The Ponzi and Chris Show
So, I wanted to sit down with my business partner / CEO / soul mate / fiancee not long after Gnomedex came to a close to make sure we got our spoken thoughts recorded. In theory, interacting with the love of your life is easy to do – and staying on topic is even easier. You might remember our first true audio interaction from last week, wherein we explain how love conquered all. We gave ‘er another go, attempting to explain the emotion of our conference… but we soon found ourselves sidetracked into further relationship foibles. Ain’t that always how it goes? Yes, we love one another – we really do! Methinks this “Beauty and the Geek” are ready to break out and do another show. Tell me we’re not the only seemingly-mismatched pair that makes sense of it all?
The following are the show notes for the June 30th, 2005 edition of the Chris Pirillo Show.
Contents |
Chris DiBona of Google
You may remember Chris DiBona from his many appearances on TechTV while he worked at Slashdot, SourceForge.net and FreshMeat.net. He’s now the Open source program manager at Google.
Steve Lombardi of MSN Mappoint
Steve is head of the Mappoint unit at MSN. He briefly spoke about Streets and Trips and a new product in beta, Virtual Earth.
This Week In Games
I’ve taken a different appraoch from the drab copy-reading and added a little spice to this episode.
In this episode we discussed expansions to World of Warcraft (both free and not), Fox picking up the license to create a movie for Hitman, AMD vs. Intel, and why you shouldn’t blame GTA 3 for violent crimes (and instead blame the mother who told her son she wanted to die).
I want to apologize ahead of time as the audio quality in this episode is sub-par, and I could not convert it into WMA format. Sadly, my hard drive had crashed, and I lost everything. So, I’m now running Linux (Ubuntu to be exact), and I’m still trying to learn the best way to handle things. Please excuse the mess ;)
Mary Hodder
Marry Hodder of Napsterization spoke about copyright, panels at conferences, and social networking online.
Ask-Leo
The Ask Leo show notes are available on Leo’s site.
Matt Torkington (sp?)
He spoke about the Where 2.0 conference, which covers map hacking hitting the mainstream via GPA, Google Maps, and various technical toys. The conference encompases users, hackers, and map makers (such as Google and Yahoo). It’s a single track conference, similar to Gnomedex, which has the disadvantage of being responsible for the room which it is held in.
The goal of the conference is the provide fuel for the ideas that will push mapping even further into the mainstream.
He pointed out that nobody has really made a business out of map hacking even though the oncept is mature enough, with open API’s and free graphics. The only question is who will be the first to build a successful business around the idea.
The next Where 2.0 will – hopefully – feature the implimentation of the ideas fueld at this years conference.
Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks spoke about URL tagging, using the REL Anchor attribute. The basic concept, from what we were able to discern, is that it is a technology which allows a user to describe a link to a computer, while the actual link text describes the link to a human. An e-mail has been sent off in hopes of calrifying this idea, so we’ll update this if/when that e-mail is replied to.
WorldWind
WorldWind is still deciding on wether they will open up the API, but there is a program available that converts Google Maps to WorldWind.
The original WorldWind project was aiming for a DVD distribution (either single, or multiple DVDs), but in order to distribute the project via the Internert they started to trime the distributed files down. The next version is expected to be as slim as 40MB.
The project started abiut a year ago, but was made popular in September 2004 when they were Slashdotted, and put on the map overnight.
He stated that since WorldWind was built to be an educational product, it has an easy to use interface, and an easy to upgrade backend.
WorldWind was made in C# .Net. The project would like to port it to Linux and Mac, but the Mono project is not mature enough to support the WorldWind project at this point. They explained that since it is supposed to be an educational tool they decided to targert the most popular desktop platform – Windows.
John Frank
MetaCarta is a program that takes text documents and “geo parses” the text that a human can read, and creates geographic meta data so that the document can be searched using a map. the software preprocesses documents, finds the names for each location, and indexes it to be human searchable.
There are discussions of opening up the API, if you’re interested, send an e-mail to john.frank@metacarta.com
For an enterprise class solution, they have to build “connectors” within the enterp[rise so their users can easily access the required data.
Since the Internet is public, that step is removed; however, because it is public, it consumes much more bandwidth.
The company has offices in Cambridge Mass., Washington DC, and Houston TX.
It was founded in 1999 when John was still a graduate student at MIT. DARPA gave him $500,000 to continue researching the project. The company ended up working very closely with the intelligence community. In 2003 they moved out to Houston to work with oil companies, and are now expanding into other vertical markets.
, including utilities and facilities management.
Chirs & Ponzi
Or, as we like to call it, Dawn nand Drew 2.0
