Monday, February 15, 2010

Feb. 2010 ChicMeetsGeek Event Videos

The San Francisco based ChicMeetsGeek event on February 4th 2010 was a HUGE success!  I love the event's goal to bring together the Chic crowd and Geek crowd.  There is a large convergence happening in many industries right now that is being driven by the web and social media.  The Fashion, Athletics, Music, Film, Television, Travel, Fine dining, etc... along with the Web Development, Programming, Social Media, Video Game, etc... Industries are being forced through competition to further their communication and relationships with one another.  In my mind, ChicMeetsGeek epitomizes that convergence and acts as a catalyst to further it's inevitable marriage.  I give the founder, Carol Tran, mad props for pulling the vision, branding, speakers and event together.  She's been able to surround herself with an incredible team of supporters that all play a role in making the event the HUGE success that it is. Below is the video from the LIVE stream that my company Tenacious Ventures did for the event.

Pre-Event Invite Video Program Pieces:

Feb. 4th 2010 Chic and Geek Speakers

(See below for links to Specific Speakers)

SalsaMania Dance Performance

(See below for links to Specific Speakers)

Individual Speakers parts: Speaker Interviews: SalsaMania Performances: Fun: Thanks to all the Sponsors that made the event possible!

Posted via web from ColinAC

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Social Media 101: Eastside Entrepreneurs

. On September 25th Joe Kennedy founder of the Eastside Entrepreneurs network hosted a Social Media 101 event on the Microsoft Campus. . The conference was to learn how and why to get your business connected online. We had experts such as Chris Pirillo, Andru Edwards, Jake Ludington, John Cook, Eric Weaver, Joshua Dirks, Warren Sukernek, Jason Preston, Shauna Causey, Joe Kennedy, Kevin Urie, and Edith Yeung speaking about various topics.  I covered the event by streaming it LIVE to the web. Below are both parts. . Part 1/3

. Part 2/3

. Part 3/3

. The event was written up in an article for King5.com by tech reporter Renay San Miguel. . Thanks to the sponsors for supporting the event: Comcast Business Class, Microsoft Local Engagement Team, Cyberstreams, Lighthouse, Seattle Computing, Social Media Club Seattle,  My Buzz Social Media Analytics, BizTechDay . Special Thanks went out to: Kenji Onozawa, Colin Christianson, Dave Manningsmith, Kevin Henry, City of Bellevue, Laura Adams Guy, Pam Hoelzle, Veronica Wei Sopher, Redmond Chamber of Commerce, Seattle Chamber of Commerce, Eastside Entrepreneurs .

Posted via web from ColinAC

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My facebook Categorization / Filter Process, Led Me to a Bug

This is a bug report / email that I sent to facebook. I setup lots of filters on my friends so that I can choose what demographics, Industry, past groups of friends from school, area of expertise they are in etc... to keep up with what they are all up to. My list has grown to 36 filters with each person, on average, being in 4 filter categories. . Below is the basics of the problem with screen shots. Basically if the list runs off the screen you can't scroll to select the lower filter or else it will glitch up and select the wrong one. . As seen below the list of filters runs off the screen.


List Drops Down Off the Screen
I can scroll down to select the filter that is off the screen but when I select it...As trying to select Social below....
When Scrolling To Select, I Select Social
The system puts a check next to Music instead. Grrrrrrrr...
It Bumps Up to Select the Wrong Filter
As a result I have to Hide my Dock below along with the navigation bar and bookmarks bar in the browser.
So I hide the Navigation and the Bookmarks Bar (Sometimes the Dock at the bottom too)
Then I am able to select the filter that I want without scrolling down and voila! I have taken 30 seconds to do what should have taken 3 seconds!  So based on the Life Expectancy Calculator I have 54 years left.  I average about 3 new friends a week, so at 2815 weeks in 54 years left I will have added 8,445 new friends. That's 228,015 seconds or ~63 hours of my time gone just to play with the settings if facebook doesn't fix this bug. Come on facebook, be a pal.
Then I can get to the filter without scrolling.
I love the filter concept and know I use it more thoroughly than the average user. . In the future people should be able to add themselves to filters so when I add them as a friend they already have recommended filters / categories.  facebook could standardize some for people to select based on demographics, the Industry we work in, and job.  Or find a way to automate this by crawling a persons profile to determine the topics, linkes, and things they like center around.  That way when I want to see search results or filter my friends, I can easily select the "daily social newspaper" that I want.  Blogs already have these categories / tags. Profiles and Individuals should too. . P.S. Twitter I would love you if you did something like this too instead of having the 3rd party apps do it. .

Posted via web from ColinAC

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Health Care or Health Snare?

In the news, blogosphere and all over the social web we have seen updates about the Health care reform conversation that President Obama.   In my opinion reform to the Health Care system is needed.  I grew up in a small town where many people don't have health care and can't afford it.  I know motocross riders that couldn't afford it and have been lucky enough that the MX community held fundraisers to help pay their medical bills.  What package it comes in and what that looks like is to be determined by the conversation Obama has opened up.  Whether the reform includes a public option or not, it is necessary. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines reform as:
  • 1a: to put or change into an improved form or condition
  • 1b: to amend or improve by change of form or removal of faults or abuses.
. It's undeniable that the Health Care industry has been corrupted by greed and that strategies have been setup to increase profit by denying the people who are too sick or don't have money care.  Also strategies are used for prescriptions to keep people hooked.  This is not preventative care.  In China obese civilians are put on an exercise and diet plan paid for by the government. If there is no sign of improvement over time they are fined.  This is to prevent the high costs of diabetic care the nation incurs as a result of people not staying healthy. Now there is some preventative care!  Although I don't advocate this kind of preventative care for us. . Good health is a necessity for a society to thrive, learn and develop.  Safety and Physiological needs are fundamental for a long life as well as the ability to think with a clear mind.  Take a look at Maslow's Hierarchy of needs: . This video does a good overview of the conversation on the table.

