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Lot’s of great stuff. I’ve already filled three memo books with notes. No time to blog about it. More on the symposium here.

Some study out of Princeton says that all things considered the production of ethanol from specially grown crops will actually be bad for global warming. Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures) has sunk a lot of money into ventures in and around the ethanol space. Some of his ethanol bets include…

Sugar Fuels:
Altra (Los Angeles, CA).. producing ethanol and biodiesel
Cilion (Goshen, CA).. destination ethanol plants with greenest of corn ethanol
Hawaii Bio (Honolulu, HI).. ethanol plants in Hawaii
Ethos Ethanol (Cambridge, MA).. sugar cane biofuels in South America

Cellulosic Fuels:
Range Fuels (Broomfield, CO).. cellulosic ethanol usirng biomass conversion to syngas using proprietary catalysts
Mascoma (Boston, MA).. biochemical conversion of cellulosic biomass to ethanol reducing external enzyme demand
Coskata (Warrenville, IL).. a fermentation technology to make fuel grade ethanol from syngas
Verenium (Cambridge, MA).. cellulosic ethanol from biomass and specialty enzyme products

Future Fuels:
LS9 (San Carlos, CA).. petroleum replacements using fermentation
Gevo (Pasadena, CA).. bacterial production of Bio-butanol
Amyris (Emeryville, CA).. fermentation diesel and higher alcohols
Kior (The Netherlands).. biomass catalytic cracking (BCC) to convert biomass into bio-oil usable as crude

According to the Princeton study, sugar cane fuels may be ok. Both Hawaii Bio and Ethos Ethanol are sugar cane plays so they may be able to dodge this negative PR.

This once monthly meeting organized by Steve Garfield is a must if you’re into (or want to get into) the New Media scene.

The group meets at “Sweet Finnish” on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain on the first Sunday of every month. It’s a nice coffee house with decent coffee and pastries (half the price of Starbucks) but most importantly free WiFi and a large meeting room in the back. The first half of the meeting consist of short self introductions. Steve has everyone who wants to give a short (3 minute max) introduction and describe any projects they are working on. Most of the meetings I’ve been to have at least 20 people so these intros usually take an hour.

The second half of the meeting usually consists of short topical presentation followed by a discussion. Sunday’s presentation was by Beth Kanter, a technology consultant who primarily works in the non-profit sector. The topic… using social software and social software tools to promote your projects. It was a great presentation…. actually more of a conversation because Beth really solicited a lot of information from the other people sitting around the table.

As always, I left the meeting with a head full of ideas to implement and a fistful of business cards. Damn good meeting.

I would have to say IgniteBoston fizzled. Yes, they got a lot of Boston area geeks together (probably too many) but the venue sucked. Tommy Doyle’s is a plausible place for a frat party or an overly loud band but little else. The keynoter was a little off key and ran too long. The two short presentations by O’Reilly folks (one on “WiFi in RI” and the one on how OpenSource projects can go terribly wrong) were good or at least what I would have expected. The other presentations just meandered or were thinly veiled sales pitches.

Maybe the second half was better but I had to leave at the half-time break. I simply couldn’t tolerate it anymore.

An interesting mix of folks… some of the old regulars (e.g. Crit Jarvis, Mal Watlington, Michael Feldman, Zach Braiker, Jesse B.). A new regular Dr. Hari Jayaram, a chemistry post doc from Brandeis. And two new people, one fellow launching a new web based service called the NakedGuru and Toby, a security guy who was helping out a medical doctor friend of his launch a blog.

I had asked Erica George to brief us on Berkman’s “Stop BadWare” project. It’s pretty depressing how much hacking is going on out there on the internet and how sophisticated it is. I think every one who attending the meeting last night is updating their virus and spyware protection this morning. I know I am.

