We are a week out from NAB 2008, the first one without either Apple OR Avid battling it out with mega booths in the South Hall. Should be interesting, for sure. Nick and I will be there from Monday morning to Wednesday evening (actually Nick will be out earlier), so if any of you are reading this, give us a shout.

It’s great to see that Apple is finally shipping Final Cut Server, even if it was a tad late. FCS will finally give creative production facilities a cost effective way of ingesting, managing, tagging and searching their high resolution assets (video, images, audio, etc) - think of it as iPhoto + iTunes for professionals. Add a little transcoding and delivery services and you have quite a valuable organizational tool. We’ve been looking for a realistic smart vault solution like this for years, so it’s great to finally see what they have to offer. Version 1.0 will come with a few bumps, like always, but over time it will be the new core foundation for any company serious about storing media (for under $4,000).

Rambling on… I’m now several weeks into the Wiki experience and still loving it. It’s like a well organized sticky note system, where I can ask a bunch of questions and provide an ever growing resource of answers that are all interlinked. This feels totally different than storing thoughts in standard documents and folder trees, because communicating the “flow” of information is almost strangled by the limited length of folder names. I’ve also found that hooking up Wiredrive presentations to blog entries makes the best of both worlds - a great way to manage text entries and a great way to handle images and videos, either on their own or as a group.

I’ve finally added Facebook to my list of technologies that I love, for one simple reason. People have photographs of themselves AND of their friends. What an amazing part of the business networking process… something that LinkedIn still hasn’t figured out yet. Seeing what people are into feels so much more natural than lists of references and job experiences.

So, yeah… I’m joining in on what all the cool kids have known for years a touch late. But better late than never.

Regards,

Bill

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.