Remembering not to forget…or something like that

At the end of the movie When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal quips about the song Auld Lang Syne: “What does this song mean?  My whole life I don’t know what this song means.  I mean, ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot’.  Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already forgot them!?”

Well, I don’t know about the song either, but it reminds me that there are many people and experiences I’d like to remember from 2008. It’s certainly been an interesting year, with far reaching political, economic and social implications. Personally, at work, this has been another year of meeting brilliant and interesting people, learning from them, and sharing some of their technologies and ideas here. And as 2008 closes with another balmy, blue-sky day here in Los Angeles, I’m also reminded why I like living in California and that my family and I are fortunate to be here.

So, no New Year’s resolutions as such — I don’t do that anymore, but some things I’ll work toward in 2009 include becoming even more of a minimalist than I already am, traveling, making it to the ocean more often, reading more books, and right here in this blog, I’d like to:

• Write more – more often, and about more topics
• Stay away from talk of social media and Web 2.0 (unless market forces make it impossible not to)
• Look out for more emerging companies, technologies and ideas
• Talk more about emerging markets, especially the places I’ve lived in and traveled to in Africa and Asia
• Follow more smart people out there (please let me know if you’re one of them)

… Just a few things for me to ponder on December 31st, reflecting on old acquaintances and more, and looking forward to a great new year.

Happy New Year!

On building the personal brand

On the topic of building a personal brand, there’s an interesting article in the New York Times, Songs from the Heart of a Marketing Plan, that talks about the trend of artists creating music with the goal of commercial success — besides the obvious one of selling songs to fans. More than ever, as a consumer market, we’re tuned in to emerging artists and niche genres, but we’re reluctant to pay for any of it. With that reality check, artists are creating music specifically for commercial uses like television ads (eg. Apple), thereby building their own personal brands through exposure. Revenue through music sales is just icing on the cake.

Also on the topic of building the personal brand: Not a stunning revelation, but this BusinessWeek article talks about the Web’s Free-Labor Economy. I like how it succinctly describes what many of us are doing these days — spending large amounts of time working in the hopes of non-monetary incentives. For example: the free-labor model of blogging, spending hours on the Web and writing posts in an effort to build an audience, a community, a personal brand. There have certainly been notable success, but whether all of this is sustainable in the long term is another question.

A home for the holidays: Deals in SoCal

Living in Southern California, it’s easy to see the effects of the economic downtown. For starters, there are more people moving out of California than moving in. Even in upscale Pasadena, where I live, home prices are stagnating or dropping and more storefronts are sitting vacant despite the Christmas shopping season.

Overall, home prices in SoCal have dropped approximately 44% from their peak in 2007–the median price has dropped to under $300,000 for the first time in five years. For those who aren’t struggling with the reality of giving up homes, the bargainers mentality has set in–maybe there’s a good deal out there. Maybe flipping will come back in style soon, and now’s a good chance to get in on a cheap home buy. Especially in neighborhoods like Riverside and San Bernardino, there are “deals” to be had.

Of course, I’m keeping my eye on what is apparently the real deal steal now — Berkshire Hathaway stock, undervalued today at just $100,410.00 per share.

Exploring virtual worlds for the blind

Like me, you probably cringe at the mention of anything related to virtual worlds–Second Life or otherwise. But there’s a new technology we’ve just published on alphaWorks called Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind and it’s undeniably interesting.

As the name suggests, this technology allows blind users to navigate SL. But more importantly, it explores accessibility issues that visually impaired users encounter while navigating the Web, including communication and accessing various forms of content. It’s a niche technology, but the goals of this research project are far reaching.

Automatic indexing of multimedia content

Tackling the problem of dealing with large amounts of image and video data, this new technology on alphaWorks called Feature Extraction Service annotates multimedia content. It applies machine learning techniques across multiple visual features to automatically index visual content. These semantic annotations can then be used by applications for search, filtering, classification and other content management.

Created at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, this service builds on the capabilities of the IBM Multimedia Analysis and Retrieval System, also available on alphaWorks–an automated desktop indexing and multimodal search system for digital image and video collections.

A distributed federated database: GaianDB

I’m glad to see alphaWorks end the year with the launch of a technology I learned about in January at IBM’s Hursley Software Lab. Gaian Database is a dynamic distributed federated database. It was developed to provide a robust self-organizing distributed database on mobile ad-hoc networks, borrowing concepts from autonomic and grid computing, and adding many complex features. Developed as part of the USA-UK international technology alliance (ITA), this ambitious research project is worth checking out.