Monday, December 29th, 2008
December Tech Meetup – web analytics, casual games, and online spreadsheets
The December meetup started earlier at 6:30pm like last time. The turn-around was smaller (40) this time, possibly because its December and many people are on holiday and students/professors are preparing for exams. For people working in retail-related industries, Christmas season is the busiest time of the year, while others are preparing for the holidays.
Even then this tech meetup was one of the best we have had since we started. We had two great demos, an interesting talk, and lots of pizza and beer for everyone.
We started early like last time (6:30pm) and the initial chat and pizza took us an hour. We started with the presentations by 7:45pm. We had initially planned on each demo/talk taking 15 mins including questions, but it took much longer and in the end, all talks finished only by 9:30pm.
But the quality of the discussion was really good, be it Andrew explaining policies of Google and use of analytics, or Thanasis defending Java and the design decisions behind his game, or Gordon explaining their plans to take over the world of Spreadsheets.
So let us get to the talks…
Web Analytics
Andrew Hood who founded Lynchpin Analytics gave a quick rundown on Analytics, what it is and why to use it. He explained how advanced analytics can help websites track the sources of traffic and the flow within the website.
Analytics can also track how successful various marketing campaigns (like AdWords/AdSense) and referral strategies have been. In today’s world of cut-throat competition for attention on the web, successful marketing campaigns are critical to a websites’ fortunes. But failure or success can only be understood and replicated if hard statistics are available for the decisions being made. Online Analytics is a way to achieve this understanding.
Lynchpin from Sam Collins on Vimeo.
Crazy Space
Casual Gaming is a pretty big industry ($2.25 billion in 2008) and is growing fast. The industry consisting of small and easy to play games like Solitaire (Microsoft), Tetris (Tetris Holding) and Bejeweled (PopCap Games) is aimed at “non-gamers”. These games are intended to be for relaxation and quick entertainment, and are mostly aimed at women (comprising 75% of the sales). The reason we don’t hear a lot about these games is that these gamers don’t tend to talk a lot about their gaming habits and they usually don’t identify themselves as gamers.
Thanasis Theocharidis who has been working on casual games for many years, gave a demo of his game “Crazy Space”. Crazy Space is a “Othello” inspired game which has been engineered ground-up. Thanasis wrote his own libraries for online AI calculations and fast hardware acceleration in Java. The game can also run on Google’s new Android mobile platform.
Dot Red Games from Sam Collins on Vimeo.
Hypernumbers
The charm of starting a start-up is to dream big and think different. But alas, even in the startup world, very rarely do we see ideas that are truly original and ambitious. And this is what excites me most about Hypernumbers.
The charm of starting a start-up is to dream big and think different. But alas, even in the startup world, very rarely do we see ideas that are truly original and ambitious. And this is what excites me most about Hypernumbers.
The whole idea of Hypernumbers is a little hard to grasp in beginning, and it looks like another online version of Microsoft Excel. But its purpose is to build a platform using which any non-developer/non-programmer can easily build their own websites. You say: Hold on… what?
In Hypernumbers, every cell in a spreadsheet has a unique URL and hence can be used as a variable to be programmed with. This means that any element on a webpage can map to a cell in a spreadsheet. For eg, each textbox, dropdown or checkbox on a webpage would map to a cell in a spreadsheet in the backend. So, if you can program an excel sheet you could potentially create your own website!
The point is that this allows a huge number of non-technical people who know how to use and write macros in Excel, to easily create websites.
Gordon Guthrie, Dale Harvey and Hasan Veldstra have created a highly scalable architecture in Erlang from scratch. They have written their own parsers for Excel documents (along with 100k compatibility tests) and Gordon tells me their system has recently crossed 90% compatibility.
Hypernumbers were funded by SeedCamp in 2007 and are looking to launch their first beta product this year in March. So stay tuned at http://hypernumbers.com/.
See slides of Gordon’s previous talk on Erlang.
Photos
I was in-charge of the photos this time and didn’t do a very good job 
. But I did take a lot of pictures and by the “law of large numbers”, some of them did turn out to be good… They are here.
