Event on May 17th – Marc Canter on Digital Lifestyle Aggregation

I thought I had posted a notice about this on my blog previously, but apparently hadn’t so…

An Evening with Marc Canter

In May 2007, Marc Canter, ‘a well-known figure in the sphere of open standards, social networks and blogging’, will visit Japan. Take this opportunity to hear from Marc and mix and mingle with Tokyo’s international internet community.

PRESENTATION OVERVIEW

Digital Lifestyle Aggregation: Portals 2.0 (DLAs)

As the worlds of social networking and blogging become more and more of a commodity, new ‘destination’ sites are arising which provide integrated, aggregated and highly customizable interfaces. These DLAs will bridge the world of PCs, with mobile, gaming and TV. Are they long awaited solution for convergence? What about the battle between the big boys (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace) and all the smaller players? Will there be any crumbs left on the table – for us?

And what will the global, distributed, decentralized mesh of inter-connected social networking and blogging platforms look like?

SPEAKER PROFILE

Marc Canter is a well-known figure in the sphere of open standards, social networks and blogging. Marc co-founded MacroMind in 1984 and began developing for the newly launched Apple Macintosh. MacroMind became Macromedia in 1991. He was part of the team that created the first multimedia player, the first cross-platform authoring system and the world’s leading multimedia platform. Marc was considered one of the founders of multimedia and has been a speaker, developer and evangelist in the industry for over a decade. Over the years Marc has also traveled worldwide, consulting to global corporations and has written on the multimedia industry and burgeoning world of micro-content publishing and social networking. He is the founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics (broadbandmechanics.com) a digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA) company. Broadband Mechanics builds tools and environments to enable online communities. (Source: Wikipedia.org)

For Marc’s full profile see en.wikipedia.org…

DATE: 17 May 2007

TIME : 18:30 ’til late (Presentation from 19:00)

COST: 2,000 yen includes light finger food buffet. Drinks pay-as-you-go.

VENUE: The Pink Cow – Great food and drinks
Shibuya, Tokyo
www.thepinkcow.com

Space is limited so RSVP is required, sign up here. (or send me an email. If you sign up directly, if you would say that you were directed to the event from this blog, it would be appreciated…)

Marc’s reputation precedes him, and I think this would be an extremely worthwhile event for anyone who is doing (or thinking of doing) anything in the area of internet services, with themes such as social networking and micropublishing becoming increasingly de facto features for current and next generation plays in this area.

I’m a vocal proponent of users owning their own data and having the right and ability to do as much with their data as is technically possible. Locking in users by creating technical hurdles to switching seems to be such an authoritarian and shortsighted way of doing things.

Marc appears to take a similar view on these important issues, and when I saw that he was going to be in Tokyo, I suggested that it would be interesting to get him to host an event. Many thanks to Andrew Shuttleworth for taking the initiative to organize the event, and Traci at the Pink Cow for hosting us as always.

I’m going to be there, and hope to see many others there too.