Yesterday I visited five companies to get you the latest that’s happening in the tech industry.

Here’s the five companies I visited (now you know why my email isn’t getting answered):

1. Xobni. This is a cool add-on for Outlook. Tim O’Reilly has been raving about it on his blog. I’ve been using it for about a week and it lets me see patterns in my email that I wasn’t able to see before. I spent a lot of time with the founders talking about their business and the industry. Sorry for splitting the video up into three pieces, but if the cell phone connection disappears for some reason it ends the stream and I have to restart it. I’m trying to get Qik (the service I use to stream these videos live) to address this and make it possible to join videos together. Part I; Part II; Part III.

2. LifeSize. HD videoconferencing. Pretty affordable compared to other HD systems I’ve seen (starts at about $5,000). Awesome quality and a good demo of state-of-the-art of what videoconferencing systems can do.

3. Vusion. HD streaming. Oh, my, is this cool for cable companies and others who want to bring you HD video to your computer. You need to download a small plugin, but once you do this brings the highest-quality video to your browser I’ve ever seen. This one too is in three parts, sorry for the cell phone troubles. Part I; Part II; Demo.

4. Equals. This is a startup that hasn’t shown anyone its main product yet, I get an exclusive first-look at what they are doing. Wow, what a new way to work using Twitter, social networks, phones, and more. If you only watch one, I’d watch this one. The CEO is a bit wordy, but the demos he shows me are interesting. Part I; Demo; Demo of separate product called Party Line.

5. Google. I filmed a few videos at the Google Friend Connect “Camp Fire One” (aka press/blogger conference). Short video of people standing around, including my former boss, Vic Gundotra. Short video of Mike Arrington and friends (goofy). Long video of entire press conference along with a few interviews at the very end.

Bonus video? Check out the video I did of Kevin Fox, famous interaction designer (used to work at Google, now works at FriendFeed). We talk about “Googly” design.

Today? I’m going to slow things down just a bit and visit Longjump. Gotta run, see ya later on my Qik.com account.

Remember when I cried over seeing something very cool at Microsoft Research?

Well now you can cry too, because the World Wide Telescope is now up.

Still is stunning, even a few months later.

Here’s the FastCompany interview where we meet the two guys who got this built and is what led me to declare I was crying.

I am playing with the new Google Reader for iPhone. Where am I playing with it? I’m sitting in the middle of Google’s campus. I’m still very disappointed. Here’s some of my disappointment:

1. Can’t share items from top level, like I can on Web page.
2. Can’t add notes to items, like I can on Web page.
3. I can’t see my friends, like I can on Web page.

I won’t tell you what I’m using on my iPhone instead cause I’ve already hyped them up too much.

UPDATE: see the comments here for an answer from the Reader Team (Mihai Parparita, engineer, told me how to see my friends).

PS: I still love the Google Reader web edition, just find the iPhone edition to have limited utility for me. You might like it though. Some of my Twitter friends say that’s how they read all their feeds (I bias my life around sharing feed items, so making me click through items to share makes me mad).

BBC: Twitter and the China earthquake.

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. Now there’s lots of info over on Google News.

How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!

Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account.

It’s amazing the kind of news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world.

I fear a large casualty loss. The epicenter was 50 miles from Chengdu, which has about 10.5 million residents. Already reports are coming across of buildings that have been knocked down.

dtan was the first Twitterer I saw talking about the quake. This was my first post in reaction to him.

UPDATE: Online Journalism Blog has a lot more details about what happened on Twitter tonight. From the Frontline blog has even more.

UPDATE2: Global Voices Online has links to videos and other Twitter and blog reports.

UPDATE3: here’s a timeline of what first Tweets looked like.

David Risley this morning wrote about all the noise in all these systems like Twitter and FriendFeed. Of course that kicked off a whole discussion over on FriendFeed.

Oh, the glorious noise! Everyone loves beating me up for causing the noise. No, I am not the cause. I pass it along. You should see my inbound streams. Every second or two a new Twitter is aimed at me. Every few seconds, a new blog post comes into Google Reader. Every few seconds, a new thing on FriendFeed.

24 hours a day of noise. And we’re not even counting the professional noise over on TechMeme and Google News.

Buried by noise.

So, how do we get out?

Well, we have a couple of choices.

1. We can choose to remain ignorant. Billions of people choose this route every day. Pop open a beer and pretend nothing interesting is happening in the world. That explains why American Media would rather talk about Britney Spears than about anything really important (like what Barack Obama’s new policies are).

2. We can try to swim in all the noise and soak it in. That’s what I do, but only a small number of people are going to have time or willingness to do that.

3. We can build noise reduction systems. Techmeme is one such system. It shows you only what the bloggers think is important. Google News is another. That shows you only what professional journalists think is important (or, at least their algorithms are designed to show you that and, while the algorithms don’t always match real-world behavior, they do get close enough to have high value).

