Alec Saunders SquawkBox

There’s no denying that some meetings have to be had face to face.  Increasingly, however, people are becoming more willing to have those meetings virtually – via conference call, video conference or some other vehicle. 

Because it’s Earth Day, I thought I’d work up a small calculation for what one of those face to face meetings might cost.  Let’s say, for the sake of example, that my friend Jeff Pulver, myself, iotum co-Founder Howard Thaw, Andy Abramson, and GigaOm founder Om Malik all decide to meet at San Jose’s Computer History Museum to hear a speech by RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis on the topic of battery conservation in wireless mobile devices (something that Mike is an authority on). Oh, and Robert Scoble crashes the party as well with his video camera in tow.

• I fly from Ottawa
• Jeff flies from New York
• Howard flies from Halifax
• Andy flies from San Diego
• Om drives from San Francisco
• Scoble drives from Half Moon Bay
• and Mike Lazaridis drives from Waterloo to Toronto, and catches a flight to San Jose.

A visit to the handy NativeEnergy.com carbon offset travel calculator reveals that we would have collectively generated 8.6 tons of carbon by travelling 21,402 miles.  Better yet, it shows that we can offset that carbon by buying $126 in carbon credits from NativeEnergy at the paltry price of $15/ton.  That’s a steal compared to some carbon offset vendors!

Or you could spend a lot less money on a conferencing service, or a streaming video solution to hear Mike speak.

We charge $50/month for as many meetings as you want using Calliflower.  No matter how you look at it – whether it’s the $126 environmental offset price, or the actual cost of plane tickets — $50/month is cheap compared to the alternatives.

So think about holding fewer face to face meetings. The planet doesn’t care which conferencing or online meeting tool you use, but we hope you’ll at least give Calliflower, with its organic green color scheme, a good look. 

Happy Earth Day!

On today’s show we had special guest Greg Clinton, developer of a new
application called Talk Soup that lets people easily start podcasting.
Available at the URL http://talk.appspot.com/ , the application involves
two people simply calling each other, talking for some period of time and
then at the end of the call both agreeing to share the content on the web.
The MP3 file is then made available on the website and through RSS feeds.

The technical side may be of most interest to many of our listeners because
Greg and his son developed this application using:

• Google App Engine for hosting the web pages and user database
• Amazon EC2 for hosting the streaming audio server that connects the two participants
• Facebook for user authentication, names and pictures/avatars.

Making use of these resources out in the “cloud”, Greg and company were
able to rapidly develop this application without dealing with server
hardware nor getting into authentication issues with usernames and
passwords, etc.

It was an enjoyable conversation and we with Greg, his son and their
colleagues all the best as they continue developing this application.

After Greg left the call we continued for a bit discussing the new service,
identi.ca, which aims to be an open source version of Twitter.  We talked
about what the service might mean in the future and what it means for
developers to have some Twitter-like code they can now play with and hack
away on. (Some of this I discussed in my recent post on Disruptive Conversations.)

On the call: Dan York (host), Greg Clinton (guest), David Brown, Dameon
Welch-Abernathy, Jeanette Fisher, William Volk, Jeb Brilliant and Ian Hood.

Show notes and links (including our identi.ca URLs) can be found at:

http://apps.facebook.com/calliflower/conf/show/34160

 

 Squawk Box - July 3, 2008 [44:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Security is a sensitive topic for Americans.  In the post 911/War on Terror/Iraq era, it's easy to see why.  Men are in harms way, and the country remains on a war footing.

At what price?

American airports are starkly reminiscent of George Orwell's classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.  People bustle to and fro, under the watchful eyes of security officers, and accompanied by the droning of propaganda.  "The threat level is orange", blare the loudspeakers.  Television monitors tell the stories boys and families damaged by combat.  Even the very name of the border patrol — homeland defence — conjures images of threats and war.

This photograph, taken on the F Concourse at Philadelphia International Airport, shows no fewer than 9 visible surveillance cameras, and as you walk further you will discover more — a dozen in total.  Some of them are less than two yards apart.

My friends in America, as you head to your elections, ask yourselves whether the fear fomented by the current administration is justified.  Is it rational, or paranoid?  Ask yourselves what the right thing is for Iraq, too. 

I am not discounting how hard these problems are, nor would it be appropriate for me to suggest that another could have done a better job than Mr. Bush. He's your President, you elected him, and presumably he's what the majority of your electorate wanted.  Besides, I don't have the right to vote in your country.  

The situation deserves a real debate, that's all. After all, the price of security is liberty.

Did you know that Winston Churchill and his wife took separate vacations — he to paint (preferably at a beach), and she on tour?  Well, we don’t take separate vacations, but certainly by the time Thursday of last week rolled around we were all ready for a little relief from touring around.  So, we shopped.  Guyaberas (the ubiquitous shirt worn by Meridano’s), panama hats, table cloths, soccer shirts, and more.  We had a great time.

