David Hornik on iPhone Leads To New Laptops

I haven’t sat still long enough to queue up for an iPhone (maybe next week), but David Hornik (the wisest of VCs), has been fooling with one for a bit. His prediction:

[from I Want Everything to be Like the iPhone]

[…] if I were a betting man, I would bet that the next two significant product releases that Apple comes out with are 1) a touch screen iPod with the same gesture controls as the iPhone, and 2) a touch screen laptop that allows the same sort of browsing, etc. And I will be one of the first to buy the laptop. The iPhone experience is so good. And will absolutely translate to a bigger screen.

I am so spoiled with the Nokia n95 camera that I think I will have to drag the n95 around with me once I have an iPhone, because the feedback on the iPhone camera is bad. But I crave the rest of the experience, particularly a better integrated experience with music on the phone. I have tried the n95’s music capabilities — which are impressive, especially the stereo speakers — but the problems with copy-protection on iTunes music are so pervasive that iPhone (or iPod) looks like the only solution.

Memewatch: Valleyschwag

Since I announced auctioning off 240 days of T shirt wear (see this and that), I have been relentlessly needled by my entire social network. Mostly people think I’m whacked. David Hornik mentioned the Valleyschwag deal, where you can get schwag sent to you monthly for $14.95, without having to actually go to conferences or sleep on the moldy rug at a Bar Camp in Delhi to get the T shirt.

Also, at the Valleyschwag blog I learned that schwag has additional meanings in American street culture:

[from What the urban dictionary says]

Perhaps I’m naive, but I didn’t know that schwag means “…low grade marijuana. This type of marijuana is usually brown, seedy, dry.” My favorite is the usage:

adj- Ewww this schwag ass weed tastes horrible and it didnt get me very high. noun- I hate smoking schwag, but i cant get any dank right now so i guess i’ll have to.

According to the Urban Dictionary, schwag is also “A rock & roll band based in St. Louis, Missouri,” “a fat homely chick,” “an amazing band in London, ON,” “slang for penis,” “of reject status,” “cool or awesome cool and sweet skittles with sprinkles on top!,” and “Give away promo items procured through working an event. Often used in the stagehand world when working corporate or industrial gigs.”

I don’t think that paying the $14.95 will get you any of that kind of schwag.

On The Conference Thing: Etech, SXSW, Unconferences and Monocultures

 

ETech has turned into one of those events — like many others — where the real value for me is coming from the myriad conversations in the hallways. Not to detract from the presentations, per se, but that’s seems to be where the real deal is for me, here.

A few highlights from 8 March 2006:

  • At a press lunch dedicated to the upcoming Where 2.0 — now on my calendar — I met Di-Ann Eisnor, one of the founders of Platial. Several members of the fifth estate seemed intent on trying to rip her guts out because there are stalkers in the world, and they might decide to use a geolocational tool like Platial, so what is she doing about that? Wow, was that over the top, or what. Nat Torkington, the conference chair who was trying to steer the lunch discussion, finally stepped in and shut down the idiots that seemed to be clamoring for editorial review of all user content at Platial. Oh sure. Tim O’Reilly made some insightful visionary statements, but the feeding frenzy of a few self-appointed protectors of the greater geosphere really dominated the whole lunch.
  • Tom Coates of Plasticbag.org and Yahoo gave a great talk on the Web of Data, laying out principles not only of design but a higher order goal of participation in the edge-based infrastructure of Web 2.0. Nice.
  • Clay Shirky spoke, which I have already posted about (see Social Software is the Experimental Wing of Political Philosophy). Very cool.
  • Jon Udell presnted on Attention Focusing Strategies, which helped me focus my attention on the topic, at least so long as he was on the podium.
  • The Data Dump session, subtitlted Fun with Graphs and Charts, was real fun. Speakers included
    • Marc Hedlund, Entrepreneur-in-residence, O’Reilly Media — I came late, so if he presented something I missed it.
    • David Hornik, General Partner, August Capital — when the world’s funniest (and most insightful) VC looks at six months of his email content, what do we learn? VCs are lazy bastards who do nothing but talk about wine, vacations, and the occasional IPO.
    • Ian Kallen, Architect, Technorati, Inc — There’s a lot of splogs out there, but thank god they don’t cover their trails very well.
    • Eric Lunt, Co-founder and CTO, FeedBurner — Really cool visualization (with audio!) about the rise of feeds, culminating in 200,000 feeds under management at Feedburner.
    • Roger Magoulas, Director Market Research, O’Reilly Media, Inc. — what we can learn about tech trends from book sales and job postings? Ajax and Ruby are really, really hot.
    • Adam Messinger, VP, Product, Gauntlet Systems — As we always suspected, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the programmers, based on his analysis of a bunch of open source projects.
    • David L. Sifry, Founder and CEO, Technorati, Inc. — An update of his State of the Blogosphere preso, showing that, yes, the blogosphere continues to double in size every five months. Most interestingly, he answered a few questions that I sent along recently. 28% of blog posts now have tags using the rel=”tag” microformat. What he didn’t answer — he hasn’t dug out the data — are these questions:
      1. What is the average number (or distribution) of tags per tagged post?
      2. How many posts reference the average tag?

I found refuge in the hallways, since the ETech format is highly structured, and the sessions were all jammed. Most of the sessions had people sitting in the aisles and leaning against the walls. I was also surprised — it’s my first ETech — at the depressing ratio of women to men. Perhaps its inevitable that a conference that is constantly referring to its audience as the “alpha geeks” would be so skewed, but it’s still annoying to me. I am not suggesting some nefarious scheme here, to marginalize women or something, just that the whole tone of the show is hyper geeky. As a complement to that — because geeks are as conservative as cats — the structure is a series of parallel tracks just crammed with techno-goodness: technologists with a never-ending parade of powerpoints. Very little organized socialization — not even a defined IRC backchannel! My recommendation would be to go single track, and drop 2/3 of the sessions, and open up the schedule for more loose stuff: but O’Reilly is probably delivering exactly what the alpha geeks want.