Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

friendfeed on netnewswire is useful

With all this craze around microblogging, IM & co, it's become impossible to track what the other folks are doing / saying.
Twitter's downtime doesn't help either.

I find that Friendfeed aggregates very well all of these services, but it's hard to use (UI wise, not too friendly). My trick :
-> add friendfeed's RSS feed to your RSS reader (I use NetNewsWire on a mac), and tada : you got the history in the feed, so you're not missing anything :D, and it updated itself whenever someone comments on a feed (which is tiresome with Twhirl for example, because growl only catches the headline).

my 0,02€

First presence of vpod.tv in Second Life

View of the building, originally uploaded by rsepulveda.

Here's a quick view of something we've been working on for a while at vpod.tv: enabling our users to easily publish video onto their own environments such as web, mobile, IPTV and new virtual worlds such as Second Life and others :)

Here's my avatar in our piece of land on the LoicLeMeur island :) (thanks buddy!), and and big thanks to the girls (they'll recognize themselves) for the garden layout. Coming up: streaming video (live? :) in there...

and indeed, some very careful eyes had already spotted something...

What do you use?

I'm stuck with a small problem here: I take notes all the time.
Either I think too much ( :D or my memory is too bad and I can't recall all the points when I need to structure them.

Hence I've resorted in the last couple of years to write everything down:
- on paper
- yellow post-its
- on todo lists
- I've tried programs such as EverNote and Onenote.
- I use the notes program on my Nokia E61

And so far what seems to work best for me is add an icon to Notepad on my PC, and create on the fly a note for myself for anything. Hence my screen on my PC at home is cluttered with notepad notes. But when I close them or save them, I SELDOM ever reopen them, and start writing up all of that again.

On my new mac, I'm using Stickies (came with MacOSX); on my PC I've tried the 3M electronic Post-It program. Crap.

The problem ? I need a unified way to deal with my thoughts, with my links (I've been using del.icio.us quite a lot lately: I love the shortcut on the firefox extension: 1-click !), and make all of the stuff searchable with categories.

Somehow, OneNote doesn't work for me, and the files are local, I need them to synchronize accross my computers (what .mac does for PIM is GREAT! and I'm sure the guys at SharpCast aren't solving this yet.

I noticed at trial version of OmniOutliner. Does it work for you ? Or maybe I need to try 37signals ?

Help ! :)

just installed Second Life

I’ve never been much of a gamer. When I bought my PSP in January at Fry’s in Las Vegas, the sales clerk asked me what 2 games I wanted with it (maybe $10?). I said “what?”. “yeah”, he said, “we have a special promotion, you can buy 2 games with your new PSP for just xxx $”.

“Nah…” I said, as I really seldom play anything.

Actually I have a great desktop at home. Dual screen, bi-pro, lots of RAM (3 GB), dual pro. And I have NO GAME installed. Maybe I should find one that would suit my style: I don’t like shoot them ups, beat them up, kinda games. Nor the complicated ones where you have to spend hours of your time just trying to figure out how they work.

Every now and then I hooked my son’s Nintendo Game Cube to play with him. We have 6 games, but the only 2 I play with him (and he doesn’t play much either) are Super Mario Kart (I like the dirt track only), and Snowboard 1080° (or something like that). On my phone, I only play Sudoku. I tried “grand theft auto” on the PSP the other day when Smooth lended it to me. 20 min was all I could take on that one

So, unless you guys have an idea of what I should be experimenting with… And I know that the game market is larger than the cinema industry… Probably I should get into it at some point. I saw an Xbox 360 the other day. I’m interested for its windows MCE capabilities, not really for the games. Anything good in there ?

So back to the title of this post: Eric Rice at vloggercon showed me what he was doing on Second Life: trading goods, buying / selling land, hosting concerts in his conference center; he told me about what the BBC was doing there, how people were setting up virtual record labels, how the vloggercon conference was streamed live inside it (and Supernova will be streamed live as well), etc. Now this is REALLY getting me interested. 

I touched upon the economics of WoW in an old post, and more recently in the possibilities of a Habbo-hotel-like venture, called Taatu. I will explore this new business world more in the future. I’ve seen the many posts that Joi Ito has devoted to WoW. I can only guess he was also looking at the economics of the new world as well.

By the way, anyone else out there on SecondLife ? My character is called “Rodrigo Television.

update: interesting article on Trademark issues in second life.

Cédric Maloux (All Peers)

Download clip

web 2.0 startups in Europe

I know we have tried to address the definition of what the web 2.0 means. Some people tend to use a 1. technological definition (AJAX and so on). 2. Others use the social component of the application and mix with the first definition to create mash-ups. 3. others finally talk about user generated content. Not an easy task, and depending who you talk to, or what you are talking about, you can use any of these definitions. I recently wrote an article on the topic for the alumni association of French engineering school, Centrale Paris. It should be published in the upcoming months in a special issue (Thanks to O. ).

My point today is that I myself don’t really know what definition to use. I like of course David Hornik’s definition of Triple-A. But indeed when you have a look at www.netvibes.com: it’s so web 2.0, you just know it. No definition required. Or www.wikio.fr, so web 2.0 again. Tariq mentionned www.MusicMe.com tonight, and I thought, oh, trying to be web 2.0 also ? (I had actually never looked at the site, although it’s CEO Freddy Mini had been on vpod.already, and that Pascal Mercier has mentionned the services gazillions of times…).

So the usual question: what companies are really web 2.0 in Europe these days ? Pierre Chappaz tried the quiz the other day, but I tend to think that too many people registered saying they were a web 2.0 company without much justification. Please reply in the comments, with a justification of why you think this or that company IN EUROPE, is part of the movement… or not.

Looks like a fantastic videoconferencing tool: vsee

Just spotted this demo of the VSee tool from that recent DEMO conference. VSee enables videoconferencing, desktop sharing, etc. Their website looks very ppor, although achievements look great: anyone’s tried it ?

From what I read, they look like great VC money candidates, and the exit seems clear with telcos.

Note: they could indeed use some of that money to hire a few marketing people, and port the app to other systems such as Mac & linux.

Facinating article on the future of online video distribution

As usual, Cringely mixes number crunching and analysis, and produces a great paper:

The problem:

“Twenty million viewers, on average, watch "Desperate Housewives" each week in about 10 million U.S. households. That's 210 megabytes times 10 million downloads, or 2.1 petabytes of data to be downloaded per episode. Fortunately for the download business model, not everyone is trying to watch the show at the same time or in real time, so iTunes, in this example, has some time to do all those downloads. Let's give them three days. The question on the table is what size Internet pipe would it take to transfer 2.1 petabytes in 72 hours? I did the math, and it requires 64 gigabits-per-second, which would require an OC-768 fiber link and two OC-256s to fulfill.”

Part of the solution is in his article, and he mentions some companies trying to address the problem.

3GSM: dialcom launches P2P video on the mobile phone...

Download movie (.mov)

Yes it works, I tested it and was quite surprised ! The benefit: it uses much less bandwidth than classical 3G video, and hence can work on 2.5G and EDGE networks... boosting a second life to those networks in many parts of the world !

I have a longer interview with the CEO of Dialcom, Enrique Dominguez: this is the company that first launched a video plugin for skype. They also announced a big deal with Kodak. More soon !

World of Warcraft screenshots

Attacking the Ancient Core Hounds patrol we aggroed in MC, originally uploaded by Joi.

Have a look at Joi Ito's series of screenshots of this game on flickr. Rather impressive environment.

I am no player of any video game, but am impressed by the economics of online gaming.