2008 Presidential Debate on National Security and Foreign Policy

What is it that we do when we gather as friends to watch the superbowl or the presidential debate?

We all magically transform into analysts, pundits, and talk show hosts.  More?  We become judges of our own courts in which performances have to pass (or not) our scrutiny.  More?  We have fun and entertainment in that process

Seems like that’s what this Jeremiah Owyang blog post is also talking about.

Good news! We have extended www.unfuse.com – our social collaboration solution for trusted groups – to have a twitter-enabled participation in the presidential debate.  The Twitter page can be seen at: http://twitter.com/unfusedebate

We welcome you to try our site at 2008 Presidential Debate on National Security and Foreign Policy

unfuse on getsatisfaction

We have added our presence on getsatisfaction.com.  Visit us at http://getsatisfaction.com/unfuse to have a dialogue with us.  Look forward to hearing from you on queries, suggestions, pain points and all other kinds of feedback.

unfuse “word cloud” on Wordle

Visit us at unfuse.com

My Flat Panel HDTV Purchase – a follow up

Continuing from where shyamster left off (see previous post), I am addressing the same “digital home entertainment” problem looking at different flat panel HDTVs for my home.  There are quite a few brands/models common between the list that I am considering and the one shyamster did.  However, my requirements criteria differ a lot from his.  For starters, I am considering something for my bedroom as opposed to his requirement for the family room.  Second, I will be mostly using this only for DVDs and off the air channels.  No premium HD cable.  Third, no mac minis for me.  But YouTube and Flickr on Apple TV .. YES.  And, so it goes ..

Options remaining the same, my context being different from shyamsters, how can I still leverage his research and buying experience to help me with my own decision making and purchase.  Wish there was something that will let me do this in a simple, collaborative manner online?  You betcha!  BTW, did I mention I have four other shyamster-clones as my Gadget Gurus .. only that one happens to be my cousin living in Seattle, the other my undergrad best friend in Jersey, third a co-conspirator in the valley here and the fourth my world is flat friend in Bangalore India.

So can I bring these guys together under the umbrella of my context and help them help me make my decision?  Isn’t that what we used to do in the good ‘ol days when the world was spherical and we shopped socially with our trusted buddies.  Some might have seen it as men behaving badly but we ll leave it as out of scope of this post

See below for how I am doing it presently:

Deciding on my first HDTV purchase

Unfuse Summit on Whitney

Unfuse team summits Whitney

This summer, Vijay and Bala join fellow co-founders Shyam and David in summitting Mt.Whitney @ ~14,500 feet.

More unfuse moments

Unfuse Moments

Who do you trust for your buy decisions?

Will continue on this topic in a follow-up blog post ..

My Flat Panel HDTV Purchase

Couple of months ago I convinced myself and my wife that we should upgrade from our eight-year old trusty Sony KP-53HS10 Rear Projection HDTV to a sleek new flat-panel.  Usually I am an early adopter of new technology, often jumping in much before it becomes mainstream.  In this case the Sony was performing very well and we were quite happy with over the air free HDTV via our Media Center PC to satisfy our entertainment needs.

After a remodel of kitchen and family room late last year, the rather large rear projection TV was starting to look out of place.  I had already migrated from my Media Center PC to an Apple TV and had my eye on a Dish Network service with exclusive HDTV programming.  

Time to jump in!

But what do I buy?  I had to come up to speed on the state of technology.  LCD or Plasma – which is better? More importantly which one is better for my content/viewing habits?  What resolution? 720p or 1080i or 1080p?  Does it make a difference in my situation?  What kind of connectivity features should I be looking for based on my input sources?  Which TVs accept signals from my Mac Mini without any tweaking?  Do I need a dedicated VGA port or would HDMI suffice?  What about Screen Size? What about all the windows in my family room?  Will the glare spoil my viewing experience during daytime?

Through quite a bit of research online and a bit of help from my network of trusted friends, I found answers to all of my questions and narrowed in on a few options.  In the end I picked up a 50 Inch Panasonic Plasma Model TH-50PZ77U that satisfied a majority of my criteria.

So far we are having a ball watching movies, sports, and National Geographic in HD.  I fire up Hulu on the Mac Mini to catch up on shows we did not bother to record on the DVR.  When there are guests, we enjoy watching Youtube on Apple TV even though the quality of the videos does absolutely no justice to the TV’s capabilities

Since my purchase, I have influenced a few of my friends with their purchase of an HDTV.  Some of them bought a different model as their needs were a little different.  Nonetheless, my input based on my research and experience were valuable in making their own decisions.

How does all of this relate to bHive Software?  Stay tuned.

[4C + P + VS]

There is a very good blog post by Sramana Mitra on what she believes web 3.0 to be.

Sramana Mitra writes:

3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search

This, I submit, is the formula for the future: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

hmmm … how could this be related to what we are currently working on? Hope to shed more light on this over the course of this spring and summer.