scales, robert scales

The 29th Summer Games have been underway for a few days now, and so much has happened.

I am excited to be here in China. Beijing is a great host city; people are going out of their way to make us feel welcome and ready to assist fans from around the world.

On Friday August 8th, or 080808 as it will now be recorded in history, China inspired the world with an incredible display of artistic choreography, traditional culture and brilliant pyrotechnic displays.

China blew our minds with this human powered show, an event that will be forever archived as one of the best Olympic opening shows!

After spending a brilliant night making friends with fans from around the world, we went exploring various venues. On our list of locations to scoot, we ventured to the 'Birds Nest' national stadium, the 'Water Cube' aquatic centre, the fencing hall and the Yukeson basketball stadium.

Day one here took a sad turn when we heard about the deadly stabbing of an American relative of a USA volleyball team coach, an event that has raised issues about some of the security measures at non-Olympic venues.

We also ran into the Chinese women's fencing team and their coach. Since I'm such a fencing fan, this was the highlight of my day.

That night we went to Beijing's one and only Drive-In-Theatre where an all night concert was hosted.

On our second day here, we attended the rowing qualification and cheered for Canada, China and other countries. Sadly a thunderstorm forced us to return to the comfort of our apartment in Fulicheng, a district south-east of Beijing. This allowed us to regroup before watching the USA-China basketball game.

Today we will be going to see our peers at the British Colombia Canada pavilion where they will showcase the upcoming 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Cross-posted from: BBC Sport | Olympics | Beijing Diaries

Background: Raincity Studios CEO/Founder Robert Scales and Pres/Ambassador Kris Krug are on the ground in Beijing to document and study the 2008 edition of the Olympic Games. They are publishing dispatches to a variety of news outlets including the venerable BBC. Here's Scales' first installment of his Olympic diary.

ROBERT SCALES, MONTREAL, CANADA

Robert runs a web development company based in Canada

Citizens On the Ground

Raincity Studios Sino-Away-Squad of Scales and KK, are on the ground in Beijing to cover and participate in the Olympic experience as citizen journalism, technology experts, social pundits and cultural ambassadors.

The Glimmer Twins' tasks are diverse and their methods varied so here's a preview:

• participating in the 9th International Symposium on Olympic Studies, in Beijing, August 5-7 with Olympic scholar Dr. Andy Miah's
• documenting the scene for crowd-sourced new site: Now Public, Vancouver radio station: Crave 95, and BBC Interactive - among other media outlets



• shooting Creative Commons licensed photos delivered via Flickr
• extolling about the new, improved Bryght web community hosting product - available in free, cheap or fancy varieties
• meeting up with prospective clients to extol Raincity Studios' status as an approved weblog vendor for Vancouver/Whistler 2010
• cheering for Team Canada at the Archery, Fencing, Women's Softball, BMX and more summer games sports
• spreading international goodwill in the fun-loving/hard-working style they honed whilst at the Torino 2008 Winter Games.

Jacob Redding, John Zhu, and I ran this session. The three of us talked about China, the Drupal project, and why the Open Source community makes so much sense in the Chinese environment.

There is a curious problem with licensing in China. Licenses for software (like Windows for example) are often ignored. There is a brisk trade in illegal copies making it nearly impossible to sell people legitimate licenses. The GPL is perfect in this circumstance. You can't pirate something that is free to be downloaded. Some of this is due to language. The Chinese tend to create a duplicate of many kinds of services--like a Chinese clone of YouTube. There is even a fork of PHP written in Chinese. But Drupal's internationalization makes this kind of duplication meaningless. You don't have to recreate the system from scratch. There is no need to fork and there is no need to pirate.

The 1.3 Billion Person Myth

Sometimes the concept of a 1.3 billion person market, ready to be tapped, makes it into presentations and conversations. This is largely a myth due to the fact only roughly 260 million people have Internet access which shrinks the market to about the size of the US or Western Europe.

Third time is a charm!

I am currently in Shanghai with kk, we are gearing up for our move here next year.

I should blog about that but not this time..

This is just a shoot at IMO the best Jazz base player on the planet. Not only can this master play a 5 strings base guitar like no others but he is the owner and creative mind behind one of the coolest jazz club in this city; JZ.

He's also running a cool private school..

Anyway, here's some of the shots that I took of him while we hang out earlier this week.

More news from the chinese front coming soon..

It was great to be part of the organizing team of the second Barcamp in Vancouver.

This is a shot of us sporting the "fuschia" shirts!

I did a session on open source business development, I am sure someone will write something on it and I'll cross link. I was under the impression that my topic would not attract many people and 30 minutes would suffice, silly me! Room two was packed and half-hour was a tad too short, it seemed we where just getting started!

I enjoyed KK's photo-walk and I managed to get a bunch of pictures.

A special shout to John for his iPhone for Canadians session, maybe the hi-light of my day! Yeah I know; geek!

I am a big fan of Futurama, and Matt Groening.

I've been finding myself quoting this line a few time lately..

"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"

This is the short clip from one of my favorite episode and the source of this quote..

