Conquest of Union Square - submission for the Disposable Film Festival

Conquest of Union Square - DFF submission from Lam Thuy Vo on Vimeo.

This is a short for the Disposable Film Festival, all shot on a Flip Mino HD.

Thanks to Chris King, Zachary Timm and Catherine Chao for their collaboration!

Music: "Funkind" by Vincenzo/Disco Ninjaz netlabel

A money tree, a barbie doll on a cake and a naughty man in a suit

A money tree, a barbie doll on a cake and a naughty man in a suit from Lam Thuy Vo on Vimeo.

Nadia's bridal shower. Wonderful food, wonderful people, one very interesting gentleman.

Thanks to Bibi, Fareeda and Anna-Lisa for putting this on!
Thanks to Radha for manning second camera!
And congrats to Stokely (Nadia) and Sean!
Woot, woot!

Music: Jaan Pehechaan Ho by Mohammed Rafi
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyEnG_DEB1I)

Moving to Hong Kong in October for Work

Now it's official.

Webcam used differently

Video art that a virtual acquaintance sent over. VERY inspirational in its use of video!

Midtown Games

Shooting a 90-second-long event...makes you scramble for broll!

Did it for the Speakeasy blog:

Economics of the net

“Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material - data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it’s attention.”

Brad Burnham, Union Square Ventures

Chris and Malcolm are both wrong

(via fred-wilson)

Manhattan

The power of data and the need for aggregation

The New York Times published an article yesterday about how statisticians are quite hot (i.e. in demand) these days. That's cause the almighty organism called Internet and other machinery help us gather a ton of data. And now we're not quite sure how to deal with it. This calls for the aggregation, visualization and compartmentalization of an ocean of figures, numerics and letters:

“We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”

Why this gets me so giddy, I don't know. But I feel as if it opens up a whole other realm of playfulness with conveying information, using spiders, graphical imagery and interactivity.

I guess, some webby folks have already understood and found a way of visualizing the power of data. Jonathan Harris, one very inspiring net artist, has done so in various of his projects, one of my favorite being We Feel Fine.

The project does this:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".

It's a small supernova of colorful dots that signify emotions. You can sort them. You can look at the individual entries. It's a lovely way of gauging moods on the internet.

Here a video lecture by the artist on TED:

Now I just need to learn programming.

"Total personalization will require total transparency"

The above-mentioned quote is from an inspirational TED talk by Kevin Kelly about the first and next 5000 days of the Internet. He likens the web to a global, reliable machine, even an organism to which we respond and with which we interact. Watch it!