Apr
23
2008
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m currently attending WWW2008. John Breslin has posted an excellent summary of the keynote speech by Google’s Kai-Fu Lee. Lee was at the centre of a law suit between Google and Microsoft over his move to Google.
But I digress.
Rather than comment on the presentations themselves, I have a few comments. First, I’m much more jet-lagged than usual. Normally after a long-haul flight, I snap into the right timezone and sleeping pattern pretty quickly. This time round, I’ve been up most of the night, and pretty wrecked during the day.
A second, slightly more interesting and relevant observation is the use of laptops at the conference. Just about everybody has one, and at any given time, the speaker is fortunate if 50% of his or her audience are actually looking at them. Surprisingly for such a large event (~1,500 attendees), the WiFi coverage has been pretty good. There are plenty of Macs in evidence, as you would expect. Mostly Pros, with a few MacBooks and Airs. The most popular Windows laptop range appears to be IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads, with Sony Vaios a close second.
There are very few Dells in evidence. If one subscribes to the view that what the alpha geeks are doing today, the rest of us (them?) will be doing tomorrow, this does not bode well for Dell.
A third and final comment is that the exhibition stands are pretty poor. The usual web-giants are represented, with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and eBay (although no Amazon, strangely). But only Microsoft look like they put any effort into their stand. The rest of them appear to be just a bunch of PCs running the vendor’s software, which everybody could do from their own laptop anyway.
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Apr
18
2008
I’m very fortunate to be attending the WWW 2008 conference in Beijing, China next week.
Among the highlights for me, from an SFI perspective, will be John Breslin and Uldis Bojars’ half day workshop entitled TP3 – Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web. Both John and Uldis are researchers in the SFI-funded Digital Enterprise Research Institute.
If you’re attending, drop me a line.
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Apr
7
2008
Apropos my last post, there’s an interview with Bertie Ahern in the Independent where he talks about his career and decision to resign. From SFI’s point of view, there’s an interesting quote:
One of the things I am particularly proud of is the work that we did in bringing Science Foundation Ireland, bringing in proper research so that we will invent products and innovations for the next generation which will keep employment strong in this country. When I took over as Taoiseach, there was no research budget, there was very little science budget, we weren’t into the area of innovation but, as Hugh Brady said in UCD, we are now a country that is strong in that area and I am glad I have been able to give the leadership in that area for the last 10 years.
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Apr
2
2008
Out of the blue, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern has just announced the date for his resignation: May 6. This seems to have caught everybody, even the media, totally by surprise. When I saw the mails flying around before his speech, I though that it was a day-late April fool’s joke.
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