Maglev - Shanghai

I was recently in shanghai with work and I was lucky enough to take the Maglev from Shanghai to the airport. The Maglav (wikipedia) is an amazing magnetic train that reaches speeds of 380km/h. I have enclosed a couple of videos so you can experience the joy which is the Maglav.

Profiles 2.0

A couple of posts ago I blogged that profiles were the most important aspect of Web 2.0. I have created a presentation to articulate this these thoughts, here is it in all its glory.

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Chill out to the sound of devotion

I was surfing about imeem trying to find a chilled out playlist and I found this really chilled chanting track, it sounds like the buddha refuge prayer in Tibetan but with all the drum beats and swirly music its difficult to say.

Video on Flickr

Lots of debate about videos on flickr but for me its a great thing. We have a 3 month old baby and we have taken a stack of photos that we post to flickr for the family to see. We also take short videos of about 30 seconds with the digital camera when she is doing something especially cute. I am so pleased that flickr now have this option as it allows us store and share all out little photos and videos - brilliant.

Here are a couple of very short videos from my companies christmas do 2007 - its on the ferry from Waiheke to Auckland.

GM's Bob Lutz talks

I just picked this up from @shelisrael on twitter. Its a really interesting interview and remarkable to see a thoroughly blue chip guy talking about one aspect of social media - blogging. A great source of reference for future discussions with Business leaders in other enterprises.

If you want to feedback about the piece, Shel would appreciate it here.

Enjoy.

Web 2.0 for Business = profiling

I was chatting to Donald brown of Brown House fame yesterday about some of the presentations I had recently created e.g. University 2.0, Universities and Social Networking, Twitter and the Telcos and a couple of IBM internal presentation such as Innovation for Web 2.0 Technical Sales and Future of the Media industry and it struck me that all I am really doing is looking at an industry and applying some thought to come up with how I think Web 2.0 effects those industries.

I discovered that as I apply a scenario to one industry I can also apply it to another industry - its like applying an architectural pattern............ So where is all this leading?

I think that for the Corporations Web 2.0 is about the profile.

The profile has two aspects, the person or individual and the activity they are doing.


Person:
1. Measure participation
emails, IM, blog entries, comments made, wiki updates, your content, rating of content

2. Measure interactions
while doing 1 above who are you interacting with, how much and what about?

Activity:
1. What are you doing
Twitter-esk type updates, I am walking down Queen street just passing the Newsagents.

2. What is the environment, where, temperature, weather, location
Its raining, the wind is up its 11am (the person could do with a coffee!)

If we combined all this information we have a possibility to understand the needs, wants and desires of a person at any given moment.

In IBM speak we have a research product called Atlas which is part of the Lotus Connections suite which starts to do this for enterprises - its like LinkedIn on steroids. As we move forward more tools will be needed to sift through all of a persons "participation and events" to create a more meaningful profile.

Once we have this profile we are then in a very powerful position to sell services and products.

So, Web 2.0 for the enterprise is real about user profiling.

(presentation to follow although it may be a week or so as I am in China next week with my head firmly wedged on the grind stone)

Twitter and Telco

I had a discussion with some IT directors about them using text messaging to keep their students up to date on the events happening in the University. My initial thought was why implement something with mobile text messaging, why not use twitter. The problem is that twitter is a difficult thing to explain to IT folk and it is even more difficult thing to explain to the "business". After a bit of thinking I thought that twitter would be a great partner for the Telcos so I produced a presentation to help solidify those thoughts.

The preso is pretty high level and "light" but I think it gets my point across. Any comments are appreciated either here or on slideshare.

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University 2.0

I have spent some of my free time building a presentation on Universities specifically about how a University must change to become an openly accessible content aggregator in order to survive the new models of knowledge delivery.

I have posted the presentation onto slideshare as shown below, I would really be interested in your thoughts.

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Vimeo and Facebook

Vimeo have a plug-in for facebook, I have embedded the short video off their site - go and check it out its pretty cool.



dananananananana Facebook! from Blake Whitman on Vimeo.

Meditation for my old man

My old man (dad) wanted to know how to be a bit more relaxed in his everyday life. Even though he is retired he still thinks about things and gets worried and stressed.

I went through a phase about 3 years ago where I was very stressed all the time, pains in chest, not sleeping, hyped up all the time. In desperation I picked up a few books on meditation and the book "Buddhist Meditation for people on the go" by Gill Farrer-Halls was quite a good one to read.

If you have a similar question like my dad then give it a try.

The book can be purchased from Stretch Now (you will need to page down a bit to find it)