4. We can use search to only present high value items. For instance, let’s say you work for my sponsor, Seagate, wouldn’t you be very interested in only items that mention Seagate? Like this search on TweetScan? Yes, you would. There’s still SOME noise there, but a lot less for someone interested in stuff about Seagate than there is coming through, say, TwitterVision, which shows a random selection of all Tweets being posted in the last few minutes.

The problem? Twitter and FriendFeed have brought new noise into our lives (at least for the early adopter types) and there aren’t good ways to reduce the noise.

But FriendFeed shows us a way out. How about seeing only posts that have at least two “likes?” Isn’t that a way to reduce the noise? Yes! In fact, my eyes are already doing that. I scan the page of FriendFeed looking for things that stick out of the noise and I’ve noticed that items with lots of votes and lots of comments stand out.

Tonight I’ll be attending a FriendFeed party and I’ll ask them just what their plans are in terms of giving us new views into their streams of info: one with noise, one with noise removed. Yes, of course I’ll post videos to my Qik feed and they get forwarded to my FriendFeed account too (which shows up on my blog’s sidebar too). More noise ahead! :-)

What kinds of noise reduction systems are you seeing? What kinds do we need?

Oh, and here’s a FriendFeed search for all items that include the word “noise” in them. That’s one reason I wrote this post. The noise has our attention and we need to damp it back down.

UPDATE: In just half an hour we’ve gotten tons of more comments on this blog post over on FriendFeed.

UPDATE 2: another way to remove noise is to just watch the things I’m commenting on or liking. That ensures that my noise isn’t there, and that I’ve hand filtered the noise for you. Another way? Don’t subscribe to many people, just to people you know will provide you interesting stuff and little noise.

I just visited the offices of Lefora, free forum hosting, who is making cool new forum software that goes in interesting new directions that I haven’t seen forum software or services do yet. Stuff like embeddable YouTube videos with just copying the URL. And I +love+ the color theme selector they have.

You’ll see that in the video demo I just filmed with Vinnie Lauria, VP of product.

Paul Bragiel, CEO, told me a lot more about the company and its plans in a separate video.

An example of their new forums can be found on their “fun stuff forum.”

UPDATE: In just a few minutes Vinnie created me a forum.

New 3G iPhone is coming this summer, it seems. Will Patrick and I wait in line overnight again like we did last year?

No.

Why? Even though the line was a heck of a lot of fun, I think that’s a one-time deal. It’s pretty clear there won’t be any scarcity (there wasn’t any real scarcity last time, either) and I doubt Bill Atkinson (Apple’s first software developer) will come and wait in line overnight with us like he did the first time.

That said, I will be one of the first to buy the 3G version. I hope it has video on it.

The downside? With millions of people getting new 3G iPhones, I bet the speed and quality of AT&T’s 3G network will go down. In the United States there aren’t many 3G phones yet, and the ones that are out there suck for Web browsing, so other than a few freaks like me who are using it to broadcast video there isn’t much usage yet.

The 3G iPhone will change all that.

OK, over the past few hours I’ve gone crazy with Google Reader’s shared note feature. You can see how I’m using it on my shared items feed, which has a cool new ninja design (another new feature shipped yesterday).

It’s interesting, but leaves me wanting a LOT more.

For instance, if you share an item, add a note, I can’t pass those notes along to my readers. I can on FriendFeed, though.

I also can’t edit my notes. You can on FriendFeed though.

I also can’t comment on your notes without resharing an item, which causes duplication of an item if I’ve already shared it. You can do that on FriendFeed, though.

Are you noticing a theme? Is it any surprise that I’m seeing lots of early adopters move their reading behavior from Google Reader onto FriendFeed?

Discuss this either here, or over on my FriendFeed discussion page (which I call the World Wide Talk Show).

I love the idea of Google Reader’s new “share note” feature, but find it lacking in implementation — watch along in this video review.

What’s really wrong with it?

1. It’s breaking on my machines. No way to cancel note that I can see, and UI is not coming up. I’m sure that’s a temporary problem, so let’s discount that.

2. It’s causing a LOT of new duplication of items (which was a major problem in Google Reader before this, but is even worse after). Why? Well, I share one item, then I decide “I’d like add a note to that” so I click “share with note.” Now it shares it again with the note added on.

3. No way I can see of removing the note once it’s shared.

4. Unlike FriendFeed, I can’t add a note to other people’s shared items.

5. Unlike FriendFeed we can’t see threaded discussion under the headlines.

6. I can’t figure out a keyboard shortcut.

Speaking of FriendFeed. Check out the commentary about this feature. I’m sharing the best sites I see that talk about it. Welcome to the World Wide Talk Show.

UPDATE: I just added a video comment on TechCrunch’s post about this. Seesmic posts are pretty cool. This time the actual UI worked fine, but the post was shared twice.

Ballmer and Microsoft are the losers. Yahoo and Google win. See the chart from the day when Microsoft announced it was trying to buy Yahoo.

Now do you understand why Bloomberg says that there’s new pressure on Ballmer?

And why Ballmer is now out in the press trying to pitch that Microsoft has an Internet strategy?