TechTableTalk: "It's Not Over Your Head"

Dancing to Your Own Music

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 12:26:00 -0800

When an email arrived from the theater dance and performance studies program announcing a lecture “about “Doing Dance Criticism,” I decided to go.

I thought the lecture would be a healthy experiment. With a half hour before the program was to begin, I landed a parking spot and walked through UC Berkeley's Sather Gate and located Room 315 in Wheeler Hall, which was already filled with people. There I found the famous quartet of dance criticism composed of:

Sarah Kaufman, dance critic for The Washington Post, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, regularly writes about dance, music, and opera. She is the author of eight books, including The Amateur: An Independent Life in Letters and Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering.

John Rockwell, former dance critic, music critic, and editor of The New York Times Arts and Leisure section, is the board chairman of the National Arts Journalism Program.

Lewis Segal, formerly the staff dance critic for the Los Angeles Times, is a freelance arts writer based in Hollywood and Barcelona.

Sarah Kaufman referred to her experience checking in at the airport and asked, “Why do people recoil from physical contact and prefer a quick, but questionable technology,” contrasting the pat-down to the x-ray scan, perhaps thinking of the theme of her next dance article. Wendy Lesser responded to Kaufman’s question and offered, “The scan is faster.” As a recipient of two hip replacements, which requires Lesser to undergo pat downs all over the world, she said that the scan procedure means that people can keep a closer eye on their computers rolling down the security assembly line.

But what about dance criticism? There were a variety of thoughts ranging from the notion that dance on stage, or to what the panel referred to as “concert dance” represents an accumulation of inputs from everyone who touches a performance. The age-old question posed by the poet, W.B. Yeats, “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” was described in the same way that the poet did—we really can’t. Another panelist said that the ability to write well in evocative terms, crafting language to describe the physical experience of dance, was a big plus. The last speaker held by his motto, “We don’t make the scene; the scene makes us.”

One of the critics let the cat out of the bag and voiced a concern for the future of dance criticism. As newspapers shrink and arts publications die, Rockwell acknowledged that bloggers on the Internet have challenged the relevance of dance criticism. He said, “We’re in transition to a new business model that may eventually allow some people to earn a living.” He also hinted that the Internet may evolve into a pay-as-you-go model.

Segal also acknowledged changing business models, recognizing that new TV sets now offer access to the Internet. As a result, he said, the “difference between cable and websites will become blurred” and offer dance websites a viable future.

However, the critics did not mention the impact of TV programs like “So You Think You Can Dance,” or “Dancing With the Stars,” in bringing dance to new public audiences, until that question was posed from the floor. Then everyone pitched in about articles they’d written on the subject. Some offered that the programs were “vulgar,” others were more positive in recognizing that dance-savvy judges offered the public an opportunity to become “dance literate.” Another critic wondered why the public needed to know about what steps composed the “Paso Robles,” for example, when they could simply discern “the movement,” which sounded like a Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” attitude if there ever was one.

My take-aways? I learned that the world of dance, like every other place, is being seriously impacted by technology. I also felt that these four dance critics may be falling behind the public as You-Tube, the Internet, and TV programs legitimize forms such as B-Boy and Hip-Hop and bring dance to a new audience. Do these audiences have an interest in a criticism that can expand beyond the world of concert dance?

Maybe the panelists are dancing to their own music...

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Winners and SemiFinalists in the Cleantech World

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:50:00 -0700

What organization has raised 280 million dollars in the last five years for clean technology companies? A few hints: It’s an organization with nary three paid full-time staff members. The group currently runs five regular business competitions covering 22 states in the U.S. Oh, yes, in another month they plan to award $200,000 to a national prize winner.

Give up? Cleantech Open (right, you saw the picture) is a five-year old organization that “finds, funds, and fosters entrepreneurs with big ideas,” according to Executive Director, Rex Northen who spoke at the October 8 California Regional Cleantech Open hosted by Chevron in San Ramon, California. At the end of the day, six new companies each walked away with awards of $18,000.

Many fledging companies have been assigned mentors and are given business plan assistance. Cleantech wants to help commercialize clean technologies. Corporate sponsors also are part of the backbone with expertise and support from companies such as Autodesk, Chevron, Kauffman Foundation, Google, PG&E, Reed Smith. San Diego Gas and Electric, and Wells Fargo, and others.

Andrew Hargadon, Professor and Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Davis gave the keynote. Hargadon focused on assembling a network around an idea. Citing Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, neither of whom actually invented anything, Soderquist advised to “Find the path to deliver to as many people as you can as fast as you can. And if it takes several centuries that’s not scale—it’s change.”

In the judging panels and during the “innovation exchange,” many venture capital firms were on hand, Both Nancy Floyd, Nth Power, and Nancy Pfund, DBL Investors, acknowledged that environmental companies are at the “tipping point.” Don Riley of Chevron Technology Ventures extended an open invitation for entrepreneurs “to contact me.”

I served as a scribe on the Energy Efficiency Judging Panel and heard about a slew of technologies, everything from a specialized pump and software algorithm to collect the natural gas spill-off from oil rigs, a new resin insulation for the high-speed transmission of electricity, and a social networking utility to allow people to track their carbon footprint.

Congratulations to the six regional California winners and semifinalists. Here’s how they stacked up:

Category	Winner	Runner-up
Energy Efficiency	Suntulit	Enovative Kontrol Systems
Transportation	Pressure Sentinel	Conderos
Air, Water & Waste	Fog Busters	Mango Materials
Green Building	Stramit Strawboard	Bellwether Materials
Smart Power	SmartSense	Intuitive Energy
Renewables	Pure Solar	Nascent Solar Technologies

The six finalists participate in the national judging on November 15^th and 16^th. National awards are held on November 17^th at the 2010 National Awards and Expo, at Parkside Hall A, 271 South Market Street, San Jose.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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How to Impact Green Legislative Policy

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:26:00 -0700

SARTA (Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance) sponsors a leadership series to give local entrepreneurs and students of emerging technologies an understanding of how green business works.

The desired outcome is to speak with state energy agencies and venture capitalists about solving real problems and saving people money with new energy efficient products.

The topic of the Leadership Series Clean Tech Track, held at Drexel University on September 2 was, “How to Influence and Impact Clean Tech Regulatory and Legislative Policy.” Drexel offers eleven doctoral and master's programs, including in all things entrepreneurially green.

The September 2 discussion included instructors  Michael Faust, CEO and President of the Northern California World Trade Center; Will Gonzalez, Owner, Gonzalez Public Affairs; Jan E. Schori, Of Council, Downey Brand,  and Jan Smutny-Jones, Executive Director, Independent Energy Producers Association (IEP).

Places on the Internet to start getting informed include high-priced and free publications. Possible sources with a mixture of both are:

Don’t forget about using Google Alerts with specific keywords and TweetFeeds to get information about the energy movers and shakers of the moment.

“Get in Early, Tell Your Story, Keep it Simple”

High on the list of questions was how to go about identifying the leaders in any community once there’s a real product in hand. The advice was to:

Know the local Chamber of Commerce
Informally introduce yourself to local elected officials
Describe your product in non-technical terms in a way that addresses the WIFM (what’s in it for me?)
Query both groups about whom they consider local community leaders
Contact those people and talk to them

The district director of any federal or state legislator can be of tremendous assistance in identifying local leaders and subject matter experts, advised Michael Faust.

