Wed, 30 Dec 09
Posted in Presentations, Video, Web Applications at 7:35 pm by moore
… from the perspective of people building platforms for add-ons (or plugins or extensions or what-have-you): this collection of videos from the keynote of the Add-on-Con covers a variety of interesting topics regarding browser development, the security model and how extensions fit, ad blockers and what they mean, and more.
Of the major browsers, Chrome, Opera and Firefox are represented–the Microsoft/IE representative was sick, and Apple/Safari was MIA. It’s about 30 minutes of video, unfortunately split into 5 separate segments. Well worth a view.
[tags]video killed the radio star[/tags]
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Thu, 12 Nov 09
Posted in BJUG, BarCamp, CU Colloquia, Conferences, Drupal, Java, New Tech Meetup, Presentations, RIA, Tips at 11:26 am by moore
Updated March 21: crossed out ‘conferences’ because I don’t do a good job of listing those.
Boulder, Colorado, has a great tech scene, that I’ve been a peripheral member of for a while now. I thought I’d share a few of the places I go to network. And by “network”, I mean learn about cool new technologies, get a feel for the state of the scene (are companies hiring? Firing? What technologies are in high demand?) and chat with interesting people. All of the events below focus on software, except where noted.
NB: I have not found work through any of these events. But if I needed work, these communities are the second place I’d look. (The first place would be my personal network.)
Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup
- 5 minute presentions. Two times a month. Audience varies wildly from hard core developers to marketing folks to graphic designers to upper level execs. Focus is on new technologies and companies. Arrive early, because once the presentations start, it’s hard to talk to people.
- Good for: energy, free food, broad overviews, regular meetings, reminding you of the glory days in 1999.
- Bad for: diving deep into a subject, expanding your technical knowledge
User groups: Boulder Java Users Group, Boulder Linux Users Group, Rocky Mountain Adobe Users Group, Denver/Boulder Drupal Users Group, Denver Java Users Group others updated 11/12 8:51: added Denver JUG
- Typically one or two presentations each meeting, for an hour or two. Tend to focus on a specific technology, as indicated by the names. Sometimes food is provided.
- Good for: diving deep into a technology, networking amongst fellow nerds, regular meetings
- Bad for: anyone not interested in what they’re presenting that night, non technical folks
Meetups (of which BDNT, covered above, is one)
- There’s a meetup for everything under the sun. Well, almost. If you’re looking to focus on a particular subject, consider starting one (not free) or joining one–typically free.
- Good for: breadth of possibility–you want to talk about Google? How about SecondLife?
- Bad for: many are kind of small
Startup Drinks
- Get together in a bar and mingle. Talk about your startups dreams or realities.
- Good: have a beer, talk tech–what’s not to like?, takes place after working hours, casual
- Bad: hard to target who to talk to, intermittent, takes place after working hours.
BarCamp
- Originally started, I believe, in response to FooCamp, this is an unconference. On Friday attendees get together and assemble an interim conference schedule. On Saturday, they present, in about an hour or so. Some slots are group activities (“let’s talk about technology X”) rather than presentations. Very free form.
- Good: for meeting people interested in technologies, can be relatively deep introduction to a technology
- Bad: if you need lots of structure, if you want a goodie bag from a conference, presentations can be uneven in quality, hasn’t been one in a while around here (that I know of)
Ignite
- Presentations on a variety of topics, some geeky, some not. Presentations determined by vote. Presentations are 20 slide and 5 minutes total. Costs something (~$10).
- Good: happens in several cities (Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins) so gives you chance to meet folks in your community, presentations tend to be funny, wide range of audience
- Bad: skim surface of topic, presentation quality can vary significantly, not a lot of time to talk to people as you’re mostly watching presentations
CU Computer Science colloquia
- Run by the CU CS department, these are technical presentations. Usually given by a visiting PhD.
- Good: Good to see what is coming down the pike, deep exposure to topics you might never think about (“Effective and Ubiquitous Access for Blind People”, “Optimal-Rate Routing in Adversarial Networks”)
- Bad: The ones I’ve been to had no professionals there that I could see, happen during the middle of the work day, deep exposure to topics you might not care about
Jelly
- Cooperative work environments, hosted at a coffee shop or location.