** all rights fox / Matt Groening...

Thanks to Jordan Behan for an exellent post. Like Roland, I just shamlesly reposted...

QUOTE

Barcamp Vancouver, the 2007 edition is fast approaching, so get ready to get your Barcamp on. Unless of course you’re not already signed up, because the pattern is full, Ghost Rider. The pattern is full.

This year’s Vancouver event is already well over-booked, with a waiting list of over 70 people! So this post is more for the folks who are already signed up to attend.

Those of you not in Vancouver are encouraged to search Barcamp.org for your local event, or find details at that same site about how you can organize and host your own. Take a cue from the likes of Kris Krug and Robert Scales, Vancouver’s own adopted sons, who are teaming up to plan Barcamp Shanghai and Barcamp Beijing. Leave it to them to return to the land of the Great Wall with their free-spirited, open-sourcedness to host an unconference in a place where free speech doesn’t even exist.

Kris has been bugging me for days about posting my traveling and event schedules.

For some reason, August and September are always busy months for us!

We decided to make our life a bit more complex this year and added a third barcamp on our list of events to organize...

Hopefully we'll post more details about each of these events coming over the next few months:

Gnomedex 7.0 - Four RCS staffers are heading down to Seattle to see Chris, Ponzi, Schlomo, Corey, Jacob and the rest of the geekospher.

Barcamp Vancouver - Vancouver's 2nd Barcamp is expecting to attract 180+ people. I've been helping with some of the organization and Raincity is sponsoring the event again this year. I am looking forward to kk's photcamp and photowalk.

A question that has been growing in popularity since we started in early 2004. I recall Boris Mann and I debating this some time ago, before Raincity and Bryght even had offices...

Drupal product development vs product service provider. What is the best route to take for an entrepreneur?

For myself the answer was pretty easy: To create a reputable open source service provider firm! It is my calling. Why? Simple! I am a business developer, a marketeer and somewhat of a visionary (and arrogant apparently). I'm not a very talented coder or designer, I know my basics but I am passionate about the business development and enabling clients and talent to work together.

Plus it's easier to build other people's products than coming up with your own. At the end of the day, I am unsure how I would cope with having to report to an investor(s)?

If you ask me, creating a service company is easier as you don't have to go through months of development to create a product that will hopefully provide you a decent return on investment to justify the initial expenses and the hardship that the team had to face to get the product off the ground. Not counting the time you need to spend to maintain, support, upgrade and fund this new monster you've just created!

Copied from Flickr's forum

image from adporter

Since around 12:30pm (Beijing time) on June 7th, users in China have been unable to view images on flickr.com.

Our technical staff have looked into this and determined that it's not a technical issue from our end. Evidence suggests that our image servers are being blocked for many users in China.

We are checking periodically to see if the block is still in place, but haven't detected any change. We hope that this is a temporary issue and we currently believe that it will be. In the meantime, we are investigating our alternatives. Thanks for your patience.

As Stewart stated earlier,

"Unfortuantely, the firewall's administrators don't provide contact details, so we can't just call up someone who makes decisions about which sites are blocked and plead our cases. All we can do at this point is continue to monitor, seek advice from colleagues closer to the region and/or with more experience.

Today, in Vancouver, shortly after noon, the Olympic countdown clock was revealed to the public in an event attended by supporters and surrounded by the chaos of protesters chanting and protesting the coming of the Olympics.

Here's VANOC official Press Release regarding today’s presentation:

“What’s six metres high, three metres wide, weighs 1,170 kilograms and is wrapped in a 15 metre by 12 metre gift box from Omega on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s northwest corner in downtown Vancouver?

It’s the new Vancouver 2010 Countdown Clock, presented by Omega, Official Timekeeper. Preparations are underway to unveil it to the citizens of Vancouver, rain or shine, in a fast-paced noon hour celebration on Monday, February 12 – the three-year anniversary to the start of the 2010 Winter Games.�?

A friend pointed me to this little cartoon about Vista..

from this site: www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/915.html

I had the pleasure of testing Vista earlier last year, sadly for Microsoft I'm a mac person!

Kris Krug and I will be presenting on Web 2.0 and the 2010 Olympics as part of New Media BC's New Media Day for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Committee and friends on Thursday December 7, 2006.

We will be showing how "Web 2.0" can further the promotion of the Olympics and help connect the real world Olympic community with the online community world wide.

Bryght's blog post from 2006/12/06.

This will be a continuation of the work we've done earlier this year in Torino, where KK lead a Web 2.0 and Sports Symposium. This is also link with our ongoing strategy towards the 2008 Beijing Olympics with our client; China Access 2008 and the recent BarCamp Shanghai which Raincity helped organize and sponsored.

A few weeks ago while we hosted the first joint drupal training session between Bryght and Raincity, Anna Olejarczyk interviewed Krug and I for her upcoming article on Web 2.0 start-ups in Vancouver.

The article came out last week, here's a portion of it.

Robert Scales, CEO and founder of Raincity Studios, says that people who are in the Web 2.0 industry are more like “private investors.