TechFest and its Value

Posted on March 5, 2008 by lewisshepherd

I am spending much of the week at Microsoft Research’s annual TechFest, which is proving to be an absolutely mind-blowing experience.  So much, so cool, so out there….

There’s been some good press about the show already (ComputerWorld, and ITWorld for example), and the official Microsoft TechFest site has a wealth of material.  The media were allowed in on the “Public Day” to report on a carefully selected subset of the projects being displayed. But I think the coverage has missed an important difference between this show and something like COMDEX or CeBIT.

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Tagging in Esperanto

Posted on November 24, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: “Russian search leader Yandex has released their Autumn report on the current state of the blogosphere in Russia [source: Nick Wilsdon, CEO of the e3internet group]… Some of the highlights:

  • There are now 3.1m blogs in Runet [the Russian-language areas of the Internet], 2.6 times larger than this time last year…
  • The blogosphere in Russia represents 3% of the global total…
  • Now there are more Russian language blogs than French, German or Portuguese ones, but less than blogs in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, English or Japanese…
  • About 7000 new blogs appear daily in Runet.”

Analysis: I found the numbers on Russian-language blogging interesting, and not only because I still remember some of my schoolboy Russki. (I’ve forgotten nearly all my Arabic and Maltese.)

Comparing the velocity of blog-growth in Runet (the term used quasi-officially to refer to all of the Russian-language and Russian-geographic areas of the entire Internet) with the growth of all global blogs shows Russian is a mover, but not the biggest one.

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Blogs & the Death of Stealth Mode

Posted on November 23, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: “Folks at Path101 are doing a very interesting experiment. They are liveblogging their start up. Everything about the startup is out there, including their to-do list from Monday meetings – with items such as preparing presentations for investors, etc.” (from Toni DasGupta’s BizOrigin, 10/29/2007)

Analysis: Silicon Valley chronicler Michael Malone used to say that the greatest new company in the Valley is the one being formed late tonight by two engineers sitting in a back booth at a Mountain View Denny’s, bouncing ideas off one another with napkin sketches. Today, the napkins would be personal blogs, and the engineers may never have met and may be sitting halfway around the world from each other, working for different companies, but engaged in the same technically promising pursuit.

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