Esquire North Livin’ Teched Out Above Central Park

I got to participate in the September 27 opening of Esquire North, the ultimate bachelor apartment located on the tree-lined edge of New York’s Central Park in Harlem.

The 5,700 square-foot, triplex penthouse offers rare and breath-taking views looking downtown over the lush green park. This NY apartment has two outdoor terraces and an Italian designed spiral glass & metal staircase.

I toted my Sony HDV and shot some wonderful footage then tried rendering some high resolution video files — I have lots to learn!

This is a behind-the-scenes look at the final hours before the opening gala, as broadcast media came to capture interviews and visuals for live and taped reports. Esquire magazine publisher Kevin O’Malley is genuine, thoughtful and very involved with so many of the people, furnishing, artwork and technology that together showed how a modern Esquire man would live if he had Kevin’s connections! Top designer brands filled each room

Live like a king at least for fund raising (CARE) night party, test drive F1 racing powered by Intel Quad Core processors while sitting in eel-skin covered racing seats, lounge with an UMPC or watch HD in any room streamed form a dream home hub powered by Intel Viiv with Core 2 Quad processor technology — below there’s more on Niveus.

The are some cool photos and crazy viewer comments on Gizmodo. And Gizmodo shot their own video featuring my Intel pal Michelle — she’s a technical wizard who easily slides into the role of technical art expert!

i4U News took b-roll and created a cool video tour.

Niveus’ entertainment hub was at the heart of the apartment. Michelle says the upstairs closet, which was packed with digital equipment connecting to 3.5 miles of cable, cost over $500,000. Learn more about Niveus, but here’s what the company says:

Niveus chose the top of the line Pro Series media server to deliver high-class and high-def entertainment throughout the Esquire North dwelling. Incorporating the most advanced hardware and software, the Pro Series allows the sophisticated Esquire man (and his guests) to easily manage and access hundreds of movies, thousands of CD’s, photos, games and television shows.

Based on the Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center platform, the Pro Series is engineered to provide exceptional images and pristine video quality; incorporating the Intel® Core™2 Quad processor, Nvidia’s GeForce Series 8 Graphics, and HDMI output. Specially designed in a sleek, rack-mount black chassis, the Pro Series offers up to 3TB of storage and supports simultaneous streaming of HD media and multi-channel music throughout the Esquire North home and features four television tuners, 7.1 analog and digital surround sound, and more!

With the Intel Core 2 Quad processor, the Pro Series is capable of streaming HD media to 5 additional, Esquire North zones while providing the power, compatibility, and connectivity to perform as the hard-core central media hub. In addition, the Intel powered server also allows instant access from any networked computer or DLNA enabled TV or Digital Media Adapter throughout the Esquire home!

Take your own private Esquire North tour here. First, get a behind-the-scenes experience.

Facebook’s Value is Five Times the Price Tag of New Intel Chip Fab?

Lots of buzz about the the big investment in Facebook that set off calculation artists to figure the funnest site on the virtual planet is valued at $15 Billion. Wow! My advice: Don’t buy it!! Let it live, breathe and be free to grow…at least for a while longer.

Here’s something just announced today by the company I work for, Intel. Press release is pasted below. But my mind is swirling, connecting numbers. What do they really mean? At a cost of $3 Billion, Intel’s new Fab 32 chip making plant in Arizona is rapidly pumping out nearly a billion newly minted Intel transistors onto each multi-core chip coming out soon. OK, actually on the new quad core chips, it’s estimated to be about 840 million newly designed transistors built using Intel’s Hafnium-based high-k metal gate silicon technology.

Press Release from 10/25/06: Intel is opening its newest state-of-the-art microprocessor factory (called Fab 32) in Chandler, Ariz. as it prepares to ship its first 45nm processors on Nov. 12.

Context: Manufacturing capacity and modernization are key differentiators in today’s competitive market for microprocessors. Intel invests heavily in its global manufacturing network, including a $3 billion investment in Fab 32, to ensure it can meet the demands of the market, and is quickly ramping production on its 45nm process technology. Two more 45nm factories will open next year.

