Unconventional Everything (Mikamai)

What could attract 40 great minds from all over the world and any walk of life in a hot humid room in central Italy for 3 weeks, in the middle of summer, coding every day until 2am ? If you just said “cellular automata“, you would be right.

I’ve heard a lot about “Mathematica“, a software developed by controversial geek celebrity Stephen Wolfram, but it wasn’t until I met some of its passionate users that I got really into it.  As London-based architect Jiang Shu Han puts it, it’s about visualizing problems in order to trigger intuitive development of possible solutions to them: he used Mathematica to analyze 8-years of email traffic, and find interesting patterns in it. It all came down to a beautiful graph that really looked like art. He then went to explain why he’s into it: he’s looking forward cellular automata answering questions about how people can use space more efficiently. Really interesting.

As Timothy Walker, Maths professor at Ohio Dominican University, tells me why he got into Stephen Wolfram’s NKS Summer School in Italy and shows me some of his code, I understand how fun it can be to play with something that feels like a programming language, a sandbox, a spreadsheet-on-steroids, all together. I get excited, and ask him if I can play with it to visualize social graph data. He gets excited too: we both leave our pasta aside and start coding in the middle of lunch. After a few minutes, under his patient and skillful guidance, we’ve got 2 Lines Of Code rendering 1000 nodes of Facebook’s icelandic network. How cool is that ?

On July 19th,  2009 it’s scheduled the Roma Startup Brunch. In the heart of San Lorenzo, we’ll share experiences and ideas about the next wave of Italian startups.

Prepare a 3 minute pitch to explain your idea or reality for a game-changing, international start-up. Arianna & Johanna will host this event: they just started an internationally funded company in San Lorenzo. You can sign up for the event, join us on our trip from Milan to Rome, and get updates on the live streaming in case you can’t come.

On Wednesday (July 15th, 2009) there’s going to be the second Giant Global Graph meeting. It follows the “GGG breakfast” (pic below), but this time it’s going to be a “GGG Aperitivo” :)

We are going to talk again about the social graph and how we can scrape it, put it to good use, monetize the social capital, create a trust-based economy.

Please bring your laptop, your code, and your own slice of graph: we share a passion for scraping it! :) You can share code, data, slides about your GGG-related project.

What we talked about last time: virtual currencies, Wikipedia as a social network, how to scrape and smush the graphs, subjective search engines, QQ Coins vs Renminbi, The Singularity (the rapture of nerds ?), abundance vs scarcity, trust networks, recommender systems, post-Google scenarios, subjective vs objective logic, Bruce Sterling, Gregg Egan, post-central banks world, and other stuff…

Sounds interesting ? You can sign up here. And yes, we’ll have an aperitivo at the pub after the meeting :)

Many strange people working on the social graph are converging tomorrow on Milano.

I am organizing a Giant Global Graph Breakfast on saturday morning (4th July 2009) to talk about the social graph and how we can put it to good use to create a trust based economy.

Giant Global Graph Breakfast! Tomorrow somewhere in Milano!

This is going to be a private event, but you can join us. I just need to know about it in advance.  Send us email+mobile on the contact form and I’ll let you know when and where we are going to meet up tomorrow.

‘cos webscraping is fun :-)

Questa sera, presso gli uffici Mikamai, per la prima volta avremo la fortuna di ospitare gli amici dell’XPUG di Milano. Le porte si apriranno alle 18.30 dando il ben venuto a nuove e vecchie conoscenze e mangiando giusto qualche tramezzino. Alle 19 partiremo poi con le presentazioni vere e proprie, iniziando con Antonio che ci racconterà come sia possibile avere contratti più “agili” per tutti, per poi concludere con Fabio il quale ci delizierà con una presentazione intitolata il Cliente: comprenderlo e capirlo.

Ovviamente chiunque sia interessato all’argomento più venire, perchè più saremo più la serata sarà divertente. A prestissimo!