New hope for the not-so-geeky

Gina Schreck, Digital Immigration Officer for Synapse3Di, has been busy producing a brand new show for the not-so-tech savvy. Gettin’ Geeky features excellent primers for many of today’s mobile friendly web applications and gadgets. Gina even shows new users how to get started in Second Life.

If you feel out of touch with the rest of the geeky world, check out some of Gina’s helpful tips and tricks on ramping up your geekiness. I’m really getting into the intro music! [Daft Punk - Technologic]

There are 18 episodes of Gettin’ Geeky so far. Here are some of the topics Gina discusses.
FlipVideo – a mini portable USB video camera
Jott – capture notes, set reminders and appointments with your voice
ChaCha – find answers with your mobile device
Twitter – everyone’s favorite micro-blog site
Skype – Internet phone calls
CallBurner for recording those Skype convos.
iPhone applications
LinkedIn – Business Social Media
Facebook – Social Media
Fuser – merges email, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter functionality
Improving your professional and tech image for career management
The 4-day (almost)tech-less Survivor Challenge
Last but not least, Gina takes users on a brave new journey through Second Life and beyond!

Gettin’ Geeky on Synapse3Di

Gettin’ Geeky on Blip.tv

November 24, 2008 | Filed Under colleagues, speakers, training, videos, virtual | Leave a Comment

Multicolr drops Flickr goodness

In my search to find all things cool with the Flickr API, I ran across the MultiColr Search Lab created by Idee. MultiColr employs a super easy interface for searching Flickr photos by their color palette. I found it to be very useful for finding different color schemes and combinations.

Idee seems to be on the forefront of color technology these days. They’ve also released a tagging app that return combinations of photos and another app that allows the user to upload or point Idee to a photo and they’ll tell you what it resembles. Very cool, folks. Check it out.

October 27, 2008 | Filed Under carbonBased, web sites | Leave a Comment

Strandbeest

Truly amazing. Wind powered artificial intelligence. Designed by Dutch artist Theo Jansen, these “beests” live on the beach sand between the surf and the dunes. Once they detect either water or dry sand, they reverse direction. This “flight instinct” prevents them from drowning in the ocean or getting stuck in the sand dunes.

Nothing new, just thought I’d share.

Strandbeest.com
also…
EcoGeek

September 18, 2008 | Filed Under awesome, carbonBased | Leave a Comment

Playing with Flickr

I updated my Flickr account a couple days ago and since then I found a some decent apps that use Flickr’s API.

Tag Galaxy – A Flash-based web app. Allows you to search for a tag on Flickr, the app then overlays the photo results on a sphere. Click and drag the mouse left or right to spin the sphere. Click a photo to zoom.

Wrapr – Flickr panoramic images can be wrapped into an interactive panorama. Also available is the option to embed the interactive pano. Looks like panoramas can only be accessed through existing Flickr groups. Some are better than others.

September 6, 2008 | Filed Under carbonBased, web sites | Leave a Comment

Second Life Meet Up

Tonight, I had the opportunity to experience my first virtual meet up via the Synapse3Di conference center in Second Life. From my comfy office chair at home.

Kirk Schreck (aka Kimo Sirbu), CEO of Synapse3Di was on location at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo in Los Angeles and presented us with an interesting and captivating briefing of the expo. Gina Schreck, Digital Immigration Officer for Synapse3Di, was at her home in Littleton, CO and helped us with excellent pointers for navigating the virtual terrain and afterwards gave us a grand tour of the Synapse3Di virtual facilities they created for ‘inworld’ training, meetings and workshops.

The most fascinating thing was that Kirk (Kimo) was actually in LA at the conference center where the expo took place, getting weird looks from the security folks, no doubt, while we were all in our respective homes kicking back enjoying the presentation. Kirk mentioned that he was the last person in the facility and I’m sure the cleaning crew cared less about the latest and greatest virtual technology and more about when they could vacuum the carpet under his chair. Everyone’s got their priorities.

Second Life and other virtual worlds have been taking off as a way for corporations to have meetings with employees who can’t always be in the same location. ‘Inworld’ meetings are making more sense to corporations as they see current technology as an alternative to putting empoyees on jets to attend a meetings they could just as easily get to virtually. Having 2000 employees in the air heading to real world locations used to be a badge of honor for big corporations, but now it’s becoming a hindrance and a resource hog. There’s always a better way.

Some highlights Kirk brought to our attention during the conference via Twitter:

John Lasiter, producer of Titanic, spoke about his upcoming project with James Cameron, “Avatar“. Here’s a brief synopsis and an FAQ describing the tech used in the movie.
A Dell spokesperson focused on “social shopping” as a new virtual world initiative. Shop virtually with a friend in another country. A virtual Wists, if you will.
Quote: “The future is here now, it’s just not equally distributed.”
Microsoft is using Second Life to connect with technical audiences and to lower the cost of events.
Dr. Colin Paris from IBM addressing virtual worlds conference. Using Twitter to send questions to the stage for him to answer.
IBM has 6000 internal virtual world focused employees working daily to come up with the best uses for the platform.
My favorite: At virtual worlds conference, still amazing that presenters use PowerPoint slides with 10 bullets per slide with 8 font- can’t read anything.