Archive for August, 2009
« Previous EntriesWednesday, August 26th, 2009
August Tech Meetup (Edinburgh)
Augusts Meetup was uninterrupted even though the Edinburgh festival(s) are keeping everyone busy, hedout provide the official festival iPhone application(here) and both festbuzz and edtwinge both recently launched review guides for festival shows.
As we kicked off with a round of introductions as usual, this month there were a lot of companies looking to hire, so any programmers looking for work would do well to come along next month.
Before the talks started Greg Soper started the night with an announcement of the upcoming Scottish Open Source Awards. The awards are looking to promote open source within the small business community and to reward those who have made valuable contributions. The awards night is coming up soon so check out http://www.opensourceawards.com/ for more information.
Ben Werdmuller – User Centered Web
The first talk was by Ben Werdmuller, co-founder of elgg, the talk was part of an ongoing discussion about the current and future state of social web applications, while there wasnt a lot of conclusions to be drawn, there was some very interesting observations about what the web application developers of today should be looking towards.
Ben started by taking back the term “social network”, warning people against putting up sites with social software such as ning and elgg and hoping that communities will somehow form around them. Instead, looking at the 2 main approaches that have been used for current popular social networks:
1. An existing social network that can also be served online (Craigslist – San Francisco, Facebook – Harvard)
2. A tool that is useful for the first user (flickr, delicious, last.fm)
As Joshua Schachte said “If you need to scale in order to create value, its hard to get scale, because theres little incentive for the first people to use the product”.
Since web applications(particularly social based ones) are often monetised through advertising, their inventive is to get as many users as possible and keep them there. This has lead to the proliferation of online identities where poeple often have accounts registered on 10’s or possibly even hundreds of different sites, Ben talked about the problems caused by having seperate identities, the problems that can occur by joining them together and why current initiatives such as OpenID arent a complete enough solution.
Neelima Alluri – Developing for the Microsoft Surface
Neemila came to talk about developing with the Microsoft Surface after her experience in the touchscreen development competition.
“its not about getting the job done but the experience you get while doing the job”
For those that arent familiar with the Surface, it is a touchscreen interface in the form of a table top, it allows multiple users to work on it at the same time due to its size and support for multiple orientations, it has multi touch for more intuitive commands for actions such as resizing and also has a basic object recognition based on a tag system (similar to barcodes) that need to be placed on objects.
The Surface is a step towards “natural user interfaces” which is aim to make user interfaces more intuitive to the user and less like you are performing a series of steps instructing a computer to do what you want.
Neemila gave a pretty extensive overview of the Surface, explaining the overall architecture, along with an introduction to its software development environment, its features and its limitations. For anyone who is interested in developing for the Surface I would certainly check out the video below.
Watch The Videos
Ben Werdmuller talks about building a user-centered web from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Neelima Alluri talks about Microsoft Surface from TechMeetup on Vimeo.
Friday, August 14th, 2009
TechMeetup Glasgow #5 – August 26th
August 26th is confirmed as the next TechMeetup in Glasgow. Once again held at the excellent Saltire Centre on Calidonian Uni’s campus. The usual beer and pizza is complemented this month by three excellent speakers:
Topic: How to Optimise for Profit using Google Website Optimizer (Jim Williams)
Why guess what web design would works best with your customers when you can ask them live on your site 24/7. Jim will show you how Google Website Optimizer can be used to quickly and cheaply optimise your web designs, increase your web site conversions and boost profitablity . Using case studies from his work at the social networking/gaming site weeworld.com Jim will share some of the many pitfalls and lessons learnt using Google Website Optimizer.
Topic: Programming Microsoft Surface (Kate Ho & Neelima Alluri)
The presentation gives a brief introduction on Microsoft Architecture and Surface SDK, differences between Surface programming & traditional WPF programming, and using Surface simulator to create rich surface experiences.
Towards the end we will have a demo of the surface applications developed by Kate and Neelima as part of the Touch Finance Competition.
As you can see, an interesting and diverse set of topics, providing the ingredients to an excellent Tech Meetup evening. We hope to see you there, at the usual time of 7pm.
TechMeetup Glasgow is made possible through support provided by Wireless Innovation.
Friday, August 7th, 2009
Coding Dojos meets Public Service
One would think that there must be very little in common between these two topics. And they would be almost right. Except that the July TechMeetup in Glasgow held two very diverse presentations covering the ninja-esque training styles of developers found in Coding Dojos and the ongoing successes and strains of Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public (4iP) fund.
It turned out to be a very interesting evening with great energy amongst all who attended, and as usual I got to speak with a few people whom I’m delighted to have met. A big thanks to Wireless Innovation who sponsored the beer and pizza (and serious props to Heidi for the range of beers and pizza/sides). Alastiar Gunn from Wireless Innovation also announced about the Orange developer team coming up to Glasgow for a few days in August, and the OMPT Mobile Barcamp to look forward to in September. More on this will follow, we’ll post up details once we get them but I also believe information can be found at 38minutes.
