sky, Author at Sky's Blog

Backstage Pass- Howard Rheingold on nurturing innovation

16 July, 2009 by sky 1 Comment

In the back seat of a London taxi, Howard Rheingold talks with me a bit about how information research centers can form around people who attract talented individuals and then “protect” them so they can innovate.

First he mentions Bob Taylor, who was at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where Alan Kay and Bob Metcalfe, among others who I know, did some really innovative work.

JP Rangaswami, at BT, is also a “people connector” and extraordinary manager who in a big-company environment, such as a telecom company, is doing some interesting things. BT’s CEO Ian Livingston, the night before, had told us there are 200 competing companies here vying for UK business and that this bodes well for services and low prices.

Backstage Pass- Tom Foremski says disruptive tech linked to fault lines

15 July, 2009 by sky 2 Comments

Kinda spooky idea, but Tom Foremski suggested to me that fault lines and disruptive technology appear in the same regions of the world. Speaking of disruption, we were at Reboot Britain when I recorded this clip and were struggling because hundreds of attendees were sharing a wi-fi connection and it was pretty difficult to find enough bandwidth to squeeze up a podcast or video to the Traveling Geeks web site.

Backstage Pass- Real Customer Service

15 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Customer service takes dedication, and Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s list, takes this to a degree you won’t see many places. Every day, whether he’s at home in San Francisco or on the road in England, he attends to his half-time position as customer service rep for the institution he founded.

Each night, as we’ve been winding up or down the evening activities, Craig has bowed out at a reasonable hour to go online and attend to customer issues as they come up. Being +8 hours from San Francisco’s time zone has helped, but it’s still a remarkable thing to see this kind of dedication.

Backstage Pass- WDYDWYD

14 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

Susan Bratton is doing a meme — WDYDWYD — Why Do You Do What You Do during the Traveling Geeks’ week in London and Cambridge. She asks interesting people to put their name and URL on a piece of paper, and then give a short statement of “why I do what I do” and she photographs the person with their paper. Susan has been doing this all week and you will find her WDYDWYD memes interspersed throughout the blog.

Backstage Pass- Login, login, login

9 July, 2009 by sky Leave a Comment

I estimated last night that I spend 1/3 of my time trying to debug and solve connectivity issues^[1] both at home and on the road. Though perhaps when I’m at home, more of that 1/3 goes toward updating software^[2].

Please note – This video isn’t intended to put anybody on the spot, but when Susan was having so much trouble on Monday getting connected to wi-fi at the Reboot Britain meeting, it just seemed like old times to me! At big meetings like this (several hundred people) the wi-fi is frequently the crunch. Just getting an IP address, and then being able to stay connected 30 minutes or more, can be a challenge. To their credit, the venue did have really good wi-fi signals in all of the rooms at the conference center! However, I stayed on my BT Mobile Broadband connection the entire time (the little illustration is their USB modem device), and though the bandwidth was challenged (inside a brick, steel, concrete building) it was reliable.

[1] Connectivity includes finding wi-fi, dealing with “blocking” problems (more on that later), spam overload, and helping others get connected (which is major).
[2] I probably update a program every 2 days. This isn’t just Microsoft Office, but dozens of other programs I use. I use MacUpdate as a paid service to notify me of updates, although I’d say that 1/2 of the programs I use will automatically alert me when updates are available.