Roland Tanglao's Weblog

I think Jon is onto something. Mesh sounded great (could people blog more podcasts and videoblogs of the conference please? That's it, my goal will be to make sure that Northern Voice 2007 is 100% podcasted and videoblogged at decent quality, sorry Tim but not everybody can do awesome HD video for everything) but we are missing the common Web 2.0 thread that "meshes" everything together which I think lies somewhere in open source, ubiquitous inexpensive broadband (fixed today and mobile tomorrow), RSS, people (not just white male Californians, but women, Canadians, Indians, Filipinos :-) , etc.) and "Silicon Valley everywhere" (including Vancouver in my biased opinion with great startups like sxip, Dabble DB, eqo, etc.)

FROM Jon Arnold's Blog: Mesh Conference - Final Thoughts:

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There was lots of good content and obviously some great energy. I'm sure the successes of the show were a happy mix of good planning and putting everyone together to share and feed off each other. I definitely learned a lot, but for someone who is on a steady diet of VoIP and telecom conferences like VON, Internet Telephony and Globalcomm, this is a different world in many ways. Didn't hear much talk about VoIP or podcasting or SIP - stuff like that. But that's ok - Web 2.0 is about so many things.

And that's where the challenge lies for me. A lot of great perspectives were put forward at Mesh - both from the speakers and the attendees. However, there wasn't a lot of connecting the dots - maybe by design - but I'm left with the feeling that for as much as I learned, I still don't have a sense how these things fit together.

This actually brings me back again to the Mesh logo. You can't help but be drawn into that image and the energy it seems to radiate - which is exactly what happened at the show - so, kudos for the logo designers. The energy was there alright, but like the logo, I didn't really feel that all the strands - yellow, blue, green, etc. - connected. They're oscillating around each other, and bumping into each other a lot, but never really intersecting or truly meshing into a unified form. At the end of the day, much like Earth at Creation, I'd like to see this humming mass of energy and chaos sort itself out and unravel nicely like a ball of yarn.

My conclusion is that this did not happen, and I'm concerned that for some, the conference was just a blur, like this....

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Instead of regurgitating material from big companies like Yahoo who are doing "Web 2.0 by acquisition", why not profile Canadian Web 2.0 startups like eqo, sxip and Dabble DB (at this rate the Globe and Mail will write about them in late 2007!) where the true innovation is happening? And also why do none of these Globe and Mail magazines ever talk about open source? Without open source there would be no flickr, in fact there would be almost no Web 2.0 companies. Finally, it's not right to preach at organizations that they "better wrap their heads around Web 2.0 or they will find themselves stuck in a 1999 frame of mind" when the same author advocated an 1999 style SEO strategy in the Globe's TQ just a couple of weeks of ago. The "authority" of the Globe and Mail is seriously undermined by flawed articles like this one.

FROM Backbone Magazine business technology news consumer technologies e-marketing news online.:

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In short, Web 2.0 may be a coined phrase, but it is also a way of using online tools in a creative and collaborative manner. Software and hardware developers, researchers and scientists, businesses -- especially those with an online customer base -- not-for-profit groups, and even political organizations had better wrap their heads around Web 2.0, or they will find themselves stuck in a 1999 frame of mind.

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Flickr rocks but this piece really adds no information (the time to write about how great flickr is, what great people Stewart and Caterina are and how much money they got would have been in Spring 2005 just after the acquisition not Spring 2006). Instead of concentrating on yesterday's news, the Globe and Mail Report on Small Business should be covering today's Canadian small businesses i.e. EQO, Dabble DB, etc rather than last year's small businesses like flickr.

From globeandmail.com : Exit strategy: Cashing out, staying in.:

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Thanks to Yahoos traffic, Flickr membership has quadrupled to

2.5 million, and the site has emerged as the linchpin of its new owners social-networking strategy--that is, to reposition Yahoo as a venue for people to connect and share experiences, rather than simply as a place they go to search and shop.

