imran*

My snippets from the workshops day at ETel 2007…

• Breakfast with Brady, Anish, Bruce and Serena – Brady scared be my taking me to one side, but actually wanted to introduce Carbon to Mark and Bryce at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures 🙂
• I’ve been looking forward to Sean Moss-Pulko’s segment on OpenMoko and the Neo1973 since Sean and I first talked about his participation in ETel. Sean and I have previously spoken about the contrasts between the PC and mobile industries, notably where open source can be applied to ignite innovation in mobility. interestingly,  Sean asserted that the real end-game is to move beyond both the PC and mobile paradigms to a new form of intuitive ubiquitous computing…‘where our devices learn us rather than us earning our devices’. `i explained Fingertip and Inteleme to Sean – I hope we’ll soon bring those services to OpenMoko 🙂
• Sunil Vermuri, Chief Product Officer for QTech, was one of our most valuable collaborators during my work with France Telecom R&D’s Boston office…he’s currently creating a number of services to aid memory and recall, most notably reQall a service that in essence, enables the ‘search of speech’. In the second half of this segment, Nexidia’s Drew Landham demonstrated some very impressive phonetic technologies; Ian pointed out that mee:view could employ an ASR’d audio stream to trigger contextual searches.
• Ian and I had a fascinating conversation with Sheldon Renan; he spoke extensively of his Long Bet on Moore’s Law and his emerging notions of fields of Netness as a metaphor for re-considering ubiquitous and pervasive computing with a new vocabulary – including thinking about value as virtue. I’m hoping I can help Sheldon with some of this work in the coming months. Also today, I discovered that, towards the end of 2005, Sheldon wanted to build on some of the ideas within Orange Slice and engineer a USB Flash drive that could locate the nearest host computer using a tiny onboard screen. Once attached, the user would be able to sling applications as well as media to their location 🙂
• Surj and Om Malik – a great, self-deprecating double act – introduced Launchpad, a showcase for telephony startups, including GrandCentral, Jive’s Wildfire, CellCrypt, mySay (an audio Twitter?), The Flat Planet Phone Company, mig33 and Peerant…best line, British Patelecom 🙂