scottberkun.com » Buy nothing for Christmas – I definitely agree with this. Not so much the title, but what he actually writes.
It is hard to get somebody a good gift, and I would rather give or receive nothing than something unneeded or unwanted.
YouTube – Waterloo Flash Mob – Pillow Fight Official Video – very cool, I forget why I didn’t participate. ah well, next time
I don’t do enough product endorsement on this blog. Of course, most of that is due to the fact that there are very few products I’m willing to endorse.
Anyhow, for sandwich containers the best I have so far found is Tupperware Sandwich Keepers. Link goes to Amazon since Tupperware’s own site lacks permalinks. Most so called “sandwich containers” are neither the right size nor shape. This one is both, and no more, as sandwich + container have a negligible difference in both mass and volume from sandwich alone.
One of my original ones did get a broken hinge, but they will replace that and it seems to have been a random case.
On the downside, they seem to only be available in one colour now, without paying more for fancy cartoons on it, which makes it slightly less useful when preparing sandwiches for multiple people. Interestingly, Tupperware’s Australian site does have permalinks for sandwich keepers where they are available in different colours.
I also took this opportunity to add this to ProductWiki, a site built by my friend Omar in Waterloo. Then I was going to mark it up in hreview when it occurred to me that ProductWiki probably did that already. Turns out it doesn’t, so get to it Omar. I did at least add rev=”review” though.
PHD Comics: Seminar Appeal – heh so true. I’m glad a friend got me on to PHD last year.
On a related topic, I had a hard time deciding where to blog this. I used to use my own blog for everything, but for the last while I use notes on Facebook for things that are more pertinent to my friends than to everyone else. This one is tricky though, as now none of my friends will see this, since few subscribe to my general blog…
The Waterloo Conference on Social Entrepreneurship took place this weekend, although I missed out on Sunday’s portion. The first thing that amazed me was finding out that the idea for this conference occurred less than two months ago. The opening keynote was by George Roter, co-founder of EWB. EWB is quite active here, seeing as it was founded by UW graduates, but I learned a lot that I didn’t know, and I was very impressed with both George and EWB. Another presentation I attended was on how to talk to the media (sending press releases, etc.) which was quite interesting.
I hope the title of this blog post is the last thing I ever read that sounds like that. sadly, this will not happen
frequent blog posts on the same topic? how odd of me
Anyhow since there’s an infinity now written about the Facebook advertising stuff that I talked about in my previous post, I need to of course correct all those misinformed people 😉 . As I said, Facebook is doing a great job with this new stuff. One lame thing that they did, which is something that I see happen with all these companies that start going big, is that they got a small number of big players (the short head, if you will) on board so that they can feel all special about it. So these lame companies go into this with lame ideas (if Coke’s plan isn’t the stupidest idea ever…). None of that matters. They might get smarter, or they might not (hardly possible). More importantly, the non-huge players (fine, fine, the long tail) are what will actually make this work. It may take a while to get there, but it will certainly happen.
Why Facebook Shouldn’t Fear OpenSocial – I’m supposed to be studying, so of course it’s a good time to do some blogging.
Anyhow, I agree with Josh that the idea that the competition now being Facebook vs OpenSocial is silly. Facebook is doing an absolutely amazingly fantastic job pleasing users, developers, being innovative, and soon, generating profit. Their upcoming “Beacon” plans seem as brilliant as their previous ones. The only bad thing I have to say about them (from a business perspective), is that they have been way to slow getting their advertising products out. In the long run, that may not make much difference.
OpenSocial is not competition in any sense of the word. It’s just a little specification to standardize some web services, which is a good thing. And assuming it gains the traction it is expected (the supporters actually follow through), then Facebook will just join it too, and they haven’t lost anything, really. In fact they’ll have gained additional developers and applications.
Facebook would have to be really stupid to act any other way, and from what I’ve seen, they are anything but. Except their HR, I’m not so in love with that.
Is it just me, or is MySpace sitting on their laurels? Just copying Facebook isn’t going to do it, and besides, they don’t seem to be copying them very well or quickly. I thought being the major player was supposed to count for something, like having resources.
One last comment on OpenSocial… while it is certainly good for developers that there will be a common API, let’s not forget that this simply means it will be easy to have an application run on multiple websites… separately. Having an application that seamlessly uses more than one social website simultaneously will still be an enormous headache. So there’s plenty more to be done there.
Update Nov 5. After reading a few things elsewhere, maybe myspace isn’t doing nothing, they just decided to let Google deal with all their advertising, and hope to make enough from that. But since that will likely be almost all of their revenue, might that not be a bad idea?
StartupCamp Waterloo was last night. I was surprised at the crowd, a number of people came up from Guelph and Toronto, including Mr Toronto DemoCamp.
First up was Ali Asaria (of well.ca), whose honest presentation about his own abilities and knowledge was fantastic. I love when people are real, rather than some fake presentable version of themselves. Ali’s stories of dealing with VCs were great.
This Camp was well-sponsored, which was great. Nothing beats free food. Except maybe the awesome door prize I won, thanks to Tech Capital Partners. I’ve been hearing good things about them (especially their ability to make the right investment choices), and I’m not just saying that because of the prize.
Avery showed us all how easy a Windows app can make installation. I think it made a fool of every single other piece of Windows software. One-click, that was it.
Simon Clark presented on his neighbourhood website (for his and hopefully other neighbourhoods), which was nicely done, and I’m very interested in that sort of thing. Does everyone on a street really need a huge ladder? (hint: the answer is “no”). He also did well by pointing out that it’s not just the technology but needs to be lead by an enthusiastic community member.
I presented to talk about Zimride. Simon was managing the presentations and asked everyone a few things, including what we hope to get out of presenting. My answer of “to turn everyone in the audience into evangelists for Zimride” got a lot of laughs, although that wasn’t really the intention ;-). I was presenting using Jesse’s computer, so there was a mildly embarrassing minute when I went to Facebook and realized Jesse was already logged in. Hopefully I didn’t show anything too sensitive from his or my own 😉 .
The Facebook hype (as we all know, of course) is completely insane. Two people immediately came up to me afterwards asking if I could build them a Facebook application. I’m not going to do that, but I think I can find them someone who will. Thats what’s so great about these events, I definitely made some good connections, and may have convinced one or two people to attend the Web Clinic events I run.
Robert Barlow-Busch (of UX Group) proposed some sort of UX Critique Camp, which I and many others seemed to think was a really good idea, so hopefully that will happen at some point.
Monish (link to his startup since he has no site yet) seems to have decided to start a blog listing Waterloo tech events, which is a good idea. There’s no real centralized place for that now, although there are a variety of obstacles.
Lastly, I finally got around to adding a new feature to Quizify, touching the code for the first time in nine or so months. Yay.