Policy Highlights

There were many other tidbits including the fact that Southern California is probably more fertile ground right now for green products since they are dependent on coal to meet a large percentage of their energy needs. Talk with Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power if you have a solution to that particular problem.

With the coming of electric vehicles, there will be tremendous drain on “the grid” which has a whole other crop of officials grinding their teeth. Bundling home audits with grid pricing, suggested Jan Schori, may be one innovative way to package a solution in this area.

Lastly, the speakers recommended to thoughtfully attend conferences with a game plan.

Don’t feel badly if you can’t contribute money to a politician’s fund because in the long run, it won’t do that much good, said lobbyist Will Gonzalez.

And finally, even if AB32 gets clobbered with a yes vote on 23, there’s enough legislation in place to keep energy regulations going. On the other hand, said Schori, a yes vote will send a message to venture capitalists that California is turning away from its commitment to clean energy, which will not be a good.

I wanted to end this discussion on a high note. Be sure to check out the upcoming SARTA Clean Tech Showcase, Tuesday, October 26 at Sacramento State, the region's largest event highlighting the clean tech sector's innovators, investors, educators and companies. And contact Lenore Weiss if you need a great writer to communicate a strong message that will get your customer’s attention.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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What is a Passive House?

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:21:00 -0700

What exactly is a passive house ? A refuge for passive-aggressive types? A space where the lights are out all the time and its inhabitants sit in quiet contemplation before a burning candle? Well, actually none of the above.

I was hoping to find out more about passive houses at a talk presented by Build It Green in Berkeley. Build It Green, a nonprofit membership organization that offers training and certifications in green building from Sacramento to Downey, California.

Amid a lovely dinner served with ample bottles of thirst-quenching waters and sparkling ciders at Truitt & White, a roomful of building types gathered to hear more about the building of the first Passive House in California on a land trust in West Marin County at 11560 California 1.

According to Build It Green, about 20,000 passive houses have been designed, built and retrofitted over the last 10 years in Europe, 12 in the United States, and one in California, which may offer another reason to drive to Pt. Reyes.

Most simply put, a Passive House receives and captures energy. In doing so, it slashes heating and energy costs by 90 percent. Of course this is a loosey-goosey definition.

There are Passive House standards that a building must meet to be certified. The Passive House Planning Package (PHPP), is a software package constructed like the popular TurboTax income tax program, allowing builders to plug in numbers and to receive automatic calculations for projections of heat load, loss, and energy usage with updated calculations for climates around the world. It’s a package that continually improves with updated data.

Here’s a bit of history. The notion of the Passive House (“Passivhaus”) was first developed in Germany in the early 1990s by Professors Bo Adamson of Sweden and Wolfgang Feist of Germany. They put together solar design ideas from North America with “low energy” European building standards to create the notion of a house that could maintain a comfortable interior climate without conventional heating and cooling systems. A Passive House can be operated without the help of large “active” mechanical systems (i.e. furnaces and boilers), thus the “Passive” moniker.

In 2003, Katrin Klingenberg, a German designer, built the first Passive House in Urbana, Illinois. Klingenberg established the Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS) in Urbana with builder Mike Kernagis. In January 2008, PHIUS was authorized by the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt as the official certifier of Passive Houses in the U.S.

Got it? Now back to Berkeley where James Bill, Katy Hollbacher, and Terry Nordbye, architect, engineer, and builder who worked together on West Marin’s Blue2 House, discussed what it took to build California’s first certified Passive House that soon will be occupied by a family. All agreed that the Passive House model goes far beyond Energy Star standards, a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy’s effort toward more cost effective environmental solutions. “In the past compliance, not energy usage, is what people looked at,” said Hollbacher.

Retrofitting an entire home to meet Passive House standards may not be cost effective for the average homeowner in the temperate Bay Area. However, the Build It Green presenters agreed that incorporating different aspects of the PHPP methodology may be the incremental best way to go.

In any case, it's going, going, going green. So be passive already. For more information:

passivehouseca
beyondefficiency

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Van Jones is a Green Horn Looking to Create Investment

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:29:00 -0700

Listening to Van Jones speak at the Commonwealth Club last week, which is one of my new favorite hang-outs, gave me a glimpse of our green future.

Jones, a former Obama administration appointee as Special Advisor for Green Jobs who was smeared by Republicans last year as a radical and finally resigned his office so as not to distract from the discussion about health-care legislation, said that our green future is part of a movement for a “voter-owned rather than a corporate-owned democracy.”

With the vision and courage to speak his mind, it’s easy to understand why Jones would ruffle a few feathers. This was my first time hearing him in person although many Bay Area folk know him as the founder in 1996 of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a California non-governmental organization (NGO) that is now focused on a green jobs campaign in addition to reducing violence. While many of us only knew to associate Saint Patrick’s Day with the color—Jones has been a green activist for a long time, building organizations and advocacy groups toward that end.

He spoke for the need for a climate and energy bill to ensure that no one gets to pollute for free. Jones maintained that the oil companies are “baking the planet and have been able to do that since the Industrial Revolution.” He advocated for the government to serve as a midwife to create a “New Green Deal” both in the United States and other industrialized nations. “If you want to solve problems,” he said, “you have to unleash market forces by bringing investment into green technology,” which is the only way he said that we are going to get out of the recession.

Describing a moment for change that includes every “color, class, gender, and sexuality,” Jones said that going green is not about jobs versus the environment. “The government doesn’t count what counts,” he said. “Our metrics are off. There should be a movement like ‘Accountants for Transformative Change.’”

If you’d like to get more detail about the new economy, pick up a copy of his new book, or set your Kindle or iPad to “The Green Collar Economy” with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that ends, “Let the revolution begin.” While the sixties were about the struggle for political and social equality, perhaps a new chapter is opening up about the struggle for economic justice.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Plug Into Your Electric Vehicle (EV) Future

Fri, 21 May 2010 11:55:00 -0700

Surely you’ve heard about the May partnership announced between Toyota and Tesla to start building electric cars at the recently closed NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.) plant in Fremont, California. For the past 25 years General Motors and Toyota had worked to manufacture cars together, seeing it as an opportunity to learn about each other’s production methods. The plant was closed earlier this year by Toyota as a cost-cutting measure; now it is being resurrected in the name of electric car development.

And who is Tesla? The only manufacturer of EVs in the United States at prices that none of us can afford. But that may change with Toyota acquiring a $50-million stake in Tesla and the two companies poised to rumble on the assembly lines together…but don’t look now…the Tesla-Toyota partnership may have competition.

At a Commonwealth Club meeting in San Francisco this month, speakers representing different spectrums of EV car development including a representative from General Motors, discussed the possibility of these electrically powered cars becoming the future vehicle of choice.

Tony Posawatz, Vehicle Line Director of General Motors’ New Chevy Volt and also Co-Chairman of the Electric Drive Transportation Association, announced that he had driven a Volt to the meeting, and offered that the car will be in retail development by the end of this year “with GM being the first to mass market electrically driven vehicles in the U.S. and around the world.” Currently, the Volt has a 40-mile range with an extending gas generator that produces enough energy to power the car along further on a single tank. Posawatz spoke of that initial range being upped from 40 to 100 miles and that the Volt is not “a single play for GM.”

