Remind me never to go to Heathrow when there is a security scare on. It took about 4 hours of chaos and queueing to get to the departure gate, then another hour to get through the takng off of shoes and the patting down of clothes. Although I sprinted to the gate, the plane ended up not taking off for another hour while the captain had the bags of the
Next week I’m off to Tokyo, where I’ll be dunking my head into all things mobile, electronic and (I daresay) visiting the famed Akihabara area, famed for it’s geeky fascination with technology. Being a card-carrying Neophiliac and already write a column called Technofile, it’s just as well…
One thing that struck me while I was in Los Angles last week was that the people I met kept saying the same thing: media, entertainment and technology are converging (yes, THAT word) on Los Angeles. The simple fact that the biggest music and Hollywood players are there, and the act that it is an hour’s plane ride from Silicon Valley, and an hour’s drive from San Diego (where the
AlwaysOn is not your typical conference. During the two and a half days it was on, it ranged from discussions about data to user generated content to venture capital to mobile. Quite a range. This was both a strength and a weakenss, but the audience handled it all with aplomb. Perhaps the hottest topic at the event was social media and in particular the rise of sites like YouTube and
We were interviewing Steve Wozniak (the original co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs, who actually built the first Apple machines) after his speech at the AlwaysOn conference. Being a Mac fan and user of old I asked him to sign my Macbook. He tried a ballpoint which didn’t work. The next thing I knew he’d whipped out what appeared to be a portable laser (it was damn bright to look
So I arrived in San Francisco on Saturday only to be met with another heat-wave to replace the one I’d left behind in London. Oh joy. At least my hotel in Palo Alto, off El Camino Real, turned out to have air conditioning that worked! The Sunday morning was cooler when I met tech writer Mark Haas, (pictured) who had been introduced to me by old friend Steve Carlson, whom
So I’m off to San Francisco/Palo Alto to meet some contacts and attend the Always On conference at Stanford this week. After that it’s on to LA to chat to a few ‘digital hollywood’ execs and mobile people…
First published, Future Media, June 2006: Disney launched its first massively multiplayer online role-playing game back in 2003, the success of which has inspired the company to devise similar propositions around Lost and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Just what does the Mouse see in the MMORPG? Mike Butcher reports. You can imagine the scene. Having recorded that must-watch show on the PVR, you are now painstakingly slow-mo-ing
Published in New Media Age 15.06.06: Gustav Söderström is sitting in a hotel bar in Stockholm looking at the profile of a 23-year-old woman. This isn’t some seedy chatroom on his laptop, though. He’s taking part in a social experience entirely on his mobile phone, updating live as he talks and allowing him to instant message his friends and contacts, writes Mike Butcher Söderström is a founder of Kenet Works,
Who needs courses when you can just read WikiNews. (Damn – and all those early years of slogging it through boring local council meetings, court cases and shitty magazines was for nothing).