This morning I decided to head downtown to witness the opening of the Vancouver Apple Store at Pacific Centre. This was my second Apple opening as I was at the Bellvue Square one a few years ago.
I arrived around 8am expecting to either see a huge lineup of campers already there or not much of a line. Apparently the first guy in line got there at 5:45am so it wasn’t too bad….but Apple wasn’t having a sale or giving away anything other than a free T-Shirt to the first 1000 people through the door.
Buzz Bishop shot a video of the lineup and the opening of store (I say hi to Buzz at around the 16 second mark):
Towards the end of the video you can see some very enthusiastic Apple employees high-5′ing the people in line….I was surprised how many employees were on hand but it actually is a fairly big/deep store unlike many other Apple stores that are inside malls.
Overall I’m glad there is finally an Apple Store in the area but it would have been better if it was a larger store that had a theatre with classes like many other stores I’ve been too. The training seminars they offer are usually free and it would be great for me to point friends and family to them if they wanted to find out more about Apple products. But hopefully this store will do ridiculously well it will warrant additional stores in the area (like maybe Coquitlam Centre beside the other H&M store in the area). Toronto currently has 3 stores with a 4th one in the works.
Here’s a few more shots of the store and the opening day madness. This is probably the only day that Apple will allow photography in the store too…I’ve been asked to not take photos a few times in other stores. More in my flickr stream:
Yes, there were also a lot of iPhones in attendance. The store has a few accessories for the iPhone as well but not much (yet).
All the blue or orange t-shirts are Apple staff
The Genius Bar is open for business.
My next visit to the store will most likely be on June 9th which is also the day of the WWDC keynote and when the next version of the iPhone is expected to be unveiled….and possibly even available in Canada.
Thanks goes to Derek for tagging all my photos on Flickr for me while I was rushing to get them online using the free instore wifi!
I’ll be heading down to the Centre For Digital Media on Saturday to attend the Bridging Media event organized by Megan Cole and Erica Hargreave. I think you can still register if you’re interested in attending this free event.
I’m looking forward to a number of the sessions as I’m contemplating a couple of side projects that harken back to my ‘roots’ as a film school grad and a film nerd. More and more the techy stuff I do around here and other stuff I am interested in seems to cross back over into the film world so it will be interesting to see where this all goes.
Creative outlets FTW.
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of being one of the first people to get a sneak peak at something that has been in the works for a long time now. I’ve come to know a few of the people working on this project over the past year and have been patiently waiting to find out what they’ve been up to over at Strutta.com. They have been dropping little hints all along and now that I’ve seen what they’ve been working on, many of those little hints start making a lot more sense…like a big puzzle finally coming together as something recognizable.
I had my own thoughts as to what Strutta was. Given it’s name, the clever taglines on T-shirts (”What, ou think you’re better than me?”) that have been popping up at various events around town and the kinds of things people working inside do and don’t hide, I was beginning to piece together what was going on.
So what the hell is it?
Without giving away all the secrets that I’ve been sworn to keep, Strutta is a place where people that have ANY kind of skill (that can be captured on video) can compete with others to be the best at that skill.
Using a lot of cool technology, people will be able to upload (or link to) their videos and others will vote on them using a number of different methods. Videos will be grouped into ‘games’ which you then play by ranking the entries in that game.
What impressed me the most wasn’t this basic premise (which I’m over simplifying), but rather the myriad number of ways you’ll be able to participate in the ‘games’ without other stuff getting in the way. I won’t get into detail here (mostly because I’m not completely sure how descriptive I can be without Jordan busting down my door), but suffice to say, you won’t be able to miss Strutta when they take off. They’ve thought about this a lot and have all the bases covered. They also have a pretty kick ass team working on it too.
This has the potential to get huge because it appeals to people’s competitive nature in a way where you don’t necessarily have to be an uber-athlete to compete and the gameplay mechanisms are quite intuitive. Anyone with a skill or something they (think) are the best at can play. I’ve been racking my brain to think of something I can do. I’m sure I’ll think of something you can make fun of me over later.
Here’s the official, Jordan Approved™ screenshot of what the site currently looks like which I think doesn’t do it justice since you really have to play with it to get a feel for it….and I’m told you’ll get a chance to do that very soon.
Of course, the screenshot features Alexa as the ‘Best Guitar Hero Player’ - which is totally unfair because Strutta has a dedicated room for her to play GH in during work hours. She is so hardcore, she even dresses like the characters in the game while she plays. Their team meetings must be fun.
