The last few weeks have been really busy. So much has been going on I haven’t had time to blog.
Since last time, I’ve launched a new company called Roundhouse Technologies and helped to organize an unconference here in Baltimore called SocialDevCamp East.
I’ll be talking about Roundhouse Technologies in more detail in the coming weeks. In the meantime, it’s important to get the word out about SocialDevCamp, as it’s coming up fast — on May 10.
SocialDevCamp will be held in Baltimore and is an unconference focused on the future of the social web. We’re looking for developers and thought leaders who are interested in imagining the future of the web, not just where it is today.
While “monetizing Facebook applications” might have been a good topic for six months ago, we’re after a little deeper reflection than that. What are the long term implications of platforms like Facebook? What effect will Google’s Application Engine have on creativity? What direction is the ideation, funding, and liquidity process going in? Do we need to create new paths to liquidity, as some have suggested?
SocialDevCamp is an unconference, so the agenda is not cast in stone; we’ll form the agenda based on the interests of the attendees. It’s also free to participants. Our costs will be covered by some sponsors; we need sponsors. My new company is one, but we could use more. Please email me at dave at roundhousetech dot com.
Why is SocialDevCamp East in Baltimore? It’s central to DC, Philly and pretty accessible to NY and Boston. Our hope is to draw deep thinkers from each of these markets. This kind of conversation is happening much more frequently on the west coast, but as a friend of mine recently said with tongue firmly in cheek, “the people in San Francisco are all smoking the same air.” There’s something to that. We have an opportunity to have a thoughtful, realistic conversation that’s influenced by reflection and not so much by what might be happening on Sand Hill Road.
We expect to have about 100 people. Please spread the word. We’re planning to have four separate break out session periods, plus lunch and an after party. We hope you can make it to what should be a great event!
And if you know someone who would be a great fit for the event, please pass on the word. We’re really looking forward to meeting all of the fantastic thinkers in our midst here on the east coast.
And yes, the venue has not yet been confirmed, but we’re working that now. We’ll update as soon as we have more specific details.
This was another action-packed week for me which I’m just recovering from now.
On Tuesday, I headed up to New York to be a part of another of Jeff Pulver’s social media breakfasts. This one was at Friend of a Farmer (Gramercy Park area) and featured about 100 of New York’s most active social networkers. I had a great time and met a ton of people, some of whom could become potential collaborators.
Jeff’s onto something with these breakfasts. It’s not rocket science — it’s getting people together who are preselected via a common medium — but his belief in turning online connections into real human connections is powerful, and it will be the basis of much of how we all do business in the future. The world is re-sorting itself. More on that in a minute.
After the breakfast I headed over to Jeff’s offices in Melville, NY to be on Jeff’s online TV program, Pulver.TV. I was a featured guest, as was Ann Bernard from whygosolo.com, a new social networking service (and Facebook app) that “makes spontaneous connections happen”. More on that in a minute too.
Interview with Dave Troy:
Interview with Ann Bernard:
On Wednesday, I made an important appearance in Annapolis, Maryland at Save Maryland IT Day. For those of you reading this from outside Maryland (I dare say most of you), our state legislature, in its infinite wisdom, has passed a law that imposes a 6% sales tax on all “computer services” — whatever that means. Anyway, it applies to me and what I do and I have been part of a team of technology business leaders fighting this law. There are several bills pending that would repeal this tax, but it won’t be easy to do. We need to get the word out about this to everybody in Maryland. This tax is bad, bad, bad! Learn more at the website for the Maryland Computer Services Association.
The World is Re-Sorting Itself I’m active in my local technology business community. I think that’s all part of good citizenship, and it’s good business and common sense to connect with people who are close-by and like-minded.
But things are changing. The two local technology councils, and the economic development agencies who help to fund them, are primarily geared towards old-school, big-iron economic development. Convince a big company to put a corporate headquarters in your state (or county) and you’ve got a lot of jobs, tax base, and capital investment for years to come. This is not a criticism; this is naturally what they would want to encourage and it’s great as far as it goes.
But that world is slipping away. Today, geography is no longer a primary concern for companies. Small, focused companies can be virtual, or distributed, and this is more functional than it’s ever been. I am struck that Maryland wants to push its technology activities outside its borders.
Meanwhile, I am meeting my most valuable collaborators in places like New York, London, or Berlin, and finding that they live all over the world. I am more likely to start a company with people from six states and three countries than I am to start one entirely headquartered in Maryland.
Collaboration of subject-matter experts is what drives excellence in business and we are no longer likely to be able to convince these experts to co-locate near each other for years at a time. People choose where to live for a host of reasons that, ideally, should and can be disconnected from their professions.
Social networking tools now make it possible for us to locate and stay connected to our peers wherever they may be.
Likewise, Ann Bernard’s brilliant WhyGoSolo concept helps connect people in an orderly way to share experiences. It’s not a dating site; I described it as kind of like couchsurfing.com, only standing up. Meet new people, experience new things, grow your network, push your mind. A lot of people gravitate towards the more libidinous aspects of ideas like this, and hey, what happens between consenting adults is their business.
But again, that’s not the point. We’ve only got about 80 years on the ship here, and life’s too short not to use every last minute to its fullest. To the extent that social networking can help us make new connections — both business and personal — shouldn’t we milk it for everything it’s worth?
All these concepts — Jeff’s breakfasts, WhyGoSolo, couchsurfing.com — help us make connections and maximize our life ROI.
Noel Hidalgo’s Trip Around the World: CoWorking As an experiment, I spent summer 2007 living in Berlin with my family. I got to know several ex-pats who were living there, or just passing through.
