Cristiano on Tech/Life

So my second Geek Dinner is over and done with, and although I felt it went better, we still had problems with the venue and the food. We might be looking for a new venue somewhere in the future. DataPortability proved to be a very interesting topic as we had way more people show up this time. Lots of new faces which is always a good thing. Below are the photos.

We also tried to stream the talk, but the “The Cloud”-hotspot died after about 10 minutes making even normal internet communication impossible. Maybe next time. Improbulus recorded most of the talk though, which is actually interesting to listen at if you weren’t there. Click through to the full article to see the video.
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By popular demand we have decided to set up a Ustream of the talk tonight. We got someone to give us access to the BT Openzone and have setup a Ustream channel in preparation. Tonight the talk will start at about 8:30, and you can watch the video here.

Unfortunately I think we do still need a better microphone cause in-build microphones for laptops sound awful in video streams. So, if you have a decent mic solution for tonight, please bring it along!

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Last week we saw the launch of Tipit.to, the Dutch startup by Reinier, Jeroen and Alper. Tipit is a webservice that allows anyone to give a small tip (starting at 1 cent) to anyone. Tips are aggregated before payed and a similar system is used for payout. This makes it way more easier to pay a tip using Tipit than having to go through the PayPal process for every 10 cents you want to pay someone.

Why tips?

So why would you leave tips? Well honestly there are numerous reasons, but I always like to think about it as a good anti-advertisement measure. Most sites show Google Ads simply because the income they get from it pay for the server bills, which doesn’t mean they feel happy to have to show their users advertisement. Instead, a Tipit button on a website could allow users to make simple and easy donations, eliminating the need of advertisement.

Creative uses

There are obviously other reasons to have a tipjar besides preventing advertisements, and since the launch last week we have already seen a few uses that were pretty creative. The most notable is Lauren, who’s house burned down and is now looking for some money to get his life back on track (photos and videos here, or tip him here).

How to join?

Setting up your own tipjar is pretty easy, just go to Tipit.to, sign up, create a tipjar, and place the nice button on your site. In contrary to other services like Paypal they don’t need an awful lot of info about you before you can set up an account, and in contrary to services like TipJoy they pay out real money.

Is tipping the future?

I personally think we will see more and more tipping in the future. Tipping is the logical extend of the currently increased social activity on the web. Recent research shows that people are clicking less and less on advertisements and honestly I think we all hate to see them around anyway. Add on top of this that many people are starting to feel more and more invested in the sites they use day in and day out (see Flickr users vs the Yahoo/MS news), and tipping is definitely going to be hot in 2008.

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So last weekend I went to SemanticCamp, a semantic BarCamp organized by Tom Morris here in London at Imperial College. The event was kind of “OK”. I said OK because honestly the event was not the best thing for me. I personally went because I was wondering what all this “semantic” stuff was all about. I guess more people had the same idea, and as a result, at most of the times, only 1 talk was going on. Combine this with a lot of no-shows and you get bored soon. I didn’t feel like listening to too many talks on RDF so I hung around with some people in the other rooms instead.

There were some great things about SemanticCamp though, most important of which was the organization, the location, and the drinks afterwords. One of the other great things about SemanticCamp was the Semantopoly game, custom made by Jon Linklater-Johnson. The game is a kind of Monopoly where you can play a web “celebrity” and buy technologies and social networks to make mashups and get venture capital. One of the board characters was Jeremy Keith so image the joy we had when Jeremy decided to play himself in the game.

Here are the photos:

Time for the third Geek Dinner event of the year already. This time I invited two guests, Paul Jones and Ian Forrester, to talk on the very hot topic of DataPortability. If you don’t know what DataPortability is, take a look at the website or this interesting video:

The date is the 27th of February, the venue is the same old Ye Olde Cock Tavern, and this time we will start at about 7:30. Food (open buffet) will be £5, and please let me know if you are coming so that we can guess the amount of food to order. Hope to see you all!

[Upcoming link]

• www.dontclick.it – Very interesting web design where you don’t need to click to navigate. Feels a bit like mac’s one button mouse idea.
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• Funny story about computer confiscation in Denmark – The title is quite descriptive….