The iPad won’t suck…
…but it will burn many hours of your work day talking about this enlarged iPod/iPhone. Everywhere I turn people are either making fun of it, dismissing it (passionately), or ready to pull out the credit card and buy one. What really gets me are this new group (to me) of people that think you need a half inch, desktop powerful, physical keyboard using device or it just isn’t good enough.
Here’s my position on the iPad the day after:
- It is a consumption device.
- It won’t burn your bits when you try and watch a movie on it.
- I sat in the coffee shop with morning with email, a web browser, and tweet deck open for 3 hrs—didn’t need my laptop for that.
- It isn’t expensive for the early adopters that will buy version 1
- It is a product release that had features dropped that didn’t meet the quality control requirements (think iPhone before the 3G)
- Developing apps for it will likely be awesome
- If I were a student, I would be beyond excited to have all my text books on that (hey higher ed, how many will be offering this to first years loaded with all their text books, notes, slides, podcasts, etc?)
I will admit my bias and say that a big iPod touch that can tether with my iPhone is all I really wanted. A full OS would have been nice but I am really excited to see how developers take advantage of the HTML 5 stuff that Safari supports.
Will it be for everyone? No. But I would bet their $50 billion company is safe for now.
All events have their audience but…
When TEDxWaterloo was first mentioned I was beyond excited (it was around the same time IgniteWaterloo was being planned which is also awesome). The focus and quality of the independently organized TED event is something I think the local community could really benefit from. As much as I love the whole unconference thing I know it doesn’t work for everyone and it can be really strange to people that haven’t attended. However, I am disappointed in the rationale behind applying to attend that TED itself promotes. I do appreciate the views on it by organizing folks but…
I am concerned about it being exclusive
I had a big long rant written about this but instead I will keep it simple: applying to attend something in a community this small that is dominated by Higher Education, think tanks, and RIM-jobs driving BMW’s implies exclusivity. Maybe being exclusive to a certain type of person is exactly what TED is trying to do to ensure there is quality conversation. However, the community is full of interesting and colourful personalities… you can’t just exclude them because, well because is hard to say as they haven’t really listed any measurable criteria.
As one of the commenters on Renjie’s blog post there is a fine line between elitist and open that TEDx seems to just barely stay on the positive side of but I think the problem the registration is intended to fix doesn’t actually exist. Not in Waterloo anyway.
What am I going to do about it? Nothing. I am not going to apply to attend, not going to talk about it anymore (I will try), and look forward to the next Ignite Waterloo or BarCampWaterloo or StartupCampWaterloo or Web Design meetup or startup drinks or any other event that is open to everyone.
A Startup Week at VeloCity: stop talking, just do something
Over the past week we tried something different at VeloCity – we opened up the term not with speakers but instead engaged the students in a serious of brainstorming evenings followed by a weekend focused on starting their startup. Amongst the group discussions, team formation, development, and business planning have been a number of local entrepreneurs that have wandered around the residence talking to students and offering some insights—at least one mentor really enjoyed the experience.
The goal for the week evolved a bit but what I wanted to do is give all 65 students at the residence an opportunity to participate early on by challenging them to have a pitch and a demo by Sunday night. Keeping in mind that most (if not all) of the students here have never had an opportunity to work towards building a business with their peers.
The result? About 50 of the 65 students at VeloCity participated this weekend in fleshing out some ideas and most of the teams actually built a usable application. One of them, the room booking application, will be used at VeloCity starting this week!
At the moment I am a bit tired from the 80+ hour work week to write a big post but I can confidently say that we have exceeded out goals for this week and moved VeloCity clearly away from simply a space for innovation to a community that is actually doing something.