- Good: informal, could be plenty of time to talk to peers
- Bad: not sure I’ve ever heard of one happening on the front range, not that different from going to your local coffee shop
Boulder Open Coffee Club
- From the website: it “encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organize real-world informal meetups”. I don’t have enough data to give you good/bad points.
Startup Weekend
- BarCamp with a focus–build a startup company. With whoever shows up.
- Good: focus, interesting people, you know they’re entrepeneurial to give a up a weekend to attend, broad cross section of skills
- Bad: you give up a weekend to attend
Refresh Denver
- Another group that leverages meetup.com, these folks are in Denver. Focus on web developers and designers. Again, I don’t have enough to give good/bad points.
Except for Ignite, everything above is free or donation-based. The paid conferences around Colorado that I know about, I’ll cover in a future post.
What am I missing? I know the list is skewed towards Boulder–I haven’t really been to conferences more than an hours drive from Boulder.
Do you use these events as a chance to network? Catch up with friends? Learn about new technologies, processes and companies?
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Tue, 10 Nov 09
Posted in Presentations, Technology and Society, Video at 9:00 am by moore
Fantastic video from Dan Pink about motivation in the workplace. He examines the science of motivation, and knocks business for not adapting new methods of encouragement for the new, right brain type problems that face us.
This quote pretty much summarizes the talk:
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.
You can see a transcript of the talk by clicking on the ‘Transcript’ link on the right hand side of the video. It’s actually pretty cool–clicking on a sentence and it updates the video to that part. It’s not linkable, though–FAIL.
A few takeaways:
- If/then rewards work well for simple tasks…they concentrate the mind and narrow your focus.
- From a study by the FRB of Boston, “once [a] task called for ‘even rudimentary cognitive skill’ a larger reward ‘led to poorer performance’”
- Management is not a tree, it’s a television set. We invented it.
- Atlassian used to give their engineers autonomy at least a few times a year to choose what they work on (FedEx Days), and now gives workers control over 20% of their time. (Joel has something to say about Atlassian too.)
- Autonomy, mastery, purpose are what people are looking for (once money is taken care of)
- Results only work environment–people can work when they want, as long as they get their work done. Here’s a stub wikipedia article about ROWE.
- Encarta vs Wikipedia–who won? The encyclopedia that leveraged people’s desires to work, not the one that paid them.
Now, my thoughts.
- First, watch the whole video. It’s only 18 minutes and is well worth your time if you are an employer or an employee (which covers most of us, I think).
- ROWE reminds me a lot of college, especially higher level classes. No one cares about when you do the work and I don’t remember being required to be at classes, but the results (passing a test, turning in a paper) were very important.
- He only talks about the autonomy component of the new ‘motivation trilogy’ (autonomy, mastery, purpose). I wish he’d chosen to talk about ‘purpose’ because to me that is the hardest bit–someone needs to do grungy jobs. I guess granting workers autonomy is pretty revolutionary too.
- “once money is taken care of” is a huge elephant in the room that he again does not address. When the work is high value add, it makes sense to take money off the table (software developers are very lucky in this respect). But what about a worker at Target, for example? A Target store can’t afford to pay someone enough to take the money issue off the table, but can probably benefit from the ‘motivation trilogy’
- The whole Encarta vs Wikipedia example that he gives is great, but he ignores the fact that Wikipedia has very few paid employees and that Wikipedia only won because of volunteer labor. It’s not a solution that scales across a society.
Overall, in general, a thought provoking talk (expect nothing less from TED). I would say that he is describing the future of work as consulting. You are paid for what you know, the problems are fuzzy, answers are unexpected and at times unclear, and results arrived at matter far more than hours put in.
Is the future of work consulting? If so, the business world is about to be upended, because, to borrow Dan’s phrase, “the operating system of business” isn’t designed to handle a workforce of consultants. Heck, society isn’t either.
