iPioneer: Mark Johnson's Blog

Meetro, MySpace, and BBQs

On Saturday, I popped down to the MeetroHQ via CalTrain, for a fun BBQ.  There were hotdogs (of the real variety), hamburgers, and lots of beer.  Lots of beer.  I spent the CalTrain ride home sound asleep.  In any case, the BBQ was loads of fun.  I met a number of interesting and attractive people, gorged myself on the bbq food, and witnessed random stripping.  Meetro is definitely a bunch of cool cats who know how to throw a good party.  I'll be back at the next one, especially since I missed riding in the rickshaw.

In any case, the party got me thinking about Web 2.0 social networking.  Since it hit the mainstream, I've completely avoided the revolution.  Sure, I was chatting and meeting people on Prodigy and AOL in my early teens, I used personal ads when most people thought it was "weird" to meet people online, and I still know all my IRC commands.  My only analysis is that I was always dating someone when the geek->mainstream switch was happening, so I completely missed the boat.  I've been complaining for the past year that I'm "too old" and I don't fit into the 18-25 demographic anymore, but if car dealers can use MySpace, then surely I can.  So today, I've started a myspace profile.  Add me if you're on.

If you haven't checked out Meetro, I highly suggest downloading it.  It's sorta like MySpace+AIM.  Since Meetro knows your location, you can find people who live near you and chat with them.  Back in the old days, IM was all about chatting with (the few) people all over the world that actually used it.  Now that everyone has it, I don't really want to chat with some random person in France, whom I'll probably never meet.  I'm eminjay on Meetro, if you want to hit me up!

 

Technorati tags: meetro myspace socialnetworking

 

E3: Martin Leung Plays Super Mario Bros Medley

I was at the 1up.com booth and heard the ending theme from Super Mario Bros. 2, which is one of my favorite video game tunes of all time (I used to beat the game just to play it on endless repeat).  Lo!  Some kid (i.e. Martin Leung) was playing a medley of songs from the Super Mario Brothers series!  How freakin' cool.  This is from his 2:30 performance.  Unfortunately, he didn't play the ending theme from SMB2, but he did include some favorites from SMB3.  He told us that he's playing with some symphony that is touring doing video game music.  From a quick search, my guess is that he's playing with PLAY! Symphony.  Unfortunately, Mr. Martin Yeung is impossible to find online.  I'll bet that E3 propels him into video game stardom.

In any case, watching the joyful tears welling up in the eyes of all of the gamers crowded around Yeung's piano, I realized two things: repetitive video game music means a lot to gamers and that I, and many others, formed a serious emotional bond with games like Super Mario Brothers.  Enjoy!

 

Update (5/16): I must have been typing the wrong name into Google, because I found Martin Leung on his own homepage: VideoGamePianist.com.  Oops!  He's already been propelled into fame with the release of this fabulous video several years back.

Tags: supermariobrothers martinyeung e3 videogamemusic

E3 Impressions

  E3 2006 
  Originally uploaded by philosophygeek.

My ostensible reason for attending E3 was to celebrate the launch of Gazerk.com, but E3's reputation for raucous displays of marketing was a huge attraction.  Since things are busy at Kosmix, I only was able to fly in on Wednesday night for the 1up.com party and had to fly out on Thursday afternoon, but I had a lot of fun during my short stint.  The ZiffDavis Party apparantly has a reputation for being fantastic and it didn't let me down.  Since I wasn't able to find a hotel in downtown LA, I had to be responsible with my drinking, but there were plenty of fun signts and interesting folks to chat with.  Watching other people get drunk is almost as fun as doing it yourself.  Well, not really, but it's still entertaining.  I had a chat with Michael Miller, who echoed a common sentiment at E3: shock at both the price of the PS3 ("What are they thinking?") and shock at how exciting the Wii was ("I really liked it: it was fun!").  Unfortunately, since the line for trying out the Wii was so damn long, I never got to play.  I commend Nintendo for focusing on gameplay over power, but I do think that they should have given a little bit more umpf to their newest system.  The Wii's controller allows you to move your arm to control the game.  Think shooting an arrow in Zelda or playing tennis and putting spin on the ball.  Neat, huh?  But, almost everyone commented that the graphics didn't look very next generation and were comparable to the GameCube.  Nonetheless, if Nintendo goes sub-$200 with the price of the Wii, they might capture enough of the market to stay in the game.  I spent a lot of time in the 1up booth, since Kosmix is providing the back-end search for Gazerk.  1up threw a great party for its hardcore 1up Network members, complete with cake and booth babes.  Since I was running around so much, I didn't get to play many games.  However, between going to E3 and Zero Hour this year, I feel like I really need to dust off my GameCube and become reacquainted with the wonderful world of video games.

