Musings

There are lot of echos on the blogosphere about reboot. The best summaries I have seen so far are from Laurent Haug, who blogs at bohellz. Check them out! And sorry Laurent, that I didn’t manage to show RoR to you - are you in Zurich any time soon? Technorati Tags: reboot7

reboot is over, I missed the party last night, but I’m almost on the plane back to Zurich with a couple of hours of sleep. reboot was a great experience and I there was enough food for thought there to keep me occupied quite some time. What would be needed now is a couple of days quiet thinking time. Unfortunately my family and the pending move to a new house next week will make that impossible. ...

The thing that pains me most about this conference, are the chairs. There are three different models in each of the halls, and they compete in the “which is the most uncomfortable” category. There is no clear winner, all of them are extremely uncomfortable in the long run. They therefore can’t be of danish design because danish design not only looks good, but serves their intended purposes. These chairs clearly don’t. ...

Ben Hammersley delivered a great presentation. He spoke about the history of blogging – all the way back 300 years ago to The Tatler as the proto-blogger. A very good and entertaining presentation with lot’s of food for thought. One patter of though is, that our society must come up with new social norms and acceptable behaviors to cope with the rapid change of technology. We even aren’t used (as a society) to the walkman - a 25 year old technology. ...

We were promised the “mother of all demos”, the complete Doug Engelbart demo done in 1968, that preceded so many technologies that we are working with today. The video can be seen partially on the net, but we got 90 minutes of raw footage. Foto by Michael Heilemann And boy - this really is called “the mother of all demos” for very good reasons. Not only were there the occasional bloopers in the demo, that Doug skirted around nicely, but the stuff showed was and is so far advanced, that even today, it looks modern. There was hyperlinking (not only to documents as we know it, but down to individual objects - word, code, etc), instant messaging, email (or predecessors of it), sharing of screens between workstation and much much more. Watching the demo unfold, seeing how much fun Doug had doing it, one understands that this truly was a near-religious experience for quite a few people. ...

Here’s an idea that occured to me here at reboot. Why not set up a special session with all 400 people and have them produce a product / a service during a time period of say 4 hours. There are so many intelligent, smart people around here that have all kinds of skills. Why not give them a task and let them rip at it? There are visionaries, philosophers, artists, writer, marketing gurus, VCs, programmers, designers, project managers and so much more. ...