Technologizer posts about Conferences

Why Tech Conferences are Now the Worst Place to Demo Tech Products

More and more, they mostly demonstrate that wireless Internet access isn't very reliable.

By  |  Posted at 4:51 pm on Tuesday, July 13, 2010

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Back in May, I attended Google’s I|O conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It was an eminently worthwhile event, but wireless connectivity issues were a persistent problem–demos during both of the show’s keynotes were messed up by the difficulty of establishing a reliable connection in a room packed with geeks brandishing smartphones, notebooks., and MiFis.

A few weeks later, Apple’s WWDC convened in the same conference hall. Nobody knows how to orchestrate a demo like Steve Jobs, but when he attempted to show off the iPhone 4, he couldn’t get Safari to load Web pages. The poor guy was reduced to pleading with attendees to shut down their Wi-Fi and said there were 527 MiFi-type wireless routers in the room.

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E3 in Images

By  |  Posted at 10:31 am on Monday, June 21, 2010

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Jared Newman, Technologizer’s intrepid gaming correspondent, spent much of last week at the E3 conference in LA. He cranked out some great stories. And now he’s shared some of his photos from the huge, exciting, weird, and occasionally disturbing bash in a slideshow. Here’s “E3 in Photos: Blood, Sweat, and Hardware.”



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Wi-Fi expert Glenn Fleishman on the severe troubles Steve Jobs had with his WWDC keynote of the iPhone 4: They may have stemmed from both congestion caused by too many Wi-Fi networks in the room (as Jobs concluded) and buggy iPhone 4 software (unmentioned by him).

Posted by Harry at 9:40 pm

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You weren’t in San Francisco yesterday for Apple’s iPhone 4 re-unveiling? Here’s the Webcast.

Posted by Harry at 10:49 am

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Rating Your Apple WWDC 2010 Predictions

By  |  Posted at 9:26 pm on Monday, June 7, 2010

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Another Apple WWDC keynote has come and gone. (Here’s a transcript of our live coverage.) As usual, I cleverly avoided making any predictions of my own–if you don’t predict, you can’t be wrong–and instead invited you to participate in a survey which formed the basis of collective Technologizer predictions.

Hundreds of you took the bait. And you were right a lot more often than you were wrong–including on one point where I felt positive you’d be proven incorrect this morning.

After the jump, your predictions and today’s upshot.

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Apple WWDC Keynote Live Coverage

By  |  Posted at 9:21 am on Monday, June 7, 2010

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I’m at Moscone! Join me a bit before 10am and we’ll learn the news together.



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Tomorrow’s Apple News Today: Your WWDC Predictions

By  |  Posted at 9:47 am on Sunday, June 6, 2010

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Twenty-four hours from now, I’ll be standing in the hallway outside the Moscone West auditorium in San Francisco, a half hour from the Steve Jobs WWDC keynote which I’ll liveblog at technologizer.com/wwdc2010. A couple of hours after that, we’ll know all the Apple news there is to know.

So here’s our traditional final jag of predictions: Yours, in the form of results from our survey.

As usual, I’m aggregating your collective wisdom into group predictions. On questions for which you were allowed multiple answers, it’s a prediction if the majority of you guessed that something will happen. On ones for which you were allowed only one answer, it’s a prediction if a plurality of you expect something.

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Name That iPhone

By  |  Posted at 9:00 am on Sunday, June 6, 2010

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I’m compiling the results of our Apple WWDC predictosurvey and will reveal ‘em soon. But it just dawned on me that I should have asked you to guess what the name of the new iPhone–assuming there is one–will be.

So here’s a special election–could you please participate?

Thanks very much…



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Apple WWDC 2010: Come Predict With Me

By  |  Posted at 6:14 pm on Friday, June 4, 2010

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On Monday at 10am PT or thereabouts, Steve Jobs will take the stage at Apple’s WWDC 2010 conference and announce something. Maybe several somethings–including, just possibly, a new iPhone. I’ll be in the audience providing moment-by-moment live blog coverage at technologizer.com/wwdc2010, and hope you’ll stop by.

In the meantime, how about some predictions? Not by me–by you. Click here to take our short multiple-choice predictosurvey. [UPDATE: survey closed--thanks, everyone!] Before the keynote, I’ll publish your collective wisdom on what we’re likely to see. And then after Jobs has been heard from, I’ll revisit your guess to see how we did.

