Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Life in the Wireless City

The session Life in the Wireless City provided some good insights to the future wireless network in San Francisco and how the rolls of the joint venture Earth Link/Google are being played out. There were some really specific questions to the panel from the attendees about privacy and health issues. The answers for some of these questions was pointing to hopefully valuable experience Google will get from a smaller free city WiFi.

Google is currently working on a free Wifi this summer for the city of Mountain View to gain experience of user interaction as a preview of the much larger San Francisco WiFi that is going live in 2007.

Another issue was the positive benefits of having service providers knowing the location based information of its users for context aware services for content like finding the cheapest gas station in the city based on your current location.

Personal Infosphere

Supernova2006 workshops open with a look at the “Personal Infosphere,” and asks: With all the feeds of information that come to us, how do you get your life back? Five companies demonstrated Web services that enable you to aggregate information and collaborate with others who share your interest in that information.

imeem: Dalton Caldwell, co-founder and CEO of imeem, showed how an IM client can be used to gain “presence” online and find out what are other people doing. It becomes a social networking medium when you use meems (groups) to aggregate people around different interests.

eSnips: Yael Elish, CEO and co-founder of esnips described a social service focused on finding people with like interests and sharing content that you’ve collected. People who use esnips want to go beyond sharing and socializing, they can sell things. Collections can be public or private.

Plaxo: Ben Golub, president and CEO, says Plaxo is the industry’s first smart address book. It connects people through multiple accounts and synchs data, so no matter where you access your address book, you can have a consistent data set. When you change an address, your book is automatically updated.

Netvibes: Tariq Krim says the idea of netvibes is to create one place where you can access everything you like. From the start page, you can aggregate your blogs, searches, bookmarks, personal channels, etc. You build your personal portal, using modules you create, or ones built by other users.

Plum: Hans Peter Brondmo, founder and CEO of Plum. Plum gives you a way to collect information, no matter where it is, and bring it together in one place, which you can share with family, friends, colleagues. Plum creates communities of knowledge. When you search for info on the web, Plum indexes it and creates a searchable archive of articles on that topic.

Audience Discussion
Opening the floor to discussion opened the door to every conceivable issue that could be raised in an hour. These are some of the perplexing questions raised by not fully answered by the audience:

If you want to connect with people locally, regionally or globally, how does that affect data structure and tagging? People want to put form and structure around content, but that restricts how it can be searched, shared, archived, indexed, etc.

Does the company that hosts the web service claim the data as an asset? Most terms of service agreements state that the user owns their information, barring copyright issues. The knowledge you applied by making a collection makes that content yours.

What happens when too many people use a social networking tool? The people in your social network become your filter. When you search a social network for information, When the masses start using social networks, the quality of that filter will degrade. Then you need collaborative filtering.

How do you structure services so you can continue to add value? Does the service adapt to adjust from a narrow search among a small social circle, to a broad search among the masses? With all these different ways of getting information, are we simplifying our personal infosphere, or contributing to its complexity?

Does tagging data impose unwanted structure? When you initiate a search, you have a moment of unstructured discovery. There needs to be a seamless connection between the digital realms where data may be stored in both structured and unstructured ways. You can spontaneously discover things because instead of searching for info, it’s being pushed to you through your filter (the social network).

If your data collection represents who you are, just like your collection of books , do you want just anyone rifling through it? Would you pay a premium for a service that lets you have a private collection behind the firewall, and a public collection that takes advantage of collaborative filtering?

Massisively Multi-layered Learning from Virtual Worlds

The session about how interactions in virtual environments can be utilized in the real world was very inspiring and could have kept going for hours. I will try and highlight some of the general trends of the many issues discussed. 

The MMOGs of today like Wow is very expensive to create and maintain because of the time spend by game designers to generate content for the users. The general consensus among the panel was that hardcore gaming MMOGs like Wow will blend more with user generated worlds like 2nd Life and generating a hybrid format of MMOGs in the future. The hybrid MMOGs will benefit both game producers and users by lowering the cost of development but also by adding more sustainability for the users by allowing them to create their own content and hence creating an army of game designers.

