“After studying the potential impact of Y2K on the telecommunications industry, health care, economy, and other vital sectors of our lives, I would like to warn that we have cause for fear. For the failure to address the millennium bug could be catastrophic” … Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The Last Year of the Century

At the end of the 1990‘s the top story wasn’t about the significant advancements in technology but rather about a programing decision made decades before. Y2K was a hydra like story spreading its tentacles into all recesses of media throughout the word. It became the world’s most famous bug. It really wasn’t a bug, but a memory saving programing decision of using two digits instead of four for a date. The solution was a simple BIOS update, and by Jan 1, 2000, to a world-wide collective sigh of relief it was a non story. 1999 had been a very busy news year: President Bill Clinton had survived impeachment. John Elway won his second Super Bowl title in Denver then retired. Lance Armstrong came back from testicular cancer to win the Tour de France. J. K. Rowling, a Scot writer’s first novel ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ hit the top of the New York Times best seller list. The US Women’s Soccer team won the world cup and Brandi Chastain’s picture made the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. The New York Yankees won their second straight World Series title. Mark McGuire hit 65 home runs and Sammy Sosa hit 63. Tiger Woods won 8 tournaments including the PGA and was named AP Male Athlete of the year.

But the big stories, not withstanding Y2K, were still in tech. Both Nordstrom and auctioneer Sotheby’s decided to create unique ecommerce divisions, with significant investments from Benchmark Capital and Madrona Investment Group funding Nordstrom.com and Amazon as the primary investor in Sotheby’s. Merrill Lynch launched it’s online brokerage after Paine-Weber’s late summer launch and Morgan Stanley’s folding Discover Brokerage online trading unit in-house. In November Nike began to take orders for customized shoes, following this practice from P&G,  Levi’s and Maidenform. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that Microsoft used monopoly powers to stymie competition. The forecasted dotcom bubble didn’t pop, but just got bigger and bigger. 200 net businesses had IPOs in 1999, double the combined total of the previous four years. From April through August net stocks declined on street talk that the bubble wasn’t sustainable. But a end-of-the-year rally restored value to the stocks, and on the desk of federal regulators awaiting approval were 16 new internet mutual funds. The words IPO, burn rate and VC entered the everyday lexicon, and billionaires were created through mergers and IPOs. 29 year old Atlantan Jeffery Arnold became a paper billionaire when his then obscure website WebMD merged with Healtheon, an internet service that connects doctors, patients and insurers over the internet. With all this news, and all of the Y2K panic in the press, the late 90’s provided some key developments that either directly or indirectly provided the philosophical foundations for the movement towards wine business ecommerce.

Google

In March of 1996, after meeting as Stanford computer science grad students, Larry Paige and Sergey Brin start to work on a web crawler called BackRub, developing a PageRank algorithm to convert backlink data as a measure of page importance. Search engines at the time ranked results on the number of times the search term appeared on the page. Paige & Brin were convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other relevant web pages would be the most relevant and produce better results. Inspite of impressive and innovative technology Brin and Page were grad students struggling for attention and financial support. In August 1998, cutting their pitch meeting short, Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check made payable to Google Inc. The original BackRub had been renamed Google, based on a play-on-words in reference to the math term googol, and was registered and incorporated on September 4th, 1998. At the time Google was located in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park. By June of 1999 Google announced a $25 million dollar infusion of capital from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. This idea of organizing the googol of information available on the web, making it universally accessible to users would have a profound impact on ecommerce and on the dissemination of wine product information.

craigslist

In 1995 former IBM and Charles Schwab computer programmer Craig Newmark decided to jump into the conversation with the community of users on the WELL and in the Usenet by contributing information about events in San Francisco to an email list of friends. Through word-of-mouth the increasing number of visits to the site became numerous enough to require a list server, majordomo, which required a name. Craig wanted to call the site ‘sf-events,’ but was persuaded by friends to call it ‘craigslist.’ The site was built on conventional open source LAMP architecture, and has changed little graphically since it’s inception, which even by 1996 standards is very basic, with the last visual upgrade completed in 2001. The idea behind ‘craigslist’ is that everyone is included…”the net is everyone’s printing press.” Because the volunteer managed list was user generated, people started listing for sale or help wanted ads. This started to become chaotic and Craig stepped in changed this from being a hobby to being a real company. By 1999 the site had been incorporated and Craig hired Jim Buckmaster to be the ‘dude.’ Craig is a believer in providing the list as a service to ‘a centerlized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements.’ The idea of free classifieds has affected newspaper and news organizations by repurposing classified advertising that was a main source of print medias’ revenue stream. With the move of news, information and advertising to online media, newspaper have diminished power to influence or control consumer choice.

