Ymogen @ MiniBar

Friday night seemed to go fine at the MiniBar. I presented a story I built on the route down to the venue (uploaded via Wi-Fi at the venue upon arrival). Take a look at the Story on the site (will only be there for a couple of weeks now) and let me know your thoughts. I could have done with 5 minutes to go through a few more interesting aspects of where Ymogen are heading but everyone will see when we Beta in the summer.

Google Street View

Rather interesting buzz going around about Google's new Street View addition to the maps, seems to be in San Francisco so far but take a look, its really interesting. I am guessing they have used a mix of GPS, a 360 camera nailed to the top of a car and driven around town and let the device automate based off certain GPS criteria ... probably with a large set of hard-drives in the car boot?

Ymogen to present at MiniBar

Just a quick note for anyone interested, friday 25th May I will be presenting on behalf of Ymogen at MiniBar. We will show a quick story built on the night (just before hopefully) and play it out as the presentation. The idea is to show how location, the immediacy of mobile and rich media can be brought together with a strong narrative to produce an interesting story. Anyway lets see how it all goes on the night as I only have a 3 minute slot to present!

MoMoLondon May

Monday saw the latest MoMoLondon hosted by Qualcomm at The Hospital in Covent Garden. I was MC for the evening and did the minimum possible due to having 8 speakers. However it felt like it all went quickly and being that I dont know a huge amount about mobile widgets was very educational. Qualcomm were very hospitable and we had some interesting mini-hot-snacks which everyone appreciated. There were some well known industry faces again this month, of which a few I think Dan Appelquist interviewed on camera after the event. It appeared most of the speakers agreed on where they saw mobile widgets going, but I think their views were a little too optomistic for the right now. Anyway, I can relax a little now that is over :)

Social networking ... or collective destruction

The blogsphere over the last 24 hours has lit up on the subject of Digg and various codes being copied around for unlocking protected DVDs. The real base of this is:

• Is this the community making the decisions on what is right or wrong, and who are they to make these decisions?
• How can the site feel confident they can moderate content and keep the trust of their user base?
  
• Is the community being dragged along on something they dont fully understand the implications of?
• If your community is producing content of a questionable nature, what can you do about it?
  

So are we really starting to see the start of the community working as a union for constructive or destructive behaviour on social networking sites? This is very relevant to me in my new role at Ymogen. If one day a user submits something that say infringes copyright, if/when we pull the article what are the consequences and who has the final say? By the look of the situation with Digg it appears that outcome has potentially damaging affect on the brand and the trust of its community. We will see if this dies down and if the bloody thirsty mob go back to being normal cizitens over the next few days. I feel this shows how people can react in a crowd and in many cases lose sight of what is reasonable. Who is in control, the site or its community? Lets face facts, Digg could well be successfully sued and put out of business, will everyone be much happier then?