Oct 30 2008
American Stories, American Solutions
Fantastic stuff, wish I could vote in this Election.
Archive for October, 2008
Oct 26 2008
The Crypt
Originally uploaded by brucieweb
New entrance to St Martin in the Fields church. We had a nice coffee in the Crypt.
Oct 24 2008
Burt Bacharach at the Roundhouse
Oct 21 2008
London Murders
It crossed my mind that Friday’s murder is the third that has been committed near accommodation I was living in at the time.
On 23rd June 2004, my first week in London, when I lived on a council estate in Parsons Green, a resident of the estate, 15 year old schoolboy Kieran Rodney-Davis, was killed for his mobile phone.
Later that year, I had moved to Chiswick, and on the 20th October 2004, Robert Symons, a 45 year old teacher, was killed on the doorstep of his £1m home, across from my flat at the time.
And on Friday 18th October 2008, Ashley Kemete, a 20 year old probable criminal was shot outside his home by three gunmen, in a gangland attack, right outside my flat in Kennington. This is the closest yet!
Needless to say, I am getting very fed up of this – London is such a violent dangerous place, and the sacrifice to live here is becomming less and less worth it!
Intresting that all three were killed near their home, two in rough parts of town the other in a wealthy part – which attracted the murderer. I will move again shortly, lets hope this is the end of it.
Oct 19 2008
Time to move
Yesterday, there was a man shot 4 times in my street at point blank range by 3 gunmen, in a gangland slaying – not the best really is it?
The Sun Says:
The killing happened on Friday night in Kennington, South London — an area notorious for drug dealing and gun crime.
Oct 17 2008
HH Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan
HH Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan
Originally uploaded by BlingBling
Fantastic pic of Sheikh Zayed.
Oct 10 2008
FOAW 08: Day Two
Getting Through the Tough Times by Tim Bray, Sun Microsystems
This was my favourite talk, and one that I would recommend watching. Tim is a bit of a legend in the community and he was at the top of his game in this presentation. He had expected to give a talk on ‘The Fear Factor: What to be Frightened of in Building A Web Application’, at the 11th hour, he re-wrote it to take note of the credit crunch. Great advice on what do to if you loose your job and if you don’t how to hold on to the one you have. Lots of advice about growth areas and skills to keep an eye on. One bit was of note; he said that he expected all projects in our respective businesses that needed a large capital expenditure up front for future benefit would be canned.
Cloud Computing in the Enterprise – How Businesses are Taking Advantage of the Future of the Web by Adam Gross, Salesforce.com
Bit of a sales pitch this one. Darlings of the SaaS (Software as a Service) industry SalesForce.com has realised they are sitting on a massive infrastructure that they could ‘leverage’ as a platform, – here we have force.com – all about running your apps in the cloud. I spoke to the chap after the talk and I am still not sure if it has to be an app that works with salesforce.com or any app, he scanned my badge, so no doubt I’ll be hearing from them. Interesting, but prob of little use to us at the mo. Of more interest, was the Amazon Web Services, more on that later.
Innovation, the future and why nothing is ever simple by Simon Wardley
Very good talk by Simon, pretty hard going and academic – but great none the less. His hypothesis is comparing the web industry to the electricity industry – did you know people used to run their own electricity generators before the national grid came along? He compared this to the mythical ‘Cloud’ (we heard a lot about the ‘Cloud’) – the upshot was, as technologies become saturated and mature, they become boring services that others build on and fade into ubiquity.
How to decrease the environmental impact of your app by Gavin Starks, AMEE
Another excellent presentation, but unfortunately one that was woefully attended. Pretty much 90% of the room left to go and learn about how to increase their online presence. One delegate noted that this will pale into insignificance when the world is on fire – fair point. I’d recommend checking out this video too. One of the best bits was to add environmental impact as one of the metrics of your web app – clever idea. A sobering thought that in a few years, the impact on the environment from web servers will eclipse that of the airline industry! One of the benefits given for hosting within a cloud environment was that the companies that provide these services utilise their servers at around 60-75%, whereas most single instance web servers run at around 5-15%. AMEE provide an API to the worlds energy data.
Video coming soon
Work/life balance or Blood, sweat and tears: Which is the startup way? By Jason Calacanis Mahalo.com and Tom Nixon, Nixon McInnes
A head to head talk on the same subject from two differing points of view. Jason Calacanis is well known in the blogosphere for his outspoken views on how to run a successful startup, and for using a formula to work out which of his staff are the most productive and sacking the rest. Tom Nixon had a much more cuddly approach to work life balance, and everyone in the room knew who they would prefer to work for!
The important bits of cloud computing by Tony Lucas XCalibre and Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services
Another of these head to head talks, less controversial this one. XCalibre use the cloud and Amazon run one. I’ve used Amazons excellent A3 server hosting before – dirt cheap and you can scale it from one server to 10,000 at the flip of a switch – if you ever find yourself with a web app that popular, see me, I have Jeff’s card.
The Future of Entrepreneurship by Julie Meyer, Ariadne Capital
Bit dull this one – all about venture capital funding of your start up.