The hybrid MMOGs raises some interesting question about the game designer versus users designing content and who have the power to develop the game and controls the game mechanics. 

Another interesting issue was raised by Jerry Paffendorf that MMOGs are becoming a point of access to the internet where build browsers in 2nd Life allows users to have one access point to web content and implementing that with a Google Earth type MMOG would creating a true metaverse experience.

The last issue I will highlight is the blending of MMOGs quests with real world problem solving like quests where a player have to scan images for certain patterns to complete the quest. The real pattern the player is scanning is a real world x-ray images and is helping a doctor diagnose for cancer. It might be one of the more difficult quests to complete but a very interesting collaboration with a truly real world socio-economic benefit.

And so it begins...

I’m writing this from one of the first Supernova 2006 workshop sessions, which just kicked off in San Francisco.  I’m always excited when the conference—which exists entirely in my head and on my laptop for several months—suddenly becomes real.  And this year I’m more psyched than ever about the people, companies, and ideas that will come together over the next three days.  Welcome to everyone who’s here on-site, and everyone else participating virtually through the blogosphere!

We’ll have several guest bloggers posting session notes and commentary on this site during Supernova, including Cathy Chatfield-Taylor, Peder Burgaard, and Eveyln Rodriguez.  I’ll drop in and post when I can.  Send us your comments and trackbacks, or directly with your thoughts. 

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Sold Out

Supernova 2006 is SOLD OUT.

For those who wish to participate virtually, we’ll be streaming live audio of all the general sessions, starting Thursday morning, on the Supernova Media Center.

Virtual Supernova

Although there’s really no substitute for experiencing Supernova in-person, we’re providing a number of resources for virtual participation in the conference. 

We’ll be streaming live audio of all the general sessions, as well as posting podcasts, videoblog entries, and blog coverage on our Media Center page, starting Thursday morning.  You can also access the Supernova blog, wiki, IRC chat, and other tools at the Supernova Community Connection. 

And if you have an account with Second Life, the 3D virtual world, you can hang out in the virtual Supernova Lounge and see live video of the Connected Innovators presentations Thursday night—go to http://tinyurl.com/m42t8 while Second Life is running to be teleported directly there. 

Monday, June 19, 2006

Heading Out...

I’m about to get on the plane to California for Supernova this week.  Everything is looking amazingly good for the conference. 

We’re right on the brink of selling out.  I’m working hard to make all the sessions sizzle.  And, a couple of surprises have come together at the last minute that I’m really excited about.  Can’t say more—you’ll have to see in person!

Friday, June 16, 2006

Why I haven't been blogging

Supernova planning has been all-consuming the past month.  But that’s a good thing! Registration numbers are up, we have a tremendous group of speakers, and we’re doing all sorts of cool new things that we haven’t tried before.  All of which should make it an awesome event this year.

By the way, if you’re thinking of coming, register soon.  We’re getting close to selling out.

Friday, May 26, 2006

Stalking the Supernova speakers (part 3 of 3)

Here’s the third and final part of a series of posts that have taken far too long to string together, thanks to the non-stop activity of Supernova 2006’s speakers. My searches are surely inadequate to track the full scope of what these folks have been up to for the month of May, particularly in cases where they’re heads down in projects that haven’t been publicized.

• Selina Lo appeared in a CNBC interview coinciding with her appearance at the Lehman Brothers Worldwide Wirelines and Wireless conference in New York, spoke about the different requirements for WiFi access in a municipal environment, inked a deal to distribute her company’s products at French electronics retail, and a Stevie Award.

• Robert Levitan secured second-round funding of $7 million for his startup, launched a P2P file-transfer service that aims to make it easy to email around large files, was interviewed by Tom Taulli, and was written about by fellow Supernova 2006 speaker Om Malik.