Relevance: With 1 million square feet and more than 1,000 employees, Fab 32 is Intel’s latest environmentally friendly factory that will manufacture tens of millions of the most energy-efficient processors the company has ever made. These processors are based on Intel’s groundbreaking transistors with Hafnium-based high-k metal gate silicon technology, the biggest change to how transistors are made in 40 years.

Here is a fun, educational animation shared during the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco last month. Following the animation is a video shot inside Intel’s fab and research facility in Oregon in January when Intel first showed working processors build with the new, smaller, energy-efficient transistors.

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Internet Future for Africa: Intel, UN and ITU Efforts to Globalize Broadband

Broadband access in Africa is less than 1%. In Africa or even Brazil, where mobile phones are more common, maybe WiMAX and better content to phones could get the Internet to spread more widely, more quickly.

Here is a video story about the upcoming Connect Africa Summit, where Intel Chairman Craig Barrett his World Ahead posse will meeting with government and community leaders in Rowanda, Nigeria and Morocco.

This is a video by Jason Lopez, who will be traveling to a few of the stops to report on results.  If you’re in Facebook — who isn’t?!! — follow the trip by joining the World Ahead Group.

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Prophet Talking at the Speed of Business

I’m checking out what people shared about their experience Monday evening at the Social Media Club, Silicon Valley hosted at Intel headquarters. I’ll write up another post this week when I have a little more time to reflect. But first, this…Someone in Facebook described Jeremiah Owyang, strolling up to the podium with think black book in this hand….he looked like a prophet. Aptly put, any which way you think about it…he’s a prophet sparing time, insights, always a helping hand with a finger pointing forward, move ahead, avante!

Jeremiah let’s fly brimstone, bleeding edge wisdom and can zero in on specifics backed by examples or data. Sometimes both. Here’s another helpful list to train our eyes on. Enterprises might watch for these potential ills as more marketers speed to add new tools that help companies and people connect with clients and audiences. The list, followed by Jeremiah’s business “fix.”

* Disparate user experiences to customers and employees
* Information spread off the firewall, some potentially sensitive
* Risk of enterprise 2.0 vendors being acquired by a competitor
* Real time information being spread at the “edges” of the company, where there was one before corporate communications
* Multiple login systems
* Multiple identity systems spread from system to systems
* Systems that may not talk to each other, now or in the future.
* Business program managers that leave the company or position, orphaning any technology deployment deployed at the business level
* Business groups paying for web programs in different locations, different budgets
* Lack of a cohesive web strategy

clipped from www.web-strategist.com

The fix? IT moving at the speed of business

Business units, IT groups, and Enterprise 2.0 vendors need to work closely together to deploy programs across the enterprise. I, we, you, would love to see IT to rise to the occassion and get ahead of the demand curve. Get aware of what’s happening, build connections internally. Get educated, attend enterprise 2.0 conferences and events. Initiate a dialogue with business units fast and early. Your business analysts can stay close to the groups, gather information and help drive a real strategy. Experiment with new technology (give time and resources to those wide eyed employees in IT you see who may adopt these tools) and deploy quickly. Be flexible as business and technology changes over time. Sure, there are going to be changes at the speed of business, but that’s far better than doing nothing.

  blog it

One other cool thing from Jeremiah’s blog was this interesting, but not quite there video. It’s about MediaSnackers. This is a great premise — young people are the new www = getting info and entertainment whenever, wherever and whatever. But JO argues it’s not just young people. There are pleanty of us almost middle aged MediaSnackers. But the point is, are people acknowledging and respecting this short, random media consumption trend? Two-minuteTV on phones, 100MB or 10-minute video file limits on YouTube, mash-ups….but I’d say it’s not quite a mega-trend. But people are consuming and doing more, so where’s the time go/come from? Maybe by building in efficiency into stories we share.

