Garr Reynolds, the man behind the amazing PresentationZen blog, will be speaking at the SF offices of SlideShare this Friday, June 6th (upcoming.org listing here). Garr is a great speaker, and has thought really deeply about presentation design from the perspective of Japanese design practices. If you care about presentations, you should subscribe to his blog (his book is also really good). And if you're in SF or nearby, you should drop by the SlideShare offices to see him in person this Friday!

Update: Nancy Duarte, who was the designer behind Al Gore's famous "The Inconvenient Truth" presentation, will also be speaking. AFAIK, this is the only PowerPoint presentation to date that has been made into a movie, so it should be interesting to hear her perspective on things.

The upcoming BayCHI panel on UX of Advertisinglooks really cool! A great line-up of folks:

Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed,
Ted Rheingold, Dogster,
Joe Hurd, VideoEgg,
Heath Row, DoubleClick

are going to be talking about the user experience of advertising. It's been on my mind a lot lately. I'm interesting especially in whether Flash can be used to make advertising LESS annoying.

Plus the Dogster guy will be there. Dogster cracks me up, the fact that a social networking site for dogs is a massively succesful site is probably a sign of the apocalypse.

Pecha Kucha is a really cool design-geek event that originated in Japan. The format is somewhat similar to PowerPoint Karaoke, with some important differences. Participants design a 20-slide slideshow, and have 20 seconds PER SLIDE to talk over it. The timing is done by computer, so you don't have any leeway, and have to time your presentation perfectly for it to work.

It's creative, it's competitive, it's funny, it's awesome. And it's happening in SF on August 29th! The SF Pecha Kucha group has been at it a while (this is their 16th event) and was recently listed in the SF Bay Guarian's "Best of The Bay" issue as "best hyper-intellectual show and tell". Here's the full description:

Pecha Kucha - Japanese for chitchat - began in 2003 in Tokyo as a way for emerging designers to share ideas. The wildly popular concept has now caught on here, with San Franciscan chitchatters meeting every last Wednesday evening of the month, usually at 330 Ritch. The format is simple: presenters curate a 20-image slide show about their creative work; each slide is shown for exactly 20 seconds; and each night has an overarching (and often disregarded) theme. Anyone can sign up, though it's mostly designers and artists talking about their work - which can range from Burning Man sculptures to mass-market furniture. But you never really know what you're going to get: recent nights have seen a writer, a couple of software developers, a social engineer presenting an interesting theoretical exercise, and a creative vacationer with some gorgeous images of plate tectonics in the Colorado basin, graffiti in Australia, and the state of socialist architecture in Eastern Europe.

Proto.in is a simple concept: it's a clone of the hugely successful Demo conference, in India, run on a not-for-profit basis (for reference, the demo conference costs companies that choose to participate SERIOUS money). No powerpoints are allowed: you have ten minutes to demo a working product.

The list of companies that have been accepted is being kept under wraps until the event itself. I've talked to dozens of Indian entrepreneurs in the last month: I predict that there will be cool wireless stuff being demoed for sure!

Startups in India don't have the nifty ecosystem that silicon valley companies do, so this is a valuable opportunity for anyone with working code to show their stuff to a room full of venture capitalists. Hopefully, press attention and possibly funding will follow.

More coverage at:
pullur
witopia
tggokul
inspirons

Manik and I will be hosting a Delhi meetup for Ruby enthusiasts this Friday. It's completely informal: we'll be drinking beer, eating food, and talking about Ruby and/or RubyOnRails. In that order.

We're meeting up at the Piccadilly, in PVR plaza, Connaught Place 8PM this Friday (June 2nd). Needless to say, it'll be dutch (Manik and I aren't buying). If you're a Delhi geek who grooves on Ruby, Rails, or domain specific languages in general, come on down! You have nothing to lose but your sobriety.

DCamp (a barcamp-like event for DEE signers and DEE velopers) starts tonight in Palo Alto (at the socialtext offices, home of the original barcamp). Lots of awesome smart people are going to be presenting and sharing their ideas, including (but not limited to!) Sarah Allen from Laszlo, Rick Boardman from google, LukeW and Bill Scott from Yahoo!, Nate Bolt from Bolt/Peters, Micah Alpern from ebay, and Luke Hohmann from Ethniosys.
Sounds like my kind of party.

