-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-

 ``.~.  r-.  (*)    -=~ .___    __.   ,         ___  _    __
  '  ' /  \       //   `| R \\ /  \\ /:   ^  / /   '. \\ \/ ====|
  -  | |   !  || <    :|. _ //.| 0 | /|: |*| | | A  | || ||:
  =  \*/   +  ||  /     | =|\ |. 0 |. \  | : | | a || | V | >===
 -=   v    \  ||   \==- | ^ |. \\ //  \\/  \v/ \_  --, \'/ :
~-=           |`.   `"  ~    `~  u      '   V     |__|  V  .====|


<- Back to 2006.02.24.


Dude, the Play conference is teh lame.  Turns out it's put on by
the Haas Business School here at Berkeley, and is therefore all
about discovering the "pain points" of "mainstream consumers" and
such (currently sitting in Cammie Dunaway's keynote).

Sweet Jesus.

The panel on the "long tail" was a saving grace.  It was moderated
by the Editor of Wired (who coined the phrase), and featured the
owner of Weblogs Inc (who's a genius), some so-so guy from Amazon,
one of the founders of Flickr (who's a genius), and Sundar Pichai
from Google (who was standing in for Marissa Mayer).

The other panels all had cool names like 'P2P after Grokster', but
wound up being 'since we finally crushed the bastards, how can we
monetize their disenfranchised users?'.  That particular panel had
the founder of Pandora, which as you know I think sucks ass.  The
other cool title was "Design as a competitive advantage", which
had a guy from Adaptive Path, a guy from Palm, the guy who started
Jawbone, and somebody else.  But it was all about "competitive
advantage" and none about design.

We missed the 9:00am keynote from Adobeman.  The closing keynote
was by Neil Young from EA.  He's the only guy I heard talking
business stuff that made sense.  Brilliant guy.  There was nary a
mention of 'capturing the intent matrix' in his spiel.

I should have known it was business-focused when the reg. e-mail
mentioned casual dress -- "We'll all be in jeans", it said.  At
the time, "...but engineers normally wear jeans..." was only a
murmur in my subconscious.


-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-`._-
                                                 clumma@gmail.com