Concerned Citizens

I’m at TEDx San Antonio for a full day of bold ideas. I’ll be live blogging the day to help provide a journal of the fun. Already met a lot of cool people so far. Read more…

I’m live blogging from the TechStars Cloud Demo Day at my technology blog today. If you want to follow the latest cool innovations by some creative people who’ve been working on this for the past 3 months, follow the link. It’ll last until about 1 p.m.

I’m wrapping up my fifth year of SXSW Interactive, one of the biggest tech and social media conferences in the nation, just right up the road in Austin. This year’s attendance has not been announced but estimates are that it will be well over 20,000, eclipsing last year’s attendance of 19,364. Even with the incredible growth the organizers of SXSW were able to accommodate everyone by expanding the footprint and introducing transportation shuttles between the campuses. Still, there were some challenges with the festival, especially with registration when most people showed up almost all at once to get their badges, resulting in 2+ hour lines. Not much can be done to speed that up except encourage folks to show up early to get badged or have remote badging sites at the campuses. But all that aside, what draws people to this annual week of geekdom?

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This weekend and part of next week I’m at one of the biggest techy paradises in America – SXSW Interactive. It’s my third year and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger with around 15,000 people attending the five day conference. It’s a great conference in many ways and a place where you can spot the latest trends and technologies before they go mainstream. It’s where Twitter, foursquare, Gowalla, and Whrrl got their sea legs and took off. But there’s so much more that jumps out about SX Interactive that shows me we’re on the cusp of some great things in store for the future – and I’m only on day one.

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This past week Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher and chairman of the NY Times, told a group of attendees at the International Newsroom Summit that “We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD.” For some time now we’ve known that the Times would be changing its revenue model to a paywall to help support and sustain an all digital edition. The question back then was whether Sulzberger would continue the print edition that blankets the nation and world. I guess we now have our answer and would definitely signal the new course of media to an all digital model. Read more…

Okay, I’m going to try to start a new trend in blogging by picking a topic a day and blogging in that area. Today I call Tech Tuesdays and I take a look at multi-touch interfaces. If you’re not familiar, multi-touch is what you’ve been using a lot lately if you have one of the more popular smart phones like an iPhone. The interface basically allows you to interact using your fingers and various gestures. What’s interesting is that it opens up an entire area of user experience many have never really realized, interfaces that are more natural to our daily lives. Read more…

Last week on Friday Apple Computer fixed a problem and, in doing so, garnered the attention of most of the technology media and even some of the mainstream media in the process. What is even more interesting is that prior to the press conference Apple had essentially been denying there was a problem to fix. However, when faced with proof positive from Consumer Reports of a potential reception problem while holding the iPhone a certain way Steve Jobs had to confront the issue. In doing so he made lemons out of lemonade by turning the conference into a marketing event. Only one other person comes to mind with that type of charisma – PT Barnum. Read more…

Today I found this video at Mashable produced by Whirled Interactive providing a perspective on 2009 using Google Wave. In case you’re not familiar with the technology the perspective is a “wave” with a series of wavelet conversations. There are a lot of subtle nuances that are Wave specific so all you Wavers should watch for them, especially the RIP section. Regardless it’s just fun to watch. The thing to understand is that the only editing is audio. The Wave was built and replayed as is.

Yesterday Google announced a lot of new innovations to the public to try out and explore. One that has gotten a lot of press has been the real-time search application. However, one of my favorites is the new Google Goggles application. It’s an application that is only available to those who have an Android phone. Now that ranges from those with the original G1 from HTC to the new Motorola Droid announced by Verizon Wireless. The application is pretty unique in that it leverages Google’s incredible image library and search heuristics to do a visual search. By pairing an image against their image library through some complex algorithms Google is able to provide search results for the image provided. So where does the fun come into play? Read more…

This past weekend I traveled to Austin to attend the Texas-Texas Tech game which was the largest football crowd in Texas at 101,297 until the Cowboys-Giants game eclipsed it on Sunday. Regarding the crowd, in my mind Texas Memorial Stadium still had a bigger crowd than the Jerry Dome. Counting people standing outside in the plaza isn’t really valid when you count a crowd but that’s Jerry Jones for you – all hype and low delivery. Regardless, with the record crowd in Austin came a lot of other problems. I’ve already hit on the transportation issue in yesterday’s blog but let’s talk about AT&T’s failure to deliver. For all the hype of the iPhone it was basically rendered useless once we got into the sea of burnt orange across 15th Street. Read more…

Okay, I’m the first to admit it. I’m a techno-nerd all over. New technologies excite me in a big way. But I’m also a tech critic. Do it right and you have me won over. Screw the technology up and I’m outta here and will tell the world how bad you screwed it up. You see, technology these days is more about how you creatively put together technical components for everyday tasks than the old days of just seeing “Hello world” flash on a computer screen. So when Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone I liked it but it missed the mark in several ways. Slow network, no stereo bluetooth and several other missing features. But let’s face it, if Apple didn’t leave us hungering in some way we’d never come running like pigs to the Apple trough every June. Read more…

Last night was a busy night on the technology front. After years of planning and public outreach the nation’s television airwaves went all digital. Hundreds of analog transmitters were turned off across the nation and thousands of TV sets went dark. As a result of this transition stations are able to save thousands of dollars in energy costs since the new transmitters use substantially less power. It also marks the beginning of a new model in mobile communication but more on that in a bit. Last night also was when Facebook allowed users to pick their own identity on the popular social media platform. I went with my social media ID of RBearSAT while others who were up at the magical moment got more recognizable names like their real name. Read more…

On Monday I decided to jump on the iPhone bandwagon after the recent announcement of the iPhone 3GS. Most of us who watch technology had been anticipating this announcement, both from a hardware and software perspective. While the other versions of the iPhone have been good, this is the version I felt was a good mix of technology for a smartphone. In another development, Mayor Julian Castro has started vlogging from City Hall in an effort to provide a more open and transparent government for San Antonio. Aside from the normal political and civic agenda you get a better picture of what’s on his iPod. It’s probably the first time an iPod has been a main component of the office. Who knows? Maybe he’ll start podcasting for those of us with iPhones. Read more…

Recently I have been following the City of Austin’s efforts to revamp its website and some of the issues associated with this upcoming project. Back in March the city had planned to award the contract for redesign to a Cignex Technologies, a California based company that prides itself in leveraging open source technologies to provide solutions. Some of Cignex Technologies prior customers include the City of Austin and the University of Texas at Austin. Apparently Cignex developed the current website which seems to be a collection of technologies including Plone and Cold Fusion. Based on the way the bid was worded development would have to be done in Plone. After considerable citizen feedback the city has decided to rebid the contract and look at new local options. Read more…

Just in case you thought all I ponder is politics, politics, and more politics there is another side to me. In reality I’m a techie nerd that just happens to have a political side to him. To the tech side, I am anxiously awaiting to see if Apple is going to come out with a new model of the iPhone. I’m not talking about the firmware upgrade that’s planned but an actual new device. The usual announcement date is at the World Wide Developers Conference held in June. That’s when the last iPhone debuted. However this WWDC is a little different in that Steve Jobs could be absent from the conference. John Paczkowski of All Things Digital reports that Phil Schiller, Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing for Apple, will be delivering the keynote address this year, a possible sign that Jobs may not be ready to return to the company he helped found. Read more…