I’m looking forward to seeing the full Strutta unveiling over the coming weeks and months and people starting to use it. Great job so far and thanks for giving me a sneak peak!
Now that Northern Voice is over, everyone is gearing up for SXSWi which starts in just over a week. My damn Moo cards better get here soon!
One of the great things about attending a conference for a bunch of geeks, is that if there is anything missing or lacking from the conference organizers themselves, the attendees will fix/build/make it. Case in point, there isn’t currently an easy way to see all the panels and sessions in one place.
Previously, I had a Palm device and there was actually a surprisingly good schedule app available. This year of course, just about everyone there will have iPhones or an iPod Touch. There are web optimized versions of the schedule but since I’m not planning on relying on the sketchy wifi, I’d rather have something a little more stable.
Enter Stuart Colville’s iCal version of all the daytime sessions as well as the evening parties. Just download the .ICS files, add them to your iCal and then sync with your device (iPod or iPhone) and you’re done. The added benefit is that you also have it on your Mac laptop if you’re taking one. Awesome job Stuart!
Check out the SXSW Tools page for other things that will help make things more fun.
Photo by kk+ on Flickr
Another cool thing about SXSW is that it’s also a music festival…well actually it was that first and then the geeks came along. A music festival has bands which play music. They want people to hear that music so what do they do? They post a huge pile of MP3’s online of all the bands coming. Then someone makes a giant torrent of all those MP3’s.
Yup, a big pile of free music to listen to on that long flight to Austin. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the torrent link - lots of other great SXSW resources in Scott’s post too.
Finally, check out Phillip’s round up of all the locals making the trek to Texas.
A few of us have been noticing that there hasn’t been as much chatter on the internet about Northern Voice during or immediately following the event. As well, the page views on Flickr seemed to be a lot lower than last year. Personally, I think it’s just that everyone hasn’t fully had a chance for it all to sink in yet. As I’m finding by new followers on Twitter, new contacts on Flickr and a bunch of new feeds I’ve been reading, it’s slowly gaining some momentum after the fact.
Let’s face it, a weekend of conferencing takes it’s toll on people and especially since most of the attendees have normal day jobs that they returned to almost immediately. It takes awhile to get your head around what you participated in and find a way to record or publish those thoughts. Not to mention taking care of all the things you didn’t tend to during the conference.
So in that vein, I thought I’d followup my somewhat brief recap with a few more cool things I’ve found since the weekend:
- my pal, Duane Storey, pulled some awesome out of his hat with his amazing photo mosaic of all the tagged photos in Flickr he could hoover down. He called it 1600 reasons to love Northern Voice and I’m sure he’ll have to rename it as that photo number keeps growing as attendees get out their card readers and upload more shots to the Flickr stream. As Gene said in his post, if you can’t find yourself in those photos, you weren’t there.
- I twittered about it a bit and mentioned it in my first recap but I keep coming across blog posts and photos of people that I wish I had a chance to either spend more time talking to or even just meeting at the conference. I guess one of the cons of going to a conference in your own town, with a lot of friends in attendance, is that you don’t get outside your circle as much as you would if you were somewhere you didn’t know many people. That and there is never enough time.
- I wish I had an opportunity to chat with Stewart Mader whose presentation about Wiki’s I really enjoyed at last years NV and missed his this year. He’s been rounding up some great links and comments from other people as well as doing a great job liveblogging a lot of sessions
- Another missed meet/chat was with Alan Levine who gave a great presentation on “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” in which he outlines some of the amazing web tools out there you can use to tell a story. Something he did with all 50 tools and the same story. Alan also managed to capture one of my favorite open mic sessions at the Opening Night party by Scott Leslie called Trackback Love.
- Bobby Dassler took an awesome set of polaroids that turned out really cool…and I’m even in there
- DaveO’s amazing “F*ck Stats, Make Art” session is now available via Audio (MP3) thanks to Cosmo and Matt’s keynote audio is here although he says that it may not be a great experience without the slides. Stewart has a transcript as well.
There is a ton more stuff that I missed that I hope makes its way online eventually. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to next year already.
Check out the Northern Voice wiki for other things you (or I) may have missed.
Update: Looks like videos of Miranda’s natural light talk and Reilly’s modified light talk have been posted. Both are great parts of PhotoCamp. Great video capture job too!
