Project

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 08:31:43 +0000

Ethan Katz-Bassett – The Hubble Project

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Ethan Katz-Bassett graduated from Williams College in 2001, spent 3 years as a ski instructor in Taos, New Mexico, then decided to go to graduate school. He is working towards a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Washington and expects to graduate in about a year. Ethan’s dissertation work is on measurement-based global-scale Internet monitoring systems, and he’ll be speaking about Hubble, one such system he developed. Hubble identifies and monitors Internet black holes, when a network is reachable from some locations and not others for extended periods of time. It has been running for almost a year now, and one of the goals of the project is to eventually have a measurement deployment with probers located in every edge network on the Internet.

Ethan’s primary interests are in networks and distributed systems, especially Internet measurement. He is interested in how we can use measurements from distributed vantage points to infer otherwise hidden properties of the Internet. He likes to build real systems that provide benefits to end-users and network operators.

Global reachability — when every address is reachable from every other address — is the most basic goal of the Internet. It was specified as a top priority in the original design of the Internet protocols, ahead of high performance or good quality of service, with the philosophy that “there is only one failure, and it is complete partition.” However, this is not always the case in practice; traffic may disappear into black holes and consistently fail to reach the destination. This is problematic when the outages are not simply transient, as an operator generally has little visibility into other ASes to discern the nature of an outage and little ability to check if the problem exists from other vantages points.

We present Hubble, a system that operates continuously to find Internet reachability problems in which routes exist to a destination but packets are unable to reach the destination. Hubble allows us to characterize global Internet reachability by identifying how many prefixes are reachable from some vantages and not others, how often these problems occur, and how long they persist. Whereas previous work focused on reachability within the narrower context of an AS, testbed, or set of clients, or obtained breadth by monitoring routes only via BGP, Hubble monitors the data-path to prefixes that cover 89% of the Internet’s edge address space at a 15 minute granularity. Key enabling techniques include a hybrid passive/active monitoring approach and the synthesis of multiple information sources, including historical data and spoofed probes to isolate failures.

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Ethan Katz-Bassett – The Hubble Project

Jeremy Toeman – Bug Labs

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:44:23 +0000

Jeremy Toeman – Bug Labs

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Jeremy Toeman (JT) is an expert in digital media and consumer technology. Over the past ten years he has designed, built, and marketed numerous award-winning products in the “convergence” space. Jeremy is currently the VP of Marketing for Bug Labs, and is also a consultant advising companies on both product design and deployment as well as non-traditional marketing (such as community-driven) strategies.

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use electronic modules that snap together to build any gadget you can imagine. Each BUGmodule represents a specific gadget function (ex: a camera, a keyboard, a video output, etc.). You decide which functions to include and BUG takes care of the rest, letting you try out different combinations quickly and easily. With BUG and the integrated programming environment/online community (BUGnet), anyone can build, program and share innovative devices and applications. We don’t define the final products – you do.

BUG helps you explore the realm of personalized devices and applications, and find ways to solve many of the problems current gadgets can’t.

For example, with BUG, you can easily assemble and program a GPS + digital camera device that automatically publishes geo-tagged photos as a web service. Integrating with an online photo-sharing service like Flickr is only a few more lines of code away, and now you have your own real-time, connected traffic-enabled mobile Webcam!

The platform is designed to enable a collaborative development environment. BUGnet, our online community, is tied in directly to the BUG SDK, which allows developers to connect with others, share information, and jointly build products or services.

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Jeremy Toeman – Bug Labs

Beth Kanter – Using Social Media for Good Causes

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:27:38 +0000

Beth Kanter – Using Social Media for Good Causes

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Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Her expertise is how to use new web tools (blogging, tagging, wikis, photo sharing, video blogging, screencasting, social networking sites, and virtual worlds, etc) to support nonprofit. She has worked on projects that include: training, curriculum development, research, and evaluation. She is an experienced coach to “digital immigrants” in the personal mastery of these tools.