Amazon and eBay

As 1999 came to an end, ecommerce was being celebrated as the engine that would drive the economic boom of the new millenium. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was named Time Magazine Person of the Year. He was 35 years old and as a result of the recent IPO was now worth $10 Billion. Not bad for a former Wall Street techie. In 1994 Jeff quit his day job, and drove across country stopping here and there to write his initial business plan, then launched a new retail business model out of his garage in Seattle. His vision of cyber commerce wasn’t singular, in fact it was a vision also held by eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, founding Auction Web in 1995, soon after rebranded as eBay. These were revolutionary times in the world of retail. Not since the 1890’s when Sears & Roebuck started as a mail order company and then grew into the largest retailer in the US by the mid-20th century had retail seen so much innovation. A tipping point towards a new channel, a new paradigm had been initiated. The entry and success of both Amazon and eBay gave credence to the ecommerce channel with consumers, and Amazon’s investment in Virtual Vineyards/Wine.com help to create an awareness of wine ecommerce with both wineries and consumers.

The Cloud

Prior to 1993 the only way to navigate the web was limited to FTP, Usenet and Gopher, excluding the technologically challenged. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina who as University of Illinois undergrads were funded by the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to write the script for Mosaic, the web browser that made the web relevant to the public. It was the first killer application that took the web from a niche technical arena to mass market appeal. Mosaic made the web accessible to the general, non-scientific public for the first time. Although Mosaic was not the first browser for windows, that was Tom Bruce’s Cello, future additions of Internet Explorer were based on Mosaic code. The release of Mosaic resulted in a dramatic increase in the growth of web usage in a short period of time, expanding within the general populace and outside the closed corridors of academia and research institutions. By 1994 Marc Andreessen left NCSA and with Jim Clark the founder of Silicon Graphics founded Mosaic Communications which was rebranded as Netscape Communications. Just 4 years later in November of 1998, AOL initiated the purchase of Netscape for $4.2 Billion. In September of 1999 Andreessen and three associates from Netscape founded Loudcloud. By utilizing Opsware, Loudcloud introduced the idea to clients the idea of cloud computing. The term ‘cloud computing’ was first coined and defined by Emory University Goizueta Business School professor Ramnath Chellappa. In the jargon rich world of the computer industry the term cloud computing has become a phrase to describe information stored and processed in the ‘cloud’ world of the Internet. Cloud computing refers to remote scalable virtualized data or software programs available to authorized users over a computer connection, but for the most part it is a simplification of a complex infrastructure. Basically it’s information stored and processed on remote servers and delivered back to your computer screen through your web browser. As a user of cloud computing you don’t have to own the servers or grid functioning as host to your software programs. Cloud computing utilization billing usually follows the public utility model, pay for what you consume. This helped to change the idea of software from Software as a Product (SaaP) to the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS), as first experienced by most business in 1999 with the launch of the cloud based SalesForce.com CRM. Cloud computing rationalized the cost of entry for any company wanting to launch an ecommerce web site.

