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Liveblogging the Olympus Show

Update: Finally got home, still hungry and a bit tired. To explain what the timecoded notes below are, I was at the Olympus Show and Tell 2 event earlier today and blogged about the event live as it was going on. Every 5 or 10 minutes I would update the post with a running summary of what was going on. When I have time, I can also polish up the notes a bit and add relevant links, maybe some pictures. (Update to the update: Added the links, you can find pictures over at Norm’s blog post about the event.) Anyway, do people find this sort of thing useful? If so, leave a comment. If I get enough comments, I’ll tell you guys about the reception at Google’s local office we went to afterwards.

3:35 Lenore Blum just started the show. Norm and Jason Head are here sitting next to me. Also talked with Raul from Vivisimo and Jodi Klebick of the Steeltown Entertainment Project while waiting for the presentation to begin.

3:40 General overview of the Olympus project. “We produce the best and most sought after high tech resources on the planet, namely our students, then we keep them here export them everywhere but here.”

3:45 Introduction of people behind Olympus, which includes a very impressive board of directors. Ala Bob Dylan, “Olympus is a hub, attractor, innovator, creator, enabler, stimulator, showcaser, incubator, entrepreneurial, next generation, etc.”

3:50 Matt Humphrey of Slapvid talks about peer-to-peer internet video-on-demand technology. Slapvid is a Y-Combinator startup and evolved from Eivod. It’s basically a web video aggregator to demo the Eivod technology. Cloudant is another technology they’re developing based on home routers. They currently have an acquisition offer on the table.

4:00 Betty Cheng of Mindkin talks about using gaming principles in social network development. The game element is based on keyword matching in a live text stream for profile compatibility with picture based rewards. This removes the traditional searching and long profiles associated with social networking sites. They tried to demo this during CMU freshmen orientation and are now promoting it to CMU students in general. They also invited everyone here at Olympus to try it out.

4:10 Asi Burak and Eric Brown of Impact Games talk about PeaceMaker (Middle East simulator game) and the future of serious games. People are demanding more interactive experiences with their news. They demoed their upcoming “Play the News” platform, which allows you to interact with news items by predicting future events. Is there potential for crowdsourcing or this acting like a futures market?

4:20 Luis von Ahn of reCAPTCHA talks about using CAPTCHAs to crowdsource the problem of getting accurate and reliable optical character recognition. Partnering with publications like the New York Times and web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Twitter, they’ve developed a really solid business model where they make a tiny chunk of change on every word processed by their system.

4:30 Bob Murphy of the Lane Center for Computational Biology talks about having machines learn biology and automating science. Computers are now more accurate than humans at identifying certain protein patterns. This technology has great potential for early cancer detection and individualized medicine.

4:40 Roni Rosenfeld of Project GATTACA talks about designing vaccines in computer labs. There is exponential growth in biosequences, “When you have 1000 times more data, new things become possible.” Because of this, health science can be revolutionized in a variety of fields, such as bio-defense, individualized treatment, and large scale drug screening.

4:50 Lenore Blum talks about the wealth of events in the local area and how difficult it was to schedule the timing of this show to work with everyone’s schedule. Then she introduces Carl Kurlander of the Steeltown Entertainment Project and shows a brief clip of his new film about moving to Pittsburgh. “Pittsburgh’s biggest export nowadays isn’t steel, it’s talent.” They had Pittsburgh expats gather to sing “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood” across the country and they had hundreds of people show up.