benmurray / washington d.c.

A note from SXSW

Amid all the announcements, hype and “location wars”, this is my favorite observation from this year’s SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, TX.  From CNN:

These aren’t your father’s CEOs

If there was a pinstripe suit in Austin this week, we didn’t see it.

The movers and shakers of the online world are young, casual and come at business from a different angle than their Wall Street forbearers (a fact not lost on SXSW Web Awards host Doug Benson, who joked that acceptance speeches would all be short because the winners weren’t used to being out of their basements).

But there’s nothing like seeing tech’s youthful leaders for yourself — and all in one place.

Once you’ve watched a company founder tossing fuzzy dice into a crowd of screaming fans or doing the backstroke on the floor of the Hilton lobby at 2 a.m., you won’t think of “CEO” the same way ever again.

An International Network of Computers

I intended to post this a while ago, but was reminded of it at an event this week with Mr. Brokaw. He describes the “international network of computers.” Gates tells him we’re a long way away from having a thin, portable display that acts as a book. A classic piece of history and wonderment at a technology with an impact even they couldn’t properly foresee.

Scan my code

For most of the bar code‘s history, it has been relatively inaccessible to the public.  It required a special reader and a computer system to decode it and most people just had no reason to catalog their lives.  With cell phone cameras in every pocket, the bar code seems to be getting a hip new look.

A coworker pointed out to me today that the FCC is using bar codes on their broadband.gov website that stores meeting location information (see Location & Coordinators sidebar item).  A visitor can scan the code with their camera phone and immediately see the location on a map, allowing them to get instant directions. Utility from the FCC!

While I had been aware of this application previously, I hadn’t revisited its potential since the iPhone came out.  Now that cell phone software is easy to obtain and far more useful, bar code readers are finally available to the masses.
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How I Use Google Voice

Judging by my Twitter feed, Google Voice has been handing out invitations for its newly updated phone and voicemail service.  I know this because few people know what to do with it once they’ve got it and they’re asking for help.  Here are a few examples of how it has helped me over the past three years and why you should give it a shot.

Google Voice, previously known as GrandCentral, does for your phone what Gmail did for email.  It revolutionizes the way you handle phone calls and text messages.  It releases the phone number from its associated device and frees it up for use in ways that actually make it interesting again.  For decades, phone numbers have been like mailing addresses; pretty static, boring and only serving as a big receptacle for incoming data.  Many changes in telephony have allowed phone numbers to become more useful again, and Google Voice is one of them.

Here are five questions that traditional phone numbers can’t answer with anything more than a shrug and smile:

1. What if I lose my phone?
2. What if my boss and friend call the same phone number?
3. What if I give my number to some rando at a bar and don’t want him/her to have full access to my cell phone?
4. How do I get my voicemails without calling in to your hard-to-use voicemail system?
5. Can I silence my phone while I’m asleep but still get important calls from Caller Y?

Your standard phone number can’t do anything about these problems!  Pretty lame, right?  But, Google Voice can do a lot.
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Taking a moment

If there is anything I don’t like about technology, it’s the constancy.  More specifically, it’s the never-ending stream of communication that pressures us to be “plugged in” 24/7 to every aspect of a project or effort.  It is the premiere micromanaging tool.  There isn’t time for solace or reflection-no time for thought.

People are busier, transportation permits packed schedules, a 24-hour news cycle means there’s always a story to get or correct. It’s just constant noise.

I was refreshed to read this morning in the NYT a candid conversation between Sen. Obama and British PM David Cameron.

Mr. Cameron: Do you have a break at all?

Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be …

Mr. Cameron: Your feeling. And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions.

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. … In 15 minute increments and …

Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.

Mr. Obama: And, well, and you start making mistakes or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel …

Whether it’s time to think about business strategy, political moves, your life goals, your purpose or to reflect on a fun vacation you just had, stopping for a moment and thinking about your life is critical.  It’s nice to know that two powerful men realize that.

via 43Folders

ElfURL

To the class:  TinyURL is good for making shorter links, but ElfURL will let you track how many people click on that link.

Score.