[tags]work, employment, gtd[/tags]
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Sun, 11 Oct 09
Posted in Presentations, Useful Tools, Web Applications at 11:20 am by moore
I’ve written before about Google Website Optimizer. But it’s always nice to see hard data.
Here’s an interesting GWO Case Study I found online, via a presentation by Angie Pascale. It focuses on optimizing landing pages for a college system. Conclusions:
Although the SEM agency did not find a correlation between brain lateralization and form location, they did succeed in optimizing Westwood’s program landing pages. On average, the program pages saw a 39.87% conversion rate improvement, with 83.1% being the highest upgrade. After significant results were revealed, the agency stopped each experiment and changed the format for every page to reflect the best-performing contact form location.
[tags]gwo, case study[/tags]
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Thu, 17 Sep 09
Posted in Presentations, Social Media at 9:37 am by moore
I have some interest in social media–I obviously blog, but I also have a twitter account as well as some other ‘social media’ interaction. It’s also the reason I attend the Boulder New Media Breakfast. One of the ways I keep up to date on topics of interest is using Google Alerts (it’s not just for Craigslist). I also use FiltrBox, mostly because I have some friends who work there.
The FiltrBox folks are having a 1 hour webinar tomorrow titled “Blending Social Media with Traditional Marketing” which looks to be pretty interesting. From the description, they’ll discuss:
how social media marketing and traditional marketing integrate, how your company can leverage social media, along with best practices, how to listen, monitor, engage and interact, with highlights of specific case studies.
Not sure how much marketing material you might get from signing up, but you can always use a throwaway email address.
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Wed, 16 Sep 09
Posted in BarCamp, GIS, New Tech Meetup, Presentations at 9:38 am by moore
I helped Brian Timoney, of the Timoney Group present last night at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. It was my second experience presenting at BDNT. (I presented in Jan of 2008 on GWT.) But it was my first time at BDNT Denver–down at the Tivoli.
Co-presenting is always different than presenting alone. I actually had a pretty small role in the presentation–I mostly just drove the demo (underwater navigation with Google Earth to visualize sonar coverage data–it’s very cool, but I don’t feel comfortable putting the demo login up–contact me if you want to see it). I worked with Brian on the presentation format. Brian has deep knowledge of GIS concepts (he recently ran a workshop at GIS In the Rockies), but he’s used to having more time to cover concepts, and 5 minutes just enforces a certain brevity.
We had a mentor–Josh Fraser of EventVue took some time to run through our presentation with us. It was really great to have a third party, especially one in tune with the BDNT, give us feedback. As I told Robert Reich last night, we went into the mentoring session with one presentation, and left with an entirely different one. If you’re thinking about presenting at BDNT, please get a mentor (and you might have to ping the organizers a few times to get one–we did).
If I ever present at BDNT again, I’ll follow the format we arrived at:
- 15 sec intro
- 1 min talking about problem
- 2-3 min demoing software solving problem
- wrap up
- contact info on screen during questions
However, one of the difficulties in presenting for 5 minutes to a varied audience is that it is hard to know what knowledge to assume (about, say, GIS). I talked to some people after the presentation, and it seemed like we assumed our exposition of the problem was better than it actually was. I guess one way to address that would be to have a 30 sec intro spiel that you could deliver or not deliver based on a show of hands. Not sure if there are other ways to deal with this issue.
Finally, we were the only formal presentation last night. It sounds like BDNT Denver isn’t as supported by the community as BDNT Boulder, in terms of participation. I hope it doesn’t end–so, if you’re in Denver, consider attending this meetup–it’s a great place to network and get excited about tech. Here’s the calendar of meetups.
Instead of other presentations, we went unconference style, a la BarCamp. People broke into 5 groups and discussed a tech issue (personalization, structured data, real time web) in detail for 10-15 minutes. Then someone from each group presented 1-3 minutes. The twitter feedback seemed pretty favorable. I like BarCamp formats, and enjoyed the change. I found that everyone in my group had lots to say about personalization, including some pretty creepy personal storied about advertising on the net. I believe someone was going to write up the resulting presentations–will link to it when I find it.
