Lunch@ Events – Trade Show Press and Innovator Events

You may have seen MIT student, David Merrill demonstrate his realtime music mixing technology, PureJoy, a couple of years ago at Lunch at Piero’s http://lunchat.com/events/2007/01/15/mit-media-lab-new-music-performance-technology/  Just recently David brought his interface expertise to the TED Conference where he showed the audience a new way of interacting with data that goes way beyond mice and keyboards. The interface – called Siftables – consists of interactive blocks that are aware of each other and in the TED demos are used for digital color mixing, mathematical equations and even storytelling.

Watch this video about Siftables then let your imagination go wild.  One of the things I love about this video is that once again it showed how children embrace new technologies fearlessly.  If you want to find out more about David Merrill and take a look at his research, be prepared to indulge yourself on David’s site where you’ll find photos of his projects and start pondering how you will be interacting with music, art and data in the future.

A couple of days ago we wrote about a very interesting evening meeting of the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Social Media Club where the role of social media in government was discussed by panelists involved with local city government and NASA.  While some government organizations find social media daunting and are concerned about the lack of control, clearly those that have embraced it are likely to find more solutions and input from crowdsourcing.  Tell us what you think: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1163829

Earlier this week we attended the San Francisco/Silicon Valley Social Media Club at the headquarters of Loopt, a location-based tech company in Mountain View.  The focus on the evening’s meeting was how social media is adding transparency to local and federal government.

On the panel moderated by J.J. Toothman a Web strategist for Stanford, were Ariel Waldman, former Independent consultant for NASA; David Canepa, City Councilman in Daly City; Evan Ratliff, writer for Wired Magazine; and Veronica McGregor , who manages the Mars/Rovers Twitter account.
There’s no doubt that social networking is  becoming a potent tool and resource for journalists, despite corporate and government bloggers and twitterers occasionally being bruised, gagged, or commanded to “stay on message.”  The word WILL get out.  You ain’t gonna push the toothpaste back into the tube.

Russ Johnson, my husband, writes a fascinating article about journalism icon Izzy Stone and this new age of increasing freedom of data and sources online.   You can read about his take on social media and the third estate here: http://connectedtraveler.com/wordpress/2009/02/18/izzy-stone-and-social-media/.