To further my research into new media (blogs, podcasts, etc.) and move it from a theoretical to a practical level, today I have decided to start a company focused on that. The working name of this company is “New Media Engineeringâ€? (http://www.newmediaengineering.com). The website, logos, and t-shirts are still under development. Why doesn’t a new media company have a new media website already? It will. At a very high level, New Media Engineering will construct and develop new commercial Internet properties, for itself and in conjunction with partners, while researching proprietary software that adds unique value to these sites not found elsewhere. I know this is not a lot of detail, but at this point, this is all I will say. I am in discussion with several people on the creation of new properties. New Media Engineering is the first venture I am starting under my new VDG Companies organization.

Today, I attended the Flickr Fiesta at Yahoo!’s main campus in Sunnyvale. This is an impressive facility. Just going through the massive parking structures it occured to me how good it is to be Yahoo! I don’t know why I haven’t been there before….

I have been looking at new media, social networks and Web 2.0 stuff over the past 2 weeks, and I came to see what I could learn from Yahoo! about flickr. There were several hundred people in attendance including the founders of flickr and many, many Yahoo! employees. Many of these employees were recent hires. The free food and alcohol was nice too. I posted a set of photos on my flickr account, and there are probably another 10,000 photos being uploaded as I post this. By definition everyone had a digital camera with them. From talking with the Yahoo! employees I learned about the flickr business, Yahoo! 360 Beta and other stuff.

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If you have been counting cards and know that the odds are favorable to hit rather than stand (the normal play), you better think twice because the systems from NICE are watching, and you could be booted from the casino for making too smart a play. Look carefully at the photo on the right. The system from NICE is analyzing a blackjack game using video recognition technologies. It can identify the cards that you have, and it tracks how the game is going and how everyone is playing and betting. If you cheat or play too well, the NICE system will send an alarm to the casino staff e.g., “there is a card counter in seat 3 and table 20,” and you will be out of luck.

Here is a tip from the guys at NICE, while most people think that an 18 is a good blackjack hand it turns out to lose more than 60% of the time based on their actual observations of millions of blackjack games. I have not checked their math. The only thing that NiceVision is missing is pattern recognition on the players’ faces, and they expect to have this soon.

Such amazing and ubiquitous video recognition has only been made possible recently through advances in computer hardware and software. The implications of such technology are staggering. Currently, systems like NiceVision are being used to at airports to scan for unattended baggage. But there is nothing to prevent this technology from being used in stores to identify you as a shopper and learn your patterns. I won’t be surprised to walk into, for example, a Safeway that I have never been to before one day in 2015 and hear, “Welcome, Vidal. How have you been? You look well. We haven’t seen you in a while….” How will the automated supermarket of the future know who I am? Because I walked into another Safeway five years ago in another state and the cameras captured and remembered everything. Everyone will be famous. How nice.

We now live in a society where gambling is totally socially acceptable. Poker is on TV all the time. To learn more about this industry, and seek inspiration for my next venture, I attended the
Global Gaming Expo (G2E) 2005 at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). This is a huge show with over 25,000 attendees. It mainly focuses on casinos and casino equipment like slot machines, roulette wheels, and table games. Pretty much any equipment imaginable to run a casino was on display. Some of it is pretty cool like the computerized roulette wheels and blackjack tables. No marketing angle to keep people in the casinos was left unexploited…I mean unrepresented.

I was particularly interested to see how computer technology is being used, and to look at online gaming aka “igaming.” The area for igaming was relatively small since most igaming is still illegal in the USA. I saw at least 2 tablet PC manufacturers displaying handhelds that could be used by casino staff. There was a really amazing application from NICE in NJ which is the subject of my next post. I have posted 29 photos from the show floor on flickr.

I attended Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI) Adopting and Using Open Source Software Conference 2005 in Redwood Shores, California on September 7, 2005. Open Source is an area that is going to impact every area of software tremendously, and it is trend that every company needs to leverage going forward. It’s impressive that CMU has a center and conference on it. If you are not really familiar with open source, I think it is a good conference to checkout next year.

Here is just one small intereting take-away I got from the conference. I learned there are now initiatives like the Business Readiness Rating to rate software in an open and standardized way. As anyone who tries to use open source software quickly discovers, one of the hurdles is evaluating all the different alternatives. Obviously, you cannot use purchase price as a factor or a proxy of value. Now, of course, do things like openbrr need to be limited to just open source software?

I added some recommended books and DVDs to the site using the free Amazon Media Manager (AMM) for Wordpress. Check them out. This plugin is pretty slick, and I was impressed with the quick reply I got from the developer. I am impressed with plugins I am finding. Unfortunately, I had to turn images off for now as this was adversely impacting performance.

Using this plugin also caused me to register into both the Amazon Associates program and Amazon Web Services (AWS) programs which are very interesting themselves.

This morning I suffered a major reversal in family court. I was removed as President of iambic, Inc. a company that I started in late 1993. Now, I have something else in common with Steve Jobs to talk with him about when I meet him!

And while I of course do not agree with the court’s decision, it gives me the opportunity to pursue new ideas and start my second company. I am excited about having this blank sheet of paper and the time.

I will worry for my staff and customers back at iambic, but I am sure that looking back on this many years from now we will say that it all worked out for the best.

Stay tuned for more details on my entrepreneurial journey.