Blogger

Blogging started in a very basic form, dating back to CERN when Tim Berners-Lee began listing sites as they came online. Most digital communities in the early days of the internet took the form of user moderated newsgroups. The first single user moderated group was mod.ber. Netscape followed this practice by running the ‘What’s New’ list of sites in June of 1993. The first modern version of a widely read blog was by Swarthmore College student Justin Hall. Although the site was highly personal, it was primarily a list of links that Justin found to be cool. His site was called ‘Links from the Underground.’ Dave Winer launched ‘Scripting News’ in April 1997, another frequently updated links list. Blogs were still lists developed by nerds for nerds, and for the most part out of the mainsteam of public awareness. A prime example is ‘Slashdot, news for Nerds, launched in September of 1997. Jorn Barger in his December 1997 ‘robot wisdom weblog’ site coins the term weblog. The first open community of bloggers were diarist posting on Open Diary which was launched in October of 1998. Peter Merholz coined the term blog in early 1999, shortening the term weblog which he called ‘we blog,’ then shortened to blog. At about the same time Brigitte Eaton started the first portal devoted to blogs. Brad Fitzpatrick launched the first open source blogging site Live Journal. And in July Metafilter provided the earliest blog archives. Also that July, Pitas.com launched the first free build your own blog web tool. But what we in the wine world view as blogging started with the release of Ev Williams scripted Blogger, a product that like Mosaic opened the internet to less than tech savvy consumers by blurring the lines between web diaries and weblogs, a distinction only important to the cognoscenti. Blogger was launched in August 1999, with an upgrade released in November 1999. Blogger was an overnight success, putting stress on the frequently crashing Pyra Labs Blogger server. But the cat was out of the bag. This was the beginning of the democratization of information, and the real start of user generated content, lessening over time the influence of traditional wine print media. The first wine bloggers that came to my attention were Alder Yarrow of Vinography and Tom Wark of Fermentation. It should come as no surprise that these are two individuals with tech backgrounds. In fact many of today’s wine bloggers have a tech backgrounds. Wine blogs have and will continue to change how consumers receive and access information.

Glass Half-Full

The path to wine ecommerce development is closely tied to the historical path of technology. Most of the development was done initially by educational or research institutions, but then fleshed out by entrepeneurs. People who could grasp the implication of the large and small steps. Going all the way back to Thomas Watson of IBM who bet his Father’s office machine company on the future of computers; or, Marc Andreessen who based on the work at CERN by Breners-Lee predated by the hypertext theorist, developed the first contemporary web browser that featured a consumer friendly graphical user interface. Or perhaps Jeff Bezos who gazing on a server bank visualized Amazon. Or a disparate team of Larry Page and Sergy Brin who saw a better way to map search engine technology. When a piece of new technology is released with a particular intent, i.e., the internet as a research communications tool, it can never be fully utilized until one of these visionary bootstrappers has the opportunity to put another brick in the wall of progress. Build it and they will come. To have your own vision of the future as a wine ecommerce manager, study the past to discover a better path to the present.

It’s almost Christmas, and I’m listing down my “2009 Thank You Lists” and be ready for my official “2010 Resolution Lists”.  A sneak peak??  Well, of course switching to higher-paid job is in one of them. Hehe..

Btw, I bought the Christmas Tree this year and I love the quality of it. This year theme is Gold.. May this be the beginning of our golden years in life..

Just some update in my life right now, I have went and registered myself for a CFA level 1 Prep Class that costs me a lot of my savings and I have to live tight on budget for this moment. I can’t hangout at fancy restaurant at the moment. I hardly afford any eat-out meals.. Poor me.. But this is my first step toward a “7-8mio-paid jobs” Hope it will really come true some time by the end of 2010.. Shhhhttt!!! Don’t you tell my boss about it.. hehe..

PS : I’m going to watch John Legend on Java Jazz Festival this year.. can’t wait for it..

XOXO

I thought this was really interesting about what model was most featured in Vogue editorials this year and who shoots them.  I first read the article on Huffington Post (link to the article below) where they name Karlie Kloss the most booked model across all editions.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/15/karlie-kloss-books-most-e_n_392506.html

Even more interesting is the article they referenced from Live Journal.  Here it lists the top booked models and photographers by each international edition.

http://community.livejournal.com/fashin/4623046.html

Here is the short list, but the link has a lot more info.

THE TOP 12
in general descending order, not all Vogue editions are accounted for
all you need to know is that KarKlo and Demarchelier basically slaughtered everyone else

Thanks

Michael Creagh

http://www.michaelcreagh.com

.

