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.
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.
Jambo is fostering some serious face-to-face networking at the Fuel Cell seminar. Here’s a pic of Charles and I manning mission control at the conference.
Jambo Networks deployed to the Wireless Cities Community Context Conference last week in Minneapolis, MN. I went up there to make sure the deployment went smoothly and to be on a panel discussion on Social Networks. I had never really had a desire to go to Minnesota before, but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. The University of Minnesota strattles the Mississippi River and is near the heart of the city. It was a bit chilly coming from Texas, so I recommend bringing a coat.
The conference mainly focused on WiFi, since Minneapolis is considering deploying WiFi throughout the city. I think there is a real opportunity for Minneapolis to jump to the forefront of the municial wifi movement by leveraging the power of local social software to connect neighbors or visitors in person. This can increase civic participation and promote networking among local groups or neighbors. There is a lot of untapped creative potential in city and it just requires making the right connections to unleash it.
During the conference, I was psyched to overhear another Jambo moment! Two attendees were using Jambo and discovered a name they recognized and wondered if it was the same friend they use to know at college many years ago. It was, so they reconnected over lunch!
We were featured in a CSC white paper on Extreme Data. Check out the pdf here.
“Jambo, a mobile online social network, helps people in close proximity find others with similar interests. Jambo uses personal area matching technology to help people with WiFi-enabled cell phones, PDAs and laptops meet each other. Whom should you be talking to at the next conference?” Source: Jambo Networks
Here is Andreas speaking about Jambo at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Last week I met an old college buddy. I wanted to turn it into a great story about how I first discovered that she was at the STAREAST conference by using Jambo. But alas, she didn’t bring a laptop, and I actually got the tip about her coming before the conference. It’s still an interesting series of events.
I met Hyon-Chin while studying at the University of North Texas. We both joined Alpha Phi Omega, a co-ed service fraternity. We lost touch after we graduated, and she changed her name after she got married. Several years later, we both had moved to the same city. We were unaware that we were both there until she saw me at a Chamber of Commerce meeting. She gave me a business card, which had her married name. We swapped a few emails, and then didn’t contact each other for a few years.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I’m monitoring the Jambo subscriptions for the STAREAST conference, and I see Hyon-Chin’s name flash by on the list. I only recognize her because I remember her new last name from our chance meeting earlier. But I don’t recognize her email address. So I contact her, and make sure it’s her. Sure enough, she’s doing the same kind of work I am now, and she’s going to the same conference in Florida that I’m going to. We promise to meet while we’re there.
It was great seeing a familiar face, and now I have another local testing contact. Would we have run into each other at the conference anyway? There’s a good chance she would have seen me when I was on the stage introducing Jambo, or that I would have seen her walking by from the strategic vantage point of Jambo’s booth. But I can still thank Jambo for it, because I wasn’t planning to attend the conference until we decided to do the beta test for Jambo there.
I’m fascinated how tenuous the string of events was, how I happened to learn her new name, which then connected me to her new email address when I had no way to contact her, and then meeting after we’ve both flown halfway across the country.
Ok, the low-tech thing might be getting a little out of hand. We now have a “weblog” that people can read when they are at our booth. They can also provide comments… see the postit-notes ? :) We’ll upload their comments back on to the live blog!
What’s cool about this is that Jambo itself was created as a bridge between low and high tech - between the offline world and the online world. So even though this poster-board blog sounds a bit ridiculous, it actually makes a lot of sense to us.
We kicked off Jambo at the STAREAST conference last night. After we introduced how it works, several people stayed to use Jambo. But one guy, Patrick L., can’t log in, so we start to troubleshoot. We uncover an error message in the log that hints about permission problems. So we go on a grand adventure, creating a different Windows account on his computer and finding that we could log in to Jambo from that account, and we do some tricks with the data to get him logged in with his main Windows account that wasn’t working before. We get our lead developer involved over an instant messenger, and my cohort, Jim, helps by checking the web logs. We take a few wrong turns because we’re so engrossed in the hunt that we neglect to properly check whether things are working on every test we try.
Then finally I look at the log again, and see another error that I had been ignoring because it appeared after the first error. The first error is almost always the one to pay attention to. But as soon as we actually read the second item in the log, we see that Jambo is trying to connect to our web server over a proxy. It just takes a quick bit of exploration to confirm that Patrick’s proxy settings only work when he’s on his office network.
Time has stood still while we had this flurry of problem solving, and we realize we’ve been at it for 90 minutes. When the dust settles, I’m very frustrated that I didn’t zero in on the problem much sooner. But overwhelming that frustration is a feeling of pure exhilaration. I sat down with a fellow tester I had never met before, with a common goal–we both wanted Jambo to work, and we wanted to know how to avoid the problem in the future. As testers, we also knew this was a showstopper issue for anyone who doesn’t have the technical skills to work around it. We never asked each other if we wanted to embark on this adventure, but the thrill of the hunt pulled us in to an impromptu session of pair testing.
The end result is a new item for our support knowledge base, plus a usability bug to report. I knew we’d have fun using Jambo at a conference for testers!