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This weekend I attended Webzine 2005 a 2 day conference in San Francisco about independent online publishing. I was totally blown away by this conference. I felt like I was back in college (I think the average age at the event was less than 25), and I realized that while I have been sleeping the past few years, the world of online publishing and the Internet has been transformed. The energy at this conference was great and the people were all very cool. The conference only cost $22 (!) which I think was an unbelievable value for the level of information provided. I highly recommend this conference to anyone next year.

There were sessions, workshops, and panels on podcasting, video blogging, building communities, etc. One speaker had just come back from Iraq and New Orleans and showed some incredible raw pictures. I got to meet a lot of bloggers and learn about their projects and websites. I posted some photos from the event here, and you can also find more under tag "webzine2005" on flickr, or technorati "Webzine 2005". By the end of the conference, I got really excited about video blogging, and so I am going to transform this website in a video blog going forward. Text is so 90s. I will be working on that this week.

For my first product review on this site, I decided to share the Firefox extensions I find most useful. If you have not switched to Firefox already as your primary browser, I would be curious to know why not. In any event, one of the benefits of Firefox is all the incredible free extensions that are available. Here are the extensions I like with the links to download them. And please feeel free to comment if I left out any outstanding ones. There are so many and I am sure I have only discovered a small handful!

• downTHEMall! This is a useful for downloading multiple items, pictures, etc. from a single webpage in one shot. If this did not exist, I would have written it myself. When you need this, you need this, it can save huge amounts of time.
• MouseGestures. This extension saves you a tremendous amount of time navigating through web sites. The functionality is deep, and it is extensible, but in a nutshell you can go forward and backward through pages by just using your mouse. Very simple to use, MouseGestures is a huge efficiency gainer.
• Wayback. Adds the useful ability to go back in time and see what a web site looked like in the past. I don't use it that often, but it is incredible that archive.org is keeping this repository.
• Adblock. Names says it all.
• Customize Google. Ads useful extra links to your Google search results.
• del.icio.us toolbar. This is a must have. I have been using del.icio.us for the past few months and it is super useful social bookmarking tool., Later on this site, I have planned to publish a feed of del.icio.us links.
• PDF download. Adds the useful capability to open PDF files in a new tab which is not the Firefox default.
• Alexa Sidebar Again. Not as nearly useful as the Alexa toolbar for Internet Explorer (which rocks), nevertheless it has some value. If you don't use Alexa already to get info on web sites, it provides a lot of useful information. Someone needs to make an Alexa toolbar for Firefox soon.
• Yahoo! Toolbar. Has tons of functionality, but I don't use Yahoo! that much and I needed toolbar space, so I have this toolbar hidden by default.
• Google Toolbar for Firefox. This and the del.icio.us toolbar are my two most frequently used toolbars. Since Google is the place to search, I consider this pretty much required.
• Search Status. Displays Google page rank and Alexa rankings in the bottom corner of the browser window.
• Web Developer. If you are an aspiring XHTML and CSS geek, like me, go get this toolbar now! It adds incredibly useful features for looking at web pages. You can outline elements, look at tags, IDs, etc.

To further my research into new media (blogs, podcasts, etc.) and move it from a theoretical to a practical level, today I have decided to start a company focused on that. The working name of this company is “New Media Engineering� (http://www.newmediaengineering.com). The website, logos, and t-shirts are still under development. Why doesn't a new media company have a new media website already? It will. At a very high level, New Media Engineering will construct and develop new commercial Internet properties, for itself and in conjunction with partners, while researching proprietary software that adds unique value to these sites not found elsewhere. I know this is not a lot of detail, but at this point, this is all I will say. I am in discussion with several people on the creation of new properties. New Media Engineering is the first venture I am starting under my new VDG Companies organization.

The mother of one of my good friends passed away suddenly this weekend, and this morning I attended the funeral. She was only 66 years old. I have been to several funerals, and this was a very special funeral. I knew that something was up when the parking lot at the church was completely full at 11am on a Tuesday. I would guess 400 to 500 people attended the funeral for this woman who I never met. The church was quite full. My friend's mother had dedicated her life to helping those less fortunate and was a leader in her community and church. The service was beautiful. The stories that people shared about her left me and the audience deeply moved and inspired. She made a huge difference to so many people during her life. The service left me, and other people who I talked to, wondering what legacy we are each leaving, what we are doing to help others, and how many people will attend our funerals when we all pass away someday.... Even after death, my friend's mother was having an impact.