Buy my Book!

http://www.blurb.com/books/455779

http://highartweddingphotography.com

Check back at http://michaelcreagh.wordpress.com as I update it weekly.

Recently, I shifted to Squarespace for new Journal. Pls, Looking forward new “The fragments of wanderers” journal

blog / JournalをSquarespaceへ移行しました。bloggerからWordPressへ移った時と同じように心機一転で記事のインポートは一切しないのですが、またあちらでもよろしくお願い致します。

Je menace le monde de la blogosphère (c’est assez restreint chez moi…) et annonce officiellement que je ne posterai rien si personne ne commente le post précédent. (Quelle influence j’ai n’est-ce pas? ^^).

Nan, sans dec, allez quoi…., c’est important pour moi. Tenez, pour la peine, un petit cadeau d’encouragement:

xkcd Webcomics

My brain is already in the state of Panic for these several months…The sequence that exceeds 1000+ is made and huge Sound Making is done.
Production that does Chop as huge as the things, Clark and Prefuse of the production of an expression as direct as Leila and Mira Calix in the time line is done too.

well, I bought a white bloom yesterday. I will raise it in the studio and keep Blank Spirits for making a sounds.
After all, When a lot of time deflecting are heard, it becomes an imitation because there is poisoning in the music of WARP.

Because I have the friend who has the talent that FsM is wonderful, I think that he helps my sound making
And, the song is scheduled to be added to those music finally. The friend of my important Chinese sings. Her voice is very Druggy !!

只今、どハマりなiPhoneアプリ。”Jet car stunts”というゲーム。セカンドライフで感動した3Dグラフィックの世界をそのままゲームにした感じで…レースゲームじゃないですよ！もう車を使ったパズルゲームなんじゃないかと思うぐらい難しく、そして爽快感のあるアプリ。
HARDレベルなんか40回失敗しても「まだ、やるぞ！」的な感覚で実に中毒性が。普段なら10回も同じステージならその日は放っぽり出しています。。。はは

Jet Car Stunts True Axis リリース日: 2009/11/13 ジャンル: ゲーム © 2009 TRUE AXIS PTY LTD

こんなん3Dアーキテクチャなゲームを作るのはフランスかドイツのチームかと思ったらオーストラリアの会社だそうで…

このYoutubeのCMを見てマッハで買ってしまった”Red Rage”。グラフィックと音楽にやられました。
なんちゅー、ダークな世界観:)そして難しい…

A Lyndon Wicked Tale: Red Rage Humble Gaming Ltd. リリース日: 2009/10/17 ジャンル: ゲーム © Humble Gaming Limited

Live Journal features a lot of content, news, gossip, and opinions about different bands.

One bizarre new page on Live Journal is fan fiction devoted to The Like and Ryan Ross – the story is AU (Alternate Universe) and is about The Like and Ryan Ross being in high school. Click here to read this pretty weird piece of writing.

What do you think of the phenomena of people writing fan fiction about bands? Harmful because it blurs the lines of reality or a harmless way for music fans to express their creativity and have fun?

The raining season has begun.. I love every little bit of it. Suit my mood quite well..

Though it got so wet that I got my shoes and pants dirty, somehow, I still like it.

And with it, I miss RG so much..

But again, in the midst of all problems that troubled-life women, like me and Meria have to face, this little things such as boyfriend seems stupid, unimportant and useless.

But I still miss him.

XOXO

Ravensword: The Fallen King Chillingo Ltd リリース日: 2009/11/17 ジャンル: ゲーム © Crescent Moon Games

こっちもリリースされてました。はは
やっぱり攻撃的なゲームですね。家庭用ゲーム機じゃないので若干、歩くのにも不慣れですが頑張ってヴァーチャルな冒険に出掛けてみたい思います。世界観は望んでいた通りズッパマリです！
凄いグラフィックだね！音楽も映画の世界にいるような空気を感じれるぐらいしっかり作られているので驚きました。明日はI/F通してプレイしたいと思います。

