Tonight we were pleased to be invited to the JP Morgan and the Connector Group Showcase, which is an exclusive event for influencers and tastemakers in the technology sector. The show case is a catalyst between technology companies and some, “of the country’s most well-respected businesspeople, technologists, style mavens, bloggers, and thinkers”. (Connector Group)

Hear the podcast of the event – 17 MB mp3 – duration: 1.14 min

Tonight’s event featured the following companies.
Google (Google Maps division)

Meebo
MobiTV
Palm
Pay By Touch
Peerflix
Findaway World (makers of Playaway)

Roku
Sling Media
Wolfgang’s Vault
Cocoa Designs

We were very pleased to be invited to the Yahoo Design Group Dinner on Monday night! The dinner was a gathering of web design, UI, and user experience icons from around the country. Currently, the Web Design World conference is going on in SF so there are even more talented people than usual in the bay area right now.

I was fortunate to meet Larry Tesler, VP of user experience and design, Havi Hoffman, Catalyst for Social Media Marketing, Joy Mountford (founder of Apple’s International Interface Design Project), and Julie Stanford of Sliced Bread Design. My partner Emily Chang spoke to Don Norman, Jared Spool, Peter Merholz and Jeff Veen among others.

Most of the discussion I had was about web 2.0 technologies and design. Yahoo seemed genuinely interested in the subject.

We also discussed doing some podcasts with the Yahoo Design Group in the near future. Thanks to Yahoo for a great event.

My partner at ideacodes Emily Chang and I were recently invited to participate in Microsoft’s Search Champs v4 this past week. In short Search Champs is brainstorming session between Microsoft designers, developers, project managers, and executives and a group of 57 internet thinkers and doers from around the world.

The sessions were were held at the Microsoft HQ in Redmond Washington. All participants had to sign a Microsoft nondisclosure agreement (NDA) so most of what we saw and talked about cannot be blogged about. The majority of what was demoed to us was pre-alpha or soon to be released products. There were several announcements that were made to the group that were non-NDA.

By far the one that impressed me the most was the launch that day of Microsoft Live Labs and some great improvements to live.com. I’ll be doing more involved posts about those after a few more days of research and testing.

Another non-NDA issue that was discussed that interested me as a was MSN’s recent privacy issue with Yahoo and Google. In two short non-technical sessions, one held over lunch, several Microsoft executives and lawyers discussed the recent privacy issues they were involved in with Yahoo and Google. I read about the controversy as it was happening, and it seemed as though Google was doing the “right thing” by fighting the government subpoena’s for search query information. Once again Microsoft and Yahoo looked like the bad guys.

From what we were told Microsoft did not give away any personal identifiable information (PII). All they gave away was how many times a search term was searched for. No IP information was given up. The information that was given up is actually already publicly accessible through keyword auction statistics. In my opinion the whole thing was blown out of proportion, and Google used this rather small request for PR purposes. I believe Microsoft did the right thing and Google – well huh – I’m not sure. Additionally, the government didn’t even need to subpoena these documents and pay the lawyers to do this at $300 + dollars per hour. They could have easily done this themselves.

Some larger issues did come out of this discussion. As we have all thought the major search engines do collect IP address and associated them with the search queries. This time the government didn’t push for PII but in the future they could. One Idea that was brought up by our group was blurring two of the IP number so it is no longer identifiable with the user. This would be a key change in the way search engines do business today and would protect all of us.

Microsoft discussed the idea of providing short bulleted lists at the top of the legalize written in easy to understand language so users would know what their rights really were. Several innovative ideas were brought up by participants to protect and inform the public. In his very own and animated way Merlin Mann suggested having what amounts to a comparative privacy rating system. Basically a way to compare how much privacy you are giving up for any given task. A great idea! Other thoughts discussed by the champs were some kind of a privacy standard that all major search engines follow. So no matter where you search you know your privacy is respected. One final thought that I brought up at the open lunch session was to have a Creative Commons type privacy license. I personally don’t care if the document is 10 pages as long as I can understand it.

This is just my spin on this topic.

Hear a after hours group discussion of this topic by some other notable Search Champs led by Joshua Porter.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Microsoft even though my first computer was an 8088 running DOS v3. Shortly after I switched to an Apple 2c and didn’t look back until I started making websites in 1995 and purchased a windows machine for testing platform compatibility. I’ve had one ever since however, the law suits and their business practices bothered me.

We all wondered when Bill made his announcement that Microsoft was changing if it would indeed come true. As I will post over the next several days I do believe they may have woken up and are on a new road.

Please stay tuned over the next few days for more juicy bits!

Can your website connect to every mobile device or to your company’s live inventory system? How about your customer’s neural network? After thinking about what I saw yesterday at Stanford with the nine entrepreneur’s under the age of 27, I was struck with the percentage of applications that were connected in some way to another device. Last year I saw Howard Rheingold at SXSW and he spoke about cell phones being the most prevalent computing device. Think about it. As Rheingold pointed out, “do you see more computers of cell phones?”

Currently, there are web applications launching every day that focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing. Many of these applications already include mobile functions.

So, if you are a company trying to connect to an audience under the age of 27, having mobile or other device connectivity is essential.

Check out further details about the applications featured at the E27 symposium.

What’s next? How about a web app where I can call a phone number, speak a voice command, and then have the voice command interact with the site (for example, translated into a task on my to do list). Calendars, to-do list and social applications would be more useful if they would adopt this type of idea.

(photo from NeuroSky.com)

Yesterday we attended the Entrepreneur27 Technology Symposium on the campus of Stanford University. This Entrepreneur27 symposium was a chance for nine start-ups to demo their products to, “influential representatives from newspapers, popular blogs, progressive companies, universities, and venture capitalist firms”.

Hear the podcast of the event – 12.2 MB mp3 – duration: 53 min

The companies that presented at the symposium were as follows.
BillMonk
411 Metro

Standpoint
LicketyShip
Flagr
PlaceSite
Box.Net
Skobee

NeuroSky

Download the symposium handout about the companies.

This podcast begins a new feature for my blog. I am teaming up with Emily Chang of eHub to start doing podcasts and videos of the makers and doers of the internet. Our specific area of interest will be on entrepreneurs, developers, and thinker who focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing. We will be doing interviews and attending demo events so if you or your company would like to apply please contact me. Also if you are holding a demo event please let us know.