• Saul Klein obsessed over Skype’s buzz lead versus VoIP, promoted the launch of Skypecasting, gave an “eye opening” talk at Said Business School, and publicized the launch of Skype’s translation services.

• Amy Jo Kim was interviewed for the Women in Mobile series, took a break from work to blog about teen subversion of an anti-teen technology, pointed to a Business 2.0 blog post that wonders whether slow game sales might be the result of growth in social applications like MySpace (a point of view in concert with her interesting ETech06 presentation on the same topic), and proffered a few more reasons why mobile game sales are stagnating.

• Rajesh Jain celebrated his fourth year of blogging with a post on how he’s managed to blog so consistently for so long, strings together five posts on entrepreneurship (handling failure, convincing others, his bets, entrepreneurialism as a card game, and the entrepreneur’s life).

• Joichi Ito reflected on the wisdom of Rob Pardo (lead game designer for World of Warcraft), took a field trip to Undercity, and changed his mind about global warming.

• Dan Hunter debunks a flimsy co-branded debit card scheme that Project Entropia’s marketers foisted (mostly successfully) on unquestioning mainstream press, a debunking that had the CEO of the scheming company sending nasty emails to Hunter, some of which he subsequently published.

• Bradley Horowitz warned that “Social networking isn’t a product or, God forbid, a company, but a feature that lives in service of some other mission,” talked talking shoes, and (I presume) is enjoying the fact that the 1% rule he wrote about back in February is picking up steam as a meme.

• Mary Hodder spoke at an OnHollywood panel about consumer generated media.

• Umair Haque blogged about categories of business evil, called LinkedIn the new Friendster, and requested that VCs become more clueful.

• Seth Goldstein‘s been publishing threads (on attention and productivity, on attention and mirror neurons, on the relationship between the attention economy and ADD, on attention-tracking technologies, on attention in the age of Tivo) from his appearance at the ETech06 conference. He’s also been the focus of responses from many corners of the blogosphere for suggesting that strong bloggers don’t link.

• Dan Gillmor answered questions from BBC readers on the ways in which the journalism trade is changing, spoke about the principles of journalism at the annual Hearst New Media Lecture at Columbia University, paid $50 for two minutes of parking in downtown San Francisco, called on the Wall Street Journal to deputize shareholders in the hunt for backdating options grants, and noted the curious lack of mainstream newspaper coverage of Warren Buffet’s bearish remarks on the newspaper business.

• Esther Dyson‘s conversation with Vint Cerf in the Wall Street Journal is still generating links, though it’d be best for everyone if her advice for marketers were widely linked instead.

• Leila Boujnane completed a 50k marathon and chaired a mesh conference session on creating viable Web 2.0 businesses (notes here and here).

• Jeff Belk informed an Investor’s Business Daily story on wireless market potential.

• Jeremy Allaire inked a big deal with Tivo that’ll result in Brightcove distributing online video content to DVRs, keynoted Streaming Media East 2006 (MP3 preview, and poo pooed viral cat videos.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Stalking the Supernova speakers (part 2 of 3)

The middle of the alphabet appears to have more people who write more frequently, if the Supernova speakers list is any indication, because today’s post took twice as long to compile as part 1 thanks to the prolificacy of some of the people on it.

• Robert Scoble admits to the Miami Herald that he spends “almost every minute of the waking day thinking about [his] blog.” No surprise, then, that he’s posted 89 items in the month of May, on subjects ranging from rumored (and now debunked) Windows Vista delays, the gulf between geeks and advertising types, doing a Paddy Brown, HD’s effects on Discovery, his 100-site blogroll, Microsoft marketing mistakes, how his son got booted from Second Life, and how lack of podcasting support will hurt Windows Media 11. And that’s just the stuff he’s been writing. The links back are equally prolific; if I don’t move on he’ll have another five posts up before I’ve finished my one.