Look around the corner. Motorcycles also are being slated for electric development. Jit Bhattacharya, CEO of Mission Motors whose new Mission One Motorcycle (funded with help from Silicon Valley venture capitalists) claims to be the fastest production electric motorcycle in the world, said that the company is looking to “improve range, performance, and cost.” Current EV technology is based on lithium-ion batteries, commonly housed these days in laptops, PDAs, cellphones, and the Toyota Prius.

Mission Motors is exploring a partnership he said with China, which is using electric bikes and scooters to help address the issue of smog. This was an environmental problem that was highlighted during the Beijing Olympic 2008 games. Apart from all other considerations, “The electric motorcycle is just more fun to ride.”

More fun, but what about practical, what about the massive infrastructure and development that needs to support the transition to EV? What about the growing demands on the power grid? Mark Duvall, Director of Electric Transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an independent, nonprofit center for public interest energy and environmental research which receives most of its funding from member electric power companies, said “The industry has a responsibility to serve with a job to just deal with it.” He cited how power companies have stepped up to increase service as newer technologies like computers and plasma TVs draw more juice from the grid.

Technology is improving here also with the development of what many refer to as the “smart grid” giving buildings, most immediately those owned by the government, the ability to monitor light and heat usage by wiring systems together and controlling them from a central software panel. Ultimately, we will be able to monitor energy usage in our homes. All of this will require massive amounts of capital investment. The Feds have already kick-started the process, he said, with a 130 million dollar investment, but suggested that power usage may get more expensive with different pricing tiers, encouraging consumers to power up EVs during off-peak hours. There's even talk about being able to sell power from a EV car battery back to the power grid, much the way people today with installed solar sell electricity to local power companies.

Yeah, and what about plugging in those vehicles? How is that going to happen? Richard Lowenthal, a former Mayor of Cupertino, California, and founder and CEO of Coulomb Technologies, Inc., acknowledged as a leader in electric vehicle charging station infrastructure worldwide, anticipates that this will happen differently depending on different situations.

For example, in an urban area like San Francisco where the majority of people do not live in single-family houses, drivers may plug-in vehicles while they are shopping. “Most stations probably will not charge because businesses want people to shop in their areas.” He anticipates charging stations becoming “a normal piece of parking lot furniture." He also said that the home permitting system is changing to allow for these stations. “It’s just like installing an appliance. It’s not a big deal,” although Lowenthal did acknowledge that older homes will have to do “a lot more work.”

More immediately, the future of EVs “will be blended,” said Posawatz, with an exploration of lithium-ion batteries augmented by biofuels and flex fuels. The EV “is not only for enthusiasts and early adopters. This is a car every one will love.”

Who knows? The American automobile industry, supported by power companies and infrastructure development, may have some life in it yet.

What do you think about our EV future?
Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Choosing HTML5 Over Watching American Idol

Wed, 12 May 2010 20:46:00 -0700

Sure I wanted to see the last four contestants engage in their duet duels on national TV. But we’re talking HTML5, the next generation in hypertext markup language that the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) international standards organization has been hard in work in developing. Plus, it was a total geek-out held at Microsoft’s San Francisco offices on the heels of the Web 2.0 conference at Moscone Center and sponsored by three local user groups: PHP, Java, and HTML5.

I stood my place in line waiting to grab a slice of pizza, and a cup of broccoli salad. (Mixed with currents and red onions, the stuff was tasty!) Many around me consorted with their cell phones while I grabbed a seat and gazed up at dual screens on either side of the room with the speaker podium placed <align=”center”>. Sponsors introduced themselves (Google, Guidewire, JetBrains, Kaazing, Marakana, Medallia, Oracle, O’Reilly, and Teksystems), and then it was on with the show.

So what is HTML5? Very roughly it’s a markup language for the Web that originally made its debut around 1990 and has been progressively upgraded since then to allow for the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and the implementation of AJAX with Javascripting to create in the eyes of the beholder, a more information-rich Web.

The lessons learned using HTML these past 20 years are being incorporated into tags and objects that may have previously existed as JavaScript work-arounds to satisfy growing user expectations, an approach one speaker called “paving the cow paths.” Browser support isn’t totally there, but Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft’s Internet 9.0, are all mapping the divide.

The first speaker was Brad Neuberg from Google’s documentation team. Neuberg painted a wide HTML5 swath, demonstrating how the new standards matter to consumers and developers. This includes a new specification called “workers,” which allows developers to run code that won’t block the browser, meaning that it will remain responsive while it’s parsing lots of information. With the growing use of maps, there’s a geolocation object that will pass browser latitude and longitude coordinates to a browser for map display, handy for social networking sites. There are semantic tags to break content into more discrete sections, including the printed page’s “sidebars,” all allowing for better search engine indexing.There also are new link relations to define icons (think mood icons) and pingbacks. SVG (scalable vector graphics) will be available via new CSS selectors to offer the automatic definition of column number, text stroke, opacity, rounded corners, gradients, and controls to play audio and video (think YouTube on steroids and beyond).

Microsoft’s Giorgio Sardo, took the stage, explaining how Explorer 9.0 is using the memory stored in GPUs (Graphic Processing Units), and in the double-core of “double-core” computer processors to allow for the display and resolution of HTML5 elements, pushing browser technology to a new level.

The last speaker was Peter Lubbers from Kaazing and co-author of Pro HTML5 Programming (Apress 2010). He dove into a subject that was near and dear to the hearts of many developers who have been using household web development techniques such as “AJAX” and “Comet” to simulate real-time information on the Web. The truth of the matter is that information can only flow in “half-duplex,” or in one direction, which is the reason, Lubbers explained, that the recent “Times Square bomber” (Faisal Shahzad) was not immediately intercepted on his way out of the country because the “no-fly” list cannot be updated in real time. HTML5 brings a full-duplex solution to the table and it’s called “web sockets.”

As all this settles, browser support will be spotty, but certain HTML5 elements are available in Chrome, Opera, and Explorer 8. You can inject a certain amount of browser HTML5 muscle into Internet Explorer by adding a meta tag, Google’s Chrome Frame.

Got to go. Need to turn on the results show for American Idol.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Bill McKibben and 10/10/10: Show Fossil Fuels the Emergency Exit Now

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 20:43:00 -0700

Bill McKibben looks like an aging basketball player, tall and lanky, when in actuality he is a Methodist Sunday school teacher in Vermont who has spent a great deal of time according to his own account, “in a basement coloring.” But looks don't tell the whole story.

Bill McKibben also is an educator, environmentalist and author of more than 10 books on climate change. He helped to organize the most widespread day of political activity on the planet when according to CNN on October 24, 2009, 5,200 separate events were held in 181 countries including beneath the ocean at the Great Barrier Reef.

Speaking April 23 at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley to publicize his latest book, “eaarth,” McGibben wore a t-shirt with the numbers “350,” a commitment to limiting the amount of C0₂ in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, which according to scientists is compatible with life on the planet. The number currently hovers at 390.