How to survive outside of Silicon Valley by Michael Galpert, Aviary and Andy McLoughlin, Huddle
The last of these head to head talks – Aviary is based in New York and Huddle here in London. What I got from this is, you can run a successful web start up in London, but the Valley has better weather. Check out the video though, Andy gave details of loads of London based web community groups and MeetUp’s they may be of interest. They like a drink.
To Borg or not to Borg by Gavin Bell, Nature Publishing Group
A good presentation that suffered a bit from being in the grave yard slot. The slides are great it was all about IA and user centric design. A bit indulgent, but some good messages at the end.
Adobe AIR Competition Finals
Interesting to see what people could come up with using AIR in a few days. Adobe AIR uses proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems.
No video
Fireside chat with special guest, Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg
The big event, pretty good insight into how he runs the business and his plans for world domination – could have had more questions on the recent controversy around the new layout, and how to keep your developers onside while you grow and adapt your community.
Oct 09 2008
FOWA 08: Day One
I generally followed the business route, there was a developer route going on at the same time. Most of this was typed on the hoof, apologies in advance for the ’stream of consciousness’ style.
The Future of News by Kevin Rose from digg
Pretty good opener by the founder of digg, the link sharing/news aggregator. Main thrust of the talk was that they are going to go niche (or ‘nitch’ as the American’s pronounced it, we heard a lot of talk of ‘nitch’ at the conference) using taxonomy and metatags. This was the only mention of taxonomy the whole day. The conference was wonderfully free from biz-blah – there was not one mention of stakeholders at all – and Tim Bray (see day two) gave us a great link to a concept called Business Requirements are Bullshit just showing off in front of the kids.
Web apps are dead, long live web apps… by Edwin Aoki from AOL
Edwin spoke last year about how he thought this would be the year for web apps – he was wrong – this was the year everything went propriety – and the rise of mobile. He mentioned how everyone is rushing into walled gardens such as the iPhone app SDK and Adobe Air (more on that later). He noted that people will be planning for the release of Google’s mobile platform, Android – but at least that is open source. He talked about the similarities in the Android API and Chrome, something I hadn’t really thought about. Overall, he did think web apps had a strong future – phew!
Technology & Psychology by Suw Charman
A different track here – looking at how you can leverage addictive behaviour to make your web app a success – well, perhaps not blatantly, but that’s the message I took from this. There was a lot of talk about that famous experiment with rats and reward behaviour. Do psychologists just learn about two case studies? That one and the Stanford experiment? They seem to be trotted out regularly. Anyway, Suw mentioned she was addicted to a website called I Can HasCheezburger (?) a site where people post pictures of LolCats (?) – we heard from the founder later in the day – it is ridiculously simple, successful and I wish I had thought of it.
The future of enterprise web apps by Kevin Marks from Google
Good talk from Google about their work on Open Social, something that so far Facebook is not a part of, but Mark Z said in day two, that they might be. Google’s work in this area is interesting, and I’d recommend checking out the video of this one. The upshot is if you are going to build a social web app or membership site it would be silly to do it in isolation. Most people these days have an online presence somewhere (Facebook profile, MySpace, LinkedIn) why not tap into that and allow them to port their data, save them starting from scratch allowing them to connect with people already in their network. It also means the same code should run fine on all the sites that support Open Social. It uses browser open standards of XML, HTML, Javascript, and the data formats are all ATOM and RESTful/WOA.
How the future of the mobile web is going to change everything by Stefan Fountain from Soocial
An entertaining talk inc. a very amusing mock up using clips from Knight Rider (geeks). Soocial is a cool app that allows you too keep you contacts in sync across a number of platforms/sites – so far support for Highrise, GMail, OS X address book, 400 mobile phone models, social web apps and MS Outlook. Similar to Apple’s MobileMe service and Microsoft’s Live Mesh – but much more extensible and open source. Again, something you could use if you were going to build a new social app or membership site. Stefan also mentioned that Soocial uses OAuth authentication, a clever way you can allow external applications to access your contacts in a manner that doesn’t require you to reveal your username or password. There was a specific talk on OAuth in the developer stream.
Video coming soon | OAuth: Video | Slides
Bringing Internet Television to the Masses by Ron Richards from Revision3
Great talk about the history and future of internet television. If you have an interest in that, check it out. Upshot is that it is not going to take off ‘till your Mom can do it’, which is taken to mean being able to get IPTV on your TV set. This is in the news this week, with the BBC’s Erik Huggers Guardian interview. His predecessor also frequently blogged on the subject, as has dear old Stephen Fry.
How to take your community to the next level by Ben Huh from I Can Has Cheez Burger
Very funny talk about this I Can Has Cheez Burger site we heard a lot about. Lots of good advice about running a popular community website – and lots of funny pics of LolCats doing craaaaaaaaazy things. Definitely worth a look, also a master class in how to do a great presentation.
Video coming soon
How to take your web app mobile by Tony Fish from AMF Ventures
Don’t bother with this one – crap slides and awful presentation. Only thing I remember about this is that the speaker was Michael Fish’s Son. I found out as much about how to take your web app mobile from him as I did from his Dad about a storm in 1987.