The car of the future?

This video of a GM prototype is very interesting. Are you ready for a car like this?

Nestle engages with anti-Nestle blogger

This is good stuff. An executive at Nestle answered back a blogger who said some harsh things about Nestle. I hope they start a blog and show us what it’s like working at Nestle and how they are working to improve their company. I usually don’t like being attacked but, on aggregate, I learn a lot more from those who don’t like me than those who do.

Nestle just became a little more human due to a letter from George. I appreciate that a senior executive is fighting for his company’s reputation! I want to do business with people like that.

As to Nestle, I haven’t met a corporation yet that is perfect and doesn’t mess with people’s lives in some way or another. The trick is to have some transparency into those decisions and some sort of dialog so that we can 1. hear why a company made an “evil” decision and 2. try to influence decision makers to make a better decision that is better for everyone.

It’s interesting, but as I looked for evil I just found people who made decisions the best they could. The pressures on you to please shareholders and boards of directors are extreme. How can we counteract those pressures, even a little bit? I think it starts with conversations. How can we work together to make the world a better place?

Unfortunately humans rarely think like that. Just witness the mess in the Middle East right now.

Softie buys Red Couch

Maryam reports that she sold the Red Couch to a guy who works at Microsoft. I think that’s fitting that it’ll end up at Microsoft.

Molly is right — speaking shouldn’t be done for free

Molly Holtzschlag (famous XHTML and Web development expert) writes that she will not speak for food anymore. I’m quickly arriving to the same conclusion. Speaking is fun and all (and good for your career — one speech I did at a Silicon Valley user group back in the mid 1990s got me a $10,000 raise. So far that one speech has made me about $100,000).

But, if you ever get to the place where everyone wants you to speak you find out another truth: traveling too much is hazardous to your health. Not to mention your business. Kelly and Tantek and I had a conversation about this last night.

When I hired speakers I always tried to at least pay their expenses. You simply got better quality speakers when you paid (and speakers didn’t feel so much pressure to pimp their services or products on stage to get paid back). But to be a big company and not even pay that is just not right.

By the way, I’m sorry if I turned down your event. But I have to work on my business right now. Hope you understand.

Priceless PR

Let’s see.

A package of aspirin from the corporate medicine cabinet. Cost? $.45.

A hand-written letter. Cost? Approximately $3 of Adam’s time.

A stamp. $.39.

Thousands of visits from around the world: priceless.

Thomas Hawk is stalking me

Last night I sauntered to San Francisco for the Valleyschwag party. While there, Thomas Hawk, talented photographer, made several photos. His work is amazing considering there was very little light. These make it look like we were in a studio, rather than munching on chicken skewers in an office.

What’s his trick? Well, he has a Canon 5D. $3,000 camera body. Then he only uses prime lenses. No zooms. Why does that matter? Well, they are fast, so he can shoot in low light without a flash. And they are usually sharper than zooms too.

Downside? When you switch lenses dust gets in and settles on the imaging sensor. He told me he has to clean his sensor at least once a week. Anyway, enjoy the photos.

Here I am with the 18-year-old software developer behind Zoomr, Kris Tate. You know he’s hot when even his competitors are singing his praises:

Here I am with Nivi, who is one smart dude. And Mike Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, my favorite “next Web” news site. I sucked up to him again last night.

In this one Tantek Celik and Kelly Goto talk with me about the downsides of traveling around the world on the conference circuit (and some deep personal stuff, along the lines of my mom’s death). Tantek is the main engineer at Technorati (he also wrote IE on the Mac) and Kelly is one of the most talented designers in the world.

Oh, and no SF geek party would be complete without Gabe Rivera, the guy who developed TechMeme. Yes, he’s wearing an “echo chamber” Hugh Macleod original shirt — I had to point to the Echo Chamber. Heheh. Irina wears the best shirts, though.

More over on Thomas Hawk’s Flickr account and Thomas’ blog.

Windows Media Photo format blogged

Lots of corporate blogging attention is on things like the new Dell blog, but here’s an example of a blog that isn’t very sexy but provides a ton of value to people who need info.

Bill Crow at Microsoft is providing a TON of information on the new Windows Media Photo format (new file format coming out with Windows Vista).

Let’s get ugly! (Design on our minds)

Ahh, remember when I said that ugly design might be good? Well, Ze Frank takes that football all the way down the field.

I love that guy.

Kathy Sierra goes even further and wonders if the US sucks at design? Well, yes, but my iPod says it was designed in Cupertino. So there!

The “river” versus “folder” RSS approach

Dave Winer has been talking about RSS aggregators again. I don’t use a River of News style aggregator. I use NewsGator which comes into Outlook. It is NOT a river of news style aggregator. But, I don’t delete either. I just read each folder and mark all as read. I like keeping the folders separate rather than all on one page. Why?

Cause sometimes I just want to read what Mike Arrington says and hell with the rest of you.

