Jambo

We knew Jambo would be useful at events like Macworld for finding sales leads, industry advice, and job opportunities during the event itself, but we completely underestimated just how cool it would be to use Jambo to discover fellow drinking companions.

At the end of each day of Macworld, Team Jambo would look for the WiFi beacons of attendees in their hotel rooms, perhaps checking email at the end of a long day at the conference. We’d fire up a Jambo proximity chat and convince them to head out on the town with us. As we prowled San Francisco’s finest drinking establishments, we’d pick up more signals from other hotel rooms nearby. Here’s a shot of Team Jambo and friends during a late night at Fluid — many thanks to Adam Jackson for organizing.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Chuck Joiner at MacVoices about what we’re up to. Here’s what he has to say about us:

“Jim Young of Jambo talks about his company’s product that let like-minded, like-interested users who are physically close to each other in tradeshow, conference and other situations find each other. Jambo was in use at Macworld Expo and receiving substantial interest from attendees.”

The podcast (MacVoices #603) is here. Also check out Guy Kawasaki’s podcast about FilmLoop, right before ours (MacVoices #602).

A shameless plug for our DEMO-coach-extrordinaire’s (Shel Israel) new book “Naked Conversations”. It’s a deep analysis into how blogs are really opening up a new line of communication that allows corporations to communicate directly with their customers. The book analyzes both the perils and success stories of this new world of the “open” corporation. Way to go Shel!

The line gets bigger every minute. Here are a few shots from the diehards at the front. Many camped overnight.

We met some friends at the Union Sq. Apple store at 4am for a quick photo before going to stand in line for the 9am keynote. There were already 100 or so people in line (some got there at 8pm the night before - full on camping). The apple cult in its purest form.

Jambo has been TWIT’ed. (This week in TECH’ed). Leo Laporte talked about us on this week’s podcast. Dvorak and Laporte talk Jambo. Have a listen.

We closed out 2005 with a nice bit of recognition. Charles and I were honored as two of “The Most Important People in Mass Customization 2005-2006″. That’s very cool and we’re very honored to make such an exclusive list.

Everybody at Jambo has been doing double-duty getting ready for MacWorld. (wahoo!)

One of the things we’ve done, is to customize a profile for the Macworld community (things like what break-out sessions are you going to, various conference tracks , where are you from, etc.) The whole time, I’ve been preaching that people don’t want to fill out long profiles, it needs to be shorter, shorter, shorter.

Well, we clipped a bit too much.

The internet is global, the world is global, and Macworld too, is global. Our final profile was entirely too US-centric. How great would it be to arrive from Thailand, and find other people from Thailand at the conference? Well, thanks to William B, now you’ll be able to. He wrote us today, reminding us that the community attending Macworld comes from all over. Considering Charles and I have both lived in several countries (and we met in east africa), we feel shame and we feel lame. We’re fixing it - check back on Sunday.

Thanks William!

We are excited to announce that we will be deploying to the Macworld Conference in San Francisco on Jan 9-13, 2006. This is the largest event for the Mac industry (over 35,000 attendees) and where the most innovative Mac products are launched every year. Steve Jobs always has something up his sleeve, so hopefully this year it will finally be a WiFi-enabled ipod!

Macworld will be using Jambo to facilitate attendee networking at the conference, and beyond. Since everyone on our team is an avid Mac user, we are psyched to be connecting like-minded Mac enthusiasts in proximity. If you are planning to attend Macworld, click here to sign up. If you aren’t attending, but would still like to try Jambo out to find out when friends, friends of friends, and other people you want to meet are nearby, click here.

On Sunday Dec. 25th, the New York Times ran an article about telecommuting. WorldatWork estimates that more than 26.1 million people work at least one day a month at home (from telecommuters to self-employed to contractors). Of the days that are spent not working in an office, it would be interesting to know how much of those days are spent in a WiFi hotspot like a coffee shop. With the introduction of WiFi, Starbucks and many other coffee shops have seen traditionally non-peak hours during the day become just as filled as some of their peak times. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that people miss that face-to-face interaction they get from working in an office as well as the need to get in a “work” frame of mind by stepping outside their home.

Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University, said that “In an era when so much of our communication is electronic, the value of a face-to-face meeting has actually intensified since the phone and email have become routine while a meeting reflects the importance of the person or topic. . . . . . . The reason Manhattan rents are as high as they are is because people want to be near people - there is an enormous productivity gain when people have access to people”.

The connection between high rental rates and the desire for people to be near people is interesting.