Joe Speaks at the Austin Forum - May 2, 2007

The Austin Forum (www.austinforum.org)

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and The Austin Forum invite you to a participatory talk by Joe Sanchez, an emerging leader in the field of virtual worlds and the societal impacts of technology. Sanchez will demonstrate how virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are connecting people, places, and spaces. In this open forum, Mr. Sanchez will discuss the implications of virtual worlds on business, education, and entertainment, and how the use of the 3D Web is changing the way we interact with information.

The mission of The Austin Forum is to promote awareness of issues and opportunities in our community and to enrich lives. The Forum invites distinguished professionals and leaders to speak on topics related to science and technology and how they impact society.

Learn more about The Austin Forum's upcoming events at: www.austinforum.org.

When: Wednesday, May 2, 2007 @ 6:30 p.m.

Where: J.J. Pickle Research Campus - Research Office Complex (Jackson School of Geosciences & Texas Advanced Computing Center's new building) Seminar Room 1.603

* This event is free and open to the public; complimentary food and drink will be provided prior to the talk @ 6:00 p.m.

** One Xbox 360 will be given away at the end of the presentation; must be present to win!

The Austin Forum is sponsored, in part, by RadioShack Highland Mall and TACC. Mention TACC at RadioShack Highland Mall and get a 10% discount, on select items, through May 31, 2007.

Rebeka Villarreal Martinez
Development & External Relations
Texas Advanced Computing Center
Direct: 512-232-7794
Fax: 512-475-9445

Discussion forum Wed., 4/4 - Climate Prediction: The Do's and Don'ts

From The Austin Forum (www.austinforum.org):

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and The Austin Forum invite you to a participatory talk by Dr. Charles Jackson, a leading research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics (UTIG). Dr. Jackson will present some of the little-known inner-workings of climate model development, including what can and cannot be predicted about the Earth's future climate. Are predictions of future global warming and its consequences accurate?

The mission of The Austin Forum is to promote awareness of issues and opportunities in our community and to enrich lives. The Forum invites distinguished professionals and leaders to speak on topics related to science and technology and how they impact society.

Learn more about The Austin Forum's upcoming events at: www.austinforum.org.

When: Wednesday, April 4, 2007 @ 6:30 p.m.

Where: J.J. Pickle Research Campus - Research Office Complex (Jackson School of Geosciences & Texas Advanced Computing Center's new building) Seminar Room 1.603

** This event is free and open to the public; complimentary food and drink will be provided prior to the talk @ 6:00 p.m. **

Rebeka Villarreal Martinez
Development & External Relations
Texas Advanced Computing Center
Direct: 512-232-7794
Fax: 512-475-9445

Electrical and Computer Engineering Department presents lecture series

March 28, 2007: The Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series hosts Tom Sonderman, director of Automated Precision Manufacturing Technology for AMD, at 5 p.m. in the Applied Computational Engineering and Sciences Building, Room 2.302. Sonderman speaks about "AMD/UT: A Progressive Partnership."
http://www.ece.utexas.edu/faculty/seminar/distinguished_lecture_series.html#son

SXSW podcast feed

The people at SXSW have been recording almost every session at the conference. They will be releasing them over the next couple of weeks. A few are already up including the intro remarks by Kathy Sierra and Emerging Social and Technology Trends. the link is here

The conference has been amazing this year. The tech bubble is a brewing, I was able to meet with some folks from IBM who are running their virtual worlds projects and a few others from Linden labs (second Life). We are just seeing the emergence of virtual 3D worlds and from the amount of venture capital being generated for these platforms they are going to be around for a while.

A big buzz is speculation of Google's entry into the virtual world. A few of google's tools and recent purchases lead us to think this way, Sketch Pad, Google 3D warehouse, and Google Earth 3D
Put them together and you basically have a virtual world ready to go minus avatars. Why would Google want to do this AdSense goes 3D, maybe that's why...

SXSW blogs

Hey Team,
I'm on my way to SXSW to get registered and to attend the preconference sessions. I'll be blogging from my educuase blog while I'm there at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/joesanchez about educause initiatives ( i'm trying to get a fellowship from them) and about fun stuff on our blog. A Student from my class will also be blogging from his perspective as a first time conference attendee here http://sxsw.throwspace.com/

It's neat having a student blog about SXSW. We read a book about blogging called Naked Conversations last week and he said he was inspired to blog at SXSW becasue of the book. I think that is prettty cool. I already learned a few things from him, SXSW is using a social networking website to get people connected before they attend sessions. Every conference session is listed and you can click a button that says "i plan on attending" to let others know you will be there. At the bottom of the page it shows a picture of every one who will attend the session and each picture links to the user's profile so you can read about their interest. Already i have made a few links with poeple that are attending sessions about Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds. Five profiles came up listing people who will be attending all the same sessions that i am interested in. I sent each of them an invitation for an after conference meet-up. I'll let you know what happens. The point of the story is, my student blogged about this and if i hadn't read his blog i wouldn't have known about the social networking site.
joe

Sony PS3 virtual environment

Like Second Life and There.com, Sony is launching a virtual world called Home for PS3 gamers!
Keep in mind that Home is not a rip-off of Second Life because it is, for the most part, not based on user-created content.

Found and sent to me by Joel Heikes. Thanks, Joel!

source: http://tech.msn.com/products/article.aspx?cp-documentid=3869933&GT1=9233

"Essentially, Home is a 3D, avatar-based social environment available for free to users of the PlayStation 3 network. The idea is to give users a way to connect in a multimedia space and interact with the various forms of media available on the PS3.

Home will be a free download. It will go into a large-scale beta in April and will launch publicly this fall.

While Home has some innovative features--most notably the ability to watch high-definition quality video available through the PS3 network--it's strongly reminiscent of virtual worlds like Second Life, only deeply scaled back.

Home participants will be able to meet other members, most likely in a main public area known as the "Central Lobby," and communicate through text, audio or video chatting. They will also be able to pipe in--either in public or private theaters--the latest movies or TV shows available through the PS3 network, as well as their own user-created videos.

Further, users will be able to infinitely customize their avatars. And each member will be given a small (and free) private space, somewhat like an apartment, that he or she can customize per his or her own tastes.

A main selling point of Second Life is that users create nearly all the content, with almost no limits, making for an environment that's almost infinitely extensible. By contrast, Home appears to be a much more controlled space."

Belkin TuneStudio

Belkin made a new product that lets you mix and record music on your iPod. the New TuneStudio is a portable mixer that plugs into your iPod. It has four inputs and it works with the iPod video series