• Chris Sacca is speaking (maybe even right this moment) at the Red Herring 2006 conference going on in Monterey, California. He also gives conference organizers some badge layout advice, and spots more evidence of a housing bubble.

• Philip Rosedale attended and keynoted SDForum’s mixed-reality “Virtual Worlds—The Rules of Engagement” conference, won a Wired Rave Award (category: business), fended Second Life from denial-of-service attacks, and cut a check funding a student project designed to transform virtual objects into real ones.

• Greg Richardson‘s Civitium continues to steer the deployment of municipal WiFi (TechConnect) in San Francisco.

• Vivek Ranadivé joined “Chairman’s Committee” of the Computerworld Honors Program, where he’ll help that organization recognize companies that “have leveraged technology for the betterment of society.”

• Sean Park can’t help but point out that we’re another step closer to the fiction of AmazonBay. He also spotlights the underbanked, questions IT spending in the Securities and Investment Industry, and follows developments in the area of weather derivative contracts.

• Beth Simone Noveck‘s been designing a peer-to-peer patent system for the USPTO, and wondering whether the cutting edge of virtual worlds is getting dull.

• Craig Newmark debated “net neutrality” with former White House spokesman Mike McCurry in the Wall Street Journal, is nominated to have his name affixed to UCSD’s sixth (currently nameless) college, agreed to speak at the Innovative Marketing Conference next month, hopes to develop a community journalism initiative, has his eponymous company named “one of the 50 content companies that matter,” is profiled by the Times Online, and is thanked for prohibiting animal sales on behalf of animal shelters and rescue groups across the Bay Area.

• Om Malik writes about building a bullet-proof startup, watches the Vonage IPO, monitors the YouTube clone invasion, dissects the “free calls” initiative from Skype, kenoted Mesh (Canada’s Web 2.0 conference), jumps on the Web 2.0 hand-wringing, and covers the launch of Doppelganger, a virtual world with MySpacey aspirations.

• Rebecca MacKinnon attended We Media Global Forum (summary: bloggers vs. journalists… again), attended Beyond Broadcast 2006, warns us not to trust our phone companies (that whole NSA debacle), and challenged Skype to respond to Chinese censorship accusations (Skype passes the buck).

Tomorrow, I’ll finish up the rest of the confirmed speakers list.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Stalking the Supernova speakers (part 1 of 3)

Before beginning regular blogging in the lead-up to the conference, I figured I’d get up to speed on what the confirmed speakers for Supernova 2006 are thinking, talking, and writing about in the weeks prior to the conference. I ran the list through a few searches to procure the following clues as to what they’ve been up to in the month of May (publicly, anyway).

• Michael Zyda is quoted in a story about how struggling Ohio towns might benefit from a flattening world in which jobs can be located anywhere, thanks to technology.

• David Weinberger spoke on web taxonomy and the progress of his upcoming book, Everything Is Miscellaneous at last week’s Syndicate conference. He was also quoted in an explainer on how organizations are using collaborative tools, as well as an article on monetizing user-generated content. Of course, he’s been characteristically prolific on his own blog.

• Esme Vos informs coverage of Philadelphia’s evolving plans to set up a muni WiFi network and continues to organize the MuniWireless Silicon Valley Conference (scheduled just prior to Supernova 2006).

• Werner Vogels expounded upon service-oriented architectures, iterative development, and Ph.D. sabbaticals at Amazon in an interview with ACM Queue magazine.
  
  

• Mena Trott participated in a roundtable on the topic of “extending social networks into social search,” transcripts of which are woefully unavailable.

• Jonathan Taplin appeared at the OnHollywood Conference and spoke on the issue of net neutrality, prompting ZDNet bloggers to take a crack at the suggestion that the net neutrality debate will decide who controls TV distribution.

• David Sifry summarizes the state of the blogosphere in a widely linked-to report, talks about the real value in RSS and the big picture of syndication at the Syndicate conference held earlier this month.

