Kaizen Bits

Yesterday I was the keynote speaker with my talk “Semantic Web 2.0: La Nueva Web o la Fuerza del Sino” at the 14th International Congress of Computer Science Researcher held at the Instituto Tecnológico de Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico.

I must confess that it was my first keynote and I was very nervous and excited. I think that, for a researcher, this is one of those really important moments in life. That of course, added to the point that there were 800 attendants.

The interesting thing is that magic worked and I felt very confortable and at ease from the moment one. The audience was mostly young and I was talking about Web 2.0 (more than about Semantics) so it was an impressive success. After the talk I received an overload of people talking and commenting. This is what I love from Mexico, people are so Latin, they want to talk and share their thoughts.

During these two days, I was stopped all the time by people who loved the conference. Thanks to the Instituto for the invitation, thanks for giving me this opportunity, I will never forget.

Loads of …Apple open source found here. Thought the Apple platform was sooo closed. Togther with 250 free Mac apps, it is going to be fun to come back to Madrid and to my new Mac.

“The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones”, says Masahiro Katayama, responsible of the IDC Consulting firm in this Slashdot article. He also points out that in Japan, kids are growing with mobile phones and that a bigger TV is the rocking thing: the future of the PC is not bright.

However, I think we tend to look at very developped markets when checking this. Now I am in Mexico and, particularly, at the University, I do not see people with gadgets. However, a huge number of students count on high-quality fast laptops (better than my old Acer, for example).

Maybe in a number of countries, gadgets are popping all over the place, but I still think the PC will have a bright future in those not so advanced: they are the building blocks of IT.

(Yes, the picture is from Valparaiso, Chile, the House of the Navy, but who cares? )

Today, it was announced the final movement in Google about mobile phones.  After several months  of rumours, the New York Times published this interview and  Google has announced today an open platform for mobile devices developers called Android, together with the Open Handset Alliance which gathers 34 companies, mobile telcos, suppliers, software and Internet companies, semiconductors and commercial companies.

Among those companies we can find KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, China Mobile, HTC, Telefónica, T-Mobile, Intel, Samsung, Motorla, LG… No news from Nokia, Palm, Vodafone y Apple.

So there will be no Google Phone. And this might be bad news for propietary OS such as Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile or the recent alliance of Motorola and Sony Ericsson with the UIQ plataform. Not to forget the new OS X of the iPhone. Y sin olvidar la versión de Mac Os x que controla el iPhone.
I did not have the time to research much on my own about the platform, so thanks to the great summary in Caspa TV where this summary has been extracted.

With all the conference and the travelling, I could not follow properly the release of Open Social, a master key, an API for a number of Social Networks. Thanks that I could read it both at Cloudlands and Ina´s blog, two nice sources if you wanna track the Social Network thing.

Here is the Open Social code  and the developpers forum. Also this interesting link about Manuel Vila´s Object Web (food for thought). I just need to sit down a couple of hours and see how it works. Let´s try next week.