Anyway, in my aggregator when Mike publishes something new his folder turns bold. I don’t need to read it now. It doesn’t bother me that it’s bold. It’s not like email where I’m itchy to answer it. Mike doesn’t care if I don’t read his posts within 15 minutes, or even 15 days. They’ll just hang out until I visit that folder next and click “mark all as read.” That marks all the items in his folder as read until he publishes something new.

Now, where do I use a River-of-news aggregator? On the Share Your OPML site. I love that aggregator. It doesn’t make me want to get rid of my folder-by-folder approach, though.

Engadget praises Intel’s new Duo Core II

It’s funny, I’m staying at a place across the street from AMD’s headquarters (Maryam’s brother is putting us up this week — he works on the Mac team at Apple) and I can bet that AMD’s engineers are working double shifts right now cause Engadget is praising Intel’s Core 2 Duo.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the engineer’s offices.

But, that competition is great for us. New machines ahead! Based on what I hear in the office here (there’s some former semiconductor types who work at Podtech — our VCs fund a lot of semiconductor work too) they think Intel has a winner here. Looks like they found a way to beat back heat generation and use less electricity.

Why is that important? Well, look at what Google/Yahoo/Microsoft are building in Washington State: huge datacenters.

If you can reduce power consumption and heat generation by even a little bit that’ll make a big difference over the lifetime of that PC.

Update: TechMeme has more on Intel vs. AMD.

Flickr analysis tool released

Someone asked me why they should care about blogs or podcasts.

My answer: because they teach me things.

For instance, Thomas Hawk, who is a great photographer, tells me to check out Flickr Inspector. Now, Flickr is a photo sharing service. And Thomas is an expert on photo sharing services (he even works for a competitor of Flickr).

So, if he tells me something is cool in the photosharing space, I’ll believe him.

That’s why I love this media. It lets me find people who are passionate and authoritative about something and they teach me stuff.

Thanks, Thomas, nice tool!

Great geek podcast

Scott Johnson, co-founder of Feedster, has been doing a series of podcasts and I’ve been listening all morning. They are quite excellent. Among the best geek podcasts I’ve heard.

For instance, “understanding search engine issues” is useful to any business who needs to be listed on search engines like Google/Yahoo/MSN. Or, he’ll teach you how to learn PHP.

Other topics? PHP vs. Rails. Advice for startups. Really great stuff.

Cool IT search engine

IT.com is an interesting IT-focused search engine I just found. It brings up results crawled from major IT publications and other sources.

Why you should always treat your bosses well

Last night my new boss, John Furrier, met my old boss, Steve Sloan. Ahh, they compared notes.

Google sends aspirin to blogger

I’m reading RSS feeds again. I find I’m enjoying those a lot more than reading TechMeme or TailRank alone. Why? Cause you find the small stories.

Like this one where Google sends Andy Beal a bottle of aspirin.

That’s funny.

Nielsen blows it on podcasting

Oh, Jon Watson over on the BizPodcasting blog you totally nailed it. What kind of horse manure is this to compare listeners to podcasts to authors of blogging? Lame beyond belief.

And podcasting doesn’t need the false hype. We need real numbers, real research, with organizations we, and advertisers, can believe. This doesn’t help us out AT ALL.

It takes me back to when I started blogging, though. Back in 2000. I told Dori Smith that there weren’t enough blogs to do a conference session (I was helping plan the CNET Builder.com Live conference and could only find about 100 blogs back then. Dori was one of the speakers at that conference and had been pitching me to do a session on blogs) but within a week of my starting to write a blog Dave Winer had linked to me and sent more than 3,000 with just that one link. Whoa, there are more people reading blogs than are writing them! (Still true, by the way).

I need a new blog

There’s so much happening in videoblogging that I am gonna spin that stuff out to a new blog. Gotta find a new home for this kind of stuff. What kind of stuff? Well, check out “ThisCityRocks.” Focuses on the Canadian music scene. Well done and interesting to listen to and watch. Makes me want to visit Vancouver! Warwick Patterson should be invited to do a session at Northern Voice.

Google’s Mayer on privacy concerns

Interesting video linked to by Lifehacker. It is an interview with Google’s Vice President Marissa Mayer talking about privacy concerns.

More TED video: Sir Ken Robinson

I heard Sir Ken Robinson talk at MSN one day and found him to be instantly one of my favorite speakers. Now you get to hear why since TED put video of his talk up. Thanks Frederico Oliveira for reminding us of how special this talk is.

Eric Rice and me riff on the future of media

What a wacky podcast: Alex Williams put a microphone in the middle of Eric Rice and me as we riff about the future of media. Among other things. All at a party at Gnomedex.

Eric gets my creativity going. I tell lots of people I’m gonna copy everything he does. And I’m only half kidding.

More Gnomedex audio is on the Chris Pirillo Show site.