During the Northern Voice Opening Party, Chris Heur asked if he could do a quick interview with me. Chris was doing this to capture the event by talking to as many people as possible and asking them a couple of questions. He simply used his cellphone and a service called Utterz to record the interview and it automagically posted it to his blog, twitter and to his Utterz page (and possibly other places). He also managed to take a decent photo of me which is pretty much a miracle.
Hopefully I sound as cool as everyone else he interviewed during his trip to Vancouver. Thanks Chris…it was a fun thing to participate in and a cool way to capture the people attending the conference.
Just like last year, I had a great time at Northern Voice. Like many (good) conferences, there is always too many people you want to talk to or meet and simply not enough time. Maybe next year there should be a scheduled block of ‘hanging in main hall’ just so you have a little more quality time between sessions to chat.
This year I convinced a few friends that might not ordinarily go to a conference like this to come out and I think they had a great time like I did. My favorite session easily was Kris Krug’s PhotoCamp and still think (like I did during BarCamp) that it could be it’s own stand alone conference. Dave Olson also had an outstanding session about making art instead of worrying about “fucking stats”. Looking forward to hanging more with these guys in Austin real soon.
I enjoyed all the sessions I attended (check out Rebecca’s always awesome liveblog posts of many sessions) but if there was one negative about the conference (which happens to all of them) is that there were a couple of sessions happening concurrently I would have liked to attend but had to make a choice. Judging from the results, Rachael Ashe’s session on light painting looked fantastic and I really should have went to it. I really like the mix of art that has worked its way into some of these tech(ish) events and it’s inspiring to see people doing really cool stuff right in front of you.
Using a cool trick Derek Miller shared at PhotoCamp, here is my Northern Voice wrap up in pictures:
I’ll try to tag as many of the photos as I can but feel free to tag yourself if I didn’t.
Special shout out to Jennie (who flew in from Pittsburgh!) and Dan (from Toronto) for coming out west for a few days. I wish we had more time to spend together.
I completely forgot to pick up a “Bloggable” T-shirt during the conference….maybe Boris can help me buy one. Maybe next year Basco5 can do some t-shirts too.
One of the cool side benefits of going to the Interactive portion of SXSW is that you get exposed to the Film and Music festivals. Unless you purchase a gold passport, your Interactive badge won’t get you into those events, panels and parties…well, maybe the parties but they have armed guards preventing the film geeks from mingling with the web geeks (and vice versa) inside the convention center.
In previous years that I’ve attended, and hopefully this time around, there has been downloads of music from all the bands playing during SXSW and a huge torrent of trailers for all the movies showing during the film portion. This amounts to exposure to a ton of new music and cool new films you might not otherwise be exposed to. So even if you’re not going to Austin, you can still benefit since the downloads are free and open to anyone. Looks like this year, they have a trailer site with a videoplayer to browse through all the films. They still haven’t posted (or at least I couldn’t find) the music downloads but they do have a list of all the bands performing. I’m going to have to see about getting into the Moby session.
This year, the first trailer that I’ve come across, for a documentary about online gaming/virtual worlds called Second Skin, looks very interesting and just happens to be free for Interactive attendees:
Speaking of games, another nice benefit of going to Interactive is the Screenburn Festival which happens at the same time. They also have their own arcade tradeshow with game companies showing their wares with demos and giveaways. It’s free and open for the public as well.
Thanks to an email from Rebecca, I’ve just joined ‘Team Blogger’ for this years Bowl for Big Brothers Classic event taking place on March 16th. So far I’ll be joining Corinna, Duane, Keira-Anne, John and our team captain, Rebecca. Check out Rebecca’s post if you’re interested in joining the team.
The theme this year is ‘beach party’. This could be interesting…will they allow flip flops on the lanes? Will there be wifi as you know a bunch of bloggers will want to liveblog the event.
I’m always down for hanging with the gang except this time it will be for charity so it should be a fun and worthwhile event.
If you’re interested in sponsoring me, please visit my sponsor page.
I’ve set my personal goal to be at the $150 mark in order to get the beach towel prize which is the minimum. I’ll draw a name from those that sponsor me and give them the prize if I reach that mark (or any mark in case I manage to surpass the minimum).
Now to find my hawaiian shirt.
UPDATE: Looks like we now have a ringer on our team now that Tod Maffin has joined us!