英語は結構ファンタジー用語(ハリポタ英語版とかみたいな言葉)も出てくるので英語が不慣れだとちょっと実用語との解釈の違いに戸惑いそうです。それでもゲームだし海外ではKidsの方がユーザーも多い事なのか単語自体はとても簡単かと。

この手のRPGも初めてですが面白いですね。なんていうか人間味が出ますね。バイオハザードが流行った時も「これは怖いから無理。」って諦めた自分なので、このゲームでも「モンスターが曲がった時や物陰から出てくるのが怖いから、ちょっと大回りに歩こう」とか(笑)ドラクエやロマサガじゃ味わえなかった感覚っぽいです。

明日は何年振りかぐらいですが病院へ行ってきます。ホスピタルは実は色々な意味で製作の過程で行ってみたかったので内心楽しみだったりします。はは



Star Wars: Trench Run THQ Wireless Inc.   リリース日: 2009/11/17 ジャンル: ゲーム © © 2009 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™. All rights reserved.

やっぱりiPhoneは携帯ゲーム機の一角だと思った。ついに大好きなSTAR WARSがiPhoneで(笑)
Star Wars: Trench Run for iPhone。昨日、海外のフォーラムを探索していたら見つけて早速記事書こうと思っていたら本日リリースしていましたわ。¥1200ぐらいになるのかと思っていたけど¥600でした。
64の時みたいにミッションが沢山あってクリアごとにスピーダーやY-WINGとか出てくればもっと良いのに。

ミッション５つ＆アーケードモード２種というゲーム構成。ゲーム中はミッションの成否でムービー(映画と同じ)が変わり、ゲーム中の音楽も映画まんまなのでファンにはたまらないアプリ。ドッグファイトではブーストこそないものの、宙返り反転など可能で360℃の宇宙空間でのシューティングが楽しめます。
Madden NFLと似ていてスローモーションが付いています。こちらは設定上”フォース”という意味合いですが。

あとはコレ。”Speed Forge Extreme”…これはスターウォーズではないですがエピソード1のポッドレースに雰囲気がとても似ているのでリリースが楽しみです。スターウォーズのポッドレースはNINTENDO 64の時にやっているけど、あまりの難しさでクリアしていないし、別のソフトで前述のようなシューティングタイプのローグ中隊というのは難しいながらもクリア出来たので今回のも頑張ります。はは

ちなみにR-TYPEもリリースするそうで！子供の頃は苦手なジャンルのゲームだったのですがR-TYPEはグラフィックと音楽にズッパマリになってしまって怒られるまでやっていた覚えがあります。
今でこそグリッチな世界で音楽やっているけど、思えばこの頃から影響を受けていたんだなぁと…

国内組からもエースコンバットがiPhone用に開発されているらしくグラフィックはとても美しかったです。このシリーズもどれか忘れたけど”電脳”がどうとかっていうストーリーのエースコンバットは、RPGやった時みたいなストーリーに対する感動、影響を受けたのを覚えています。

最後はなんとなーく”ワンダ”っぽい世界、ゲーム観だなぁ。と感じたゲーム”Ravensword”。自由にフィールド動けて馬に乗ったり敵が来る怖さみたいなのがあったり。
現在リジェクトされて再提出の順番待ちらしい…ただコレはちょっと殺しすぎかな。今のゲームっコには、とりあえず斬っとけみたいなノリの方がウケるんでしょうかね？せっかく綺麗なグラフィックだからICOやワンダみたいな方が好み。

他にもアクションやアーケード系の新作も色々見てみたけど、やっぱ日本勢は敵わないと思った。フォーラムは既に音楽系フォーラムと遜色ない程に発展しているし…ゲーム色々じゃないからね。あくまでiPhoneゲーム(アプリ)だけのフォーラム。
僕らが通ってきた道と同じようにフォーラムでは開発中のアプリに対するTipやFeedback、そして音楽系フォーラムでは当たり前のデベロッパー/アーティストorDJ探しみたいな構図も出来上がっていて、皆プロモが凄かったです。今の音楽系フォーラムでは感じられなくなった情熱や夢もあり、そういう面でも見ていて良い刺激を受けました。

