Categories: GeneralSemantics

Hackdays on schema.org and Quotes on a Facebook wall

We just completed a 2-day schema.org-related hackathon at the Facebook headquarters. So much fun! It’s so cool seeing companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yandex, and Facebook* come together to code, experiment, and brainstorm on structured data/actions on the Web. Everyone cares about what’s best for the Web. We built prototypes and discussed interesting statistics about the state of Open Graph and schema.org on the Web today. Only good things can emerge from collaborative efforts like this one. And no… nothing concrete to announce!

The meeting room, in which we spent many many hours over the last couple of days, had the following quotes from industry leaders in frames on the wall, some of which I found interesting.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work“, Thomas Edison (GE)
“No company can be all things to all people and still win”, AG Lafley (P&G)
“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary”, Donald Kendall (Pepsico)
“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different”, Mlle. Chanel (CC)
“Capital isn’t scarce. Vision is”, Sam Walton (Walmart)
“You won’t find a solution by saying there is no problem”, William Hesketh Lever (Unilever)
“What helps people, helps business”, Leo Burnett
“Taking risks gives me energy”, Jay Chiat (TBWA\CHIAT\DAY)
“Everything you need is already inside“, Bill Bowerman (Nike)
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”, Bill Gates (Microsoft)
“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not reaching far enough”, David Packard (HP)
“We’re all working together. That’s the secret“, Sam Walton (Walmart)

* Yahoo unfortunately didn’t manage to join this time around.

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about