[tags]bdnt is the new barcamp?, denver, the timoney group, underwater visualization[/tags]
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Wed, 13 May 09
Posted in Presentations, Web Applications at 9:38 pm by moore
I attended the first Boulder Facebook Developer Garage, and it was a hoot (are people under 60 even allowed to use that word in that context?). The second one is coming up in next week–I got a message from Kevin Cawley, who is playing some role in organizing this shindig. All the details are here: Boulder Facebook Developer Garage, part II.
[tags]facebook garage,boulder,pizza and nerds go together like peanut butter and jelly[/tags]
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Sun, 05 Apr 09
Posted in Presentations, Technology and Society, Useful Tools at 11:46 am by moore
I went to the second Boulder New Media Breakfast last week (this will be a monthly event, but this particular talk was delayed by a week due to weather). It was interesting–a 15 minute networking session over bagels and coffee, then an hour presentation. The catch is that it started at 7:45 in the morning–so you still had a full day left when you were done.
It was an interesting presentation and crowd and I think I’ll attend in the future. It was a much smaller crowd (30-40 people) and far more focused on marketing than the typical group I attend (New Tech, BJUG, CU Colloquia [which incidentally is having an interesting talk on "leveraging social networks in information systems" on Apr 7]). I talked to a couple of people who were PR folks interested in technology, which isn’t my typical networking group. I also talked to a fellow named Joe, who often asks hard questions, but always wears the great hat, at the Boulder Denver New Tech meetup. I also got a chance to talk to Dave Taylor (of elm and Ask Dave Taylor fame [who answered a tough question well enough it got emailed around to me])–it was interesting to talk to him about his move from software developer to strategic business consultant.
After the networking, we all sat down for a presentation on reputation management by John Jantsch. The following are my scrawled notes from that presentation (any sentences that start with I are my thoughts).
Notes:
Lots of people use the internet to do research for products and services. 36% of people think more positively of companies with a blog. I don’t know how many people think less positively of such companies.
As a company, says John, you need to have a policy on digital conversations. Such conversations with customers will happen, so you need a policy, and HR is the right department to produce one. He discussed three types of conversation: person to person (like Dell customer service reps answering questions on forums), thought leaders (like a blog from a industry heavy weight who happens to be employed by IBM) and company communication (like an official blog from the USPS).
John also mentioned that it may make sense to, in the same way that sales folks sign non compete agreements, to have customer service reps that interact through social media sign such agreements. After all, if someone is the face of the company, and then they switch jobs, do they (and their new company) have a right to all the followers on twitter that were acquired through the original company’s hours? Who owns the facebook profile? I never have liked non competes, but the idea follows logically from the personalization of customer service on company time.
Another concept that is important is transparency. Given the proliferation of digital communication, transparency into a company is here–now the question is, how can you influence it. The best way to influence it is to host your conversations as much as possible. In addition, be proactive in responding to issues (ie, customer complaints).
As a company, you need to have coherence in your branding across your internet presence. Just as the website used to be ignored 10 years ago, facebook profiles are now often ignored and grow up from the ranks. This leads to lack of message and branding consistency.
Now John moved on to cover some tools that are useful. Most of the tools are free, but he did mention a few paid services. The following are free alert services that help you search for keywords in various areas of the internet:
He referred to twitter as a “stream of sewage” and stated that tools to filter that stream were needed. (As an aside, this video commentary on the twittersphere is hilarious.) Twitter has a location specific search options (in advanced search) that you should definitely leverage for competitive analysis.
John also talked about making sure that your online presence is high quality. This is not only done by making sure your website/blog/facebook profile/twitterstream/etc/etc are updated regularly and with good content, but also by taking advantage of tools that aggregators like search engines provide. For example, if you have a local business that appears in Google’s local search, you can add update the entry using the local business center. This lets you claim the listing, add pictures and verify other information. Other search engines have analogous processes, and it is well worth your time to try to stand out. I don’t quite know what will happen when everyone does this updating–the value of accurate content will remain, but having a picture won’t be enough to stand out.
Then we went into a question and answer period. One person asked for examples of good corporate users of twitter. John gave these examples: Dell, radian6.
