Tuesday, April 15, 2003

Central Park HotZone Wi-Fi as Urban Renewal [via 802.11 Planet] Wi-Fi Clouds Over NYC Phil Belanger, marketing vice president for switch-maker Vivato, says the company is already working with members of NYCWireless to provide a cloud of Wi-Fi connectivity over the 843-acre New York City's Central Park. With 58 miles of pedestrian paths, 26,000 trees and more than 20 million visitors yearly, Belanger says the park has iconic importance to the public perception of Wi-Fi. Belanger believes four outdoor switches could blanket the park. He wouldnt offer a date when Central Park would go wireless, saying roof rights and other permissions have yet to be obtained. Belanger says people are coming out of the woodwork expressing interest in his companys Wi-Fi switching gear. Interest in the devices is coming from as far afield as the Caribbean, where island leaders are investigating the switches for providing public Wi-Fi services. But Vivato is not alone is fielding inquiries from communities interested in exploring Wi-Fi as an option for urban development. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio] There is something so symbolic in blanketing Central Park in wireless connectivity. I think TonyG's point of WiFi cell phones could be closer than we think. 11:43:57 AM

Disney Wastes No Time in Capitalizing on Iraqs Newfound Democracy and Commercialism Courtesy of Viralmeister [Adrants] Almost funny. 11:33:45 AM

Re-code.com * We in no way endorse the theft of products or services. Re-code.com was created as satire. We intend only to make aware the prevelance of barcodes and begin a critical discussion about what their pervasiveness means. This is not a product designed to be used in any malicious or illegal manner. Any such use is strictly prohibited. You should not use any of the barcodes available from this site for any illegal activity. They are here for your amusement only. Funny! Basically, it shows the concept of creating your own UPC bar code stickers to place on top of the bar codes printed on consumer goods packaging, in a "name your own price" priceline.com type parody. The video is a nice touch! 11:28:20 AM

SARS could be biological weapon: experts ABC News: SARS could be biological weapon: experts Russian infectious disease experts say Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) may be a man-made biological weapon. [...] The virus, according to Academy of Medicine member Sergei Kolesnikov, is a cocktail of mumps and measles, whose mix could never appear in nature. "We can only get that in a laboratory," he told a conference in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, quoted by RIA Novosti news agency. It may have spread because of an "accidental leak" from a lab, he said. Via Ben Hammersley [Joi Ito's Web] Our deepest, darkest fears are now vocalized. 11:21:33 AM

PowerPoint: Just Don't Unimpress Us When we see presentations (needless to say, a daily occurence), we are looking for a many things: a good idea and a team that can convince us of its ability to execute on the idea; an interestingly big market; a hard technical problem and the right engineers to solve it; a nice revenue model with a defendable sales channel. We are not looking for brilliance in PowerPoint design. The job of your PowerPoint slides is to not unimpress us. I'll give it to you in engineer-speak: if there is a chart where the X-axis is time spent on your PowerPoint and the Y-axis is amount we will be impressed by your PowerPoint, then the curve asymptotes at adequate. You can never impress us with your PowerPoint presentation building skills, you can only do damage to your message. I give it to you in engineer-speak because it's actually marketing and sales guys who tend to get cute with wipes and builds and whizzy animation. I'm hoping that the engineers in start-ups will now do a better job of telling these sales and marketing guys to spend more time thinking about channel development and product positioning and less on building slides. Presentations by all engineer teams tend to be utilitarian and simple but effective. And that's really all we want to see. [VentureBlog] This was a lesson I learned early on in my PT days. Keep the presentations simple, stupid. I see the same thing over and over again in my UoPhx studies. Various learning teams submit PP slides with all sorts of horrid animations and transitions, and they look like crap. Focus more on the content and less on the glitz, and you might actually learn something! 11:09:34 AM