Category: General

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Ignite Seattle – Mission Control

Photo by by Randy Stewart.

I’ve posted my pix from last night’s Ignite Seattle event.

Ignite Seattle is a tech geek meetup held semi-irregularly that brings out some of the best and brightest in the Puget Sound region.

Had a great time and hope the next one isn’t so far off in the future. Wish my pix were better, but I’m still new at this whole photography thing.

Here is a link to the photos on Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewtopia/

I seem to keep falling off of my Stewtopia blog. I’ve been spending a lot of my time working on Boxbe’s blog, prettying up the UI and talking about recent improvements such as Gmail integration, I’ve been pretty busy.

I tend to build up a lot of pressure in my head about blogging. “Oooh, I really need to blog about SXSW” or “I need to give a shout out to all the folks I met last weekend,” are thoughts that go through my head, but often I feel like my drafts are never done.

I’m just getting back on the bike today folks. It might not be great, but here I am.

Photo by Flickr member Omar Junior

Sorry, faithful readers for my long departure. I’ve been buried under a few projects. Hopefully, I will be posting more regularly very soon.

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.

There were a lot of good speakers and 5 minute presentations at last night’s Ignite Seattle, but one that stuck with me in particular was Jonah Burke’s Darfur Wall project.

From O’Reilly Radar:

Jonah Burke left Microsoft to found the The Darfur Wall with his father and brother a couple of weeks ago. If you’re not aware Darfur is in a crisis. The Burkes have created a novel website for collecting money. There are 400,000 subdued numbers on the site; each time a dollar is donated a new number is lit. All of the monies go to Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and others. In just 21 days, they have raised $5052 from 445 donors. Buying a number is fast and easy; consider it. (Blog).

When I look for donations to make during the holiday season, I always try to look for both local and global causes. In some ways, this accomplishes both. Helping someone locally who is trying to affect change globally seems like a perfect mix.

Jonah – I didn’t get to meet you last night, but I really appreciate the work you are doing to help this troubled region.

Contribute

I was talking this weekend at MindCamp about products needing to be remarkable to make headway in a crowded market. Remarkable in the literal sense of the word, like Seth Godin’s Purple Cow.

Farecast, the flight price prediction engine, announced today that they are testing a new insurance product called Fare Guard. The idea is that you lock in a price for a flight for one week (for a fee) and if the price goes up, Farecast pays you the difference.

Farecast is an interesting product. I love data and trends like the next guy. A lot of what Farecast is modeling is stuff that I’d read in Peter Greenburg’s Travel Detective book, although most of his advice was anecdotal. Farecast took that advice and backed it up with tons of data.

With Fare Guard, Farecast becomes a remarkable product. For Farecast to put their money where their mouth is adds a lot of validity behind their claim of prediction accuracy. Additionally, they are creating a new revenue streams by adding this insurance option.

Even if few people take them up on the offer of insurance, Farecast seems more reliable than ever. Now, if we could just talk Yahoo! Maps and Zillow into doing this, that would be truly remarkable.

Read

[via TechCrunch]

Photo by by OmegaStation.

Or at least their repair facility. Some clever person decided to write an Automator script to take pictures when the lid was opened next, which was deep into Apple’s repair facility.

I love the internet some days.

[via TUAW]