McGibben built the climate change case from ground-up evidence and discussed how there is now 25 percent less ice in the world including the glaciers of Greenland and the Andes. Scientists are now panicked, he said, with “every visible system beyond the top of its boundaries. Last summer typhoons marched over Asia with 9 ½ feet of rain,” he said. With five percent more moisture in the atmosphere, there’s also more evaporation and more drought.

“Even things that are too big to change are changing,” he said, “causing problems for organisms at the bottom of the food chain. Global warming and fossil fuel emissions are creating more acidic oceans. Some at the top of the food chain like cruise liners are being denied anchorage in places like the Maltese Islands, a country that is shifting its dollars from the tourist industry to moving the island's population before it floods due to global warming.

Instead of continuing to build starter castles for entry-level monarchs and listening to people like Alan Greenspan, “the tiny tired wizard behind the curtain,” McKibben said “our civilization stands at collapse.” While acknowledging the growth in the number of organic farms within the last 50 years, he also noted that assuming a six or seven degree temperature increase, many of those farms will not be successful. Nor will changing to energy efficient light bulbs impact the affect of global warming.

McKibben counsels that our entire civilization needs to transition from fossil fuels and learn new habits for a new planet. “Gas, coal and oil is the single most profitable enterprise in the history of the world,” which is why the world looks the way it does, he said.

“The only moral response is to do everything we possibly can to change the odds and that requires our full participation,” which brings us back to the idea of “350” a measurement that was proposed by James Hansen and his team at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Hansen was one of the earliest scientists to raise broad awareness of global warming. Today he advocates a rising price on carbon emissions with fees collected to promote other energy sources, a proposal that doesn’t sound totally unlike levying taxes on cigarette smoking with money going toward prevention.

Earlier this year at the Copenhagen Climate Change Accord, 117 of the poorest and most vulnerable countries who directly understand the affects of global warming, agreed to reduce carbon emissions by 2020. But the United States still has not planted its feet firmly on that terra firma.

McKibben and others involved in organizing a global 350 movement, want to continue turning down the fossil fuel heat. They announced that this coming October 10, (10/10/10) will mark a “global work party” toward reducing carbon emissions. Go to www.350.org to sign up or to create a work party in your local area.

Also keep your eyes peeled for discussion in the coming weeks about a bill that is being introduced as a “New U.S. Senate Climate, Jobs, and Energy Bill by Senators John Kerry, (D-Mass.) Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut), and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) “It’s a giveaway gift to the industries that created the problem,” said McKibben. Find out more by reading the bill that will be published in coming weeks on Senator Kerry’s website.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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A Developer Says Why She Thinks the iPad is a Raging Content Machine

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:34:00 -0800

In early 2007 Marine Leroux was surfing the Internet in her Paris, France apartment when she came across Apple’s announcement of the iPhone. She heard a click and it wasn't her mouse. Later she would say in her LinkedIn profile that her goal was to “become a user experience expert in Apple’s iPhone application design, worldwide.”

Leroux was a former head of International sales development for Adobe. She understood when Steven Jobs, Apple CEO, proclaimed at the MacWorld Conference & Expo 2007 that the iPhone, was “a revolutionary product that would change everything,” with a user interface design that combined Apple’s popular iPod music device with phone and Internet browsing capability.

Fast forward three years later, when Jobs in trademark jeans and black t-shirt speaking at Expo 2010, positioned Apple as the “number one mobile device company in the world,” and announced another new offering from the magic software kingdom, the iPad.

This time many technology pundits didn’t exactly get the Big Fuss. (Look! It's a laptop, it’s a mobile phone, no, it’s an iPad!”) Giving a similar demo as the one he gave three years earlier, Jobs showed photos, movies, great album cover arts, but then so what? Many walked away saying that marketplace would be the iPad's final arbiter of success.

Those whose business is to remain in the operating system know, whined about the inability to use and develop interactive Flash applications on the iPad, many developers pointing figures and accusing each other of just wanting to watch Flash porn on the Internet. Apple said that Flash just hogged too much OS memory, picked up its cookies and walked away.

Some developers like Jonathan Hollin on binarybonsai said, “I am genuinely at a loss as to just what all the fuss is about… an overhyped oversized iphone.”

Marine Leroux, the developer mentioned at the beginning of this entry, sees Apple's device as a new content delivery platform. She has developed successful applications for the iPhone under the auspices of her company Bamboudesign.com. Leroux is also the founder of the iPhone Network Lounge in San Francisco, and a recent speaker at the Photoshop Developers Group talking about iPhone application development.

Carlos Icaza, co-founder and CEO of ansca whose software, SDK Corona, allows developers to create iPhone and iPad applications more quickly rather than using the device's native language, is on the board of directors of Bamboudesign. Backed up by compiled code, Leroux is passionate about iPad development possibilities.

“There’s an enormous opportunity here to make content a more engaging, compelling experience,” she said as we shared a cheese platter in downtown San Francisco. “This is a more powerful, portable device that includes iWork, which is Apple’s version of Microsoft Office applications: Pages (Word), Numbers (Excel), and Keynote (PowerPoint).

Leroux is all for using the additional space of the iPad to create richer applications and said so in the New York Times following the iPad announcement. “When you’ve got more space, why not make the most of it?” Why simply port applications designed for the iPhone and iPod to a different device, she opined, when you can use the new platform to do something better?

Leroux thinks that the larger iPad canvas with a great Internet browsing experience offers a chance to integrate more functionality onto fewer screens and to deepen the user experience. An example is embedding “GPS and other mobile technologies in one place.”

She feels the real opportunity is for educational developers and publishers, particularly as the newspaper industry struggles to reinvent itself. With the iPad’s larger and superior display and 10 hours of battery life, Leroux sees the possibility of creating a “more intimate relationship between the user and an application.”

So as developers cozy up to the iPad, this new Swiss Army Knife of the mobile technology world, Leroux knows that as platforms come and go, there always will be game developers.

But she feels that the iPad will allow new content developers to reach a wider audience, including children.”This can be a Sesame Street for new learners, all learners.”

Find details of the next iPhone Network Lounge.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Design iPhone Apps in Photoshop: iMartini or My Dry Martini?