I'll be spending the weekend at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference being organized by SDForum. I got interested in Ruby because the AJAX libraries uzanto uses (prototype and scriptaculous) come from the ruby on rails world, and are awesome).

But in the last few weeks I've been hacking with Ruby on Rails itself for a new project I'm working on. The experience has left me very impressed with Ruby (an elegent little object oriented language) and especially with Ruby on Rails (a wicked cool web app framework). Anyway, this conference should be good, and it's local and reasonably priced. So if you're in the bay area and looking to get your Ruby on, see ya Saturday!

Bill Scott (AJAX evangelist for Yahoo!) will be giving a talk at the Silicon Valley WebGuild tonight (April 12). The talk is hosted at the GooglePlex in Mountain View.

It's not free (5$-20$, depending on whether you register online, and whether you're a member of the web guild), but it's bound to be good stuff.

Uzanto is contributing 200$ to help pay for BarCampDelhi. We still need a few more sponsors to help us pay for things like t-shirts ... a couple more sponsorships in the 8000 Rupees (200$) range would help out a lot right now. This is a good way to support the Delhi technology scene, and get some visibility within it.

Contact me or Gaurav directly if you're interested in sponsoring.

Delhi bar camp preparations are in full swing, with 41 registrations so far! Here's some snapshots of the facilities Adobe is generously letting us use for the event. We'll also have the use of their cafeteria, and possibly their ping-pong room as well. ;->

Some of the proposed sessions look really interesting. This is gonna be awesome!
* Ruby on Rails (Manik Juneja)
* Simple Sharing Extensions (Manik Juneja)
* Making AJAX applications faster (Jonathan Boutelle)
* Re-Inventing the wheel of Personal Information Management with a new TWIST ( (Mir Nazim,Dipankar sarkar)
* Designing Intuitive User Interfaces for web applications (Amit Ranjan)
* LinkNSurf - Social network on mobiles(Sunil Goyal)
* Bootstrapping a software startup in 7 difficult steps (Gaurav Bhatnagar)
* Can we trust next generation web applications ?(Kapil Bhatia )

It's on! Delhi BarCamp is scheduled for March 4th. It's going to be awesome. I've been working with Gaurav from Tekriti, Amit from Uzanto, and Manik to help bring this event about. Adobe has agreed to host in their facilities in Noida. Delhi has beat out Bangalore in having the first barcamp in Asia!

Sources in Mountain View tell me that google WIFI is scheduled for a beta roll-out in Mountain View sometime in March. The service should be fully operational by April, even though the date mentioned in planning documents is sometime in June.

I certainly can't wait to get my free wifi. Thank you google!

SIPA has their yearly confab tomorrow. The topic is Global Opportunities in Technology Related Services. Sounds pretty generic? They tighten it down to three panels on Vertical Search, Knowledge Process Outsourcing, and Software as a Service.

The 10:30 Software as a Service panel panel looks especially good. We've heard enough from salesforce.com: here are some of the other big players doing interesting things in the SaaS space.

Software as a Service:
MR Rangaswami - Co-Founder, SandHill Group (moderator).
Joe Kraus - Co-Founder & CEO, Jotspot.
Jay O'Connor - Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, NetSuite.
Umang Gupta - Chairman & CEO, Keynote Systems.
John Roberts - Co-Founder & CEO, SugarCRM.

Every one of these companies are doing very cool things right now. So if you don't feel like giving up your whole saturday to network with desi entrepreneurs, that's the panel to show up for. I'll be going to that one (Mindcanvas, the service that we've just released, uses a SaaS software offering as the basis for a consulting service. So I have a bit of a personal interest in the topic).

The Knowledge Process outsourcing panel also looks good. I've heard way too much about vertical search lately, so I'll probably skip that panel.

The computer history museum in Mountain View is hosting a Vintage Computer Festival this weekend. The main event (1PM on Saturday) will be a retrospective of the Homebrew Computer Club, the original hobbyist's organization that people like Wozniak and Jobs were members of.

