It was pointed out to me by my friend (who prefers to remain nameless…no really) that I have been neglecting Diggz.org lately. This is very true. I’ve been busy working on other things like Tropo.com, GWOB.org and traveling quite a bit for both. Here and there I’ve had the opportunity to play some piano.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to get back into the habit of posting content to Diggz.org. In the spirit of that, I’ve recorded a new edition of Johnny Diggz Live. I hope you enjoy…
What is the future of voice, video, text and other real-time communications technologies? Where is the innovation happening? What does our communication future look like?
That was the topic of a video interview by Chris Pirillo between VoIP industry veteran Jeff Pulver and Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor. Conducted using a Google+ Hangout, Chris described on his own site what the interview was all about and then made the video available on YouTube:
I was so inspired by the mythical tales of heroic network planning and design in Twilio’s post ,”Why Twilio Wasn’t Affected by Today’s AWS Issues“, I made this short animation to express the pure unadulterated seeping pile of awesome it represents. Kudos to the author, and thank you commenters for your inspirado.
When I was young, I loved the the movie “The Last Starfighter“…I loved the idea that some random suburban kid could backdoor his way into saving the entire galaxy by simply excelling at playing a coin operated video game (really well). Perhaps in retrospect, this was a bit of self-indulgent thinking…as I spent many a formative year dumping quarters into coin-operated video game machines.
My very first job was as a paperboy for the Philadephia Bulletin. I’d deliver newspapers on my bicycle and I’d collect tips. Many times tips came in the form of quarters. And I’d spend those quarters on video games…like Asteroids, Space Invaders, Defender… Galaga.
When The Last Starfighter came out in 1984, the Philadephia Bulletin had been out of print for two years. The Bulletin was just an evening newspaper published daily in Philadelphia from 1847 to 1982…no big deal. I was 13…my paperboy days were long gone. But when I saw The Last Star Fighter for the first time I thought it was the coolest thing ever, mostly because I could relate to the main character, Alex Rogan. Alex gets an opportunity, granted by “The Music Man” himself, Robert Preston, because he’s a smart geek. The opportunity is to save the galaxy using the skills he’s displayed by #winning the #highscore at a coin-operated video game near his local laundrymat called (appropriately) The Last Starfighter.
Well, today is my birthday and I have an opportunity to help out a very real version of this concept. It’s a project we’ve been working on at Geeks Without Bounds called “GameSave”… a competition challenging teams of game developers to create a game that teaches and trains players (in advance) in basic emergency relief and disaster mitigation techniques.
Crowdmap is designed and built by the people behind Ushahidi, a platform that was originally built to crowdsource crisis information. As the platform has evolved, so have its uses. Crowdmap allows you to set up your own deployment of Ushahidi without having to install it on your own web server. This tutorial shows how to set up a brand new Crowdmap deployment from scratch
If John Travolta and William Hung had a baby…Johnny Lee is back on stage at Baby Grands Dueling Pianos . This time with even more dance moves and even more of teh awesome. Enjoy…
Tuesday, January 10
2