If you’re planning on heading to Austin in early March to attend South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), here’s a few tips that might be helpful to you. I’ve been twice before and this year will be my third trip to Texas. Every year it’s gotten bigger than the last and I expect this year to be no exception.
SXSWi is actually only one part of the whole South by Southwest conference. Interactive happens the same time as the Film conference with the Music one starting when the film/web geeks vacate the hotels. Judging from the pictures I’ve seen, the music part is pretty amazing but I’ve never been able to stay for the full run of both conferences.
1. Pack light and bring a big suitcase.
You WILL get a lot of swag (or at least offered it) so be prepared to bring a bunch of stuff home and give it to your friends/coworkers that didn’t get to go (unless it’s cool).
Since it’s usually very warm in Austin so you can wear shorts and a t-shirt most of the time and a light jacket at night. You can even just wear the swag you get to save even more luggage space….last year I came home with about 15 t-shirts. Last year was a little cooler and it rained but it was still shorts weather.
2. Bring/wear comfortable shoes
You’ll be doing a LOT of walking between the panels, parties and your hotel so bring a good pair (or two) of comfortable shoes. Hopefully they’ve changed the panel layout this year after last year’s craziness of having a panel end at one end of the convention center and the next one begin at the other end. It is Texas and the convention center is easily the size of a small Alberta town.
3. Don’t stress about note taking
This event is easily one of most blogged/photographed/podcasted events and since you can’t expect to be everywhere at all times, you should have no problem getting the full scoop from someone else. SXSWi also publishes videos and podcasts of many panels. Although these seem to be posted over a very long period of time (like months) and not right after the event.
4. Get your DSLR tagged
kk+ gave me this tip last year (unfortunately before I had my Nikon) - if you have a ‘pro camera’ (or something that resembles one) you may be asked (but do it if not) to get your camera tagged by the Event staff. This lets people know you’re taking event photos….however they didn’t seem to care about my little Casio point and shoot. This also has the added benefit of helping you get into some places you may not normally (think Press Pass) when combined with your SXSWi lanyard. YMMV on this one.
5. Plan your power usage
EVERYONE brings a laptop to SXSWi and there are so many Apple computers there, you’d think that you were at MacWorld. Plan on charging your laptop at night for the next day. As long as your battery is decent, you should be able to last through most of the day unless you’re Twittering the whole time. If that’s the case, expect to have to share the power outlets that are strewn throughout the place with a bunch of others. Forgot your power adapter in the hotel room? No worries, as someone is bound to have the same device as you and I also witnessed some of the event staff lending cords to forgetful attendees (again it was Apple adaptors as most of the event is powered by Macs).
6. Stay in touch
If you are going to SXSWi by yourself, be prepared to meet a ton of people - you WILL leave with new friends. Chances are there are already a few people that you know going. You can find out by stalking the Online Registrants Directory, and watching Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce for SXSW messages. You might also want to get some Moo cards and be prepared to go through them all. As March draws closer, there will be a ton of online services to help attendees get organized. Panel schedules, party planners and more will be everywhere. If you want to get a head start, check out the SXSW Insider.
You’ll also want to find out about your mobile situation. Depending on your plan, make sure you understand the implications of using your cellphone in Texas. If you’re from Canada like me, prepare to get screwed on roaming charges. Even if you forward your phone to voicemail, you may be charged the roaming fees if it rings through in Austin. A better bet is picking up a disposable (don’t really throw it out when you’re done) cellphone or pay as you go SIM card if you rock the GSM. AT&T has a cheap phone you can pickup almost anywhere south of the border for $10-20 that will give you a cheap local number while down south. I got my phone/sim from Radio Shack for $10 with a $10 credit (free+tax) then added a $25 card. T-Mobile also has SIM cards you can get from ebay but they apparently don’t let you use data on the prepaid SIMs unlike AT&T. Make sure if you do get a phone down there that you can find additional add on cards for it…the first year I took a US Virgin Mobile phone with me and couldn’t find the cards anywhere and they didn’t accept my Canadian credit card to top up online or over the phone.
Unless your company is paying (and doesn’t care), the pay as you go route will be infinitely cheaper than anything a Canadian provider will charge you. Don’t forget to change/disable/reroute your Twitter/Jaiku/Facebook mobile notifications as well as those can get costly when roaming depending on your plan.
That’s all for now….more as SXSWi gets closer!
« Older Entries