Coincidentally, I met up with Noel Hidalgo, whose “Luck of Seven” project was taking him on a trip around the world. Here’s video I just found on blip.tv of my interview with Noel in Berlin in July 2007.
Noel did a beautiful job editing this video. The kid with the accordion, the windmills, the street scenes — he captured the zeitgeist of Berlin, summer 2007 perfectly.
Also with us that day was my friend Travis Todd, who coincidentally (and completely unbeknownst to me before meeting him there that day) is from Annapolis, Maryland and was a customer of mine years ago when I owned an ISP. And his little brother went to pre-school with my son.
See, Maryland? We don’t need you. Tax us and we’ll move to Berlin.
On Tuesday, I attended the press preview and opening night events for Design and the Elastic Mind at the MoMA in NYC. It opens to the public Sunday, February 24th and includes works from designers, scientists, digital artists and thinkers from across a wide range of disciplines; my projects Twittervision and Flickrvision are featured.
I strongly recommend that you check out this exhibition, especially if you’re interested in the intersection between science, design, and art. There are some stunningly beautiful and provocative pieces. While the core ideas behind many of the pieces are technical — computation, informatics, bioscience — good design is required to make the information presentable and understandable to a broader audience. Paola Antonelli, curator for Architecture and Design at the MoMA, has done a remarkable job of assembling these pieces.
Here are some photos from the party Tuesday night.
Large scale, open-source Graffiti Projection System from Graffiti Research Lab. I need to build one of these. The graffiti is “painted” where the green laser hits. Note that the paint drips “up” in this photo. You can do that with digital paint!
This still seems improbable.
Sofia Lagerkvist (right) w/partner from Front Design. Creators of the remarkable “Sketch Furniture”, which can be drawn freehand in 3-space, then rendered in plastic using a laser-based process. Insane. Create your own furniture that looks like it’s straight out of a cartoon!
This is an example of an object created with the Sketch Furniture process.
The Painstation video game; where the punishment for losing is actual pain, inflicted by a table-mounted wristband!
Adam Putter and Janis Mussat. Their project Beerfinder.ca helps beer drinkers in Toronto coordinate beer runs, navigating complex store-closing hours!
No contemporary design exhibit is complete without the OLPC!
Me and Paola Antonelli, MoMA Curator of Design & Architecture. She curated Design and the Elastic Mind.
My favorite installation in the show, Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington. Transforms people into amazing sights and sounds. You need to see this.
Me and Ian Spiro of fastfoodmaps.com, a Google maps project that shows the fast-food restaurants in the United States. He wishes he had more time to devote to this. He thinks Arby’s is retreating, but he wants to prove it!
“I Want You to Want Me” is a project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, of wefeelfine.org fame. This project scrapes data from online dating sites and attempts to make sense of it. It uses a giant touch screen and is visually quite impressive.
A giant, pulsating 15′ tall “tree” made from what appear to be clear-coated fiberoptic strands. Really, really impressive piece of work. It is the “Sonumbra” by Rachel Wingfield and Mathias Gmachl.
Me and Noelle Steber of the Google Moon project. Noelle was responsible for assembling the Apollo data and is a student at MIT.
My wife Jennifer, showing off the digitally projected “Lightweeds” by Simon Heijdens.
Today I want to rant about a few things I hate. They include:
The Word “Mashup”
Proclamations of the form: “A Thing is Dead; Long Live that Thing”
People Who Insist on Continuing to Use the Word Mashup
The Term “Web 2.0”
I know it’s heresy. Mashups and Web 2.0 are what’s hot, right? I myself am considered to be a “mashup creator” working with Web 2.0 concepts.
But that era is behind us. The term “Mashup” made sense when coders were actually lifting data from places it was hard to lift from and putting it into contexts that were hard to access. This, my friends, is no longer the state of affairs on the Internet.
Today, we are working with a world of data that wants to be free and is published via countless, well documented API’s. In the cases where API’s are still not available (or whorishly published in hopes of becoming universally adopted), advanced tools and protocols are available to automate what used to be hard.
We must remember that the word “mashup” hails back to music, originally; a talented music editor might string together pieces of previously recorded music to create something new. This was an artform in itself, and implied a kind of subversion. A repurposing of content, often done without the permission or knowledge of the original creator.
Well, the days of this kind of thing on the Internet are, thanks to everybody’s efforts to open things up, largely over. In a world where open source software is widely accepted, where it makes sense for companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon (and gee, every other damn company out there) to publish API’s that encourage their data to be woven into the fabric of the net, there is no need for the coy sense of subversion that comes from the word “Mashup.”
What we’ve got now, folks, is DATA! Great flowing rivers of it! Software that helps us use it! Ruby on Rails, Asterisk, MySQL, PGSQL, Apache, Freeswitch, Flex! Where it’s not open source, it’s at least free! Everything has an API and the things that don’t are falling away.
The next person that says to me with a straight face that they “make mashups” is going to get sucker-punched. The word has lost its meaning, so let’s move on.
That said, explaining to a layperson what it is we “creative coders” do, sometimes you, well, have to resort to saying, “I make mashups.” But do us all a favor, try to explain what that really means today. Let’s move to a world where we can think about data, about tools (which is really just code-as-data), and imagining what we can do with it all.
Mashup was a good word for perhaps 2003-2007, but it implies limitations and barriers that simply no longer exist. We can do better.
What would YOU call the innovations that are possible with all the data and tools we have today?
I am CEO and co-founder at 410Labs, and creator of Mailstrom. I'm a serial entrepreneur, software developer, and community builder in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