She is a professional blogger and writes about the use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector for social change. She was recently named one of the top fifty most influential female bloggers (#29 on the list) and the only blogger who focuses on the nonprofit sector and on a top ten list of female thought leaders in social media. In addition to her highly rated, award winning blog, Beth’s Blog, she is a Contributing Editor for nonprofits and social change for BlogHer and a contributor to NetSquared. Her articles have appeared many online nonprofit publications including TechSoup, Nonprofit Times, and others. She contributed a chapter to the NTEN’s forthcoming nonprofit technology book, to be published by Wiley, on Technology and ROI and she contributed a “thought leader” essay on social media adoption issues to the recently published book “Mobilizing Generation 2.0.”

She is an expert in the use of web 2.0 for fundraising, having raised over $200,000 for Cambodian orphans using her blog and other Web 2.0 tools. She was the first place winner of the Yahoo Network for Good Contest in 2007 (covered by the Wall Street Journal) and came in first place for global causes in America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by Case Foundation and Parade Magazine. Her case studies about using social media to raise money for charities are documented here.

Just after Beth’s presentation, Gnomedexer’s used the power of Twitter (social media at its finest) to raise funds to send a young Cambodian woman to college. In just 90 minutes, we raised nearly $2500.00. How amazing is that? Thanks to everyone who was there to make this happen, and to everyone who promised to donate.

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Beth Kanter – Using Social Media for Good Causes

Amanda Koster – SalaamGarage

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:58:37 +0000

Amanda Koster – SalaamGarage

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Amanda is an internationally acclaimed photographer who has made it her mission to raise awareness by documenting some of the world’s more compelling issues. For over a decade she has combined her anthropology background with photographic and media-making skills to create inspiring media content as a means for powerful communication, storytelling and learning.

In 1993 Amanda Koster landed solo in Asmara, Eritrea (East Africa) about 1 month after then end of a 30-year civil war with Ethiopia. WIth her were written directions to her friends grandmothers house in Tagrinia (Eritrean language). Regardless of the directions, the cabbie and she were lost for hours. Once Amanda said out-loud the only words written in English, “Salaam Garage?!” (the garage next to the grandmothers house) everything came together. They were there in 5 minutes while the trip changed her life forever.

After about the 25th person asked “…can I come?” we saw opportunities for others to experience and create intimate, social documentary projects and adventures. We do not believe ‘amateur’ or ‘professional’ makes any difference when the goal is to make pictures and tell stories that cause positive change. These days with blogs, web sites, ipods, cell phones, tiny video cameras, electronic and in-person communities, we all have the power to create effective, passionate positive media that can seep into our world raise awareness and cause change.

Salaam Garage connects media savvy travelers and enthusiasts with international Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs). Travelers commit to creating and sharing unique, independent social media that raises awareness and causes positive change. The rest of the adventure is spent touring around the region, experiencing and exploring the culture and environment with an entirely new context. We are the media now. Join us.

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Amanda Koster – SalaamGarage

And the Winner of an HP TouchSmart is…

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:22:38 +0000

And the Winner of an HP TouchSmart is…

HP was an amazing sponsor this year for Gnomedex. Anne Finney and her team did a fantastic job. On day 2, they announced a giveaway of one TouchSmart PC to a lucky attendee. In order to enter, people had to write a Limerick that dealt with Gnomedex in some way, and record it. We then uploaded the videos and Limericks to my blog, and opened a poll for two weeks.

The results have been tallied, and the winner was chosen by simple majority vote. That winner is our very own Kat!!

The WordPress poll plugin that we used kept track of votes by cookie and IP address both. A full disclosure of the results will be available upon sending me an email request.

Congratulations to Kat, and thanks to everyone who entered for such a fun contest!

And the Winner of an HP TouchSmart is…

Mark Bao – Meet Generation Y

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 02:46:54 +0000

Mark Bao – Meet Generation Y

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Mark Bao was a speaker at our recent Gnomedex conference. He discussed with us how he has become a successful entrepreneur at such a young age. Then Francine Hardaway and I joined him on stage. We represent three generations of Geeks, and what followed was a very lively discussion, indeed.