Because of that shift, Yahoo is closing in on Google, the do-everything juggernaut a few kilometres down the Valley. Which raises the question: Given Flickrs strategic significance, did Butterfield and Fake sell out too soon?

If they did, they dont seem to be regretting it. Money is clearly not this couples primary motivation. Instead of blowing their cash on Porsches or a sprawling manse, they rent a modest house in San Franciscos still-gentrifying Mission district. "We have a Prius for the fuel economy," he says. "And we share it."

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Downloading EQO for Mac OS X now to my Mac and to my N70. About time! More later! Still don't understand why a desktop client is needed; hope that this requirement goes away in time. Looking forward to using Skype on my N70 via EQO.

Watch my 30 second video with Dave Shea, Bill Tam, Jeff LaPorte, Bryan and Steph Rieger and posted in "real time" (takes about 10 minutes using glacially slow GPRS to transfer via Shozu) to show the use of Shozu.

I demoed Shozu (and recapped my journey from buying my grey market 7610 for my 40th birthday using my own money to using email to upload photos to Flickr, to using Hugin and Mugin (Java midlet to upload pictures to flickr developed by my friend and ace programmer, Simon Lewis) and being frustrated by the low res pictures from the 7610's crippled Java implementation of the camera APIs to uploading photos 4 at a time using Lifeblog to today's Shozu happiness!) tonight and we had a great Eqo demo and presentation from Jeff LaPorte.

And I am giving out Shozu swag like tshirts courtesy of the fine folks at Shozu (and I have no affiliation with them other than being a happy user of their stuff! See you there! Bring your mobile and I can help you install Shozu after my demo!

From February Event: EQO and Shozu | MoMoVan.:

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Roland Tanglao, Co-founder and Chief Blogging Officer of Bryght, and extreme Flickr addict will demo the mobile picture sharing application Shozu.

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Here's the opening words 3 mobile words from each of the attendees from tonight's Mobile Monday Vancouver #1. It was a great grassroots meeting. Lots of great discussion. I didn't know there were 250 wireless companies in BC! Thanks to Bryan Rieger for organizing it! See you at the next meeting scheduled for Monday February 13th also at Take 5 Cafe at 429 Granville

3.4 MB MP3 (7 minutes and 19 seconds) - Recorded Monday January 9, 2006

Links to participants and 3 mobile words

1. Bryan Rieger, Yiibu,
2. Roland Tanglao, Bryght, 7610, flickr, shozu
3. John Goodall, Litefeeds, RSS, mobile, browser
4. Willie Patek (mis-spelled?), data collection systems
5. Sang Mah, Wireless Innovation Network BC, wearables, WiMax
6. John Asbacher , Inform Productions (shootedit.com), shoot, edit, lost
7. Boris Mann, Bryght, media, mobile content, openness
8. Robert Scales, Raincity Studios, RSS, podcast, i-matePDA2K
9. Monique Trottier, Raincoast Books, off the grid
10. Jeff LaPorte, Eqo fka Neltura, identiy, extend, disintermediation
11. Mark Sasso Sasszel, Petroglyph Computer Labs (sorry couldn't find a link, misspelled?), intelligent, devices
12. Michael Bidu, City Dazz Interactive, culture, people, interactivity
13. Colin Quon, Eqo, online, mobile, convergence
14. James (sorry I don't know your last name, leave a comment and I will update), embarassingly primitive phone
15. Stephanie Rieger, Yiibu, open, mobile, learning
16. Brian Niessen (sp?), Mobile Software Labs (sorry couldn't find a link, misspelled?), gaming, banking, continually connected
17. Kris Krug, Bryght
18. Duff Gardner, New Media BC and Mobile Muse, always on, on the go, context

Well OK, not the entire team. Just 1 or two of the eqo folks! Maybe we can convince the eqo (formerly known as neltura) folks to give some more details on their soon to be launched mobile internet phone service at Mobile Monday Vancouver. See you Monday January 9th at 6:30p.m. at Take 5 at 429 Granville.