I'm at WIRED NEXTFEST 2004

I'm at WIRED NEXTFEST 2004 in San Francisco demonstrating Motorola's Vision of Seamless mobility - this is the stuff I've been working on at Motorola Labs. Taking a break from the booth right now. I'm in a back room hosting our servers. I'm glad T-Mobile Hotspot is providing free WLAN access to everyone.

Its pretty cool out here - both the demos and the people coming to attend - primarily the early adopter community. Its a great chance for industrial researchers like me to meet the people who buy our products - to get feedback on what we think is the future of communications. We've also got a kiosk out here at the Motorola pavilion where people can see pictures/models of our concept communication devices. People can also enter in their feedback on our ideas in the kiosk. I'm really looking forward to looking at them.

As usual demos and demos, so things do keep going wrong all the time, so my team and I need to be here on call all the time to ensure everything goes as planned. We were also at the opening party last night where we had a lot of the executives from the sponsors - GE CEO & co., Motorola CTO & co. There was also an interesting talk by Jeff from GE last night during the party.

The rest of the demos are pretty cool - esp. this one where you get to control a small ball with your brain waves ! Concept cars, car planes ..... boy, this fest ROCKS !!!!!!!!

Its the first of its kind and WIRED is planning on having one every year... Penning off for now... got to get back to work............

I've got Gmail !!!!!!!!!!!!

Gmail - the new email service from Google - with 1 GB of storage - as opposed to my Yahoo mail with 4MB of space. Yahoo is good, but heck, I need space !!!!

Also GMail has this amazing means of archiving conversations as opposed to emails. So, when you have a conversation/thread via email between you and someone else, thats what is listed on your inbox - this makes thisngs much more clean - and easy to figure out what the discussion was all about - no more sorting out through the inbox based on sender to get the context of a delayed reply!!

This is sweeeeet !!! Also, they don't have a concept of 'folders', rather, being powered by Google, everything is based on searches, so if you need to find something, just search - and being Google, you can trust it to work. I need more mail in my Gmail account before I can attest to this though. There seems to be a ton of features I need to try out - including keyboard shortcuts, periodic auto-refresh, etc. but in short, things look promising.