My household magazine subscriptions

I noticed that the number of magazines that we subscribe to is getting to be pretty sizeable, so I thought I'd share the list to see how it compares to what others are reading.

Here goes:

1. 7x7 San Francisco
2. Backpacker
   
3. Bon Appetit
4. Business 2.0
   
5. Business Week
6. C
7. Cuisine at Home
   
8. Eating Well
9. Fast Company
10. Food & Wine
    
11. Forbes
12. Fortune
13. Gourmet
    
14. Inc.
15. National Geographic
16. Outside
17. Portfolio
    
18. Portland Monthly
19. San Francisco
    
20. Self
21. Saveur
22. Star
23. Travel & Leisure
24. U.S. News & World Report
25. Us Weekly
26. Wired
27. Women's Health

What do you read? [Updated: August 9, 2007]

Who will be on the next Presidential tickets?

My hunches:

Democrat: Richardson/Obama.



Republican: Giuliani/McCain



What do you think?

[Note: I am a bit biased and have contributed to the Bill Richardson for President campaign.]

Sunday was Napa wine tasting day

The Silverado Trail Wineries Association had a weekend event where some of the lesser known wineries of Eastern Napa got together to promote themselves. We checked a few of them out, along with a few others (*), that were not part of the event.

1. Judd's Hill - A new vineyard, no longer on the hill.
   
2. Van Der Heyden Vineyards - Wine tasting or wine lecturing? We arrived and were seated while an employee held court and talked about the wine (but didn't feel it was important to pour). We made a move to leave, but the winemaker intercepted us and offered to help. Good that we stayed, as we found that they make an incredible late harvest cabernet (first time to see that!). They harvest the grapes in late November/early December. The 1997 was the best wine to ever set root(?) in my mouth. Purchased the 1997 and the 2002.
   
3. Hagafen Cellars - This one got crowded fast, so we didn't stick around too long.
   
4. Signorello Winery - Discovered that Mike looks like Ray Signorello, Jr.
   
5. * Chimney Rock Winery - We are members here. The red tasting was great...some high-end wines!
   
6. Robinson Family Vineyards - They have a nice, comfortable grassy area to relax.
   
7. * Robert Sinskey Vineyards - One of Mike's favorites. Nice kitchen next to the tasting area. Surprised that more wineries don't provide some good tasting food to complement the wine.
   
8. * Cliff Lede - We are members here. Relaxed and picked up an order of Howell Mountain Poetry.
   
9. * St. Supery - Not on the Silverado Trail...but it was getting late and we wanted to hit one more winery.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks...Chimney Rock has a wine mixing event.

STIRR Sydney announces their presenters for next week

STIRR Sydney host Martin Wells lists the next wave of startups at the next Sydney STIRR Mixer on March 29th:

Omnidrive - WebFS
Rave About It
dLook
3eep
Booking Angel

STIRR Alumni in the News!

Congrats to the following STIRR Alumni for making some noise this month!

(STIRR 1.8) has received $1 million in funding


(STIRR 2.3) is profiled in a NY Times story, "Start-Up Aims for Database to Automate Web Searching"


(STIRR 1.1) is profiled in a Forbes story, "The Ebay of Loans"


(STIRR 2.1) is profiled in a Forbes story, "Send in the Clouds"

How fast if your finger?

Over on Gizmodo, I saw this post that looks at reaction time. I was 0.219 seconds on all three trials (male/athelete/non-gamer/not tired). I am bookmarking the test so that I can re-test myself after a couple of glasses of wine. How fast are you?

Why Cisco is buying WebEx

I heard about this on the morning news and then read Arrington's take on it. This was my comment there:

Simple: Cisco is buying a channel for its TelePresence system. It is all about hardware and displays.

I later clarified more:

Sorry…it’s all about Cisco harware and their HD TelePresence displays. Once you’ve used their TelePresence system you’ll understand. It is like using broadband for the first time…once you’ve tasted speed, you don’t want to go back to dial-up.

We will soon all have HD displays in our living rooms. Cisco already owns a good chunk of the set-top market with their acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta. Throw a camera in that and voila…a home-basedTelePresence system (a few years away yes…as the home broadband speeds are not yet up to snuff).

The WebEx acquisition simply gives Cisco more sales inroads into companies that desire a better experience.

[Update: Cool! BusinessWeek's blog, "The Tech Beat", has listed my TelePresence channel strategy idea as a possible reason.]

STIRR Sydney 2 is on March 29th

The Aussies are back at it! On March 29th, they'll have their second STIRR event in Sydney. Will you be down under at the end of the month? If so, head on over to Ivory. Presenters lined up (so far) include: Omnidrive & Rave About It. Good luck to organizers Martin Wells & Mick Liubinskus.

STIRR Founders Mixer 2.3 (Palo Alto, CA)

The next STIRR Mixer has been announced for March 21st at Illusions in Palo Alto.

Presenters this time include:

• Buxfer, Ashwin Bharambe, Chairman
  
• Criteo, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, CEO
• Metaweb, Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information
• Wrike, Andrew Filev, Founder

We may add one or two more before next week. Hope to see you there!

Thanks to SUN & their Startup Essentials Program for being our sponsor!

Not too shabby for a year of work

I ran www.stirr.net through this little wizard and voila...

My Site is worth
$47,689

How much is your site worth?

Korea...you are so far ahead of us!

In a couple of weeks, a researcher from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Innovation will be dropping by IFTF for a visit. When I went to their site, my eyes were drawn to the center of the screen, "Introduction Moving picture". I went to click and then did a double take...a 350Meg download. I sighed and canceled the download while a colleague said, "in Korea, that would take about 15 seconds to download to a cell phone."

If anyone with patience decides to download it...please let me know what it is! Thanks!

The Future of Education

Wow...dive into the Fischbowl blog and you'll find many interesting things, such as:

• the past
• the present
• the future
  

Apple still has cool ads!

I still think that the iPhone will flop in 2007, but while watching House tonight, the iPhone "Hello" ad sure did impress me.

Sean Ness 2007 Tech Forecasts

Back on Jan 31, I was on a panel for Silicon Valley Web Builder and provided some 2007 forecasts (see below). How do you think I'll do? We'll see how I do by the end of the year!

10. The $100 Laptop is a non-starter
9. Reputation (RapLeaf) becomes a valuable online currency
8. OpenID is embraced by a "big player"
7. Twitter mushrooms as its commercial uses are adopted

6. Mobile walled gardens persist

5. Red Herring enters the magazine Dead Pool

4. A news story causes the Internet to crash

3. Second Life peaks and slowly dies off

2. A presidential candidate drops out of the race early due to a scandal hyped within the Web2.0 community.

1. The iPhone flops

Here's a PR 2.0 interview of me talking about item #1. (Fast forward to 3:07 left to see me.)

[#10 - Nov 26 update - WSJ calls the OLPC a failure]

[#8 - Feb 6 Update - Microsoft will support OpenID]

[#7 - June 7 Update - Techdirt explains how to make twitter useful for business]

[#6 - April 18 Update - Orange and Vodafone cripple Nokia's flagship [N95]]

[#5 - June 7 Update - Um, can you figure out how to subscribe from their site?]
[#3 - June 7 Update - Sure looks like they have peaked to me!]