にしても、ここまでグラフィックが綺麗になるのならGSに機種変しちゃいたいものです。Snow Leopardは標準のQuickTimeでiPhone GSなら撮った動画をmacに移してちょっと編集してそのままYoutubeにもアップ出来るし。proにもこの機能付けろって感じています。というかProユーザーには統合させろって話で、なんで一つのmacにQuickTimeを二つも入れとかなければならないのか不思議です。

Did you listen to the sound of NI recently? and were you able to be influenced from them?
I feel that they have already lost it to the production group like the developer of sampling CD. HAHA
No future,No Dreaming and No Reality…Their sounds lose the direction by all elements…

The piano was released from NI the other day. The sound is from my hardware to a bad quality in the sound however in the 90’s.

Field Sound was released from NI the other day. However, I was a quality in the sound that was worse than the library that was recorded with My iPhone and edited.

I think that to the company that sells sampling CD prosper for NI.

Since today was my last uni exam for my first year, I went through and got myself a Live Journal. As a journal should be, it’s a bit more personal that the WordPress I have here, if you have an LJ, feel free to add me as a friend! ^^ As I’ve read you can do that, but I’m still fidgeting my way through it

Right now I have a good solid 3+ months of beautiful Summer holidays to enjoy, where i’ll be jet setting off to NZ and then HK later   E.X.C.I.T.E.M.E.N.T to the max!! I’ll be able to raid music stores there to get all the CDs I’ve to wanted that I can’t get here in Aus. And Shopping!! Ah~~ *goes crazy*

So, reader, whereever you are, I hope you are as happy as I am, if not, I hope you will be soon! Every cloud has a silver lining!

J ♥ ♥

The Japanese survey team found coelacanth’s fry in Sulawesi,North Indonesia. This is the first experience in the investigation of the living fossil in the world.
They investigated ROV use from DAY10 Sep through DAY19 Oct, The result of the survey is the following.

09/14/2009
A female coelacanth of 120cm is confirmed in the point of 157m in depth

09/24/2009
succeeds in taking a picture the coelacanth of six individuals it seem to be in the place in north Sulawesi state Tarisei island northern part.
It is a world first that took a picture of six individual one coelacanth in the same place. The size is about all 120 a cm. 146m in depth.

10/06/2009
Coelacanth’s fry is discovered in a small crack of the rock of 161m in depth at the north Manado, Sulawesi bay.
Length 31.5cm. The discovery of coelacanth’s fry is a world first.

着実にレトロ化してきてきている我がiPhone。ついにゲームだけで2ページ目に突入してしまいました…昨日買った”Retro”にハマっています。
先日の記事にも書いたアプリ”C64″にも同じようなのが入っていてSIDサウンド風で気に入っているのだけど、RetroはなんとHooj Choonsのアーティストが音楽にライセンスされています。
懐かしいねぇ、Hooj Choonsなんてユニオンで漁りまくった時期がありましたわ♪
PETE LAZONBYのSacred Cyclesとか入れてくれれば尚良かったのにと…早速Feedback/FFを送ってみました。
最近は楽しめたアプリの制作者にメールもします。海外だから日本の社会性とは違って必ず返事が来るので、それがまた次のリリースを待つ楽しみにもなってみたり。

>C64 iPhone
C64は今月中にヴァージョン1.2へのアップデートを予定しているとの事で追加のレトロゲームにも期待が高まります。

Retro動画。これがまた難しくて…でも必死で手を振っている宇宙飛行士を見ると「あぁ、助けないと」と。音楽をOFFにすると噴射音とヴォイスしかないから、それがまた2001年宇宙の旅や初期のエイリアンとかを彷彿させてくれます。また、つくばの宇宙センターに行きたくなりました。

ACTION HEROES 3-IN-1 Triniti Interactive Limited リリース日: 2009/10/1 ジャンル: ゲーム © Triniti Interactive Limited

あとは無料でリリースされている”ACTION HEROES 3 IN 1″。このアプリにOpenFeintなんか付けばNo.1 Addicted Appになりそう。難しいんだけど、シンプルだからまたハイスコアを狙っちゃうみたいな心理…