Mark Bao is currently 16 and a sophomore in high school. He is President and CEO of Avecora, a web, new media, and advertising business. Through Avecora, Mark co-founded DebateWare and developed DebateNet, the online debate and event management system for debate organizations. DebateWare has provided services for the Junior State of America, the largest student-run organization in the United States, as well as the Collegiate Society of America, a nationwide college debate organization. Mark has developed several Facebook apps, including TopVideo and Facebook Idol. He organizes the Facebook Developers Boston meetings for social media developers in Boston.

As a partner in Stealthmode Partners, Francine Hardaway has helped package and secure funding for many early-stage technology companies. She has created positioning and marketing strategies for dozens of companies growth companies (from startup to IPO to maturity). She has a very popular blog, where she writes about technology, entrepreneurship, and society.

Together, Mark and Francine represent opposite ends of the age spectrum in today’s entrepreneurs and bloggers. They discussed some of the differences between the way things were done then and now, along with the ways things are the same. Much laughter was heard throughout the conference center, especially when Francine showed off the different ways she has “dressed for success” over the years.

The audience had a ton of questions. Many were funny, some were serious… all were full of awe for the two people on stage. Francine has accomplished many wonderful things over her lifetime, with much more in store. Mark has only begun, and is an inspiration to all of the young people who follow what we do.

Thanks so much to both of you for providing such an interesting talk, for teaching us things we may not have known, and mostly for helping to bridge the so-called “age gap” even more. By having Mark and Francine talk together, we were able to shatter the myth that there IS a “gap”.

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Mark Bao – Meet Generation Y

Dave Mathews – boxee

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:42:11 +0000

Dave Mathews – boxee

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Dave Mathews is the “user experience guy” at boxee and a consumer product expert, specializing in the convergence of digital entertainment devices. He holds more than thirty U.S. patents and has appeared on more than 300 television shows. Dave spoke to us at Gnomedex about boxee.

boxee has developed the first “social” media center. It plays media from your computer and other devices in your home network, as well as connects you to various Internet sources that allow you to stream or download movies, tv shows, music and photos. Using boxee, you can also share with your friends what albums you’re listening to, what movies and TV shows you’re watching, send recommendations and more.

boxee is designed to work with a remote control (it looks great on a big screen TV), but you can also control it using your keyboard. Once installed, boxee will start scanning your local Movies, Music and Pictures folders automatically. boxee will attempt to pull in artwork, reviews, and more from your media, so browsing your library becomes more useful and fun than looking at a list of files.

boxee is currently in alpha testing, which means it still has lots of bugs, crashes and some usability issues. Development is ongoing, and the final result will be well worth waiting for.

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Dave Mathews – boxee

Nathan Wade – Serial Cyborg

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:34:57 +0000

Nathan Wade – Serial Cyborg

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Nathan Wade presented at Gnomedex 8.0 last month. Nathan is a University of Washington Undergrad within the DXArts Department. During his session, he discussed his Serial Cyborg project, which is a DICOM Voxel Based MRI wood sculpture.

The sculpture explores persistent physical distortion through a simple gestural movement. a serialization of human interplay with particle reality as machine visualizable data and re-instantiation of these streams into physical space. This artwork also aims to explore the notion of the modern human as Cyborg, augmented and abstracted through technology while engaging hybrid human definition. The synthesis of digital revealing and informing the physical, irrevocably altering both as extension of the other. Realization of serialized motion is further heightened through interaction with an open lighting system; a battery of halogen lights forming a parameter, actuated by a micro-contoller, relays and state logic.

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Nathan Wade – Serial Cyborg

Gnomedex: Why do Geeks Gather Here?

Chris Pirillo — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:47:11 +0000

Gnomedex: Why do Geeks Gather Here?

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On the opening night of Gnomedex, I took a few moments to highlight the new theme of the convention and explain exactly what Human Circuitry really means. We had an amazing time this year, and are thinking of spreading out into four events next year, all over the country!