In the “Show me something new and interesting” segment of the meeting. Zach pointed us to Vidler… a hot new video web site. Hari pointed us to ScribeFire which someone in the group described as NotePad on steroids. Hari also pointed us to Tumblr… which he described as a lightweight blogging tool he uses to collect interesting tidbits on the web that he may want to then dump into his more formal wordpress based blog.
Most of the group went out to dinner after the meeting. They were debating the options (Cambridge Commons, Smile Thai or Black Forest Something) as they walked off into the murky night.

Critt and I, ever the responsible adults, T’d back to our quiet seaside community on the South Shore.

Interesting bunch of people. Most of the activity centered around a demo of “Thingly,” a product information website developed by Steve Strassmann. It’s interesting to watch Nabeel Hyatt, the primary instigator of OpenCoffee Boston, debrief someone. He really digs deep and fast. I like to shut up, sit back and just listen.

Hasty Granberry demoed Povo. Max Metral was sick and couldn’t make it. They position the application as “Wikipedia for spatial information.”
Some of the old regulars showed up including Lisa Williams, Amanda Watlington and Bill Wendel. Some new regulars including Jon Resig and Hari Jayaram.

The geeks present were impressed with the sophistication of the app… it’s coded in C# and has it’s own scripting language that should allow mere mortals to develop their own customizations of Povo.

Their business model is to rely on local place centric advertising arguing that small local businesses are not well served by Google Adwords.

I believe their greatest challenge will be trying to find a way to incentivize folks to populate their site. I remember one of the first Wikipedia sessions that Jimbo Wales at Berkman shortly after he became a “Fellow.” I was shocked to find that most of the Wikipedians considered Wikipedia a large and elaborate social game as opposed to a noble effort to catalog human knowledge.

About 12 folks showed up a Jeff Potter’s place for the post mortem. Some major themes evolved. We would..

1. try to hold the next BarCamp in late Oct. or early Nov. and make it a Fri evening and all day Sat. event.

2. try like hell to have the camp at MIT’s Stata center because the site was cool and had plenty of parking and wireless. But also research alternative sites which would give us a larger number of smaller rooms.

3. do some orientation and setup on the Friday evening.

4. establish some tracks like “Geeky Stuff for Developers,” “Startup Stuff,” “Gaming,” etc. and pre-populate about 40% of the tracks with pre-announced sessions.

5. have a mix of 30 minute and 1 hour sessions.
More later…..

Jack Hodgson and Bryan Person gave a nice introduction to Twitter.

This was an updated version of a presentation that Jack and Bryan did at BarCamp Boston on 2007/03/17.

At least three new faces at the meeting … Janet, a “designer” for a Boston based SEO company; Debbbie… a comparative media studies student at the New School (NYC) who is currently working as an intern on a Berkman Citizen Journalism project and Alex who said she “followed” the Berkman for quite awhile and was particularly interested in Twitter.

Some old regulars showed up included Jesse, Critt, and Bill Wendel.

It was an interesting discussion. When I was first exposed to twitter it struck me as online exhibitionist exposing themselves to online and voyeurs. Jack and Bryan described it as a subtle combination of IM and Chat. It has become their online “water cooler.”

The application apparently has a lot of appeal to geeks working remotely who want to have some sort of light social contact throughout the day. Beth Kanter, a technology consultant to the non-profit sector, has written a little article about how she uses Twitter and it pretty much mirrors what Jack and Bryan said at the Berkman mtge.

Twas truly a nasty weather night.

Aaron Atkins of SpotStory demoed his software. Also in attendance was Zach Braiker and Hari Jayaram, a BioChemistry Post Doc from Brandeis.

The theory behind SpotStory is that there are lots of interesting spots around the world that have a story attached to them. Historical markers sprinkled around the United States are certainly a classic example. But these locations have already had their story told. There are plenty locations that haven’t had their stories told. Abandoned homesteads in Maine, NH and Vermont. Faded billboards that were painted on the sides of building in and around Cambridge. The railroad to nowhere that runs thru the center of the MIT campus. On and on.

Aaron and his business partner, Matt Bellantoni hope that there are enough people out there that are willing to share their location related stories that they can developed a significant repository of location based information.

Their business model is to attract location related advertisers.