We also ate and drank!  Ice cream at Colon (a 100 year old ice cream parlor on the square), exotic fruit juices at Jugo de California, Yucatecan specialties like Pollo Pibil and Pok Chuc at the Main Street Restaurant.  In the evenings, we also ate at Pancho’s (good food, awesome mojito’s), and Vino y Pane (poor Italian, to be avoided).  Best deal on a breakfast buffet?  The Colonial Hotel — $6 for adults, $4 for kids buys you all you can eat fruit, pastries, eggs cooked to order, juice and Mexican specialities.

Part way through the day we ran into our friend the saw player again, and this time I caught him on video using our Sony HDR-SR1 camcorder.  The original is in high definition, so this streamed video doesn’t quite do it justice. 

Finally, Friday morning we packed up and hit the road back to Cancun, for one more day at the beach. This is the view of the pool and ocean, shot with a Nokia N93 cameraphone, from the lobby of the wonderful Royal Sands where we were booked to stay. 

An unfortunate screw up resulted in them renting our beach front villa to someone else, so we were forced to stay at another resort — the Royal Islander.

Beach, dinner, margaritas, and one last sunrise the next day, which I caught on the N93, clamped into the tripod accessory you can get with it.  Apologies for the wind noise, but it was quite windy!

Then off to the airport.  It was a zoo!  Despite getting there more than two hours ahead of time, and the fabulous help of the very efficient Mexican team at the airport, we got to the gate just as final boarding was announced over the PA.

From Cancun, we flew to Philadelphia, then on to Ottawa.  I caught these pictures out the window of the airplane on the final leg, just as the sun was going down. The location of the plane, between two layers of cloud, creates a very dramatic effect.  Both taken with a Nokia N80i cameraphone.

Wednesday we headed west out of Merida to the Gulf of Mexico and the tiny fishing village of Celestun.  It’s only about 80 kilometres from Merida, but the lack of a high speed road, and the number of Mayan towns you have to travel through on the way turn that 80 kilometer trip into a 1.5 hour drive.

Celestun is known for its biosphere on the Rio Grande, and the birds (including Flamingos) which you can see there.  When we got there, we chartered a couple of  boats in town, and then headed out for a 2.5 hour boat trip down the river, and through the mangroves.

First stop was at Bird Island, a sanctuary for pelicans and cormorants.  Its shoreline jammed with birds, the island is quite a sight to see.

Next stop, the petrified forest.  This isn’t a fossilized forest, but rather a forest that has been preserved for 180 years after sea water flooded an existing forest.  The tree strunks are heavily salinated, and the ground hardened with salt.

The boats were tied up to some of the living mangroves, and we walked into the forest.

Peter chose to leap a puddle of seawater, not realizing that the ground on the other side was considerably less hardened than what he had leapt from.  What vacation would be complete without mud up to your knees?

After the petrified forest, our boat driver headed out in search of flamingos.  On the way, I snapped this photo of a white egret in flight.

The flamingos can be found in shallow water on the river.  Interesting flamingo facts:

• Female flamingos are bigger than male flamingoes.
• The pink color comes from the shrimp that they feed upon.  They need to eat for 12 hours per day
• Every evening at 8 PM, the flamingos finish feeding for the day, and then fly away in order to avoid the crocodiles that emerge from the mangroves at about that time to… feed on flamingos.

Here are three flamingos and an egret hidden in the mangrove.

There are hundreds of flamingos in the shallows of the river.  There were flocks all around us. 

Flamingos sure look funny when they take flight, running along the surface of the water, and flapping their wings until the are aloft.

Unlike the flamingos which feed in the open, egrets look for food in the shallows, amongst the mangroves.  I caught this fellow perched on a branch, just above water level. 

There are also osprey, which take fish from the river.  This particular bird in flight has a fish in its claws.

Next we took a trip through a tunnel in the mangroves.  It was quite a different from the experience of having been on the open river.  The mangroves completely enclose the boat.

There are crocodiles which live among the mangroves, but the only living thing we saw was this duck.

Next our driver pulled up to a dock at the mangrove edge.  A short board walk led into the forest.

We all had a swim in the cenote that the boardwalk led to.

On the way back, I snapped this photo of a couple of men crabbing. 

And then we arrived back at the beach for dinner, drinks and the sunset.  The house specialty was fresh caught grouper filet stuffed with… fresh caught crab and shrimp.  Yum!

Down the beach, in fact, there were a couple of fisherman cleaning their catch, and attracting a huge flock of birds wanting to help.

Following dinner we headed back to Merida.  We got lost several times on the way, but ultimately made it about an hour late.