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:49:00 -0800

All the pizza was gone by the time I managed to get to first Photoshop User Group meeting of the year at Adobe’s voluminous cafeteria located at 601 Townsend Street. It took awhile for me to drive across the Bay Bridge, a drizzly wet Thursday evening stalled with both FastTrack and cash customers behind the metering lights, my first attempt at driving across the Bay Bridge since a cable had snapped last Labor Day weekend with ensuing accidents over the bridge’s now infamous new structural “S-curve.” But tonight I was good. My GPS device was honed in on my target, I arrived in time to find a chair and hear surrounding chatter (“We stayed in Lisbon for three days. It was cold and rainy and there were a lot of cobblestones.”) I waited for the lights to go down, when two t-shirted men from Aquent, a talent agency, which had been responsible for providing the now empty boxes of pizza, gave a current job forecast and encouraged one and all to stop by after the meeting. Before they exited stage right, they offered a few job pointers which included: developing a good resume, calling your old employers “to be sure you’ll get a good referral,” networking with people at user groups and staying current and relevant. They closed with “Mobile is big. So are visual front-end developers and everything Flash.” Now it was Marine’s turn. She didn’t waste time getting started despite her wrestling match with a clip-on microphone. I’d met Marine last year at the iPhone Network Lounge, but since that time, Bamboudesign has been in the news, including the New York Times and Information Week as a leading new iPhone and a new iPad developer. Marine waltzed the congregation through the development of an iPhone application using Photoshop, a nice cocktail app giving users an idea how to mix up Martinis. What else would it be called but iMartini? She started off with her own set of pointers that sounded a lot like old school journalism’s “who, what, when and where”--know the objective of your application; who are its users; identify key task, use scenarios, and then finally, sketch out your screens that will be later morphed into Design Templates. It’s all about fundamentals and being organized. A former employee of Macromedia in a former life, Marine gave the dimensions of iPhone applications that are available in Apple’s UI Guidelines and SDK. In portrait view, they translate to 320 px by 480 px with definitions for the bottom menu bar of 44px that are roughly equivalent to the size of a male’s fingertip, she quipped. There are more definitions, but check the SDK. Sans serif fonts, like Helvetica is the one to choose, although Arial also will make the grade. Text should be in the vicinity of 17 to 22 px with other definitions for labels and list view. Forget to underline, that is don’t! Other specifications include using the image file type = PNG since these vector images have a better alpha channel with greater color depth; moreover, 72 dpi is totally acceptable for graphic resolution size. Now for a lego starter kit of free pre-fab iPhone graphics, Marine suggested two good sources and here are the URLies:

www.teehanlax.com/blog/category/iphone

http://blog.twg.ca/2009/09/free-iphone-toolbar-icons/

The rest of Marine’s talk would’ve made Benjamin Franklin proud. It was all about being organized, efficient, and frugal. She explained how to create a file structure of assets that included basic screens, templates, and screens that were unique to the application with PNG/PSD folders for buttons, images, labels, and whatever else you have hanging around. Layer and name everything in Photoshop, she advised, and, “Plan to have the status bar above the title because it’s more convenient for users.”Develop your PSD screens, PNG graphics (and don’t forget about developing your post-pressed buttons), screen flows, and specify your interaction. The last two steps, she explained, are largely for developers who get handed off the information. “Don’t let your developers guess,” she advised. “They’re very smart people, but not your typical user. Give them the full recipe so they can make the cake exactly the way you want it.” Tips from the audience included using Photoshop to create highlighted (action) buttons. Just “batch ‘em.” Also craigslist is a good place to find roaming developers. As for me, pass the Martini…

Here's the link to Marine's presentation: http://www.bamboudesign.com/preso/photoshop/iphoneappdesign_Photoshop_PDF.pdf

To contact Marine: marine@bamboudesign.com

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Thumbing Our Way to a Peer Information Model

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:14:00 -0800

This holiday season on my way to visiting a friend in Louisiana, I spent a lot of time sitting at various airports. There are no direct flights to Monroe, LA so I found myself running up and down catching different flights at the Denver and Houston airports. Along the way to the gate I passed an interesting spectacle: scads of young people in their 20s and early 30s leaning against backpacks and balancing a laptop but more often, a cell phone or game device. I watched as they stared straight into the oracle of their LCDs, thumbs waving and clicking as they conducted an electronic orchestra of iPhone applications, text messages, scrolling at lightening speed through email, destroying battleships, their thumbs doing most of the work.

Being a friendly sort of person, I asked a number of backpack hatchers what they were doing, although it was obvious that they were passing time. Some looked up and smiled. Others were obviously annoyed by my interruption. But they all spoke either one of two words: “Facebook” or “Twitter,” and then they wanted me to go away. Quickly.

I’ve known about Facebook and Twitter for some time now and even have my account on each service. But the holiday airport experience in the midst of repeated terrorist threats and talks of heightened security, brought me to a different kind of “ah-ha.”

Facebook and Twitter and social networkers everywhere are changing established patterns of communication. We are thumbing our way to new peer relationships impacting a long-term top-down hierarchical model of communication where the creator or message sender controls the dialog. This is a phenomenon that is being carefully watched by marketers and corporations everywhere. We should watch it also, but maybe for different reasons.

Marketing groups and major corporations have taken notice. WalMart has jumped on the bandwagon as has ComCast, seeking to repair a less than stellar record for customer service, which is reported in“Twitterville” by Shel Israel.

In the December 16, 2009 issue of The Huffington Post, Manish Mehta, Dell Computer’s social-media and community vice president, said that “What we've learned is that social media has transformed the large corporation of the millennium into the Mom and Pop shop of the old days. The emergence of social media simply makes it more possible to connect directly with customers every day.”

But learning how to use technology to connect with customers, is giving a good number of baby-boom corporate leaders heartburn, although some like Cisco have decided to nurture that expertise in-house.

According to Norys Trevino, Collaboration Manager and Y-Space coach, “The objective of Y-Space is to help educate and inform Cisco employees about new media tips and tricks, how to work more effectively across diverse generations, how to engage and retain gen-y employees, and explore personal filters related to generational differences.”

So why should we care about this stuff?

Conversations are markets on the internet, advises Patrick Schwerdtfeger in a popular self-help book called “Webify Your Business.”

“Not only can you participate in the conversation, but you can actually facilitate that conversation as well. Think about the people who built any of the large forums or bulletin boards on the internet. Those people gain credibility by facilitating the conversation.”

Is this a ghost cousin of the hierarchy? Or maybe it’s about contributing something to the larger community. But none of this is really new. There have always been leaders. It’s just that much of what we do as humans—talk to each other—is increasingly happening inside different forums.

Have you sat down lately to watch a backpack hatcher engage in a text message conversation, marvel at the speed, the truncated lingo, the sheer efficiency of it all?

So I wonder what this says about new literary forms that are coming at us? Already there are journals like Tarpaulin Sky Press that devote themselves to hybrid forms or to collaborative writing communities like http://www.makeliterature.com/.

The January / February 2010 issue of “Poets & Writers” talks about an online dictionary called Wordnik , which is in the process of being created by an community a users. According to the article, Wordnik has collected more than four billion words of text from Web pages, books, magazines, and newspapers in a mission to chronicle the evolution of language, a new approach to defining a vocabulary that is being bombarded by diverse sources.

I wonder in this emerging global community, if writers will collaborate together on international projects in several languages with the ability to translate back and forth?

What about the addition of visual media and film, YouTube links interspersed in plot lines that can be accessed inside electronic books? These are all questions with a to be continued dateline.

However it happens, I’m hoping that there will still remain a place for solitary artists who participate in the global electronic dialog, but can become an expatriate inside their own minds, carefully crafting language and stories away from the consumer conversation that will eternally be filled with news of the best deals to buy right now. So many writers these days have been forced for political reasons to leave their homelands, exiles, who like the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, discovered a home inside his head.

I hope that no one will thumb their nose at the continued need for the artist everywhere to disengage and reflect, but maybe with a larger sense of responsibility to a collective dialog about what it means to be human.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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WordPress Meetup is TechLiminal

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 21:36:00 -0800

The sky was like wet tissue paper clogging the sun. Who would go to a Meetup group on a December Sunday afternoon when they could be more holiday-wise engaged? I'd already decided to redo my html site and turn it into a blog, and had a real reason to find out.