For everyone who's a fan of the new "camp" craze (barcamp, TechCrunchBBQ, MindCamp, TagCamp phenomena...these guys were the originals!

TagCamp (a BarCamp-like event focused on tagging and other types of user-generated content & structure) is happening in Palo Alto this weekend. Rashmi is going (though she apparently hasn't decided what she'll be presenting yet ;->). If you're into tagging, this would be a good event to check out. The vibe at these "camps" (FooCamp, BarCamp, MindCamp, TechCrunchBBQ) is very high-energy, very DIY, much the way I imagine the early computer hobbyist meetings were in the 70s. In other words, A LOT cooler than a corporate conference, and free to boot! They are a lot of fun, and excellent places to meet like-minded individuals.

There's a Web 2.1 brainjam on Friday afternoon in San Francisco. Registration is $2.80 (by PayPal). More blog coverage here, here and here Yet another example of the many homebrew un-conferences (barcamp, TechCrunchBBQ) that are proliferating in Silicon Valley and rapidly making conventional conferences obsolete.

TechCrunch (an awesome new web2.0 weblog) is having a meetup/barbeque this thursday. RSVP is via their wiki.

Bar Camp is this weekend! For everybody that didn't get invited to Foo Camp, Bar Camp might just be the ticket! Location? Socialtext headquarters in Palo Alto (details here).

The next BayCHI meeting (August 9) looks pretty good. A panel on web 2.0 with the likes of david sifry from technorati, Paul Rademacher (creater of the google/craigslist mashup,), and Stewart Butterfield from Flickr. On the hallowed grounds of Xerox-PARC, where everything we take for granted was invented.

Squid Labs is hosting the MIT club of Northern California for a tech-night tonight. Wine, cheese, laser cutters, hydrodynamic tanks, and a wind tunnel! It's in Emeryville at 7PM, and they say to come early if you want a seat near the table saw. Via the Oreilly blog network.

Paul Graham
(lisp enthusiast, successful tech entrepreneur and author of the excellent book Hackers and Painters) is speaking at Berkeley tonight.

If you miss "Hiring is obsolete", you can catch him 2 days later at PARC, for "How to Sell A Startup" (Note: the PARC talk costs 25$, the Berkeley talk is free). If you miss that, you can console yourself by reading some of his excellent essays.

Geoffrey Moore, the author of "Crossing the Chasm" (the "unofficial bible of silicon valley") will be giving a talk entitled "What Kind of Software Company are You Trying to Build" in Santa Clara next Tuesday. The event is hosted by the software SIG of TIE Silicon Valley.

I've written about Moore's model and it's implications for usability before. As the owner of a tiny little software company myself, I expect to learn a lot from this event about how to position our software in the marketplace. Notes on a talk he gave a few weeks ago should give a sense of what to expect.

An upcoming BayCHI event promises to be just awesome.

This month, a star-studded panel will look at recent developments in search and information finding. Panelists include:
Jakob Nielsen: Usability rock star
Peter Norvig: Director of Search Quality, Google
Ken Norton: Director of Product Management, Yahoo! search
Udi Manber: CEO of A9
Rahul Lahiri: VP of Search Product Management at Ask Jeeves

Moderated by Uzanto's own Rashmi Sinha.

Anyone who's interested in search in general, or the intersection of search and user experience in particular, should attend. April 12th, at PARC in Palo Alto.

The Delhi Flash User Group is putting on a seminar on RIA development this Thursday. Owas (from GE) is going to be giving an indepth treatment to skinning in Flash, and Arpit (also from GE) is going to be talking about how to use ActionScript as a proper programming language. Simon Horwith (from eTrilogy) will be introducing FLEX.

On August 10th there is going to be a very cool BayCHI panel, down at ye old Xerox Parc research center. David Temkin (from Laszlo), Mike Sundermeyer (from Macromedia), Iain Lamb and Ethan Diamond from Oddpost, and Jim Hobart (from Classic Systems Solutions) are going to be talking about RIAs and how they impact usability.