Human Circuitry is going to be our general theme from here on out. It’s not just about Technology, nor about a relation to technology. It’s about the relation between humans and technology and how it all kind of comes together. Forget the “social media” stuff, what’s it mean anyway? Human Circuitry is simply Technology and Humanity coming together and working together.

It’s too bad if you weren’t with us at the conference. HP was an amazing sponsor, and provided many excellent prizes to attendees! We already gave away an HP Notebook, and an HP Mini. Right now, the voting is in place for one lucky attendee to win an HP TouchSmart. So get out there and cast your vote!

Obviously, you’re human, and you’re using Technology. Hopefully next year, you can join us at Gnomedex and find out what the connection between the two is all about.

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Gnomedex: Why do Geeks Gather Here?

How Can You be an Awesome Commenter?

Chris Pirillo — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 06:02:06 +0000

How Can You be an Awesome Commenter?

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Some members of Ignite Seattle recently appeared at Gnomedex 8.0 to give their short and informative talks to our conference attendees. Monica is a news reporter, and spoke to us about the ways we can all become better news, blog and even forum commenters.

A product of her wired generation, Mónica obsesses over her Facebook profile and can’t remember what life was like before e-mail. She plays on the P-I’s flag football team and calls it a good afternoon when she can tinker with her piano and her Ibanez guitar — and a good evening when she can get out and enjoy the nightlife. A huge film fan, Mónica will often cry at movies people have no business crying in. She can’t cook, but she’s trying.

According to Monica, the Internet has some amazing things for news. One of the things it’s done that is awesome is to make news about the conversation. If people are smart about this, they know they need to take as much responsibility for the quality of the conversation as they do for the quality of news they provide. This means providing the right tools for community moderation, having enough resources to police that community, and that we need your help.

Face it, a lot of comments just suck. They’re angry, or abusive. It’s important to come together, and really integrate what the community has to say. What should you, as a commenter, think about before you comment?

Think of the impact of what you’re going to say before you say it. If you jump into a conversation about a hot topic, be careful. Being an angry commenter will do you no good, and no one will listen to you. Ignore the trolls. Focus on something smart in the story or post, and comment about that.
Tell us what you think. You’d be surprised how many people tell us what they think without thinking. Think about the issue. Read the story. Know what you really think and feel… and THEN comment.
Tell us your story. Maybe the author didn’t get to your story… quote yourself. Tell your side or perspective of a story if you were somehow involved, and it will expand the story as a whole.
Tell us what you know. Many journalists think they’re really smart. One thing you can do is to put up a study, share a link… whatever will help flesh the story out even more. Just do so with respect. What this does is to bring heads together, which is always better than one.
The most important thing you can do when leaving a comment is to ask a question. It will keep the conversation going, and you may learn something new. Ask a good question. Explain yourself, and people will do their best to answer.
Even if a site doesn’t ask you to identify yourself, you still should. Own up to your ideas. Be accountable for what you say.

Everything Monica had to say rings true to me, as a Blogger. I especially love this line: “Many people tell us what they think without actually thinking”. She hit the nail on the head there. Think about what you’re going to write, people. Know what you really think, and believe in it.

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How Can You be an Awesome Commenter?

The Beginning of Human Circuitry

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:11:33 +0000

The Beginning of Human Circuitry

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The latest Gnomedex wrapped up last Saturday, and the feedback we have seen thus far has been amazingly positive. The general consensus seems to be that people came away energized, impassioned, and empowered. The wide variety of excellent speakers brought laughter, tears, knowledge and food for thought to the table.

For those of you who couldn’t join us (either in person or live over the stream), this Animoto video will give you a taste of what you missed. For those of you who were there, this will hopefully bring back some excellent memories. Thanks to kk+, Derek Miller, and Tris Hussey for the photos used in this video photo montage.

If you’d like a super high quality version of this compilation, you can download the MP4. We have worked hard over the past several days to find feedback from all of you. Here, in no particular order, is the list we have to this point. If we inadvertently missed your blog post, please let us know!

Thank you to all of you for being there, and sharing in what we feel is the best Gnomedex yet. We appreciate your support… not only with your presence, but also in your writing.

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The Beginning of Human Circuitry