Flowers, Sweets & Love Seats: AOL [Hearts] Technologies

OK, here's a scene from Valentine's Day, AOL-style:

This is violinist Miles Stiebel, who was roaming the halls to drum up interest in the "We [Heart] Technologies" fair on-campus today. (In return for the photo, I promised Mr. Stiebel that I would plug his CD, No Hassle Miles, available on indy music micropublishing site CD Baby.)

As reported by tech gossip blog Valleywag (they featured an internal, all-employees memo about it -- I'm not going to direct link it, for a modicum of butt-covering), AOL has deemed February "Technology Trends" month; it's meant to highlight popular and emerging technology trends to everyone in the company, including simple, non-technical folks like me. (Stephanie's presentation on blogging was part of the program.)

For Valentine's Day, we had a big love-in and road show, the "We [heart] Technologies Fair," which showcased work from groups inside AOL (like Accessibility, AOL Mobile and MapQuest), and also from some of our technology partners (Archos, Creative, IndustryNext, Intel, NetBlender, Nokia, Ombligo, and TopCoder)

More importantly, they also had flowers:

Sweets:

Note the We [Heart] Technologies candy hearts in the bag. I ate mine.

And of course, love seats:

Attendance was pretty good, considering that a lot of people worked from home today because of the icy road conditions:

One of the sponsors of the event is the new AOL CTO, Balan Nair; I don't know that much about him, other than he's pretty tall and I didn't take a photo of him (here's his bio).

For my part, I basically played with some of the gizmos. Oh, and I also I harassed one of the MapQuesters with a feature I'd like to see (either native to the application, or available from third-parties via an API) -- think directions that update dynamically when you drag the route marker line on the map. That would be cool.

Other than that, it meant that I ate dessert before I ate lunch. But I made it work.

Happy Valentine's Day, everybody! -- Joe

Tags: aol, balan nair, mapquest, valentine's day, photos, miles stiebel, technology trends