We tried this experiment at last year’s WWDC, and you guys made more accurate predictions than some big-deal pundits did. I have this weird feeling that you might find it even easier this year to figure out what’s in store, but let’s see…



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Join Me on Monday for Live Coverage of Apple’s WWDC Keynote

By  |  Posted at 1:59 pm on Wednesday, June 2, 2010

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The pessimistic gadget freak would expect that next Monday’s keynote at Apple’s WWDC won’t be exactly spine-tingling–chances are that it will center on an iPhone which we already seem to know quite a bit about. But an optimist–like, for instance, me–would be inclined to hold out hope that surprises remain. (I’d be willing to settle for small ones, although a shocker or two would also be welcome.)

Either way, I’ll be sitting in San Francisco’s Moscone Center watching events unfold, and I’ll be reporting them at technologizer.com/wwdc2010 as they happen, starting at 10am San Francisco time. Comments from the Technologizer community are part of the fun, so I hope you’ll be there…



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Steve Jobs at D: The Headlines

By  |  Posted at 9:01 pm on Tuesday, June 1, 2010

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I wasn’t in the audience for Steve Jobs’ appearance at the Wall Street Journal’s D conference this evening. I wasn’t even following along at home–I was having fun being part of a panel on social media for business in Palo Alto. So once my panel and subsequent hobnobbing were over, I hopped online to see what Jobs had to say–and even more than usual, the headlines on Techmeme neatly summarized the news.

You could read all these stories, but even if you didn’t, you’d get the gist of the Jobs interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher:



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Apple has finally announced its WWDC developer event–it’s taking place June 7th through 11th in San Francisco. If 2010 is anything like 2008 and 2009, there’s therefore a very good chance that the new iPhone (this one?) will be unveiled at a keynote on the morning of June 7th.

Posted by Harry at 8:26 am

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Twitter’s Big News Day

By  |  Posted at 1:53 pm on Wednesday, April 14, 2010

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I’m at Twitter’s Chirp conference at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, in an auditorium crammed to the rafters with Twitter developers and other interested parties. The mood seems slightly subdued–maybe folks are concerned over Twitter’s encroachment into areas traditionally left to third-party companies–but there’s lots of news. Such as…

The Library of Congress is archiving every tweet ever tweeted. As much as I love Twitter, my impulse was to be jokey and dimissive–”what’s next, YouTube comments?”–but as I think it over, I’m glad it’s doing so. There’s an awful lot of our digital heritage that’s already gone, and it’s better to err on the side of saving everything than to let interesting stuff (like the most significant tweets) slip away. (The announcement doesn’t, however, explain precisely how people will be able to get access to these tweets, or find the ones that anyone will care about in, say, 2047.)

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Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

By  |  Posted at 12:48 pm on Sunday, April 11, 2010

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Must be a quiet weekend in the blogosphere: One of the major topics of discussion is how Apple chooses the times shown in stock images of its products–which happen to be 9:41am in photos of the iPad and 9:42am in ones of the iPhone 3GS.

As Network World and Fast Company noticed, Secret Lab developer Jon Manning blogged that he ran into iPhone software honcho Scott Forstall at the Palo Alto Apple Store, and Forstall said that the times are chosen to sync as closely as possible with the moment in Apple press events when the product is shown for the first time:

We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation. When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience’s watches. But we know we won’t hit 40 minutes exactly…for the iPhone, we made it 42 minutes. It turned out we were pretty accurate with that estimate, so for the iPad, we made it 41 minutes. And there you are – the secret of the magic time.

Mystery solved! What revealing proof of Apple’s perfectionism! Betcha that Microsoft doesn’t sweat details like that!

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C3′s Amazing 3D Cities

By  |  Posted at 3:14 pm on Wednesday, March 31, 2010

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I’m at O’Reilly Media’s Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. It’s a crowded and exciting confab on one of the hottest topics in tech: location-aware applications and services. There are a bunch of interesting demos going on, but the one that’s really knocked my socks off so far is one I’m watching right now, by a Swedish company called C3 Technologies. Mapping applications such as Google Earth include some painstakingly handcrafted 3D models of buildings, but C3 uses photos taken from aircraft to capture entire cities–buildings, trees, everything–and recreate them as photorealistic 3D models. We’re swooping through London, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and other locales, and it’s just stunning.

This video isn’t new, but it gives you a taste of what C3 does:

C3 says that its technologies requires no human intervention and can recreate an entire city in weeks. The company has recreated fifty cities to date. I can’t wait until stuff like this shows up in mapping programs, on GPS handhelds…everywhere there’s geography. Amazing stuff.



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