I located the address of TechLiminal, a space that bills itself as a “technology hotspot and salon.” For me it was a storefront near the old Holmes Book Store in downtown Oakland. But that’s ancient history…

Arriving a few minutes after 1pm, I was instructed to “go upstairs” where about 10 people already sat in front of a long black table to discuss WordPress Multiuser, software that can run many sites, something like a stylesheet for blogs with a database vengeance. But it doesn’t replace “BuddyPress,” which can be used to add a social networking layer should you want to do that sort of thing.

I could tell by the rapid exchange of acronyms that I was among geeks, while I am a mere wanna be geek.

Every blog has its own dashboard in WordPress, and there’s a master dashboard that can be used to control them all. Each multi user site is identified in the scheme of things by a blog id that can be used as a means to do queries against its content stored in a database. I also learned that some themes don’t work as well as others based upon how options are stored. To get the full scoop, you can always go to WordPress.

I think that for me the afternoon was filled with more acronym than substance, but that’s largely because I haven’t developed my WordPress chops. Give me a few months.

We did look at a Multiuser version of a Best Buy site. Below the corporate menu bar and product drop-downs, there was local content with an introduction to the store manager who smiled benignly from what looked like his kitchen. I was beginning to understand what Multiuser can do. Did I say I was a visual learner?

More buzz words and acronyms. Recommended hosts like AZHosting, MidPhase, Digital Forest, Go Daddy, and Dream Host with brief discussions about their pros and cons. Too slow. Good support. Too expensive.

Based on my recent encounter with Wiki founder Jimmy Wales, I wanted to know about the difference between wikis and a WordPress Multiuser group since they both seemed to do something similar: bring people together to share information. But I got a good definition. Wikis are a great way for groups to collaboratively edit content in one place to produce a document, whereas a WordPress Multiuser, like most blogs, is a temporal product whose interest can wane with the date.

With my question about “Where do I start?” one of the organizers, Sallie Goetsch, suggested that I read WordPress for Dummies. I will and I’ll be back…

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Wikis: Carry a Big Water Bottle and Share Information

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:28:00 -0800

It was one of those cold Berkeley evenings. After finding Stanley Hall where a UC Berkeley Regents’ Lecture was scheduled to begin at 7:30pm, I checked out the parking situation, never good around Berkeley. But on this particular evening, I found several designated spots reserved for building maintenance people. They had all gone home. Parked and hoping for the lenience of Berkeley’s meter cops, I located room 105, a small auditorium and sat in between several students who remained extremely still looking at their cell phones or staring into space, perhaps contemplating the 35% tuition hike recently imposed on UC students by the Regents. In any case, I had come to hear Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia Foundation, the charity that operates Wikipedia.org, and the company Wikia, Inc. that operates Wikia.com in a talk sponsored by The Berkeley Center for New Media.

Surely, many of you have heard of Wikipedia, which is approaching its ninth anniversary. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is in the process of constantly being created by users throughout the world.

Wiki is from a Hawaaian word "wikiwiki" meaning quick. The term refers to software used by Wikipedia that allows for quick editing and collaboration. Wikis have existed since 1995, and were invented by Ward Cunningham.

Try a Web search any day and it will most likely include a listing from Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales is the man you want to thank for putting this sailboat in motion. Wales said he cleaves to three basic truths: “assume good faith, spread knowledge, be bold,” and always carry a water bottle. I’m only kidding about the last one, although Wales did have a water bottle on the podium as he spoke to the student assemblage, the last event in a day long symposium on “The Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest”, sponsored by Berkeley Center for New Media.

Wales grew up in Alabama and recounted how much culture has changed since the sixties when he was designated as the remote control by his mother to manually change TV channels followed by the eighties with a new request to “hook up the VCR.” Turning tables around, now Wales asks his daughter to program the TIVO.

“Culture is getting smarter and more complicated,” he said, running the gamut of the I Love Lucy sitcoms of yesteryear to the more complex relationships of Seinfeld, or from Pong to the fantasy game of Warcraft.

A strong proponent of free speech with a lifelong mission to create “free access to the sum of human knowledge,” Wales noted that Wikis are available in more than 175 languages throughout the world. The three million Wiki articles in English represent less than 20 percent of the total work, he said. Wiki articles exist in languages as diverse as German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Gaelic, Punjabi, and Russian, just for starters. Wales said that Wikipedia is the eighth most popular Website in Iran.

There’s something universal about the volunteers of Wikipedia, he said, “good people working with passion to create a collaborative culture which may possibly play a role in improving the intellectual level of discourse around many issues.”

In the early days, Wikipedias were embraced less by casual users and more by the geekish community whose comfort level included new software and publishing online. “We’re seeing new types of editors,” said Wales, especially around Wikia, a public wiki space for people of similar interests to share information.

More and more he noted “consumer media is becoming dominant.” With the demise of printed newspapers and money devoted to serious investigative reporting, the world of social networking that has sent marketing gurus into a tailspin, and smart phones that allow people to communicate instantaneously, Wikis are the hand that gathers strands of information and strings the pearls.

Oh, yes. And I didn't get a ticket.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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A Green Brick Road to Renewable Jobs

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:21:00 -0800

There’s a man who sits in front of his computer developing reports about renewable resources, charting a green brick road leading to jobs and a possibly new relationship to our futures in this cash-strapped state of California. He shuttles between offices at the City College of San Francisco and his home in the Laurel district of California, rarely deflected from his goal, a man who has dedicated his career to workforce development and dislocated worker training and counseling.

Fortunately for me, sometimes this slender bearded man takes a break to lunch on garlic potato soup and toasted baguettes at a café near 16th Street in San Francisco where I met John Carrese, Center Director of Centers of Excellence.

The Centers of Excellence, delivers regional workforce research for community college decision-making and resource development. Reports help community colleges to justify new course offerings. But they can help you too.

The Centers are funded through Economic and Workforce Development, and like many other offices these days, has recently experienced budget cuts. Fortunately, Carrese continues at the helm.

Here’s where to find the reports. If you’re wondering how to restructure your careers, you may find these a valuable information resource.

To look at reports for specific green industries go to www.coeccc.net and enter a backslash with entries of green, solar, energy or wind after the initial url. For example: www.coeccc.net/energy

Also take a look at www.baccc.net for a summary of upcoming conferences and professional development opportunities at community colleges throughout the state.

EDD (Employment Development Department) has been busy also researching where the green venture capital is going and on which industries people are betting. Check out http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov and also http://www.cleanedge.com/.

“The intersection of new jobs and technology applied to real problems makes this work compelling to me,” Carrese said.

Go John. We need more programs and people like you.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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When Bacteria Give Waste Their Best Shot

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:09:00 -0800

Today’s new green jobs are taking a tip from nature with its accumulated 3.85 billion years of research and development experience. In nature nothing is wasted.

Anaerobic Phased Solids (APS) are being faithful mimics taking a waste stream and converting it to biogas and soil fertilizer amendments. San Joaquin valley, the nation’s garden, is giving a series look at APS technologies as a way to recycle their own waste stream and to produce energy sources right in the fields.