.

. This video highlights some of those questions (Embedding is disabled so will need to go to the site to watch) . Some questions I have if the plan is to keep health care privatized are:
  • How will we tweak the government regulations to keep private health care in check? and truly enforce it?
  • How will these influence private health providers to focus on preventing sickness instead of just treating the symptoms of the illness to keep your 'customer' around?
  • What new standards will be put in place to prevent private companies from cherry picking the healthy and disqualifying the sick?  Michael Moore's documentary "Sicko" had some great points towards this.
  • Has the private sector become too set in their ways / corrupted by their old systems to accept these changes? If they have, then how much money will it take to regulate the existing private system vs. competing with them through a public option?
. Some questions if the plan is to provide a public plan option:
  • As the 2nd video above points out.  What keeps employers from switching their employees to the cheaper public plan? Thus forcing employees to use it? It states Tax breaks and mandates to prevent mass exodus.
  • How long will that hold up? Sounds like a short term appeasement to make the opposition happy while in the long term we will move to the public option by way of cost. If the plan is subsidized by unlimited taxes and funding then it will inevitably drive the private competition out of the market.
  • What regulations are being placed on the public plan to protect the tax payers from it sucking in too much of our money?
  • Is there a way to setup / ensure a phase out strategy if the plan gets too costly, under performs or does it's job to get the private sector in line with the new government regulations?
  • What are all of the efficiency steps on the table to prevent mass spending and be a true competitor of the private sector without the public plan dipping its hand in the tax payer piggy bank?
. Would love articulate answers and / or questions any people have. .

Posted via web from ColinAC

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If 911 Used Social Media


Emergency Responses
What would it be like for our emergency and police stations to use social media? What would that look like? I want to explore that thought and what I see as the inevitable evolution of our emergency centers. This system would allow citizens to take an active role in community building as long as we, the community, use the right mindsets when reading and responding to reported emergencies and crimes.
With Twitter, Microsoft Vine and Google Wave emergency responses can happen live. Lets say a you just witness a robbery and tweeted or texted it into 911. Your GPS location would be recorded and response vehicles could get on their way much more rapidly. It could bounce from the 911 operator and go to a police car's news feed inside the car with an assigned category and priority level for the police officer to respond to. The FCC requires that all new mobile phones have either a GPS chip or triangulation capabilities so that in emergencies each calls location can be found. The Next Generation 9-1-1 initiatives are moving to allow any wired, wireless, or IP-based device users to text, upload images and video to 911 call centers. The platform is already being put in place.
Citizens Taking Care of Citizens

The power of a live social system is that those same messages going to the emergency centers could be pushed out to social networks, twitter, blogs, and Microsoft Vine to alert people that are in and around the area.  How many trained fire fighters, police officers, doctors, nurses, veterans etc... do you think are in any one given neighborhood and are oblivious to the emergencies happening around them due to our current slow style news and alert systems. That time is no more. Now using the power of live social media the emergency call centers can put forward an opt in alert system. For the citizens that plainly want to see what's happening around them - to the trained citizens ready to be on call and help their community, this system could speed the response of community efforts. We would see trained citizens being the first on the scene to save people from burning buildings, resuscitate the struggling, report the direction and / or apprehending criminals. Any young, ambitious 007's or Laura Croft's out there getting excited?
If you haven't seen Microsoft Vine watch this video and the concepts I talk about will make more sense.


I can see the cons already. Herds of rubberneckers with nothing else to do wandering over to watch instead of help. Therefore clogging the streets and holding up the professionals from doing their job. Is this normally a problem when lots of people crowd around burning houses or see emergency vehicles collecting in the streets? Or have crowds been more helpful from the police and emergency response team perspective? Maybe there needs to be some extra training in public schools or with the software on how to use this system to it's full potential. Also certification steps could be in place to verify and allow more specific content to flow to the citizens that have been trained in specific areas of expertise. However I vote against that as it would slow down how rapidly the system is adopted and limits the people who have basic CPR training from getting to the scene.
All in all I think the benefits outweigh the costs.  This trend is inevitable.  Whether it gets support form Emergency Call Centers or not people have the option to alert their social networks.  Involving the Emergency Call Centers would help add more structure and organization to the system.  This type of technology also lines up with President Obama's attempts with serve.gov and BarackObama.com to spark more community building efforts. Personally I would love to see more of a technology budget towards this kind of stuff instead of being allocated to our Military efforts.
Let me know your thoughts. What other benefits can you think of? What downsides are there? (Yep I want to hear the conspiracies too). Further comments?

Posted via web from ColinAC

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Monday, September 7, 2009

Summer is now officially coming to a close. All this rain! ugh!
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