A journey through my E3 experience in pictures

Tags: e3 1up wii

 

 

Lunch 2.0 @ JotSpot

I had Lunch 2.0 today at JotSpot.  I got stuck in some interesting conversations, which caused me to miss the demos.  I've used JotSpot before, but only from a Wiki perspective.  A lot of the conversation about JotSpot was about how it's really a platform for creating applications, especially enterprise applications.  Hmmm.  Maybe it's time to play around a bit more.  I did meet an interesting gentleman from Spock, which is "The Personal Search Company."  They are going to try to help me solve the problem of finding that document that I wrote last year and that person that I e-mailed in January about site tracking.  Thank God, because I'm still completely disorganized (e.g. my electricity was shut off briefly a couple of weeks ago).  I also met a cool cat from a company called Wellnet, which is also behind closed doors.  There was also a smattering of random consultants, unemployed product managers, and the regular Web 2.0 crowd.  Oh, I took some pictures, but nothing very good.

The next Lunch 2.0 is at Microsoft next Wednesday.  If I have time next week, I'll certainly be zipping over for good conversation and free lunch.

The First Stirr

I attended the world's first Stirr this evening.  Stirr is yet another local geeky tech meetup.  Even though I wasn't my normal bubbly self tonight (they didn't serve any food!), I managed to snap a few decent piccies.  As per the usual Web 2.0 dealio, five companies were given 60 seconds each to pitch their company.  The shorter pitches were much appreciated by the crowd.  Here are some of my faves:

• Prosper is a company that allows people to lend money to other people and set their own interest rate. I wonder if I can demand a pound of flesh for loans that default =)  The concept is a neat one, but I'm not sure I see the market efficiency.  When I give me money to the bank (notwithstanding a pitiful 1% APR), they're doing stuff with that money to pay me, including loaning it out to other customers.  Even though The Bank of Philosophygeek might not have the overhead of tellers, buildings, and employees, it's not clear whether I can do better with my own money, considering the risk involved.  Of course, my hope is that the distributed community-based system will rule over big corporations (sorry, C) so this is one to watch.
• Inkling Markets is another in a string of prediction markets.  I should start issuing KSMX shares.  Or maybe I'll go public!
• Meetro integrates with your existing chat clients and gives you the ability to see who's physically around you.  Back when chat first came out, it was cool to chat with other IRC users around the world.  Now that chat is so ubiquitous, bringing place back into the equation makes sense.  Of course, this will be used as a massive hookup service.  Doesn't Yahoo already do this with their chat rooms?  Anyway, I'll probably download and check it out to let you know if one can hook up successfully on Meetro.

Speaking of Meetro, I also met Seth Sternberg, the young & attractive founder/CEO of Meebo.  I got to ask him, point-blank, the rhetorical questions I proposed back when I found the company in December: how ya gonna make money?  He gave some answers about how they've clocked tons of user time (59 man-years or something like that?  I need to bring a freakin' pen next time I go to one of these do-hoppers) and they're going to make money on ads. . . aren't we all =)

I also ran into some folks from the incredibly useful application YouSendIt, which actually got angel funding from one of Kosmix's founders.  Small world!  My friend Jim Kirk, now VP of Biz Dev at Jambo, was also in attendance.  I'll be writing more about my wish-list for Jambo very soon (teaser: imagine your phone buzzing every time someone who had mutually matching profile preference came within 10 meters of you--at that point, who needs Meetro?).  Finally, I met Christine Herron from the Omidyar Network.  She told me that I shouldn't carry my business cards in my back pocket, because people will get nervous about touching something that was in such close proximity to my butt.

That's all from this event.  I hope to see y'all and some new faces at the SF WIN event on April 13 next week.

Techonrati Tags: stirr

Two Martini Tuesday Announced!

OK. I hatched the idea of a Two Martini Tuesday way back when, but it's finally coming to reality.  Check out the post at Upcoming.org and please join if you're interested.  Make sure to RSVP to me before EOD on Monday so I have an accurate count.  So far, it's just me and a friend from Sharpcast.