Let me break this down.

University of California at Davis developed and pioneered an APS technology that is being tested commercially. The process is based on the work of Dr. Ruihong Zang, Professor at the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering and director for the UC Davis Biogas Energy Project. While other APS processors can convert waste material, Dr. Zang’s process is more efficient and received an award from the Environmental Protection Agency in 2007.

Basically, the process uses bacteria to break down waste, much as we humans do in our digestive systems. But instead of feeding materials into one digestion tank, the process happens in two staged environments, which allows for different bacteria types to give solid and liquid waste their best shot.

A first group of ordinary bacteria breaks down waste in about 10 to 12 days to produce water and organic acids. This includes food processing waste, municipal green waste like grass, agricultural crop residues, animal rendering and animal manure. The resulting liquid is then pumped into holding tanks that are maintained at 130 Fahrenheit degrees with a neutral pH to encourage a second bacterial group to reduce the soup to 65 to 70 percent methane gas, in addition to biohydrogen. Both can be used to produce biofuels.

The process takes potentially harmful methane gas that is produced at land fill sites and recycles it as biofuel.

The benefit of this two-staged process is that it can process up to 30 percent of waste. Previous APS technologies typically could only handle a 5 percent solid waste stream.

The APS process pioneered at UC Davis and has been licensed by different partners including Onsite Power Systems to bring the technology to commercial uses.

Warren Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Clean World Partners, LLC, was instrumental in securing the land for Raley Field in West Sacramento, which is now home of the Sacramento River Cats. He understands how to build private and public partnerships. For a short time, Smith served as president of Onsite Power Systems before his involvement with Clean World that develops, designs, builds, and manages turnkey anaerobic digestion systems.

“In the past we thought about getting ride of waste, putting it in a hole and covering it up. The approach has become a major problem,” he said at Clean Partner’s offices in Sacramento.

Smith cited AB 939, California’s Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989 that created the California Integrated Waste Management Board, and required local governments to meet tougher solid waste diversion goals of 50 percent by 2000. Sacramento further expanded government mandates with the passage of AB 32 in 2006 making the Air Resources Board responsible for aggressively reducing green house gas emissions by 2020.

Increasing the number of landfill sites is no longer an option, said Smith. “APS is the only technology written into the scoping plan of AB 32 as waste conversion,” he said.

Clean World Partners has proposed a Sacramento BioRefinery #1 at Folsom Prison which produces, he said, “a pound and ½ of waste per person per day.” The proposed facility will produce 400.000 cubic feet of renewable gas per day. The proposal needs to make it through an EIR (Environment Impact Report) scheduled for next year.

“Supply plus demand equals the truth,” said Smith. He understands that truth to reside in renewable energy sources.

Email Warren Smith with any questions.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Sacramento Says: Green I Want You Green

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:07:00 -0700

You might’ve missed the Clean Tech Showcase , October 16 at Sacramento State University where four discussion tracks (Public / Private Policies, Clean Technologies, Clean Technology Workforce, Clean Technology Startups) chartered more than 700 participants through increasingly green waters.

The Showcase, the third annual since 2007, was held under the auspices of SARTA (Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance), an umbrella organization whose mission is to green the Sacramento Region.

It’s where I met to Ingrid Rosten, who serves as the Executive Director of CleanStart, an initiative of McClellan Technology Incubator affiliated with SARTA. Rosten excels at developing successful partnerships between private and public companies, investors, and academic institutions. “That’s when it all happens,” she said.

Her work with CleanStart began several years ago when she moved from San Jose to the Sacramento area as a successful developer of business incubators, some international.

Gary Simon and Mark Henwood, two venture capital investors, asked her to head up a project called CleanStart. The initial purpose was to assess whether the region could be a clean technology center. A feasibility study was born largely funded by SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utilities District) and the California Energy Commission.

The purpose of the study was to assess if the region could emerge as a clean tech center with enough initial investment capital, entrepreneurs, executive talent and an established base of green startups. A “Power Up Business Plan” competition hosted by California Clean Tech Open brought together green companies with the lure of $25,000 in prize money. “We began to map the clean companies,” she said.

In 2007, first Clean Showcase was held at the University of California at Davis. Today CleanStart now operates under the umbrella arm of SARTA, as does VentureStart which cultivates “angel investors with wide experience in starting companies.” SARTA uses a “Tech Index” to measure the regional technology economy by tracking 50 leading high-tech and life science companies.

The United States is behind many parts of the world with green technology, acknowledged Rosten. “Countries like China and India don’t need to deal with an aging infrastructure, but are building the (a new green) structure in place.” In Israel, she said, “use of solar water heaters is the law.”

But Rosten is philosophical. Despite the current recession, she thinks it’s a time “when people pull out the stops and starting thinking of unique ways to develop new products to service the coming market. We’ve been a consumer society. We’re seeing that shift.”

“Green I want you green /. Green stars of frost / some with the shadow-fish / that opens the road for dawn.”

—Federico Garcia Lorca, Sleepwalking Ballad

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Cisco's Y-Space Does Cross-Generational Mentoring

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:10:00 -0700

It's gotta be the best when technology events turn into unexpected opportunities, which happened to me at a recent ASAP (Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals) meeting.

One group of presenters were from Cisco, members of the company's "Y-Space" team and innovative individuals, all born to run using social networking.

What follows is a mini-interview about the group. Thanks to members of the Y-Space team, particularly Norys Trevino and Ken Lotich. May all your Twitters be prosperous.

Q.) What is the history of the Y-Space group at Cisco?

Norys Trevino, Collaboration Solutions Manager and Y-Space coach: Y-Space was founded in September 2008 as an internal blog. There are currently 26 members from around the globe. We intend to gradually expand, specifically in countries where Y-Space is not currently represented. We are currently represented in the United States, Australia, Singapore, The Netherlands, Spain, and Germany.

The objective of Y-Space is to help educate and inform Cisco employees about new media tips and tricks, how to work more effectively across diverse generations, how to engage and retain gen-y employees, and explore personal filters related to generational differences.

Q.) Please describe specific areas at Cisco where Y-Space members are applying social networking expertise and business cases.

David Habbian, Cisco Business Analyst, Y-Space U.S.-lead: Y-Space has leveraged and applied its social media and web 2.0 expertise to make a significant business impact across various areas in Cisco.

One great example is a recent engagement where Y-Space team members worked closely with various cross-functional groups within Global Strategy and Operations to develop a platform for hosting a global virtual staff meeting.

Myriad technologies and deliverables were integrated into this platform including video, live chat, WebEx, live Q & A and many more! Ultimately, the solution was utilized to facilitate a global extended staff meeting for Karl Meulema and his senior staff. There was a great response among participants and it yielded a 92 percent satisfaction rate.

Q.) What is the reverse mentoring of Cisco senior leadership about and how does this happen?

Norys Trevino, Collaboration Solutions Manager and Y-Space coach:

The reverse mentorship program at Cisco offers executives and gen-y employees an opportunity to build a relationship and learn from each other's position and experience through specific projects and regular meetings. Reverse mentorship activities are up to the participants.

