martedì 30 settembre 2008

Vieni a lavorare da Lehman Brothers

Non è che Internet sia sempre aggiornata alle ultime novità del mondo reale...



Per giunta, cliccando su "Work at Lehman" si arriva qui:



Around the world, the Lehman Brothers team is growing

sì, come no.

Lehman Brothers, an innovator in global finance, serves the financial needs of corporations, governments and municipalities, institutional clients, and high net worth individuals worldwide. We maintain leadership positions in equity and fixed income sales, trading and research, investment banking and investment management


Magari quando un'azienda di questo genere fallisce, si potrebbe appioppare in homepage un bel timbro con scritto "BANCAROTTA", sul tipo di quelli che piazzano sui siti web sequestrati su richiesta delle multinazionali della musica.
O forse non c'entra niente: una banca che fallisce in fondo che male fa? Mica sono soldi veri...

giovedì 25 settembre 2008

The Red Cross shoots back

Great keynote from Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer from Microsoft, outlining his vision for the computing world in the next 3-20 years.

Here's how they see what they call the "Spatial Web"



And this is their vision of possible future human-computer interaction:

mercoledì 24 settembre 2008

Shooting on the Red Cross

The post title refers to an italian saying, meaning "Taking aim at an easy target". You are supposed not to, but sometimes you just can't resist.

Here's a picture of Microsoft's booth at the EmTech 08


The Zune? At a conference on Emerging (and supposedly innovative) Technologies? Seriously?

Come on, you can do better than that. For instance with Photosynth, a really great application for creating and displaying high resolution pictures. But again: awful presentation. The 90 seconds "elevator pitch" doesn't sound like a great idea to me in general, but nobody managed to screw it up as much as Blaise Aguera y Arcas: a non working demo + a speech that got interrputed at mid sentence. Thank god it lasted only 90 seconds.

But all of this was swept away by the great and inspiring keynote held by Craig Mundie on thursday, of which I'm going to speak next.

They've got the looks (too)

What's the matter with the photos of the lady speakers (and technologist women in general)?

All the speakers I've seen so far look amazingly better in person than in picture. Why is that? Is this on purpose, to lower expectations so that they positively surprise the audience? Being very intelligent makes you non photogenic? They don't want to look good? They just don't care? There simply are no good photographers around?

Take a look, for instance, at the picture of Tanzeem Choudhury as profiled here.

And now look this

Doesn't even look like the same person (oh, and the real person is gorgeous! And she's a professor too: I want to go back to school!)

Same with Gina Bianchini. Here's the real one (terrific presentation, by the way):

Speaking of women technologists: what's with the “women in technology workshop”, which is not even officialy part of the conference (the Opening Remarks being held on the next day)? Isn't it a bit diminishing (not sure it's the right word) of the role women play in today's technology world? Take the “Cool innovations” session: those innovations are cool in their own right (I've been especially impressed by the rescue robot presented by Holly Yanco), not just because they come from women's work.

Poston (a post from Boston)


I'm in Boston, actually in Cambridge, for the EmTech 08, the conference on emerging technologies held by Technology Review at MIT.

As a homage to my hosts, I'm going to post my random thoughts in English for the duration of the conference (nobody's reading my blog anyway, I might as well write it in chinese – if only I knew how ;-).

Being at MIT is awesome! I think now I know how super religious people feel when they are in Jerusalem. I'm feeling intelligence waves vibrating in the air. I look at people around me and wonder how smart these people might be. Which, considering that I normally think most people are morons, is a nice improvement ;-)

Speaking of morons: of course I got lost while trying to reach the conference. Still, getting lost lead me to the amazing Stata Center.



The Keskge Auditorium, where the conference is held, is equally beautiful, both on the outside and the inside.
But, even here, there are no electrical plugs close to the seats! Reality check: the long-lasting batteries you're talking about have not invented yet.

Power (plugs) to the people!

(WiFi is working flawlessly, though)