Tag: robert scoble

Conference

Le Web3 2007 – a big hit!

After last year’s Le Web3 experience, my expectations for this year’s Le Web3 were very low!

However, Loic, the conference’s organiser obviously took all of the criticisms of last year’s conference on board and delivered a fantastic conference this time out.

The talks were great, the venue was perfect, the food was delicious, and the networking opportunities were tremendous. I had conversations with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, Stephanie Booth, Hans Rosling, Loic, Lee Wilkins, JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Laura Fitton, Dave Sifry, Jeff Clavier, Martin Varsavsky, Dave Weinberger, Om Malik, Rodrigo Sepulveda and many more too numerous to mention.

There were one or two minor issues, the wifi was poor but as Loic had contracted and paid Swisscom to make that work the fault for that is squarely on their shoulders.

From a speakers’ perspective I was surprised that the organisation charged with the AV only had a single wireless mic. This delayed my getting onstage as I had to wait while Janus Friis came offstage and had his mic removed before I could mic up and go on. Even more incredibly though, the AV crowd didn’t have a wireless ‘clicker’ to move the slides forward! This meant that I had to stand at the podium pressing the right-arrow key on my laptop to move the slides on! I like to walk around when I am giving a talk so this really interfered with my ability to be natural onstage.

Other than those minor issues, the conference was a roaring success. I didn’t hear any delegates say that they were disappointed that they had attended.

Kudos to Loic, Geraldine, Cathy Burke and their team.

IT@Cork, social media, social networks, Web 2.0

Congrats to the guys in Jaiku

I see Jaiku were bought by Google yesterday. What is Jaiku? Jaiku is what Twitter would be if it worked reliably and had neat functionality. I’m delighted for them.

If you don’t currently have a Jaiku account then you may be out of luck because in the notification email sent out by Jaiku last night they said:

In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now. But fear not! All our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will continue to be able to invite your friends to Jaiku.

I’m not sure what happens to people who are invited in this period, do they go into a holding pattern, or are they left in but the amount of invites is limited. The faq is no help there.

This is great play by Google who are demonstrating that they have their finger on the pulse. I can’t wait to see what other announcements they are going to make in this space – Robert Scoble is hinting at big news in the Orkut arena in early November.

Jyri Engstrom, Jaiku’s founder gave a great talk at Reboot and I tried to get him to come to speak at the it@cork conference this November. Unfortunately he was busy (now I can see why!). Maybe next year Jyri!