It is common for an executive to leverage this program to gain insight into the gen-y perspective of policy or program. In turn, the gen-y employee will gain experience and exposure in activities outside of their typical day job.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Social Networkers Shall Inherit the Earth

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:44:00 -0700

Social networkers are changing established patterns of communication. Who knows? After all these years, maybe the meek will finally inherit the earth. Did someone say paradigm shift?

The current generation of social networkers grew up mouse padding, YouTubing, and text messaging on cell phones.

When they went to elementary school, their classrooms stressed peer leadership, which may have been a function of increased class size but like Darwin’s theory of evolution, there it was nonetheless.

Social networking is changing the way people relate from a top-down bureaucratic model born on the assembly lines of the 19^th century to the peer model of the Information Age. Developing software and applications and technology requires that people exchange ideas. It requires social networking.

I speak as one who has spent the major portion of her working hours warehoused in various bureaucracies except for a brief stint in the dot.com industry.

The real gift of the dot.com days, IMHO, was not about stock options, but in serving as a hot house for developing new working relationships, a harbinger of social networking.

After years of occupying a cubicle as a technical writer for the offices of engineering, banking, and government firms, I was suddenly asked to speak up and participate, and not just dully nod my head in response to the latest administrative bulletin, which had arrived through interoffice mail in an ugly envelope.

At our team meetings, everyone who sat around the table was expected to generously pipe in at the appropriate moment with suggestions based on our area of expertise. One person wasn't supposed to have all the answers. Each of us were that answer.

Driven to release a new product had the net effect of wiping out years of in-bred hierarchical instinct and replacing it, or at least advancing the notion that collaboration, proven by many managerial theorists whose work had been adopted overseas in countries like Japan, was an alternate way of organizing the workforce.

For roughly five years, from 1995 to 2000, collaboration became a new craze, motivated by profit itself and not by the desire of some soft-hearted sixties refugee like myself who yearned for a more humane way of working.

So what if there wasn't a sound business plan developed by a person who understood a profit and loss sheet? That was a mere detail. So what if venture capitalists were unable to recoup their initial investment? Something more was at stake.

Although the dot.com era fizzled out in an explosion of overpriced technology stock, one thing remained clear: there was no one right answer, there was only a team.

Social networkers are that team with a model that seeks to replace the hierarchy of top-down communication.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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No Searching (or Social Networking) Tonight: Honey, I Have a Headache…

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:16:00 -0700

Don’t get me wrong. If I need to find something on the Internet, I know how to type a few keywords inside a search box.

But remember those almost bygone linear search days when all we had to do was to scan a list of blue links and select one or two or maybe three?

Even more troublesome is discovering how today’s Internet’s search engines haven’t kept up with a convergence of media across the new 2.0 Web.

Honey. Can my search engine track a rich preserve of videos, photographs, blog posts, exchanges from social networks, ratings on restaurants and other vendors? Can it then display information in one place, allow me to work with content, and in doing so, make searching on the Web more efficient?

Sure. Don’t stop indexing, classifying, and rating information. Just remove the walls that separate different kinds of media. Don’t force me to keep opening different browser windows, and then to collect responses in a file for later review.

Of course, maybe if I’m checking the spelling of a city in Wisconsin, or the name of an album by Nina Simone, I’m in good shape. Fact search.

But what if I want to find someone whom I met at a recent comic book convention in Green Bay with a really strong opinion about the type of skateboard I should buy? Or if I want to find a local Nina Simone buff who would help organize a fundraiser for a musician, a friend of a friend’s, who played with Nina for 20 years and now is sick without medical coverage?

The Web is no longer just about fact-finding. It’s becoming a way to create community across mutual interests.

Remember how President Obama’s campaign brought Twitter to national attention as he built a constituency in 140-character length messages? Then there’s Facebook, a service that college students introduced to their parents as a way of keeping in touch during semesters. Today’s unemployed professionals have discovered LinkedIn as a way of finding business contacts. And YouTube is a repository of video clips spanning past and present.

Instead of blue hyperlinks, revolutionary in their own time, I now want to search for community, find a variety of opinions, and to offer my own. I want to personalize that experience so that everything looks and feels like home.

Variety, customization, socialization and feedback are the new hallmarks of the Web. In the last five years or so, the Web has spawned a new generation of technologies, together called social media or social networking tools.

So I’m thinking, isn’t it time for a new breed of search engine, which lets me view and work within a diverse media map of my own content?

Once I enter a keyword, I want to see related information, including text, photos, video, reviews, recommendations, and even exchanges from my virtual world (if I have one).

Allow me to copy and paste information seamlessly into different accounts. Identify me through a photograph or avatar of my choice.

The Web is no longer just about links. It’s about building relationships. I want my search engine to work the same way.

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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Get Your Twitter On With Social Networking Tools

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:42:00 -0700

Find your customers and fish where the fish are, advised panelists at the first Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals, Silicon Valley (ASAPSV) program event of the year, held September 30 at the Cisco campus in San Jose. Next bait the hook with social media, and keep your message immersed in the conversation.

Speakers agreed that we are living in a time where the Conversational Era, a revolution whose direction is being shaped by its participants, is replacing the Broadcast Era.

Rajesh Setty, entrepreneur, author, and speaker, shared pictographs about the Twitter experience of “buzzability.” At one end of the spectrum is chatter and at the other is information that has immediate and future relevance and also brands its sender as a contributing node.

Next up to bat was Tim Bailey, founder and president of Alliance-Strategies, Inc., who urged business leaders that in building relationships, to check LinkedIn for company profiles, and not to miss the names of current employees, the recently promoted, and the recently moved on. He also urged the audience to have a “PowerPoint strategy” of their own goals. Know your bullet points.

Introducing the next group of presenters was Norys Trevino from Cisco, a Collaboration Solutions Manager in the CA Web Strategy & Collaboration Solutions Team and Y-Space coach. Cisco is now primarily using WebEx for collaboration and Web-conferencing, she said. Email is passé.

The Y-Space team describes themselves on Twitter as “A Team of Generation Y employees…who contribute to an internal concept blog and are passionate about changing the way business is done through Web 2.0 tools.”

Trevino explained how the Y-Space team are “reverse-mentoring” some of Cisco’s senior leadership on the use of social media tools. Did you know that the number of members of Facebook now represent the fourth largest country in the world? Neither did I.

Jennifer Vessels, CEO of Next Step, rounded off the evening with a call not to be overwhelmed. “How many people feel that they can’t find the time for the collaborative social media world? Let’s not just add social media,” she said, “but shift the way we interact.” She said that most members of Generation Y have already set up their community before the first kick-off meeting.

Director of Global Services Channel at Cisco Systems, Raja Sundaram referred to Comcast’s presence on Twitter. Twitter has allowed the company to support customers at lower cost while yielding higher rates of success.

Here are a few resources to help you move through the social networking world:

Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel.
BaseCamp, free collaborative tool to share calendars, files, action items (for those who don’t have a WebEx budget)
PartnerPedia, free online community that can host within your own company’s network

Next meeting of ASAPSV is October 28, 495 East Jave Drive in Sunnyvale. Networking begins at 5:30pm. “The Impact of Alliances on Cloud Computing.”

Lenore Weiss
http://techtabletalk.posterous.com/

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