Month: February 2007

Categories
Blogging Conferences Cool Tools Northern Voice 2007 Software

Mac blogger toolkit – Northern Voice 2007

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CBC columnist and Mac geek, Tod Maffin ran another great session at Moosecamp around favorite productivity tools. Below are my favorites from the session.

  • ImageWell – Swiss Army knife for images (free)
  • Paparazzi – takes screenshots of full web pages.
  • TextExpander – condenses messages, phrases or code that you might reuse all the time into short keystrokes.
  • VoodooPad – wiki for your Mac. BEST NOTEPAD EVER!
  • Synergy – software for using one keyboard and mouse with two computers (and screens). Kind of like a KVM…
  • Hazel – best maid for cleaning up your Mac.
  • BrowserShots.org – test web designs on 31 different browser platforms.
  • QuickSilver – I’m hoping I’ll get this one day, but for now, I’ll point it out to all all of you

More tools

Audio of the session

image by Flickr user katiew
Categories
Conferences Digital Cameras

PhotoCamp at Northern Voice

Kris Krug, photographer extraordinaire, organized a conference within a unconference within a conference at this year’s Northern Voice. He collected an exceptional panel of other photogs and tech geeks.

High end consumer cameras

Tim Bray did a talk on high end compact cameras. Made me think about using the G3 again. It does shoot in RAW and it has the intervolator. I wonder if the G6 has that? If you are looking for a new camera, Tim posted his talk at the here.

Tim’s talk brought up some points that I’m always thinking about: I love my Canon Rebel, but there are serious costs to bringing it with me all the time. It takes beautiful pictures, but it’s big and bulky. The vast majority of the photos that I take are on my Canon SD450. Maybe I could learn to use it a bit better…

Color Profile Love

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A huge THANK YOU to Matt Trent at UBC for teaching me in 10 minutes everything I needed to know about color profiles in Photoshop. I sat through an hour at a Macworld session years ago from someone who worked at Adobe and I didn’t get it. Now, I think I’ve got all I need to know.

The secret – if you work on a Mac and are posting photos online work with Adobe SRGB. Why? Safari reads numerous color profiles, but almost no other browser does. The color profile is smaller than Adobe RGB, but it is the lowest common denominator, thus will look the same on most browsers.

Hopefully, next year I’ll get to see your lab and work in HDR.

Matt Trent’s Moosecamp Presentation

Adobe Lightroom

Roland Tanglao led a session about Adobe Lightroom, which looks a lot like if iPhoto and Adobe Bridge had a kid. Oh, and apparently, in the photo world, black is the new white.

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Lots of good features here, but not enough to pull me into another app. One interesting thing, though, it looked like Roland was running an older G4 laptop, but Lightroom really seemed to fly. If you’re looking for something a little more robust than iPhoto, Lightroom might be for you.

Thanks everyone for such an informative session! Look forward to seeing you next year.

Categories
Conferences Northern Voice 2007

Pix from Northern Voice

400545822_59342ffc0f_m.jpgChris Heuer, Social Media Club founder and all-around nice guy, has a great set of pictures up on Flickr from the conference so far.

Check them out here.

All Northern Voice photos on Flickr are here.

Photo by (or at least in his feed) Chris Heuer
Categories
Geek Fun Social Media Social Media Marketing

Ziki ad follow up

ziki logo.jpgSo first off, if you haven’t used Google Adwords, I highly recommend it. Besides being a great user experience, you can learn quite a bit about search terms that you might be interested in.

To feed the ego, I now have a sense of how many people are searching for ‘Randy Stewart‘ on Google over the last month. I didn’t realize that Google showed this data, but I guess it makes sense to know what you are paying for.

So, Ziki…. how much are they paying for my name? Well, I’m not an SEM specialist, but given that I have the third position when you do a search on my name and I know how much I pay when someone clicks, I’m imagining that Ziki is paying slightly less than I am.

How much am I paying, let’s just say 6x the copper version of Abraham Lincoln. I’m still interested in what Ziki is doing and I think it’s a really smart marketing campaign. They haven’t reached their 10k goal in signups just yet, so there is still an opportunity to get in on their campaign.

Categories
Conferences Northern Voice 2007 Social Media

Northern Voice this weekend

So, given how blog lazy I’ve been lately, I’m a little embarrassed to go to a blogging conference this weekend, but nevertheless, there I’ll be going. Hell, I guess any excuse to get back to the beautiful city of Vancouver is good enough for me.