• Dan Shine published a special edition of the AMD 50x15 Newsletter for WCIT 2006, where AMD CEO Hector Ruiz spoke.

• Tina Sharkey opened AOL’s CEO (Chief Everything Officer) event honoring the heads of families.

• Jonathan Schwartz sparred with Gartner analysts who asked him to show them the money at the Gartner Symposium he keynoted last week; likened Java to lightbulbs, shipping containers, and rail lines; took McNealy’s spot on “most overpaid CEOs” lists (McNealy’s joke, not mine); and gave Forbes his plan for the next 100 days as new CEO of Sun.

Because the list of confirmed speakers is so long (and because the speakers themselves are so active), my report is out of date by the time I’ve finished Googling just half the people in it. I’m breaking this post up into three, lest I curse myself with the Sisyphean task of writing a never-ending blog post.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Early Registration Discount Ends Friday

There are only a few days left to save $300 or more on registration for Supernova 2006.  If you’re planning to attend, be sure to sign up now for the early registration discount!

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Party and Networking Reception -- May 18 at Mighty in SF

The pre-Supernova 2006 networking party will be at Mighty in San Francisco, on Thursday, May 18, 5:30-9:30pm.

Everyone is welcome; please RSVP by or at:

http://snparty.wetpaint.com

There’s no charge to come, and we’re serving free (hearty!) hors d’oeuvres, thanks to our sponsor, Blish.com.  As usual, we’ll have a fantastic mix of tech industry luminaries, innovative entrepreneurs, and other interesting folks.  It should be a perfect springboard to Supernova next month.

Friday, April 28, 2006

What We're Not Talking About at Supernova

I try to position Supernova just slightly ahead of the curve, focused on key trends poised to enter the mainstream conversation.  It’s about actionable learning.  You should come out of the conference not just hearing new concepts, but understanding things that are useful to you.  Some ideas are fascinating, but too speculative to impact large numbers of users and businesses in the next few years.  Others are “hot topics” at the time, but only because everyone already knows about them.  And often, catchy slogans are so vague that they don’t really tell you much about what’s at stake.

The Supernova 2006 agenda is pretty broad.  But there are still some topics you might be suprised not to find there, like Blogs vs. Old Media, Microsoft vs. Google, or Is Web 2.0 a Bubble? These topics generate a lot of noise in the blogosphere, and they all reflect significant underlying trends.  Yet the conversations around them have become stale and caricatured.  They all reflect a simplistic “us vs. them” mentality.  It’s easy to make sweeping generalizations or dismissive judgments; it’s much harder to dig down and explore where things are going.  That’s what we try to do at Supernova.

Of course, the frameworks I set up through the formal conference agenda are only one thread of conversations that emerge around Supernova every year.  People will talk about what they want to talk about, both on-stage and off.  I have no desire to stop that (as if I could).  It’s important, though, for a conference to push its participants from time to time.  When I did a session four years ago called “Are Weblogs the Next Platform?”, the speakers (all of them leading lights of the blogosphere) were perplexed about what that meant.  Now everyone talks about Web 2.0, and Microsoft CTO Ray calls RSS syndication the connective tissue of Net.  The topics we address at Supernova aren’t necessarily my ideas; they are concepts I perceive “in the ether,” by listening to what many smart people are saying and doing.  This year is no different.

Initial workshop list

We’ve posted a preliminary chart of Supernova 2006 workshops.  The workshops, held this year on Wednesday, June 21, at the Wharton West facility, are one of the best parts of Supernova.  The more interactive, classroom-style atmosphere of the workshop day produces some very lively and producive conversations.  (Last year, some of them were almost too lively!)

You can register just for the workshop day, or it’s part of the 3-day full conference registration. Because things change so quickly, we’ve left a few of the workshop blocks open for now, and the content as well as the order of the existing ones may change slightly as Supernova approaches.