Author: rakesh

Photographs from this weekend: Hiking, Crissy Field, Green’s, and Fireworks

After a quick meeting in Los Angeles and Gnomedex in Seattle, I flew down to Oakland and spent the weekend hanging out with one of my younger sisters, Arti. She did her Ph.D. in Chemistry at Berkeley (p chem) and is now getting a masters in accupuncture. A photologue of my trip:

Thai restaurant mascot at the corner of Bancroft and Oxford

Berkeley bumper sticker

Vegan raw food place that Arti and I ate at (it was OK…)

Parasailing (is that what it’s called?) at the beach on CA-1, near Santa Cruz (I was just taking photographs before our hike, not participating!)

An outlook from our hike

Arti, Soumya and I picnic and then throw a disc around at Crissy Field, at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge

Sunset at Green’s restaurant (taken by Soumya)

Making the trek out the Berkeley Marina on July 4th for the fireworks with Arti and her housemates

They had free valet parking at the Berkeley Marina July 4th carnival, as long as your method of transport was ‘bicycle’.

Having claimed our seats, we wait for the fireworks to begin

This is probably my favorite photograph from the evening, taken after the sun had set while we were waiting for the fireworks to begin. The lights are the lamposts that line the pier.

One of the cool fireworks photographs

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Most of the photographs from my trip are here — I also have some images that need to be stitched together for panoramic shots so look forward to those a little bit later. Autostitch (recommended by lifehacker) is the first tool I tried and it didn’t work very well on my images.

Notes from Michael Arrington’s session

Michael Arrington, author of TechCrunch, lead a session focused mostly on start-up Internet companies. Notes from that:

  • Calls TechCrunch a micro-business, he employs 5 people
  • Defines success as 1) making money AND 2) making the Internet a better place to hang out
  • Rejects the notion that we’re all in an echo chamber and that none of these new companies won’t go mainstream (Digg gets as much traffic as the New York Times)
  • YouTube is cool, he started watching SNL again after “20 years” because he saw a clip from the show there
  • They spent $75,000 to launch Edgeio
  • Pointed out Fox’s acquisition person in the audience, Heather
  • He says MySpace is pulling a Friendster — slow page loads, things breaking, not enough people
  • Chastised Scott Rafer (feedster founder, now with dogster — myspaces for pets) for not promoting the industry

More about PeopleAggregator

Mike over at TechCrunch has a much better look at TechCrunch than my brief first glance. Mike concludes with, IMO, the most significant thing about PA — they support open identity standards (among other open standards) so they win loyal users through trust instead of “lock-in”. I remember hearing Marc pitch the value of data portability at Gnomedex last year so I know shipping PA is is a big milestone for him and his team. Congratulations guys!

Photostream of a brief LA detour

At LAX on my way to Seattle after a brief stop here for a meeting this morning…

Not sure what this is called, but it’s a sure sign that you’ve arrived in LA

On Sepulveda getting out of the airport.

Hollywood Boulevard… I was waiting to cross the street and I found myself standing next to Spiderman.

Yes, my meeting in Los Angeles was with none other than… Darth Vader.  Evidently these guys make big bucks walking around Hollywood Boulevard dressed up as famous movie characters, posing for pics.

The best ice cream shop in Houston


Amy’s Ice Cream really knows how to do ice cream. They hire the right people and they train them to be generous and fun and responsive to customers. I read an interview with their founder once and she said something to the effect of, “Our job as an ice cream shop is to take care of you — whether you are here because you just aced a test or because you just failed one.” It’s a simple strategy for an ice cream shop and one the Amy’s executes extremely well on. (And, yes, their ice cream is pretty darn good too.)

(photos courtesy of shozu and my cingular 2125 telephone)

(P.S. when I say Amy’s is in a category of its own among ice cream shops, I’m comparing it to Baskin Robbins, Marble Slab (don’t get me started), and TCBY.  Cold Stone comes close.)

PeopleAggregator– initial thoughts

So I spent a little bit of time playing around with Marc’s new PeopleAggregator product (built largely by Gaurav‘s team at Tekriti Software)… some thoughts and questions:

– So what is exactly is this thing?  Is it a proof of concept for a social technologies platform from BBM that  draws together all these open standards?  Or is it / does it aim to be something that mass consumers adopt and use a la Facebook or MySpace?

– Some of the menu navgation wasn’t clear to me… For example, I think “Create content” should definitely be visible at a higher level.

– At least one feature is, um, unfortunately named… “relations” (as in, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!”).  For example, I added IrinaSlutsky of geek.tv fame (can it be called fame!?) as a relation just so that I can say “I’ve had relations with IrinaSlutsky” 🙂
– I would have loved to try the flickr integration but it wasn’t clear that this is actually working at this point.  And even if it is working there needs to be a wizard for this kind of thing — don’t make me think!

– I liked the simplicity of it all and I like the idea of it all being open standards-based.  I also like the idea of having everything in one place.

– SXIP is cool, but it’s also something I know, well, nothing about.  How do I create an SXIP account?  Where else can I use my SXIP account once I’ve created it?

I get the feeling that there’s a lot more here, and that it’s just not so well packaged / explained so I have more digging to do.  I’m looking forward to digging deeper (I’m sure Marc’s demo later this week at Gnomedex will help too) and seeing continued development on this product.