The Website
Colin has been working hard on the Tech Meetup website, and it should be functional and up pretty soon… Do send us any feedback as it is supposed to be used by you guys…
The next meetup is on 14th Jan. Hopefully everyone will be back from holidays and we will have a great Tech Meetup again…
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
Second Tech Meetup: another success…
It seems the Tech Meetup has caught the attention of the techie folk around Edinburgh, and the second meetup on 8th October was also a big success. We had about 70 people attending, which was a lot more than we expected. Consequently we also ran out of pizza and beer. So as the self-designated official blogger for the event, I’ll try and relate the happenings of the night…
Like last time, we started around 7 o’clock with people filtering in till 7:30. This, lets call it ‘group chat time’, was useful as it is a good way for people to chat with acquaintances and meet with people they already know. On the other hand, it also takes up a lot of initial time. So for the coming meetup in November we are going to start earlier at 6:30 instead of 7:00, so that we can do the introductions earlier, which means people can start meeting new people earlier.
Introductions
After pizzas had arrived and everyone had had a slice or two, we started with the public introductions like last time. Going through all 70 people did take time, but we think it was pretty useful as it helped break the ice. Even though this might not scale as the number of attendees grows, we still want to carry this on for as long as possible. The main objective of the meetup is to get people meeting and chatting to people they don’t already know. A public introduction helps this because even though people don’t remember each and every person’s name, they can still remember their faces and then come and chat to them afterward.
We are looking for ways this can scale in the future. We are trying to avoid name-badges, etc as that would make the Tech Meetup feel like yet another formal conference or a networking event. Having peoples’ profiles and interests on a website beforehand might be a way, but people will still not know who the person is that they want to meet in the crowd (unless we have clear photos on the website, or use name-badges… ).
Demos
We had two demos again like last time. We had more lined up but sadly had to cut short as we ran out of time, and it was getting late. So, this time starting earlier would help…
Wii Loop Machine
In the first demo, Yann Seznec gave a great demo of his Wii Loop Machine software. Yann’s application allows users to create new electronic music using a Wii remote.
A big part of producing electronic music is to do with looping music samples and mixing them in a good rhythm. Yann’s software allows you to control, mix and match these loops, just like a DJ would, using a Wii remote. It also looks fun because you start dancing with the Wii remote, while producing music.
Wii Loop Machine 2.0 :: an intro from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.
Technically, Yann mentioned that he is using aka.objects library for accessing Wii remote developed by Masayuki Akamatsu. Yann also has plans of porting the Loop Machine to the windows platform soon. All in all, it was a fun demo.
Erlang
Gordon Guthrie of Hypernumbers gave a high level yet interesting talk on Erlang. He focussed on the philosophy behind Erlang which was designed from ground up to be a concurrent & distribution-oriented programming language.
Even though Erlang syntax is similar to many other functional programming languages, it provides native concurrency and multiprocessing capabilities. So an application written in Erlang can scale easily to a large network of computers. Here are the slides for Gordon’s talk:
As scalability is one of the biggest concerns for any successful and growing software application, having this functionality inherent in the design since the beginning is a big plus.
Future Plans
Many have also proposed a “corners idea”, which we are going to try out this time. Basically the idea is to designate certain corners of the room to certain topics where people who want to talk about that can gather. I think it is a good idea. Coming up with a general and yet interesting set of topics for the corners is the hard part. We would love to hear more feedback on this…
• Dates: The next meetup is fixed for 12th of November which is a Wednesday again. We have also decided to hold meetups in the future on the 2nd Wednesday of every month, so that it doesn’t conflict with most of the other events.
• Website: We have a plan for a getting a full-fledged community website up for the Tech Meetup. It will have videos of demos, photos, member profiles and facilities to contact each other, forums, Job listings and Event registration. This looks like a lot of work, but we hope to roll it out in phases soon… All suggestions are welcome…
• Venue: If we continue to grow, 8th Floor of Appleton tower will soon be too small. Bigger halls in the new Informatics Forums are an option. We have decided to stay with Appleton tower for the coming meetup, and see if we do actually outgrow it…
Thanks to Adam Yates, we have some great photos of the meetup. Here are some of them (all throughout this post). I have also uploaded them to the Facebook group.
All in all, it was another great meetup with lots of new people coming this time. Can’t wait for the next one…
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
Gordon Guthrie on Erlang
Gordon Guthrie of Hypernumbers gave a high level yet interesting talk on Erlang. He focussed on the philosophy behind Erlang which was designed from ground up to be a concurrent & distribution-oriented programming language. Even though Erlang syntax is similar to many other functional programming languages, it provides native concurrency and multiprocessing capabilities. So an application written in Erlang can scale easily to a large network of computers.