Defining What it Means to be Open

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting “Designing Your Product as a Platform” for BayCHI’s monthly program at Xerox PARC alongside Dan Brodnitz (who presented “20 Conversations About Creativity”). In the talk, I spoke about what it meant to be “Open.” The word “Open” is pretty packed with meaning, and I rarely find […]

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Laaker, Brodnitz to Speak at April BayCHI Program

(Mountain View) – Christian Crumlish, Yahoo! Pattern Librarian and all-around talented design thinker, recently announced what the Bay Area had long been hoping for: Micah Laaker and Dan Brodnitz are confirmed to present at this April’s BayCHI program. Confirmed for Tuesday, April 14, 7:30pm, Laaker is set to give the first of two talks entitled […]

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Jay-Z Verse Troubles Me to This Day

In Kanye West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix),” featured artist Jay-Z drops a couple of lines that have bothered me for the past 4 years: Bleek could be one hit away his whole career As long as I’m alive, he’s a millionaire And even if I die, he’s in my will somewhere So he can […]

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Parents are Honored for Social Justice Efforts

I rarely bring up family issues here as I often assume they’d rather not be sullied by association. However, my parents recently received an award which I believe is worth mentioning. For those that don’t know, my dad is a Lutheran minister in Omaha, Nebraska (“Hometown of Heroes,” as I’m known to call it). As […]

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Capturing Important Metadata Should Be Easy

Somehow, I managed to open a debate recently with esteemed colleague and Flash/Flex wünderkind Zach Graves about which was the better flash memory card for digital cameras: the Eye-fi Explore 2GB card (mine) or the Kingston one-trick-pony 8GB card (Zach’s). I argued (very convincingly) that uploading photos and geotagging them were for suckers. They are […]

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Application Autodiscovery

Chances are, when you’re out and about surfing the Web, you’re bumping into semantically-enhanced content.* In some cases, you see the benefits; in others, your experience doesn’t change. This fact is one of the great side effects of the Semantic Web movement: if you participate in enhancing your content, none of your users suffer, and […]

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Laaker’s Photography Now Wrapped in Hardcover

(Mountain View, CA) – Micah Laaker’s photographic enterprises are now featured in “Stockton: Renewed, Revitalized, Redefined“, a hardcover coffee table book illustrating the history and revivification of Stockton, California. The book features two of Laaker’s photographs from a recent visit to Stockton: Bank of Stockton building Fox Theater Marquee These two photographs by Laaker were […]

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Browsing others’ brains

Folks who know me know I’m a fan of Google Reader; to date, I haven’t found a better consumption experience for reading and responding to all types of content that I’m interested in. Not only does it have a lightweight interface, it provides a social lens to see what my friends and colleagues find interesting […]

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Pontificating on Pizza

(Mountain View, CA) – Last month, privacy buffs, futurists, and Internet meme-followers were finally given a behind-the-scenes view of the creation of the ACLU’s Pizza Surveillance video. The Sceptical Futuryst, a blog sketching out the ideas and impacts possible in future scenarios, ran an interview with video director Micah Laaker entitled “Surveillance Supreme.” The interview […]

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Social Setup for the Apple TV

My former colleague, Mike Speiser (who’s now over at Sutter Hill Ventures), recently suggested his vision of where Apple TV should be heading. With the rumored Apple TV-minus-the-box-plus-the-TV unit days from being announced, I wanted to add one more set of thoughts to his before any such unveiling. Mike was one of the folks behind […]

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Apple TV as an Extension of the iPhone Platform

The Apple TV and the iPhone will (at some point) converge as a single development platform to complement the Mac computer platform. Or so my theory goes. Why is that? Apple dropped the Apple TV on consumers in January 2007 as a “hobby.” Since then, it has released several software updates, including a major on-demand […]

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Required Software for Mac Users

Last year, I posted a list of my favorite Mac software I used and recommended to others. 18 months have passed, and its time to provide an update for folks. Inquisitor Download Inquisitor | Previous recommendation that must be recommended again Aside from far-faster page-loading performance, Inquisitor makes Safari the one-and-only browser choice on the […]

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Amazon’s Universal Wish List

Amazon apparently rolled out a quiet, but important, feature in the past couple of weeks: the Universal Wish List. By “universal,” Amazon’s simply referring to its ability to snag non-Amazon products and track them alongside its own inventory in its existing Wish List system. I’ve been trying to get my extended family to use Amazon’s […]

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7 Missing Features from the WordPress for iPhone App

The Wednesday morning before last, I was excited to see that WordPress released an official iPhone application to the world. I instantly downloaded it, and added several of my WordPress blogs to the app. Aside from the annoying Twitter Tools glitch (which sent an empty tweet on blog setup), I was surprised to see some […]

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Sweet T’s Falling Star

I’m not sure how I initially found the news, but when I saw the headline (I Ain’t Got Nothing Against Ice T Or Nobody For That Matter But I Gotta Ride With Soulja Boy..) on Kanye West’s blog, I had to click. And, I had to click for two reasons. First, why would Kanye be […]

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