brian clegg

Garrett Camp is from Calgary. He is the guy who invented StumbleUpon. I love StumbleUpon & I live in Calgary... therefore he's a bit of a hero to me.

You may or may not be interested in this interview, but there are a couple of reasons why I enjoyed it. First, his laid back attitude is something I can identify with - maybe it's a bit of the Canadian effect, but he doesn't come across like a lot of the hyper-active, self-absorbed, 22 year old assholes that you commonly come across in this industry. He's a guy you could have a beer with.

Secondly, he talks a bit about getting angel investment and start-ups (something which directly pertains to me). It's not mind-blowing advice, but reinforcement always is valuable.

Finally, I found it entertaining to watch Melanie Wells. She seems completely out of place in this interview, she was maybe going for some friendly sarcastic ribbing but Camp's affable personality just made her look a little like a condescending bitch. I'm a little unsure what Forbes would even be doing here, she seems like she would be more comfortable interviewing a dying 90 year old CEO of a dying publishing empire. She seemed genuinely shocked that someone wouldn't have a boss (someone should tell her it is fairly commonplace in the Internet industry).

I love web stats and am a bit of a Google Analytics junkie. With that said, the iPhone app 'Ego' is really all you need for a quick dashboard view of your traffic. It only gives you the website visits and pageviews, but that's all you really need at a glance. It also hooks in to your Twitter followers and feedburner accounts.

Also - you gotta love the name of the app.

Google I/O is on right now, and Eric Schmidt isn't letting Steve Jobs steal all the headlines when it comes to trashing old friends. Google made 3 major announcements that will compete directly with Apple:

• Android 2.2 with big-time Flash support
• Chrome Web Store for apps AND music (also notable the Google acquisition of Simplify Media - a music syncing service that competes with iTunes)
• Google TV (previewed below), which will come installed on new Sony TVs

In my opinion, it's great to see this competition as both companies are getting scarily huge and are dominating more and more of our daily lives. However, a lot of this is just a childish pissing match between two ego-driven CEOs. My hope is that this battle ends up being productive and will also allow for smaller players to come up and compete with some innovative products. For example, it would be great to see Apple stop giving lip-service to "open" and allow more openness within the iPhone & iPad OS. It probably won't go that way but one can dream.

Here's what Google TV looks like:

I was shown this over the weekend.

This is definitely going to change the way people in our industry do their work. Although it might not make our lives any easier. It was pointed out to me that the expectations of our clients will likely become completely unrealistic. If you haven't seen Clients From Hell, check it out to see how bad it already is.

Designing a user interface can be a huge challenge. On top of the intuitiveness, readability, accessibility and aesthetic issues, often it is a matter of getting an endless number of components in to a very limited space while keeping enough empty space remaining so you can think.

It is very interesting to see innovation like this in architecture.

This infographic is a little misleading, but gives you an idea of what developers are using to build & test web sites. No big surprises here, but I bet Chrome becomes a bit more popular with this crowd in a year or two.

Full report here (PDF).

I'll post more on this later, but there are some big moves happening in the location space. What is discussed during this TED presentation is not live yet (to my knowledge), yet it is really only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how technology companies will be mixing mapping & location services with both virtual and real world applications.

This video demonstrates some of what is possible with mapping technologies today (mostly in the realm of augmented reality) - later today or tomorrow I will post how businesses are starting to take advantage of this technology.

I've been told by 4 people (one by proxy) to update this blog. Since that represents nearly the entire readership here, I better do it.

A few things have gone on in the past week that I'm aware of: Twitter acquired Atebits (the programmer behind Tweetie), I smashed my laptop & not on purpose (thankfully it still works... only louder!), a volcano erupted in Europe, the NHL playoffs started, the Oilers won the draft lottery, Souray demanded a trade, AdTech kicked off in SF, I discovered a bunch of new music, some drunk Apple employee left the new iPhone in a bar, Calgary had Ad Rodeo, the SEC sued Goldman Sachs, there was a blizzard in Calgary which caused the lights to go out, and some other things.

However - I was in Maui with Ashlea last week and was not in the mood to blog. Here's a picture of the sun setting from our lanai (lanai = patio).