Today, I attended the Flickr Fiesta at Yahoo!'s main campus in Sunnyvale. This is an impressive facility. Just going through the massive parking structures it occured to me how good it is to be Yahoo! I don't know why I haven't been there before....

I have been looking at new media, social networks and Web 2.0 stuff over the past 2 weeks, and I came to see what I could learn from Yahoo! about flickr. There were several hundred people in attendance including the founders of flickr and many, many Yahoo! employees. Many of these employees were recent hires. The free food and alcohol was nice too. I posted a set of photos on my flickr account, and there are probably another 10,000 photos being uploaded as I post this. By definition everyone had a digital camera with them. From talking with the Yahoo! employees I learned about the flickr business, Yahoo! 360 Beta and other stuff. Just as an example, the Yahoo! team had massive screen where they scrolled in real-time all the photos uploaded to flickr. The rate was 5 new pictures per millisecond on the upload, and 8 times that on the download. There are apparently over 1.3M flickr subscribers and the number is growing 10% per month at least. This is a big hit.

I got to spend a few minutes with Jerry Yang co-founder of Yahoo! I saw him speak a few months back when he came to Churchill Club where Jerry basically put all the other speakers to shame with the impressive collection of gadgets, phones, etc. that he carries. I spoke with Jerry about our common interests in gadgets, and I congratulated him for putting Walter Mossberg and all the other speakers to shame. We commented about how most all the stuff he brought out only six months ago (2GB thumb drive, pocket sized XP PC, etc.) are now pretty much obsolete. I told Jerry about my interests to start another company in new media and web 2.0, and he sincerely wished me luck. Jerry was very gratious to hang around to spend time talking with people at the fiesta. This guy is very cool.

I wanted to share this story. Last week when I attended the G2E, my entrance included admission to the exhibit halls of the F&B (food and beverage) and Fun Expo (amusement park operators) exhibit halls. These area all related to what happens inside a casino. The F&B conference was impressive for its excesses. There was a huge area for wine and alcohol that was totally free. See photo to the right, and the rest that I posted on flickr. Fun Expo was not bad either with its emphasis on amusement park games. If like me, you have been going too long to geek conferences in the high tech industry, it makes you wonder "What have I been doing?"

If you have been counting cards and know that the odds are favorable to hit rather than stand (the normal play), you better think twice because the systems from NICE are watching, and you could be booted from the casino for making too smart a play. Look carefully at the photo on the right. The system from NICE is analyzing a blackjack game using video recognition technologies. It can identify the cards that you have, and it tracks how the game is going and how everyone is playing and betting. If you cheat or play too well, the NICE system will send an alarm to the casino staff e.g., "there is a card counter in seat 3 and table 20," and you will be out of luck.

Here is a tip from the guys at NICE, while most people think that an 18 is a good blackjack hand it turns out to lose more than 60% of the time based on their actual observations of millions of blackjack games. I have not checked their math. The only thing that NiceVision is missing is pattern recognition on the players’ faces, and they expect to have this soon.

Such amazing and ubiquitous video recognition has only been made possible recently through advances in computer hardware and software. The implications of such technology are staggering. Currently, systems like NiceVision are being used to at airports to scan for unattended baggage. But there is nothing to prevent this technology from being used in stores to identify you as a shopper and learn your patterns. I won't be surprised to walk into, for example, a Safeway that I have never been to before one day in 2015 and hear, "Welcome, Vidal. How have you been? You look well. We haven't seen you in a while...." How will the automated supermarket of the future know who I am? Because I walked into another Safeway five years ago in another state and the cameras captured and remembered everything. Everyone will be famous. How nice.

We now live in a society where gambling is totally socially acceptable. Poker is on TV all the time. To learn more about this industry, and seek inspiration for my next venture, I attended the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) 2005 at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). This is a huge show with over 25,000 attendees. It mainly focuses on casinos and casino equipment like slot machines, roulette wheels, and table games. Pretty much any equipment imaginable to run a casino was on display. Some of it is pretty cool like the computerized roulette wheels and blackjack tables. No marketing angle to keep people in the casinos was left unexploited...I mean unrepresented.

I was particularly interested to see how computer technology is being used, and to look at online gaming aka "igaming." The area for igaming was relatively small since most igaming is still illegal in the USA. I saw at least 2 tablet PC manufacturers displaying handhelds that could be used by casino staff. There was a really amazing application from NICE in NJ which is the subject of my next post. I have posted 29 photos from the show floor on flickr.

 

[Reuters: Oddly Enough]