I attended Interesting Cafe last night and stayed for the first hour, had a hard time pulling myself away from Garrett Brown talking Innovation and what led to inventing the Steadicam. Turns out Garrett Brown also invented the Steadicam Merlin (for camcorders), Skycam (a robotic camera flying over wires for sporting events) along with Mobycam, Divecam and Flycam.

Wish I stayed and heard the rest of his talk .

It’s also mentioned in the meeting notes Garrett recorded for MGM as a folksinger (www.brownanddana.com) and did a lot of other stuff like sell Vokswagens. You can find out more about Garrett Brown at Garrett Brown’s website. I guess Girls In Tech at M1 could have waited another 30 or 40 minutes till I arrived.

At SXSW Pixton Comic Book creator is showing off their interesting Comic Book creation platform that will soon have animation and it looks interesting – maybe, more than interesting.   I checked out Allen Stern‘s review today of  SXSW Demo Video – Pixton Comic Creation Tool

I would think Pixton could become very popular because many of us have  read or secretly would love to creat Comic Books, but never had the skill or time to do it.

I am here listening to Frank Rose at Interesting Cafe@Clickable talking about the birth of the Ramones and a few other rock groups. A lot of the people Frank Rose spoke about had pretty self destructive lives.

		Interesting Cafe @ClickablePlease join us for Clickable’s Interesting Cafe, featuring Frank Rose, contributing editor of Wired. Frank will share adventures from covering the Lower Manhattan punk scene of the ’70s for The Village Voice, as well as insights from reporting on today’s technology and media titans. Discussion, friends, networking and refreshments included. Date: January 27th, 2009, 6:30pm – 8:30pm Location: Clickable New York Headquarters Address: 7 West 22nd Street (7th Floor) New York, NY 10010 (map)

Punk Rock, Frank Rose was saying, anyone could do it (you didn’t need to know how to dance or sing) and while the movement died,  it was reborn and continued with User Generated Content and YouTube, etc (I found this an interesting analogy – one that was quite unexpected, who would have guessed that the early days of Rock and Roll have so much in common with Social Media?)

Frank Rose is writing a book on how to use the Internet to tell stories with the stories becoming non -linier and game like – the book will be published sometime next year.

Also, there were some other notables in the audience with me, including Edd Kalehoff, Max Kalehoff’s father (who organized the Interesting Cafe @Clickable); Edd created the Price Is Right theme song, btw).  In addition, the sound engineer, who recorded Cyndi Lauper and the Rolling Stones, who was Edd Kalehoff’s sound engineer, was also sitting nearby.

Questions:

1. Who are the Ramones of the Digital Era? Frank Rose mentioned some names, and while I can’t remember them all,it’s important enough to note it.

2. Why did the Talking Heads cross over to the public more than The Ramones? The Ramones might be too extreme and did compromise in terms of popular taste.

3. Can you be a success without knowing what your doing? Apparently, yes, according to Frank Rose. It wasn’t about tallent and it’s analagous to what we’re dealing with the Internet, no one really knows what we’re doing or where it’s going.

4. How will story telling evolve? The Dark Knight had an Alternate Reality game, for example.