One year wedding anniversary

Today is our one year wedding anniversary for my wife and I. Can't believe that it's been one year already. But it's been a great year, and I continue to be so blessed with her. She is so supportive of me in my move to Beijing to start my job here at Nokia Research Center. I'm in the midst of finishing sending my PhD thesis to my committee members (really busy now) but it will be sent soon. Then I can relax and we can celebrate our one year wedding anniversary.

I can still remember our wedding last year, getting up, going to pick her up at the hotel, giving tea to my parents and family, going to the church, walking down the aisle and seeing her in that beautiful wedding dress. Then saying "I do", going to the park, and then the reception. If I had to do it all again, I would and I would not change a thing.

All I can say is thanks God for everything that we have, and continue to bless our marriage.

Social networking researcher danah boyd joining Microsoft Research

Just read this from the SOCNET mailing list which was sent by Barry Wellman. danah boyd (yes the lower case spelling is intentional), who is known for studies on Friendster and MySpace, and studying the youth in using these social networking services and acting as advisor to many companies and in politics, is going to join Microsoft Research in Boston in January 2009. danah wrote up about this on her own blog, Zephoria.

I think this is great for her and for Microsoft. She mentions how she will be directing her own research and how MSR is a great fit for her after she met with the MSR folks. Congratulations danah and keep us posted with your research.

And yes, I understand about the dissertation because I'm also in the same boat with finishing up the changes so I'll be ready for the defense.

OneWebDay

Did you know that September 22 is OneWebDay, I didn't know until I read the Nokia Conversations post (thanks Charlie from Nokia Conversations for this post). It's a day to promote one web, one world, one dream. Sounds similar to what the WWW 2008 conference's motto was from Beijing. I think that's great, we use the web on a daily basis, and we should promote a vision to have one Web with unifying goals. What will this web look like? Let's help to drive this vision!

Anyways, promote OneWebDay by joining the Facebook group!

Web 2.0 Expo NY presentations and videos

Even though I did not attend Web 2.0 Expo in NY, but my work colleague did, it's nice that there are videos and presentations already on the Net on this. There are videos from Blip.TV and presentation slides from O'Reilly (which sponsored and hosted the Web 2.0 Expo conference).

The most notable keynote I watched was that from Tim O'Reilly, the founder of O'Reilly Media and the person who coined Web 2.0, on Enterprise Radar. Tim was talking about how the Web meets the World, in that the valuable contributions and impact on Web 2.0 is not creating a gaming application for Facebook but using Web 2.0 technologies to help the world like for example in global warming, for helping detect weather storms and informing people, etc. Tim gave a challenge to users out there to make something that is useful for the world that is life changing. I think that is good advice.



Another video I saw was of Jay Adelson from Digg talking about the growth of collaborative filters. There wasn't really anything new here I found.



On Technorati: Web2.0ExpoNY

Web 2.0 Expo comes to New York

The Web 2.0 Expo, which is the Web 2.0 conference for industry, just started in New York yesterday and is being held September 16 to 19. A colleague from my research group at Nokia Research in Beijing is there right now providing us with updates from the conference. I'd be interested to hear from the attendees how they feel about the conference and the relevant keynotes, presentations and tutorials about how Web 2.0 is being used in the enterprise and how developers are creating Web 2.0 applications for mobile devices.

I've attended a Web 2.0 conference before in Toronto called Mesh, just before I moved to Beijing. I blogged about Mesh on my personal blog, as well as Twittered and Facebooked my updates. Apparently, Ignite NYC was happening before Web 2.0 Expo. For those who don't know Ignite, Ignite is an event where people are given just 5 minutes to talk about their product or idea and pitch it to the audience. It seems that there was a cupcake contest in which there were buttons on the iPhone in the form of cupcakes, see below.

There appears to be lots of energy online about the Web 2.0 Expo in NY as can be seen from joining the Twitter feed, the blog, as well as the photos.

If you're interested in Web 2.0 or are working in Web 2.0, keep track of this conference. It looks like the first day just finished the workshops and tomorrow starts the keynotes, sessions and exhibition hall. In relation to Nokia, it seems like S60 is a sponsor of this event so it will be interesting to see the mobile development for Web 2.0 on S60 devices.

Looking forward to hearing about the keynotes and the other sessions and demos in the following days.

On Technorati: Web20ExpoNY, Web 2.0

Google Chrome

I'm trying out the new Google Chrome browser that Google has created. You may ask yourself why do we need another browser? Google created this video just to answer that question.



According to this video, Google has redesigned the browser to take advantage of the media, the richness and the speed that users require for accessing the internet, as well as security and personalization. Do we need another browser? Well, before we used to have Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer. We now have Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Apple's Safari, and now Google Chrome. It always doesn't hurt to have more competitors, it can only help consumers. And it seems that Google Chrome is much faster in loading pages than the other browsers I've been using.

Google Chrome is open source and can be downloaded here. There's also an interesting comic book about Google Chrome as well. As with all new software, Google Chrome has not escaped bugs, there are some early security vulnerabilities as indicated in PC World magazine.

In my opinion, what will make Google Chrome a success is its openness to developers wanting to write plugins for this browser. I see many developers and techies flaunting to try new things, but what about the average joe user? They are already happy and know how to use Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, what will be the compelling reason for them to change? And I don't know if Google Chrome will support ActiveX because many web sites use ActiveX plugins like Microsoft's download sites and Windows Update. The only time I use Internet Explorer is to have to use Windows Update to check my computer for the latest updates since it won't work with Firefox.

What do people think? Are people using the Google Chrome browser, what are your experiences with it? Is it good that Google is creating another browser, are they dominating the web with their presence, is this part of the Google empire?

On Technorati: Google Chrome

Added FriendFeed to my growing list of social network tools

I'm looking at FriendFeed and it seems great where it aggregates all my social network information and Mobile Web 2.0 services into one feed (like Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, StumbleUpon, delicious, etc.). I've just added the FriendFeed widget to my blog so check it out! I hate having to go to all the different social networking and Mobile Web 2.0 sites to add updates to my blog, this just aggregates it in one place. You can subscribe to my FriendFeed here.

On Technorati: FriendFeed, social networking, Web 2.0