Technology Links fans to march madness

http://aueagles.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/amer-m-baskbl-body.html
March madness....my favorite time of year. Ever filled out a bracket? I do every year. I used to fill them out on a sheet of paper and give them to my friend who was running the competition. When is the last time you've seen someone's bracket on hard paper? I don;t think I have seen one. These are done online these days. The games are watched online now too.

In this article, it is mentioned how people are watching the games online and trash talking to each other with web cams over the internet. Now peopel are using PDA's to track the status of their brackets and pools as well. The internet is changing how we watch these games. How do you follow march madness??

Open Source News....Reliable?

Open Source news is an interesting subject. Theoretically, the more people that contribute to a story, the more informative it would be right? We'll see.....Wired News is attempting this. I think this idea is a good one, however it requires A LOT of filtering. To the point that it might be too much. Everyone has an opinion, or what they believe to be the truth. Everyone's motivations for contributing are different, some of which are not based on good journalism. I don't believe open source is a good idea for something like news. It has had success with tech projects because often the only people interested are those that are truly interested or want to help.

picture taken from: www.opensource.org/.../opensource-400x345.png

Telepresence.....it's really cool

I was in San Francisco last week and was lucky enough to visit Cisco Systems national headquarters. I got to check out their tele-presence technology first-hand. It was really cool. Honestly, for most routine meetings, it is definitely sufficient, and it allows you to project documents and power-points, etc. When you look at someone they know it, and so does everyone else. If you look at your phone, everyone can see you, its crazy. Cisco even had a virtual secretary that greeted us on telepresence. Cool huh?

I asked an expert what kinds of issues different cultures had with this technology, as you must be sitting down to use it. Turns out the Japanese for example have issues with it because they stand often in meetings. These virtual technologies will adapt to different cultures as well as other needs that come up. Overall a really cool product. FYI it costs $300,000 to equip a room with it.

LinkedIn is overrated

I understand why LinkedIn exists and believe it has its benefits, but there is definitely way too much hype surrounding it. I think its major issue is that its not selective in any way. There's way too man people on LinkedIn. A friend can invite anyone. I think this takes away from its credibility. Perhaps if only those with verified jobs could do the invitations this problem would be ameliorated. From an employer's point of view, I would think a certified universities' career center and web portal is a preferred method and has a stronger pool of applicants.

As a side note, LinkedIn is growing so fast that Barack Obama is using it to fuel his campaign....