Today’s sessions were much livlier, offered more debate and more meat.

John Hagel has done amazing research on product development methods in Asia and other region where flexibility is much more common. From Toyota to a Loatian street-level highly distributed motorcycle production community he sees again and again a deep commitment to constantly refining of a final product. He spoke of “Productivity Friction” which really engaged me. The term means including systematic company-wide review of many if not all company development. Management learns on the floor with the workers, workers learn on the floor with the managers. It’s not as cost effective from a bankers perspective, but offer great long-term benefits.

Another interesting speak was Patrick Grady of the Reardon Group. I’m not sure they can actually pull off their arduous task but they seek to release a single web-based tool that will be persistently aware of your activities at all the sites you go to. Their goal is that when you change flight times at Expedia it automatically modifies you car rental date, changes dinner reservations, changes your Yankees tickets, compares against your coworkers schedules, changes your food delivery date. They are very aware that we are all becoming executive assistants arrainging a great deal of tasks that require a lot of consistent attention. As I said I’m not sure even after 5 years of development they can offer this deeply integrated omnipresent assistant, but they are working full-steam on it. And it makes me realize it’s a real shame that not one large service website communicates with another.

I had a fascinating conversation with John Merrells that runs a mobile application company Parthenon Computing. Dogster is making a cell app so we had a lot to talk about. He told me that the SIM card that is in all our phones is more than a phone book, it has a modem and other intelligence, all on 2k of storage. He’s seen a 1Gb SIM card that once can take control of the whole phone and handle all your phone processes. This means that if integrated you could program your SIM to do whatever you want, download whatever programs you wanted, and use it for whatever you wanted, not what your provider wants you to do. Awesome.

A bunch of great sites have come across or re-across my radar in the last two days. Here’s a list in no order:
OurMedia.org, Buzznet.com, Blink TV, Bubbler.com, Microformats.org, Bryght, SecondLife (I watched usage for 20 mintues), Prodigem, Gluestik

Two hysterically pointed movies: Day of the Long Tail, 2014’s Epic

Here are PHOTOS.