Video — Intel Fab Tools Rockin’ the World

I’ve been inside only a few fabs shooting video. You suit up and step into another world, cleaner than anyplace on earth. The best part is talking with researchers and engineers who get to spend much of their time living inside and outside the fab. All of the movement and mysterious tools, many walled in behind glass. This video shows the 65nm process teams from different parts of the world, and looks ahead to 45nm circuitry process coming very soon. Several hundred of the new energy efficient, hafnium infused 45nm transistors can fit into a human red blood cell. These chip makers have advance from fitting millions to billions of transistors on a single chip since I joined Intel in 2000.

Upload HD Video to Vimeo & Teched-Out Esquire North NY Appartment

I just tested out embeding the Vimeo player in this post, but it didn’t work. I really dig this fun video I found on their site from Dala Verdugo — a simple understanding of the difference between standard and HD video. I will try uploading to Vimeo my Esquire Note in HD as soon as it’s edited.

Last month, I shot some HD video the before the opening of Esquire North, Esquire magazine’s ultimate New York bachelor apartment in Harlem on the tree-lined north edge of Central Park. I was there for some TV and radio efforts for Intel, who teamed up with Esquire to deck out the pad with the latest computer technologies — from Intel Core 2 Quad-powered gaming PCs by Dell, to ultra mobile devices and an Intel-Viiv powered entertainment system by Nevius (connected to DirecTV boxes) that could send five different HD movies to five different rooms at the same time. Here’s the video we did from the event with gaming pro Marc Saltzman. There will be an online tour of the apartment similar to last year’s enormous Esquire House 360 in Beverly Hills, California.

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Sweet Bike, Hot Babe, Tech Wizard and Nifty UMPC in Taiwan IDF 2007

Taiwan IDF 2007 166, originally uploaded by KenEKaplan.

That’s good livin’ on the go. My boy Damian will go crazy for this motorcycle!

Social Media Club, Silicon Valley Inside Intel Headquarts

The Social Media Club of Silicon Valley will be at Intel Headquarters on October 22 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. for a panel discussion on Social Media and the Enterprise: Looking Forward.

Register to attend the event here and see the online Upcoming Events listing here.

  • Shel Israel is moderating – great social media man and teacher who wrote the book “Naked Conversations” with Robert Scoble
  • Dave McClure, 500 hats blogger, software geek and spirit behind recent gathering for Facebook application creators called Graphing Social Patterns
  • Jeremiah Owyang, social media researcher at Forrester and master Web strategist
  • Jennifer Jones, host of “Marketing Voices” video Podcast available on the PodTech network
  • Eleanor Wynn is an Enterprise Architect, Social Computing and blogger at IT@Intel
  • Bob Duffy, community manager of Intel’s Open Port

Prior and after the discussion, get a show and tell from online community builders from KNTV-TV’s communities efforts, Intel’s Open Port for IT pros and Intel Software Network community.

We will try to livecast the event through UStream.TV, allowing people to watch live and send in comments to the live event — embedded below.

Homepage for the Social Media Club http://www.socialmediaclub.org.

UPDATE:  Watch and chat live on UStream’s site here (tried embedding comments below).  Thanks Jeremiah.

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Facebook Fanboys: Are you Pro or Con? part 2

Dave McClure will be on a Social Media Club, Silicon valley panel at Intel headquarters on October 22. The discussion will be led by Shel Israel — YES! Others include IT@Intel blogger and social computing expert Eleanor Wynn, Social Media master Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research, Jennifer Jones of PodTech’s “Marketing Voices” and BobDuffy of Intel’s IT community, Open Port.

Register to attend the event here and see the online Upcoming Events listing here.

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Scoble Talks with Six Apart

I missed the opportunity to visit with Six Apart during the Intel Developer Forum in September. They did participate in IDF’s Day Zero briefing with Intel Capital, when Intel’s investment group talked bout strategically supporting Web 2.0 companies like Six Apart.

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