Wicky Mendoza

I finally moved to New York a few weeks ago, I’m so excited to start this new phase of my life in the Northeast!

As I was looking through the New York Craigslist in search of apartment sublets, it was very interesting to note how people have adjusted their sublet marketing efforts to reflect the current Volcano crisis, which speaks of the rapid and volatile nature of web content, and the ease to which people can respond to the market.

Other less-businessey posts reminded me of the heightened sense of support for victims of natural disasters that has characterized this city since 911. It made me happy:

Then there’s this guy who is nicely renting his couch for the worth of a cigarette pack, who felt compelled to show images of Volcanoes – in case a stranded traveler wishes to see an image of what he’s missing…

I love you NY.

-Wicky

One of my favorite things about New York is how open people are to making connections with total strangers – despite it’s bad rap of being an unfriendly, rude city.

Many times, I’d be at Starbucks reading or working, when a stranger would ask to sit on the empty chair on my table. One way or another, we’d end up chatting about this or that until our coffee turned cold. One of these times, I ended up talking to this very interesting gentleman about all sorts of things, particularly South American politics/culture/life, for about two hours. Our conversation flowed as if we were long lost friends who had serendipitously found each other. At one point, he literally had to set an alarm to remind himself he had somewhere to be at 7.

Once his alarm went off, we both got up, gave each other a side hug, and expressed our happiness of having had met. During that awkward pause when you’re unsure if you should exchange names or numbers, I said I hope I ran into him later, and walked away.

During the rest of my stay in NY, I not only met a lot of interesting people, but also made friends whom I greatly esteem and can’t wait to see again. But I never met another tall, dark haired, Cali ex-pat with whom I can talk endlessly about hot winters in the Andes and the influence of Chavez on Venezuela’s neighboring countries.

When I first heard about Chatroulette (and if you haven’t, read here), the second thing that came to my mind after ‘damn, that’s an insanely awesome and creepy idea, I wish I’d thought of it,’ was its potential to be similar to meeting random strangers at the coffee shop/bar, making connections, and then leaving it up to fate to bring you together. I don’t think I was too far off, and Newsweek had the brilliant idea of exploring this theory in the right place: Craigslist Missed Connections.

I’m thinking more and more people will start navigating the webs in search of their tall guy who loves South America, and I’m curios to see what other platforms are used besides Craigslist and obviously Twitter.

Mobile Art Lab Developers in Japan have come up with a very cool way to enhance parent-child communication through mobile technology by integrating the new with the old in a new wave of Picture Books for children.

This “Phone Book,” as it is called in the Japanese Market, is half iPhone, half book which allows for a hybrid narrative experience with lots of room to spark creativity and curiosity.  Check it out:

The strategy behind this idea was “Analog on Digital Technology” with the “viewpoint of effective utilization of resources,”  and it has certainly achieved it’s goal.

There is a myriad of iPhone apps for children that pry into their curiosity and enable learning, but there is something fascinating about the convergence of the old and the new. This could have great implications for educational purposes, not just for picture books, but for text books as well (do those still exist?).

Is there a Caldecott-type award in Japan? If so, here is my nomination.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of flying – mostly on AA, Continental & British Airways – which has given me the opportunity to experience a lot of the changes happening in the airline industry, from the additional snack fees to the extent that check-in machines have replaced a portion of the ground crew.

The most noticeable effect of these changes is the way that it has affected the role of the airline crew. When I was little, airline stewards/stewardesses used to be like attractive babysitters. They’d bring you blankets and pillows and drinks and snacks and turn off the reading light while you napped. I always pictured the prettiest stewardess dating the flight captain, a head cheerleader and quarterback sort of thing.

But now, flight attendants are more like annoyed parents trying to control their absent-minded, impatient grown children who don’t understand what it means to turn off electronic devices. (I’m serious, on my flight from JFK to SFO, the stewardess repeated 19 + times that we need to turn of ALL electronic devices, while pointing out that the Kindle is not an exception.)  Yet there is another factor contributing to the airline crew’s outward fatigue, and that is tied to a shift in their responsibility.