Another person asked about the personal/business divide: if you’re running a small business, do you want to provide info in your twitter stream (or other digital media) that identifies you as a person (“I like to tele ski”) or just have it focus on business issues. John answered that the line is still blurry and being defined. I personally try to keep my blog focused on business, but I think it depends on what you’re selling. If I were selling socks, tales of adventures in my socks would be appropriate. Since I’m selling software services, you probably don’t want to hear about the killer desert hike I went on last year.
End notes
I really enjoyed the breakfast and encourage anyone with an interest in digital media to try it out. The next presentation (at the end of April) will be a presentation by Terry Morreale on personal digital security (I believe).
[tags]boulder new media breakfast,twitter,duct tape marketing,it’s at 7:45??[/tags]
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Thu, 12 Mar 09
Posted in Cloud Computing, Presentations, Video, Web Applications at 5:08 pm by moore
A former colleague, Tom Malaher, did an online presentation about cloud computing on Mar 11 at the Calgary JUG. You can view the recording of it now. It was titled: Cloud Computing and Amazon Web services (AWS), and was a great survey of cloud computing and then a nice dive into AWS. I used to work with Tom and always enjoy the depth and breadth of his presentations.
Below are some of my notes.
- This was their first online meeting, due to cash flow issues (lack of sponsorship), and to make it easier for speakers out of the Calgary area. It was put on using Elluminate.com. (This client was installed using JNLP; very easy to install and setup). You can use Elluminate for up to three participants for free (but you cannot record your session).
- Definition of cloud computing is in tug of war in vendor land. According to Infrastructure Executive Council, cloud computing is elastic, multi-tenant, on-demand, usage based metering (no long term contracts), self service
Tom outlined a number of variations on cloud computing
- Infrastructure as a service (s3, ec2)
- Platform as a service (Google app engine, Microsoft Azure)
- Software as a service (Google docs, salesforce.com)
- Grid computing–more homogenous, but lots of overlap
Diving into Amazon Web Services, he outlined all the webservices that Amazon provides. I had already heard of a number of these, but two caught my eye:
- DevPay–pass through payment for Amazon Web Services.
- Public Data Sets–public domain data sets easily available for computation on the AWS platform
Composing AWS services makes sense, since there are no bandwidth charges between Amazon service calls within Amazon’s data centers (e.g. EC2->S3).
He had some interesting figures from the IEC: 70% surveyed are not using cloud computer (40% aren’t even considering it). Only 10% are hosting an ‘app’ on the cloud (with no definition of an app). I asked a question of Tom about what is considered an app. I have a client who is hosting backups and images on s3, and friends who regularly back up servers to s3. Is that an ‘app’? I don’t think so, but Tom didn’t have a definition of ‘app’ for this survey.
Tom also did an interesting cost analysis when he was looking at pros and cons for AWS.
The 1and1.com high end hosting agreement: 1gb ram 50gb hd, 2000gb transfer: $59/month.
For a comparable AWS instance, with an ec2 image, 1.7 MB ram, 160gb hard drive (ephemeral), 2000 gb transfer, persistent 50gb hard drive: worst case $479.50/month, but for one day: ~$16.
In my opinion, this is the key con of AWS right now, at least for full fledged applications. It’s simply not cost competitive with some of the hosting you can find out there.
And with regular hosts, you don’t have to deal with as much infrastructure overhead. Tools like ElasticFox and S3Fox can help. I’ve used S3Fox and love it.
The development model is suprisingly similar (Tom mentioned building his demo on his home machine and using some of the more exotic services, like SQS; then, when he was ready for the full cloud deployment, he just moved his war file to the appropriate image after some setup).
Then Tom demoed an app built by composing a number of Amazon web services. Starting an an ec2 machine image (AMI) takes a long time (but still less than building a machine from scratch 
. During entire presentation and demo (1 hour, 3 instances, some messaging, he was only charged 50 cents.
Other interesting uses: The NY Times used it to build a bunch of web friendly pngs from tiffs of papers past.
You can use a regular RDBMS, with Elastic Block Storage.
Someone asked: where does AWS fit in larger organizations? Tom thought it was a good fit for small organizations… But he was not really sure about large organizations.