E-Mail Marketing for Chimps

Sending email to lots of people is usually a hassle. Some paste 200 email addresses into the “TO:” field, prompting a heinous “Reply All” thread, others just spam repeatedly without any option to unsubscribe. Email marketing websites try to solve this problem for mass emailers, but most fail.

One that definitely doesn’t fail is MailChimp. I’ve used them repeatedly for clients and previous employers with nothing but good experiences. They make it easy to send emails to one person, or 10,000. Their staff is completely anal about usability, standards and design, which is usually lacking in the email marketing space. Their customer support (thanks, Dan!) should be an example for all (read: personal calls from vacation).

At one point, “an associate” sent a campaign to about 8,000 recipients with two broken links (our bad). A frantic IM to customer support resolved the issue as they just switch out the bad link reference for the good one. Life Career saver.

While they lack some needed features in list management, sorting and client-side accounts, it’s a stellar service for anyone ranging from individuals through medium-sized PR firms.

Hillary Wakes Up to Facebook

In what could be called the slowest response to the Facebook community yet, Hillary Clinton finally got her own Facebook application today, 6 days before what is arguably her most critical step in the primaries…and it’s not even from the campaign.

The “Go Hillary” application is designed to unite Hillary supporters, recruit them to sign up more supporters, contribute, make calls, host events and compete with each other for points based on their activism.  Unfortunately, the application is probably too late to have any real impact on the primaries.

Obama has over 640,000 supporters on Facebook, while Clinton pulls in 125,000.  The lack of support could be a result of low youth support in general, but is no doubt aided by the lack of opportunities to funnel the youth support online.  Obama’s application has a Digg-like rating system of news, videos and other Obama tidbits.  It also places a nice box on supporters’ profiles indicating their support of the candidate.  Clinton’s doesn’t appear to do any such thing, at least for this user.

In this case, once again, Obama is the Mac and Clinton the PC.  Too bad, for such a great candidate.

via techPresident

Google Goes Underwater

Google announced yesterday that it is launching an initiative with 6 other companies to lay a new, multi-terabit submarine trans-Pacific cable to increase its capacity for Google services like Gmail, Google Search and Google Earth.

 As more and more people conduct online searches and interact with applications like Gmail, Google Earth and YouTube, we’ve had to think outside the box to create a more scalable, affordable and easy to manage network that meets our users’ needs worldwide. One of the biggest challenges we face is staying ahead of our broadband capacity needs, especially across Asia.

“Unity,” as it is called, will address increasing bandwidth demands but will not launch Google into the network operator category.  Google is not competing with other service providers or telecoms, but just laying cable for itself and its own services.

 If you’re wondering whether we’re going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no.

The construction of the physical Internet still totally baffles me.  When the SEA-ME-WE 4, Flag Telecom and FALCON cables were cut, the way the thousands of routers redirected traffic and essentially “healed” from the broken connections without much human involvement was pretty incredible.

Submarine communications cables, as they are generally called, were first used in 1850 to carry signals from telegraphs.  

They later were used for telephony and now link every continent except Antarctica by providing all of our digital content over fiber optic cables.These cables have been cut, stolen, tapped, crushed by avalanches, and improved from their early copper construction to today’s optical fibers.  It’s amazing how a cable only a few inches in diameter can carry the data for millions of people simultaneously. 

The YouTube for Documents

It’s about time someone found a better way to display documents online. Several companies have tried it, but Scribd gets it right this time around. Previously, websites linked to PDFs, Word documents and other files that one would have to wait and download, find the file on their computer and open it up in their slow word processor or take a coffee break while Acrobat fires up.

Scribd uses Flash technology to stream the document straight into a website, embedded right in with the rest of the content. You can share documents with embed code just like YouTube, email it to a friend, zoom in, flip through pages and see all the pages at once.

It has great potential for government websites and research organizations that have thousands of files and manuals that visitors must download and labor through. Using the Scribd Platform, they can even convert the entire collection of documents at once and share them instantly. Free from the chains of outdated and clunky government websites, these documents are searchable and placed in context with similar documents…all automatically. If only agencies would move quickly enough and adopt the new method.

Best of National Geographic: Pictures of the Year