Somehow, I got introduced to people like Daniel Bachhuber, Greg Linch, Adam Hemphill, and a few others. Together, we went launched CoPress, where we encouraged college media to become more innovative.

At the time it was an organization seriously at odds with college media. Most major papers were published using College Publisher, a locked-down platform which also severely misaligned incentives for college papers by taking most/all of their online advertising revenue.

Within a year, though, we managed to launch a half-dozen newspapers on WordPress, and I think a critical turning point was when five of our partners won Pacemaker awards for their web presences.

CoPress only lasted two years, but its had an impressive legacy. One of our former advisor, Bryan Murley, just analyzed the results of the 2012 Pacemaker awards, and found that more than half are on WordPress … and only 4% are hosted on College Publisher.

I really want to know why the eBay corporate site has a copy of "The Fountainhead" lying around. And why it showed up when I searched for "Standing Desk."

On Friday, I had LASIK surgery. My eyes were cut open, the cornea reshaped, and I'm now sitting in bed, able to read small text from across the room. Without glasses. I won't know my final prescription for some time, but I've clearly got good news.

Anonymity might be easy for diabetes, hard for Crohn’s, impossible for ALS. #SXDataNewOil #SxSW

— Miles Skorpen (@milesskorpen) March 11, 2012

Seems like one solution might be creating a new, regulated, profession, like doctors or lawyers. Not exactly the crowd-source and internet-loved solution, but I’m not sure we can trust society with utterly open information … while there clearly is enormous potential value to analyzing this information.

Just discovered an awesome feature of Wolfram Alpha -- enter in your vision prescription, and it'll return an image of what an eye chart looks like with that vision acuity. This is what I see today. Should change in 2 weeks.

Quick overview: Highlight is an app which takes our friends lists in various social services, your interests, your industry, etc. and lets you know when people with similar interests are nearby.

I’m really dubious about this claim on C|Net’s part, starting with their decision to use Scoble as evidence of success (“Robert Scoble has written effusively about it … “) — Scoble seems like on of Google Plus’ dwindling power users, and his decision to stick it out on the Titanic seems to diminish his authority.

The two issues that stand-out to me:

• Battery drain is awful. Its hard enough to maintain decent battery life in the signal black-hole that is Austin, and Highlight dramatically aggravates the issue with constant location use
• There isn’t a clear “what’s next?” The goal is to create meaningful connections with strangers. Finding interesting strangers is certainly a barrier, but Highlight doesn’t completely solve the issue (you still need to get geographically proximate to the people, then recognize them), and there are a host of other barriers to creating the connection.
• I have yet to see anyone actually using Highlight, rather than just experimenting with it.

So, I can imagine certain situations where highlight might be interesting — a new job, or smaller convention where you specifically want to network. But it isn’t an application I can imagine using on a daily basis. It is no Twitter or Foursquare.

All-in-all, this makes me wonder if “winning SxSW” is really meaningful these days.

CoBook is (yet another) app which tries to tackle the address book space–something that’s really necessary, once you get beyond managing a few friends and family members in Address Book.

It clearly is a piece of beta software–it crashed quickly while indexing my contacts, and doesn’t have a tear-away option, so you can’t see contacts while in another program–but it does a lot of things right, starting with baked-in Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter integration to match what’s done on iOS devices, really easy note-taking to remember context, and syncing with most of OSX’s default software. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to include Exchange. Still, they’re planning to launch a full version soon (~$25), and I’m looking forward to it.

Soonr is a cloud document sharing service, which is interesting … but I was particularly excited by Soonr Scribble, an app they apparently just released at MacWorld (now on iOS). It lets people write on a wide range of documents–not just PDFs, which seems to be industry standard.

I’m a little concerned that it requires a Soonr account, which starts at $99/year, but I could still imagine it as a boon to college students and consultants, for mark-ups and note taking on the fly. It also makes a stylus a much better option, though I’d recommend avoiding the Griffin.

Apparently Coke had some bad experiences with barcode scanners in the early days. Coke Zero resulted in a swiss army knife, and Diet Coke resulted in a pink pillow. They didn't call out the scanners by name, but I fear we were one of these. I think we've improved since then.

• 90% of buyers would use buy-online & pick-up-in-store later, if available, says @NCR
  I’m not sure if “buyers” is an important distinction vs. shoppers.
• 95% of all retailers have only a single store, says @EliseDG90
  I wonder what percentage of retail stores are part of a single location retailer though
• 90% of people trust brand recommendations from friends, says @HubSpot
  … which explains why people are optimistic about social shopping. Interestingly, a number of other presenters suggested shopping was only a semi-social activity (vs. shopping at the mall today with friends) because you all have separate screens, even if you share some limited information
• Mashable reported that consumers don’t like to shop on branded apps, and instead shop online. I’m not sure where applications like RedLaser fall here, however–it isn’t a branded app (like Walmart’s app), but it certainly isn’t browser based shopping either.
• PayPal’s Sebastian Taveau (@frogtwitt) noted that 25% of shoppers searched for retailer information , 10% compare prices and review … but 78% actually buy online. How can we get consumers doing more research online? How much of this is because people go directly to destinations sites (like Amazon)?

It looks like Foursquare is moving to take on Yelp more directly--I just got this notification, pushing their recommendation service. If only they'd first fix their notification clearing code. Getting the iOS red "new notification" icon to go away is harder in 4Sq than any other app.