Once upon a time, check-in counters were the main hub for chaos. Lines were full of people trying to get their last minute boarding pass, pissed people with missed connections, families needing to check in three bags per head, etc.

Now, as airlines have begun charging for luggage, and as the check-in process has become more streamlined, with self-check in machines doing half the work, the chaos has shifted aboard the aircraft.

To avoid the excessive baggage charges, travelers (who are by no means packing lighter), are bringing all of their belongings on-board, and taking up more than their share of the overhead compartment. This leaves stewards/stewardess with the added responsibility of acting as bellboys while trying to get everyone seated, with their seat belts on and their toys powered off.

As airlines continue to make changes to their services and policies, and flights continue to be full to capacity, it’ll be interesting to see the shifts in behavior of the traveler and the flight crew.

Exploring human’s search psyche using Google Suggest has become quite a popular pastime, as well as a great research technique. Building upon this, two research scientists from IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have developed Web Seer, a tool which lets you visually compare Google Suggest queries.

I absolutely love data visualization tools, as well as learning what men and women are up to, so I decided to test this helpful little tool:

So here’s a few things we can learn:

1. Women and Men are looking and searching for each other.

2. Boys and girls are both primarily searching for Men.

3. Men in Bangalore, Dubai, Kenya, Chennai, and Delhi must be hot.

4. A reaffirmation that big, beautiful women are always in style.

5. Whether it be a one night stand, a father figure, a boyfriend, an older woman, or a hottie from Kolkata, the number one thing men, women, girls and boys are looking and searching for is not a deal, a discount or the latest piece of technology, they are looking for humans.

Good.

In the seven months and 20 days in which I’ve owned my iPhone, I’ve collected numerous apps. Some make my life easier (Yelp), some entertain me (Scramble), some waste my time (iDragPaper), some I have just in case (the Holy Bible), and some I can’t get myself to delete, but should, not only because they’re useless, but pretty ugly too.

For example: The Toki Clock

It’s a clock, it’s a calendar, it costs a dollar (I got it for free as I was an “early adopter”), and its only redeeming quality is that it has a multiple time zone display.

Despite its lack of appeal, I have an endearing respect for its developer(s), as they have written one of the most honest descriptions I’ve read for an app.

I’m not really sure what their drive for such honesty is, but I think it’s nice. I’m also not really sure why it has a rating of 4 and a half stars, though as one commenter who awarded the app all 5 stars stated “it works and is easy to use!”.

So maybe that’s it, we all talk about how simple is always better, and maybe this is a sample of so, or the rating system is hugely flawed.

I arrived in New York from Europe about a week and a half ago, and though sad that my official vacation had come to an end, I was excited to be in the most wonderful city in the world, and to be re-united with my beloved 3G network.

Before entering the underground to go to my hostel, I refreshed Tweetie, and ran into this tweet  from @faris (Faris Yakob is the EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson New York).

I felt a strange urge to attend this event, though I’d received no invite of any kind, so after thanking the heavens for not having my suitcase arrive on my flight, I got off the North Central Park bound train and tried to guess the location of PWC. As there is no service on the subway, I got off on 42nd street to Googlemap directions, and as luck would call it, PWC was just around the corner.

After telling security that no I didn’t have an rsvp, but that I found out about the event through Twitter, a community in which everyone is invited, I finally sat down to hear the last 30 minutes of Faris’s talk. And afterwards, as his tweet suggested, I went to say hi.

The main point of this story is not only that Twitter makes it easy to stalk industry people, but that the web is adding another dimension to “serendipity.”

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated.

Does changing plans on a ‘tweet’s notice’ constitute as an accidental stumble? I’m not sure. But it’s pretty incredible to have tools in our arsenal that allows for these happy coincidences to happen.

And btw, attending this event and meeting the wonderful people I did, has made a huge difference in my job hunt. Yay for the web.

Emotional factors = Experience = Good or Bad