Socialight / blog+news

If you’re in NYC this weekend - do yourself a favour and check out some of the speakers / panels at the annual Conflux psychogeography/art festival, organized by Christina Ray and her Glowlab crew. If you have no idea what we’re talking about - here’s what they say:

CONFLUX: the annual NYC festival for contemporary psychogeography where international artists, technologists, urban adventurers and the public put investigations of everyday city life into practice on the streets.

Brady Forrest just posted a podcast on O’Reilly Radar with me in which we discuss where some of the ideas for Socialight originated (23centstories shoutout!), as well as what we’re working on now and what you can look forward to in the next version. (MP3)

If you’re anywhere near San Jose next week - come say hi and meet me at the Where 2.0 Conference.

We were in Las Vegas for CTIA Wireless 2006 during the week of April 5 (sorry for the delayed post!).

We’re proud to annouce that at the LBS Challenge award ceremony, Socialight took home a semifinalist trophy in the Social Networking category. Our friends at Skyhook Wireless took home a finalist award (and $10,000) for their Loki product. Congratulations, guys! See - we can be good sports…

Skyhook launched Loki at CTIA. If you haven’t checked it out yet, Loki’s an application and web browser plugin (Firefox and IE) that makes your web browsing relevant to where you are. It’s based on Skyhook’s own WiFi positioning system, which pinpoints your location based on the WiFi signals around you (US-only for now). Socialight is integrated into Loki; use the Socialight channel in its browser toolbar to view and create StickyShadows around you. If you try it out, let us know what you think.

We’re at South by Southwest Interactive here in beautiful Austin, Texas, USA. Michael (the little head at the front of the room, second from left) spoke to a packed house on a great panel here called Cyberplace: Online in Offline Spaces — And Vice Versa. Unfortunately, we’ve got to head back to NYC before the Music portion of the festival begins

Socialight is being presented in absentia today by the lovely and talented Lalya Gaye at the Third International Workshop on Mobile Music Technology at the University of Sussex, in Brighton. Do go check it out if you’re in the area.

Socialight will be at Hubert Burda Media’s Digital Lifestyle Day ‘06 in Munich on Monday and Tuesday of this week. We’ll be speaking about Socialight on a panel moderated by Jochen Wegner, the brand new editor-in-chief of German-language news site, Focus Online, on Tuesday morning. There’s a nicely produced podcast on the DLD site with some great posts already, and probably more to come…

Feel free to get in touch if you’re in the neighborhood or will be at the conference. We’d love to meet up for a bier!

*** Do you love the sound of one hand clapping? No? Well neither do we, so that’s why we’re going to be adding some sweet sounds to Socialight. To find out more, go to the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference in San Francisco from the 24-26 January 2006! See ya there.

*** With the help of our resident video guru Tom, we’ve created a short Socialight infomercial. Just set it and forget it… ah…never mind. It should give you a fun introduction to some of the things that you can do with Socialight on the web and while mobile. Click on the picture to check it out.

*** Easy links to user profiles. By popular demand we’ve made the links to our user profiles remarkably easy - just put your nickname after our regular URL to go to your profile. Here’s a few examples to get you started:

http://socialight.com/dan
http://socialight.com/Mmmyyk

*** Easy links to Group home pages. In the same spirit that inspired easier user profile links above, we present - Easy Group Names. In the Modify Groups page, you can choose an easy name for your Group and then link to it like so: http://socialight.com/groups/MyEasyName

Keep on Sticking those Shadows!

This is off-topic from Socialight, but we’re too excited to keep it to ourselves. This week, Kamida, the folks behind Socialight, along with Area/Code and Mobot, launched SuperStar at UbiComp 2005.

SuperStar is a massively multiplayer real-world game taking place in Tokyo.

The game uses Japanese Puri Kura sticker-clubs as a starting point for a playful experiment in social networks, automated phonecam image analysis, and urban visual culture. The goal of the game is to see and to be seen, using swarms of microscopic images woven into the complex fabric of Tokyo streetlife.

We’re in Tokyo for a couple of weeks bringing a project called SuperStar to life. Has to do with Purikura and camera-phones. Details to follow…

Socialight is going to be in the Bay Area in California at the end of June for the first O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference. The conference is June 29-30, 2005 and covers “the movement of mapping and location technology from the theoretical to the masses, illustrating the creativity that’s waiting to be unleashed as the tools and data become readily available”.

There are a ton of people going who we can’t wait to meet.