TurboTech: Technological Romance For Dummies

Scott Laningham and I, having entirely too much time to ourselves over the holidays to ponder all things technology, spent a good 26 minutes one late December day discussing likely future tech trends: Everything from the absurdity of code names for mobile operating systems to our having our own technology reality TV show someday — but one in which nobody could give Scott and I a rose.

That just simply wouldn’t be appropriate.

I also provide a shout out to the IBM Connections event, which starts a week from today in lovely Orlando, Florida.  It’s not too late to register for it, and for Lotusphere. Go here to learn more.

I’ll be arriving in Orlando early Sunday evening and plan on bringing all the blogging coverage my little Turbo hands can handle (And Scott assures me in the video below he’ll do some remote podcasting, since he won’t be there live and in person.  Make sure you provide some comments and try to hold him to it!)

SXSW Interactive 2011 – On The Ground Day 2

Greetings from the Social Media Club office here in lovely downtown Austin, Texas.

Scott Laningham, along with our IBM social media partner in crime Kathy Mandelstein, just finished IBM’s lead social business evangelist, Sandy Carter, on the topic of social media, SXSW and IBM, meeting 167 complete strangers in Mumbai late night at her hotel after a single tweet, and much, much more.

Scott and I also did a podcast recap of day 1 at SXSW Interactive, which you can find here.

Our social business buddy Rawn Shah joined us for that one, where we discussed the Jason Calacanis/Tim O’Reilly interview, and all that the other sessions that are now a vague remnant of neurons in my overstimulated mind.

Day 2 is swinging into full gear.  More later…

 

IBM Industry Summit: The Podcast Recap

Though my partner-in-crime Scott Laningham wasn’t able to join me live and in person during my recent trip to Barcelona, he was certainly there in spirit, and he was also gracious enough to join me for a recap discussion earlier this week for developerWorks.

In the 13-minute recap, Scott and I walked through some highlights of the trip and the first-ever IBM Industry Summit — and even sneaked in a few holiday shopping tidbits to boot.

Enjoy our short walk down IBM Industry Summit memory lane, and for those of you in the U.S., I hope you enjoy a restful and thankful long holiday weekend.

You can find the podcast here.

Go Daddy China

This has been an interesting week.

I’ve not been blogging much because I’ve been too busy playing work catchup after SXSW.

Hope you’ve been digging the podcast interviews Scott Laningham and I conducted as much as we did producing them.  We talked to some really interesting people here in Austin last week.

Of course, time rolls on, and everything changes, including in the interactive space.  I’ve been watching the Google/China situation with great fascination.

When I was in Beijing, it was before the Olympics and I stayed in the Beijing Hilton, and far as I could tell, I never had any issue with Internet filtering.

But boy have Google and China gone at it this week.  Last one out turn out the Great Firewall.

My own personal take is that while information wants to be free, China wants to keep it locked up, and Google can’t get a high-enough cost-per-click to make it worth their while.

So they reroute their mainland search queries to the “special administrative region” of Hong Kong, forcing the China government-owned mobile companies to rethink their mobile search deal, and in the end Microsoft’s Bing is the beneficiary.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

Even GoDaddy.Com has told the Chinese to take a domain-sales hike, which is really disappointing, for I was looking forward to someday seeing Danica Patrick scream around the corner Chairman Mao’s visage overlooking Tiananmen Square NASCAR style.

Of course, they may, in fact, be fighting the last Internet war — smartphone traffic has taken off like a rocket, up 193% year-over-year, according to AdMob.

The iPhone leads the way in terms of share, at 50% (up from 33% last year), followed by Android (up from 2% to 24%), and Nokia losing share (from 43% down to 18%…ouch!).

This just in time for Microsoft and FourSquare to start cozying up, with Bing now offering up a Foursquare map application that allows Bing map users to see check-ins on FourSquare.

Hey, maybe the Chinese Communist Party can use Bing maps to see Foursquare check-ins of Google sales reps running around Beijing trying to avert the wrath of the Golden Shield?!