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If you are at Northern Voice this weekend, drop me a line and say hi. I’m the guy that’s going to be catching up on a long list of blog ideas so I don’t feel lame.

Look forward to meeting you all.

Categories
Boxbe

First Boxbe board meeting



candies in quarantine

Photo by by Esthr.


Looks like I missed a Happy V-Day around the Boxbe office. From left to right – Esther Dyson, Steve Jurvetson, Thede Loder, and Corbett Barr.

Categories
Boxbe Social Media

Boxbe Blog is live

I’m excited to announce the launch of one of the projects I’ve been working on lately, the Boxbe blog. Boxbe, as you might remember is the market based spam solution I mentioned a few months back. We’re still figuring out all the ins and outs, so the blog is a little slow going right now, but we should be picking up post-wise in the not-to-distant-future.

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Boxbe solves a couple of very real pain points for me.

First, as someone who wants to have conversations with readers and potential new clients, obfuscating my email in any way is a bad idea. I want people to be able to email me easily and Boxbe helps me do that.

Second, while the word ‘spam’ is loaded (one man’s spam is another man’s canned meat), certain kinds of emailers (Viagra, Vioxx, penny stocks, etc) will never pay one red cent to reach me, so those kinds of email are dead to me. Forever. Putting a small fee in the way of spammers pretty much removes them from the conversation as their business model is predicated on free email.

Anyhow, the service is a little rough right now, but it’s being improved on a daily basis and I expect to see a lot of updates to functionality and usability real soon now.

If you’d like to reach me, send email to randy@boxbe.com

Boxbe Blog

Categories
Building Community Conferences Links

10 tips for meeting people at industry events

My friend Andrew Chen has posted his thoughts on meeting people at conferences. Great list if you are in the mood to meet folks in your industry. Here are a few of the points:

  1. Use pre-conference time wisely
  2. Arrive early for some 1:1 time
  3. Sit next to interesting people, and introduce yourself
  4. Bring business cards, and ask for business cards

Some of these things might appear dead obvious, but you would be surprised how many people don’t follow them. Fact is, even if you are shy about meeting folks, other people are as well. Keep in mind, the main reason why people attend these events is to meet people.

Andrew, btw, just moved to Silicon Valley from Seattle. He’s an Entrepreneur in Residence at the VC firm, Mohr Davidow Ventures on Sand Hill Road. Sounds like a dream job to me! If you’re looking to get a company off the ground or join a startup, he might just be the guy to talk to.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be in Palo Alto this weekend and spending a little time in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday.

Read

Categories
Apple

Steve Jobs thinks DRM is pointless

Wow… here’s something I thought I’d never see.

Steve Jobs posted on the official Apple blog, errr, Apple’s press release area a letter entitled “Thoughts on Music.”

Basically, Steve boils it down to 3 possible futures.

1. Stay the course with DRM.
This doesn’t really work for the music companies as they still sell most of their music on unprotected CDs. DRM really only hinders the sale of music on iTunes and other players as folks don’t like being locked in.

2. Apple licenses Fairplay
This doesn’t work for the music companies because ultimately when more companies have access to the DRM, DRM becomes less effective.

3. DRM goes away.
I’m still shocked about this one. You can buy music from anyone and play it on any device. Ultimately, Apple still has the advantage here as they sell the number one player.

So, the big question is why did Steve post this?

Here are some possibilities:

  • European bans on DRM will affect Apple’s business.
  • A free market for music would help, not hinder Apple’s music business. Apple doesn’t have 100% player market share, so in theory, they could sell more music. Apple could, in theory, sell more iPods.
  • iPod battery life would increase. DRM sucks batteries dead because of the additional horsepower required.
  • DRM is a bad user experience and Steve knows it.

Ultimately, I hope this has some affect on the state of DRM and isn’t just a power play to garner consumer sympathy for Apple’s dilemma.


[via TUAW]

Categories
General

Community Next – this weekend

Sorry, faithful readers for my long departure. I’ve been buried under a few projects. Hopefully, I will be posting more regularly very soon.
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In the mean time, I’ll be attending the Community Next conference this weekend at Stanford. If you are at the conference or in the Bay Area and would like to meet up, drop me a line at randy@boxbe.com.