Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
- HackTO
The first time I attended a hackathon it was in Silicon Valley and I totally fell in love with the idea of getting together with a group of people with limited resources (a laptop, skills and an internet connection), an API and the desire to create an application. Felt pretty similar to what any startup does in its startup days! So when Corey and I talked about a hackathon being held in Toronto, for local developers to work with local APIs, well you know what happened next: HackTO was born.I am very excited to announce HackTO. The idea behind HackTO is to have a series of APIs made available by local startups. And connect these APIs with local developers to build – in a day – amazing applications.
We are still working out all the details – much planning ahead – but here are the basics:
- DATE: Saturday May 15. This is an all day hackhaton. We will be providing breakfast and lunch.
- LOCATION: TBD. We are still working out the location details. It will be downtown.
- AVAILABLE APIs: Freshbooks, Idée, PostRank, CanPages + more. We will be announcing additions to these APIs in the coming days.
- SIGNUP: Sign up is currently open, there is a $10 fee for registration.
- JUDGING AND PRIZES: We are working on awesome prizes for the best applications developed during the hackhaton. Stay tuned for details.
If you’re with a technology company or startup you think ought to be involved, get in touch lboujnane (at) ideeinc.com or just say hi or ask questions.
- Playing with legos
I am a big fan of Swedish professor Hans Rosling. Here he is playing with legos and explaining population growth:
You can catch most of his videos here, of particular interest:
Asia’s rise, how and when
TED and Reddit’s 10 questions. Most of Hans Rosling’s videos are archived on the new GapMinder website.
- Top 5 tech companies by market capitalization for the decade
Always great to have a visual – Silicon Alley Insider
- Gameness, vaccines, turtles, life and startups
On Offensive Play by Malcom Gladwell in the New Yorker [...] those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff.
Does the vaccine matter? The Atlantic
The women agenda: NYT reader submitted photographs from around the world illustrating the importance of educating girls. Some great shots!
From Science Friday: Michael Musnick is a citizen scientist who studies wood turtles in the Great Swamp — a stretch of wetland about 60 miles north of New York City. He found turtles dying in the railroad tracks and proposed a solution to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority: tiny turtle bridges.
There are close to 1.7 billion Internet users in the world. The network by the numbers.
Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in the slums of Nairobi, then Caracas, Mumdai and Jakarta. His Foreign Policy photo essay is enlightening!
Best young entrepreneurs of 2009 from BusinessWeek and yes the list includes women!
Interview with Ken Segall, the man who named the iMac and wrote Think Different.
- You stop moving and you die.
[...] web software is like a shark. You stop moving and you die.
- Visualizing the Petabyte Age
Mozy has an awesome poster about data. It is all about the data.
and their poster is so awesome, they should consider printing it! I would get one!
- The next copyright battle
A big part of the reason for changing copyright law in 1909 was the fear that player pianos would destroy the market for sheet music and even (potentially) live performances. So the law was changed… but the player piano soon died. But the copyright law it gave us stuck around. When radio came about, we got changes to copyright law to deal with that. When the internet came about, we got the DMCA. So what’s next? Perhaps the internet’s new big buzzword: “the real-time web.”
- Buck the trend!
Communitech’s Tech Leadership Conference is taking place on Thursday May 14 in Waterloo featuring:
- Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur, agent of change – All Marketers are Liars! , Invisible or Remarkable
- Jeremy Gutsche, founder, Trendhunter
- Paul Kedrosky, author, Infectious Greed, on The New Normal
and a lot of great speakers.
- It is personal
That would be the user generated content conference in February 2009 in California. I will be speaking at the conference and I am looking forward to it. I am surrounded by user generated content: open source software in the software space, wikipedia, flickr and creative commons, ThinkBig, just to name a few. I am looking forward to meeting some of the other speakers and putting together a kick ass presentation.I am obsessed these days with search, particularly searching user generated content. You can’t use what you can’t find. I know that everyone else is more concerned about trust and accuracy: like in can you trust what you are reading and is it accurate. Search will find the accuracies and inaccuracies all the same! Searching photographs is particularly painful since we typically rely on keywords to be associated with images to find them. It is a starting point but it is limiting. Large scale image searching on the web is still in its infancy. We have seen a lot of development in the search space this year, with the introductions of visual search features, colour searching, keywords + geotags but we still have a ways to go. What I have been thinking a lot about is the creation of a world visual repository: imagine (soon) being able to take a photograph of anything and getting back (useful) information about what you photographed, via mobile devices preferrably.
How far are we from this dream? I say: not very far. Not very far. Start work on stealth project now!
Work: CEO of 
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