Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an article “Microsoft Tests Software To Fight Identity Theft on Web” (paid subscription required unfortunately).
Not to be outdone, the Red Herring had “Microsoft’s security card:
‘Info-cards’ would help computer users communicate securely with web sites.” and internetnews.com had “Microsoft Said to Have New Security Plans”
I’m looking forward to learning more about MS’s “Info-card” strategy. What I know looks good.
I sat at breakfast this morning with the president of the International Space University
They have a Summer Session Program that is being hosting in Vancouver of all places! (well, at my alma matter, UBC which technically is not in Vancouver)
I was excited to hear that there will be guest lectures several evenings during the course. They might even have a taikonaut there ( an astronaut from China) — that may tap into the large Chinese population in Vancouver.
The poster for the program has a cool graphic which looks like a native indian version of a Canada Goose. Also looks like a Klingon Cruiser. Looks like they are chasing the satelite.
I’m sitting here at Flight School which is put on by the same folks that put on PC Forum, so it was easy to just extend my stay here in sunny Arizona. The morning is all about the potential, upcoming disruption in air travel. The afternoon will be about space travel.
Some parallels to the shifts in the PC industry:
A major difference is the regulatory environment, but then there are similarities to the telecommunications industry ie. FAA and FCC.
Marc Cantor launched Our Media. More here. Go Marc!
This morning @ PC Forum Jeff Hawkins from the Redwood Neuroscience Institute gave a great talk about new research in how the brain works. His book “On Intelligence” explains what they learned.
I had a startup that used neural nets 15 years ago, so I was really interested in the pattern recognition demo he showed that used a model of what they are doing. (this is not covered in the book unfortunately). They used a few planes of probability to build a model for recognizing shapes that supposedly worked well.
I’m sitting here @ PC Forum 2005 and happy to hear Jerry Yang announce Yahoo! has acquired Flickr. (I knew this was going to happen which is I am likely one of the first posts 
As the first outside investor and previous board member, this is pretty exciting! This was my first large angel investment, and I in some ways I feel like the newbie gambler that has a big win with the first roulette bet. In other ways, I am now wary of making any other investments as I don’t know what the formula was for success.
I am really proud and happy for Stewart, Caterina and the rest of the small, hardworking Flickr gang. They have learned alot in the last while and plowed through many challenges. I will continue to watch to see the cool things they release now.
Evan Williams of Blogger fame is here at ETech giving a demo of Odeo, his new venture that is all about the Podcasting equivalent of Blogger. The coolest part of the demo was the in-browser audio studio. People are doing really wicked stuff in Flash now. Too bad it is still not fully launched.
Following on the wild success of the Terrorism Futures Market [smirk], Yahoo! and O’Reilly rolled out Buzz Game. Reminds me of a stock market game that I played a couple years ago in a beta test.
Jeff Bezos is demoing some new features in A9. (he had a little excitement with his PowerPoint presentation first When going to A9, it bounces you to Amazon to see if you have an amazon.com cookie so that it can detect who you are. An Identity 2.0 problem.
The key thing is how you can consume search results from A9. Not quite sure how it all works yet though.
Danny Hillis from Applied Minds, Inc. is showing cool stuff here at ETech that he has made recently. Besides a bunch of cool robots that would be cool to see videos of, there was a demo of a mapping application. Google found it as a Northrop Grumman product
They are hiring. I’d apply if I did not already have a job.