In my opinion, many of the technical decision makers I know are willing to use S3 as a storage mechanism, but they still want a backup solution, in case Amazon is unavailable (as it sometimes is). This unavailability would be even more damning if you had an entire webapp running off ec2 and the other services.
Buying your own dedicated server has its own risks, but many people are still used to that paradigm. But, for quickly scaling, or for a special one time project that needs a lot of firepower (like the NYTimes project above), it makes sense.
Stepping back from AWS, the idea of cloud computing seems to be continuing to make progress and attack the issues of network connectivity, security and cost that make it a hard sell at the present. I love the delineation of the variations (infrastructure as a service, etc), and not all cloud computing will look like AWS.
Overall, a great presentation. If you have the time (I stayed for some of the Q&A, and left at the 90 minute mark), it’s worth a listen. Go ahead, check it out.
[tags]cloud computing,cjug[/tags]
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Sun, 01 Jun 08
Posted in Conferences, Presentations at 9:49 pm by moore
I just got back from Google I/O. This two day conference was the successor to Google Developer Day. There were a wide variety of topics covered. I hope to get my notes written up, but for now, I just wanted to capture some advice on conference-going, mostly for my future reference.
- Go to more conferences, at least one a year. Sure, they take time and money away from real work, but they refresh you, expose you to new technologies and people, and recharge your batteries in a different manner than a typical vacation. If you are not excited by the end of a technology conference, maybe you shouldn’t be in technology.
- Realize that you probably won’t find a solution to a specific problem you have. Why? Because your problem is probably very specific to your current situation. Talks at conferences tend to focus either on general introductory material, or very specific, in depth explanations of other people’s solutions to problems. Chances are their problems weren’t yours.
- That said, come with specific questions/areas of interest. This lets you have focus when you are confronted with the vast feast of knowledge that most conferences display. Make sure you read the schedule and note interesting talks.
- Don’t eat all the snacks provided. There’s a temptation to take advantage of all the ‘free’ food, but gorging yourself will make you sleepy.
- Realize that you can’t see all the interesting sessions. See if the conference is posting video later. Google I/O is (supposedly by June 6).
- Talk to people. This is one of the hardest things for me to do–there are a ton of strangers at a conference, I’m not sure if they’ll have valuable information, and it’s so much easier to sit back and wait for someone else to talk to you. But everyone I talked to at I/O had an interesting story to tell, and most everyone was interested in what I had to say.
- Get people’s business cards. It’s flattering to be asked for a card, and you never know when you might run across an article or project that might be of interest to someone you’ve met.
- The informal meetings (Birds of a Feather, Fireside Chats) are worth far more than the organized talks. There is a fantastic amount of formal and informal articles, blogs and videos about technology that you can consume at your leisure, in your bathrobe at home. Far less common is interactive descriptions of problems and solutions, including face to face time. While mailing lists and newsgroups take care of some of these needs, social time at conferences is an even easier way to have these kind of thought provoking and wide ranging discussions. Also, it’s easier to talk to people when that is the purpose of the event.
- Sit at the back of the session, and on the sides of the row of chairs. This lets you exit easily if you need to. (Of course, not everyone can do this.)
- Verify how feedback will be given to the speakers before you spend any of your precious time filling out feedback forms. Conference organizers, this is a call for you to step up and tell attendees how their feedback will be delivered–I heard at least one speaker say that in ten years of attending conferences, he had never seen any feedback forms.
- Keynotes are interesting, high level, and great places to finish breakfast.
- Use a notepad, not a laptop. For I/O, I took a laptop one day and a notepad the next. I have a hard time taking notes on a laptop and not being distracted by email, searching for concepts/tools/projects that the speaker mentioned, and upcoming work. (I’m not sure I’m NADD compatible.) With a notepad, you can capture everything you feel is important, and if it is really important, you can revist it later.
- Review your notes. Perhaps for a blog post, but definitely review them and break out action items–projects to investigate, articles that you should read, information to pass on to colleagues. Act on those action items.
- Bring a water bottle.
[tags]io2008[/tags]
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