Joe Wright on Coding Dojos
Joe had a great time presenting the concept of Coding Dojos, a concept that was stirring up a lot of question prior to the talk. I suppose everybody thought this was some sort of fusion between hacking and ninjitsu and to see the first few slides start off with photos of developers wearing bandanas made me think that might just be true.
Coding Dojos, is really developer “practice” in a social, but intensive environment. The reality is that developers learn on the job, and make mistakes during a project – rather than training in off the job, in outside practice. Coding Dojos is a place where developers can practice and fine tune their skills, to then take a better quality of development to the real life projects. Laurent Bossavit set up the first Coding Dojo in Paris where he took a “coding kata” – a relatively straight forward and repeatable task – and encoded it in front of the audience. The audience is then prompted for feedback on improvements or what would others have done, given the same task. The concentration is on continuous learning with an involved crowd.
The principles of Coding Dojos are about learning how to solve the problem, rather than the a competitive-like race to solve the problem. There are two simples rules to maintain these core principles:
1) Use either behaviour driven, or test driven development.
2) Everyone has to understand what’s going on. Everyone should be able to cooperate on the problem.
All that’s needed to get started is a room, a projector, a group of programmers, and at least one machine. Joe runs his own Dojo in JP Morgan, internally. He explains that it is an easy and cheap way to invest in training for the development staff. Joe pushed the idea that this might be an interesting method to hiring developers: rather than sitting at a desk and scanning CV’s with somewhat arbitrary work experience, this would be a direct presentation of the developers ability to work and more importantly, an illustration of their thinking process.
Joe covers all the fundamentals of Coding Dojos, from the founding principles through to operating models and a few guidelines on what works and what doesn’t work. The topic inspired a lot of interest from the crowd and I’m exciteed to see what dojos might start to pop up after this. Bam, 15 minutes, great talk, check it out.
Ewan McIntosh and the Quest of 4iP
I’m just looking over the video taken of Ewan’s presentation, and eerily enough it’s 38 minutes long – that is some very subliminal branding. It was an insightful talk from Ewan and true to TechMeetup, it was a snap 15 minute talk – so the length of the video is indicative of the amount of questions (slash grilling) thrown at Ewan. For anyone interested in 4iP, it’s operations, motivations and progress so far this is a must watch.
I presume that many of the readers of this blog are based in or around Scotland and hence are familiar with 4iP, 38minutes and Mr McIntosh himself. The 4iP fund is well explained over here and the community that has formed around this initiative can be found over at their social network, 38minutes.co.uk.
I won’t go through a step by step explanation of the video because the video is much more informative – but I’ll highlight some of the key mentions and insights covered. 4iP has invested just over £1million in Scotland, and Ewan reckons that about 5% of the submitted applications get funded. The other 95% get rejected for a number of reasons, primarily:
- ideas are best suited to starting in TV
- ideas are not the first out there – there are already existing products or services available
- ideas aren’t really Public Service
- ideas are a bit too half-baked or not realistically fundable proposals
Ewan had an interesting explanation on how 4iP characterise ROI (return on investment) – which for them, is really more about returning attention, rather than financial gain. This is certainly clever, in this space it’s important that any projects aimed at the public – are actually known about by the public, and for this the projects need to be high in buzz and well-talked about. Later on in the game, once people are aware of and using the product or service, there can be a bit more thought about revenue models and how to sustain further growth. The cleverest revenue models in the world can’t make money when there are no users.
Here’s some simple checks to make before you approach 4iP: 1) Google. Have you checked that you really are innovating or are you just unaware of what’s going on elsewhere in the world? 2) “X is the only Y that allows these folk in this place to do this at a time when..” If you can fill in this sentence with your product, it’s benefit, and the target customers – obviously it’s important that you keep the word “only” in there – then there’s definitely something worth having a chat with them about. 3) Are you a destination site? If so, are you aware what it takes to actually create a destination site? Bear in mind that people sit on a handful of sites namely Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Google (arguably) etc. These are destination sites. 4) Does it make peoples lives better?
In my opinion, 4iP is a fantastic opportunity, the guys responsible deserve a huge amount of credit for what they are attempting to do. It’s absolutely worth investigating whether it’s right for you – but remember this is still an investment fund and as such they have requirements and an agenda and you must fit with these in order to create a suitable match. 4iP is generally very flexible in terms of how they arrange the investment – equity stakes, revenue shares etc and Ewan touches on these in the Q&A part of the video. The next tranche ends on August 23rd so get your applications in and see if 4iP can help you help others.
Watch the videos
Friday, August 7th, 2009
Edinburgh TM #12: Programming Microsoft Surface and Building A User-center Web
The second Wednesday of August is upon us, which means that it’s time for another TechMeetup in Edinburgh. As usual, you’ll be able to join us on August 12 from 6:30pm on level 8 of Appleton Tower (map) for an evening of talking tech whilst consuming copious amounts of pizza and beer. We have two talks lined up: one on programming the Microsoft Surface, and one on building a user-centered web.