Lisa Padilla on Media and Culture

This week I attend the largest technology conference I have seen to date. Typically held in Geneva, the International Telecommunication Union Conference (ITU) was held in Hong Kong December 2006. Held once every 4 years, this event has drawn over 150,000 attendees from all over the world. Those who know me will understand the sheer nirvana I am experiencing in connecting with people from so many countries all discussing and understand opportunities to extend technology and improve social conditions. Very few people I spoke with in the US before the event even knew what the ITU was, including me, so I learned that the ITU is the telecommunications committee for the United Nations (UN). This morning, among a diverse and experienced group of telecommunication leaders in a panel on this first official day of the event, were Andre Smit of Cisco and Didier Philippe , President of the Micro-Enterprise Acceleration Institute in Switzerland, who is working with HP. They spoke about the conver...

Mashery made headlines last week at Web 2.0, not by presenting but by being present. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=10700 Mashery launches with two versions of it's service, "free" and "pro". The free version offers a place online for people to find a company's API, along with documentation and peer support. Also cool, this version includes an integrated forum, wiki, and blog (and you only need one login). The pro account, which typically runs around $1000/month, includes extensive metrics (such as precisely who is using the API and how much), issuing of developer keys, security features and server load protection. You can, however, sign up developers for your community with the free version. I think this service has so very much potential in aiding companies in being successful, in fact, if it had been around in 2000 I bet there would be fewer professionals returning to the Midwest waning "I used to be in that th...

When asked about the latest trends of hosted office applications and how they are built, Marco Boerries (SVP Connected Life, Yahoo!) said at the DowJones VentureWire Consumer Technology Ventures Conference ( pics ) this morning that he did not think it mattered whether these were built in AJAX or Java, what was important was the “openness” of these services. For the office, things like open document formats and rich text editors would continually grow in importance whereas consumers will be mostly about getting media and being able to open it. His response to a question from the audience about open source applications and their future was tepid. Boerries feels that the value chain created by companies such as Microsoft, Intel and Dell is a huge inertia to overcome but the fact is that we do use fewer Windows applications than we did 10 years ago and he looks forward to more Linux-based solutions. “Less time in front of the PC, more time in front of the phone,” says Boerries. Time that...

Yesterday I attended the ACM West conference in San Jose. Most of the attendees were from the Public Access community. One session I attended was on the topic of Youth Media, mainly with regard to camps, outreach programs and intern training through public access TV stations. i was struck by the community element, something I feel is missing in most of the competitive, fund-seeking world of Silicon Valley startups. But there are some really great programs out there, and some great volunteers and production professionals looking to share learning about video broadcasting. As example, the Youth Media session began with no moderation or leadership -- they actually didn't show up. So the group looked around, quickly and without question nominated a moderator and turned the session into a very productive roundtable discussion. I'm not sure that would happen as readily at a technology conference. Later in the evening I met with a couple of people at a Halloween party thrown by my fr...

Stowe Boyd is someone who attends a lot of conferences on technology, all around the world. He is widely regarded as an expert in social and business applications. I caught him for a few minutes to discuss his thoughts about the first annual Office 2.0 Conference ( pictures here ), it's relative success to similar conferences and the building and selling of enterprise software. He raised a good question that wasn't covered at the conference and that was in essence "If we're talking about Office 2.0 software and that it's the future, what elements of Office 1.0 are not going to survive in the future enterprise?". I was less enticed by the OpenID presentation and it's potential for adoption and more interested in the ideas IBM presented about longer-term document management and protection. Early adopters like Stowe and me, might be picking up one-off feature applications like signature managers or even 30boxes.com, but we agreed that those will fold into l...

On Saturday night this week I witnessed something interesting. It was the Live Billboard Project in San Francisco. It wasn't interesting because it was effective. It seemed to sell nothing more than the concept alone. What was interesting was that it arrested the attention of hundreds of people on Mission Street. When I came upon them, they were standing completely silent, staring up at the building. I wondered at first if there were a band performing on the roof, but I found that not to be the case. I'm all for performace art (not really) and for experimental advertising (if it sells). Calvin Klein did a live billboard about a year ago, and models danced around above their store in the clothes. That probably sold a few more clothes. But on Mission Street, the cafe scene meets gymnast act meets lack of purpose, seemed to mesmerize a group of people, again, to complete silence. The only sound beside the cars passing by was a man on the opposite corner telling everyone that the ...

In the end anyway. Says the article : Sept. 28, 2006: HP announces the resignation of General Counsel Ann Baskins, who helped oversee the leaks probe.