While attending the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis, TN I had the pleasure of gathering some of the leading minds in the fields of IA, UX, and IxD to talk about the subject of Ubiquitous Computing and related ideas.

Be sure to check out the work and initiatives being taken on by of all my guests for today’s podcast; remarkable work gentlemen!

Steve Baty is working hard to put together a tremendous line up of presenters for the upcoming conference, UX Australia. Steve also formed the UX Book Club; is a contributing author at Johnny Holland Magazine; and is the Principal at Meld in Sydney, Australia.

Will Evans runs Semantic Foundry in Washington D.C. and is currently part of the group helping to promote and put together the IDEA conference being held in Toronto this September. Looking forward to helping you with Idea and Interactions ‘10 in February, Will.

Joe Lamantia is speaking at the upcoming Enterprise Search Summit in NYC in May. Joe is also writing a column on designing for ubiquitous computing for the magazine UXmatters.com and he’ll publish another one in May.

(I actually had the pleasure of interviewing Joe on a two part series on Ethics and the Web in June of last year.)

Matthew Milan and Jon Tirmandi run Normative Design out of Toronto. Matt gave a great talk at the IA Summit entitled, Leading with Insight

Joe Sokohl is the User Experience Lead at PracticeWorks. Joe gave a great presentation at the IA Summit entitled, A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely. Joe is currently in Shanghai on business; hope the journey has been a great success, Joe!

Todd Zaki Warfel is the founder and President at Messagefirst. Todd is speaking at several events around the world, including:

July 1st and 2nd Université du SI Paris, France Geeks and Bosses
July 14th UPenn Philadelphia, PA. Higher Education Web Symposium
August 24-28 Agile2009 Chicago, IL. UX Design Studio Experience
October 8-11 UX Challenge Longyearbyen, Norway. UX Challenge

Many thanks to all for taking time out at the Summit to share your ideas and insights. I hope to be able to have more discussions like this one with others within and outside of the IA / UX / IxD / Design disciplines later this year.

Thanks to Chris Greenfield who spoke the Ottawa Social Media Breakfast. I first met Chris at the VizThink conference last year.

Chris gave a great presentation that spoke the truth regarding social media, called “Social Media Bullshit”. In essence he spoke out about how all social mediums are simply a means of connecting people with one another.

The value of such tools is the ability to bring people together to share ideas. If you’re a New Media Douchebag, you’re not contributing to the conversation – you’re impeding it!

Special thanks to the volunteers for their time and energies in helping to capture the audio from the 2009 IA Summit for the Boxes and Arrows Podcast.

We ran into many technical issues at the Summit this year, including most rooms that were not mic’d for questions. As a result I had to remove the questions b/c without that audio, the answers provided no context.

Thanks to Gene Smith and nForm out in Edmonton for chatting with me about doing some video for their upcoming Web Strategy Summit. Although this time can’t work, I look forward to helping share experiences in the form of audio and video at future events.