Today was busy but invigorating.
I went to go hear Howard Rheingold (author of Smartmobs, both the book and the weblog) and Anthony Townsend (of NYU and NYC Wireless) speak at a GLOCOM event which was arranged by Izumi Aizu of Asia Network Research. I met Izumi last month at the First International Moblog Conference (see my notes from the conference.)
I’ve been wanting to meet Howard for quite some time as Justin is good friends with Howard and I was taken by many of the ideas in Smartmobs. Anthony is also someone that I’ve been wanting to meet for quite some time because as a founder of NYC Wireless, he worked closely with my motorcycling buddy Terry Schmidt, whom I met when he was still an undergrad at UCLA. The venue was the Academy Hills conference room on the 49th floor of the Mori Tower of Roppongi Hills, which was quite the location and view! Izumi-san, you put on quite a conference!
After that I had a nice chat with Gary , who was at the conference as well, went back to the office, did a little work, and went to dinner with the Sony Mac Users Group, which is an unofficial group of Mac users in Sony. They told me some crazy stories about how at one point in time Sony was the largest Appletalk network in Japan and that Sony had made and sold a Unix workstation called Sony NEWS. My jaw droped at that one. We also looked at a beta release of Panther (which I thought was already out in the wild 
and it is really cool! I’m dying to buy that new 15″ Powerbook!
Finally I’m currently in the RDF Interest group IRC chat.
A long but interesting day.
yeah, there are a couple guys over in my lab who could go on for hours talking about the NEWS system, some who worked deep inside it, others who were testers of some sort. Saying that Sony is involved in many areas is just the tip of the ice-berg. It’s really too bad how often projects get scrapped in this company simply because they were just a step ahead of their time (although some projects really were better left to wither
. Sony seriously needs a Jobs right about now, or at least someone who’s seen all the great internal innovations over the past decade, and align them. The NeXT-alike comeback within OSX is one of the best examples 
Diary
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Sounds like a full day with good geek stimulation! Howard has a way of attracting smart people when he travels. Wish I could have been there!
I’ve heard about the NEWS and the heavy use of Apple computers at Sony in the past, but it is interesting to hear about the existence of a Sony Mac User Group. I wish I had run into them during my days at Sony in Osaki.
thanks… it was interesting meeting you too. i decided today it was finally time to get on the blogwagon. but for me its an intellectual thing rather than diary – its for the class i teach this fall at NYU on digital urban design
http://stage.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~amt3/mt/index.rdf