Aarron Walter

Jason Calacanis put on a hell of a conference this past week in San Francisco. LAUNCH gave a series of startups the opportunity to demo their products to a panel of expert judges (including your truly), the tech press, and a crowd of industry pros. Some amazing products were presented. My favorites were Hipmunk, a mobile and web app that does travel booking the right way, and Chute, a mobile app that get’s you to “photo 0″ by facilitating photo sharing and backup to the cloud.

The final demo on the day I was judging was Domo, a mobile app that helps you find people with similar interests in your vicinity. It’s a cool idea, though perhaps not the best design execution. The presentation, however, was brilliant. You’ve got to see it to believe it.

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Last week, I had my ass handed to me by what seemed like a failing hard drive, but turned out to be a dead hard drive controller in my MacBook Pro. Luckily I had backups, but a near data loss experience can put the fear of God into you, and compels a closer consideration about how your data is managed. I ended up putting a new 240 GB SSD into a different MacBook Pro, replacing my old 500 GB hard drive that was reaching its limits of storage. If you do the math there, you’ll recognize that I was left in a quandary as to how I would store and manage my gigs and gigs of music, movies, and photos.

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If the publishing industry can deliver on the promise made by the iPad and rich media technologies, a content renaissance could be around the corner fueled by throngs of customers ready to shell out for a more compelling experience.

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Dan Benjamin – host of The Conversation podcast – talks with Christina Warren of Mashable and Nilay Patel of Engadget to discuss the issues surrounding h.264 and how the HTML5 video battles will shake out.

h.what? – The Conversation podcast

In many of my classes we use RSS readers to subscribe to a number of different content sources relating to course topics. Explaining RSS to students who are completely new to the idea is sometimes tricky. Common Craft has recently published a wonderful video explanation of RSS, and how to get started consuming feeds. He doesn’t mention my favorite feed reader, though.

Watch the Video: RSS in Plain English

Carson Workshops, the creators of Think Vitamin, puts on short conferences examining hot topics in the Web world featuring a host of luminaries speaking about the various facets of their topic. They often post podcasts of each talk, and their recent The Future of Web Apps Summit is the latest in that series. Kevin Rose, Jeff Veen, and Tantek ?áelik are just a few of the big names who spoke at the recent conference, and all of this knowledge is free for your listening pleasure. The topics cover UI design, the business of building and selling your web application, development practices, APIs, and more.

You can download each talk individually or subscribe to their RSS feed to get them all at once.

CNN is reporting a story we have all heard before, but perhaps there is finally some validity to it this time. Macs have had little to worry about with viruses, Trojan horses, and the like in the past because their market share in the computer industry was small enough to avoid enticing hackers to launch attacks on their systems. Apple has seen steady increases in sales of the Mac, selling 1,610,000 Macs in the recent quarter, with many purchases being made by Windows PC users (50% of Mac sales in Apple stores was to new Mac users). Apple is becoming a bigger target for hackers as they increase their market share. Hopefully they will prove more successful with security issues than Microsoft has. Apple’s recent iPod virus blunder is, however, not encouraging.

Saturday evening was Lange Nacht der Museen here in Berlin, an annual event that opens the doors to all of the cities major cultural institutions late into the night. Special performances and events take place in and around the museums including art and music performances, poetry readings, special exhibitions, guided tours, and activities for children. For 12 euros, you can get into as many museums as you like, all of which are linked together by a bus system shuttling visitors from place to place as part of their admission fare.

The events outside the museums were every bit as engaging as what was inside. At the Gem?§ldegalerie, an impressive pyrotechnic display lured visitors from afar to the museum. Classical and contemporary music ignited the space while flamethrower devices atop the roof and around the museum shot streams of fire into the air in time. A large flamethrower array burst a massive fiery charge above the crowd at the crescendo of songs.

At Potsdamer Platz, a building facade was transformed into a screen displaying media art works. Giant florescent bulbs in circular and linear shapes serve as massive pixels of the display. I stood mesmerized by the imagery for some time.

A highlight of the evening for me was an installation by Cai Guo-Qiang entitled Head On at the Deutsche Guggenheim. A large drawing of swirling dust and silhouettes of wolves begins the piece. In front of it stands a lone, snarling wolf, poised to spring forward into a large pack of wolves running, and leaping in an arch above the ground, ultimately crashing into a glass wall. Each wolf is quite carefully crafted with what appears to be real fur. The piece captures the motion of the pack suspending dozens of wolves in mid air until their bizarre demise at the wall.

Last Friday I visited the hallowed ground of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland where Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in the early 1990′s as a means of sharing the research of the many scientists and engineers there. Berners-Lee, in the CERN spirit of open exchange of ideas,
opted not to file a patent on his creation, but rather released the WWW into the public domain, which has allowed it to grow into the history changing medium it is today. Ironically, this free exchange has opponents today that jeopardize the future of the WWW. Berners-Lee also originally defined HTML, created the first web server, the first web site, the first web browser, and established the World Wide Web Consortium that guides the development of the WWW still today. Berners-Lee left CERN years ago and now works full time as the head of the W3C. His pet project is the semantic web, a project that has the potential to revolutionize the way we and our computers interact with our data.

For me the visit to CERN was a pilgrimage to the most significant place of my medium. Just setting foot on the location where it all began made me giddy as a schoolgirl. The artifacts of this significant achievement are not as visible as I had hoped, however. The primary focus of our visit was the amazing nuclear research that is happening at CERN. The facility boasts the largest particle accelerator on the planet, some 45 kilometers in circumference crossing the boarder between Switzerland and France. A particle accelerator speeds up protons to nearly the speed of light using electro-magnetic pulses that propel them faster and faster. Large groups race towards one another until meeting in a giant crash that breaks these tiny atomic particles into even smaller particles such as quarks and various other subatomic elements that are not yet understood. The crashes, which occur every 3 hours, take place in a collector that can map he explosion and the properties of the particles using massive super-computer clusters networked around the world. The data gathered allows physicists to understand the microcosm of elements that make up our universe, which can lead to a clearer understanding of how the universe began, how it works, and even provide advanced medical treatments for cancer. All research done at CERN is published to the public freely, none of which has military applications.

CERN has a number of collectors where they monitor these subatomic explosions, but they are currently working on a rather advanced one called Atlas, which we were lucky enough to see first hand. We were bused to their largest particle accelerator, where we dawned red hard hats before descending 100 meters into the belly of the beast. Descriptions of Atlas will not do it justice, but let me say the complexity and scale are astounding. It really should be classified as one the man-made wonders of the world! Hosts of engineers from around the world climbed and repelled off the giant collector taking measurements, bolting on new parts, and fine tuning their creation. The projected completion date seemed to be a running joke, as the deadline has slipped into the future on more than one occasion. Their hope is that they will be observing proton collisions at the end of the year. The scale of Atlas is immense, and perhaps can best be understood from this video.

As an Apple fan boy I was amused to see that CERN loves the Mac. 90% of the computers scientists were working on (even the receptionists) were Macs. I passed many office doors with Mac stickers.

Check off one item on my list of things I must do in my lifetime!