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  • Simple Bridge Building – Ray Ozzie

    Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks and creator of Lotus Notes, now one of Microsoft’s many CTOs demonstrated LiveClipboard.

    Coincidentally, Ian and I were just last night speculating on a network enabled clipboard that would allow users to copy and paste from other screens to their own. It seems Ozzie’s work on Windows Live has yielded a similar, yet more sophisticated application.

    The clipboard is the original mashup mechanism, enabling data from one application to be re-used in an another – Ozzie began his talk with the premise ‘Where is the clipboard of the web’ and ‘Why isn’t this just the regular clipboard users are already familiar with?’. Ozzie speculates that such a mechanism would become a lightweight mechanism for connecting the data silos of the web.

    LiveClipboard uses the native CF_Text format (the original microformat!) of the Windows clipboard and simply inserts a piece of structured XML data, rather than plain text. This isn’t disimilar to the way content can be copied from an IE web page and pasted into Microsoft Office applications, preserving the original pages’ formatting. In this case the content of the CF_Text construct is HTML.

    Ozzie’s examples of LiveClipboard included:

    • Copying event information from and Eventful.com web page and pasting into an Outlook Calendar.
    • Copying RSS feed data from a web page and pasting into an aggregator – simplifying an otherwise onerous process for new users.
    • Copying a live location feed from a Windows Mobile / MSN Spaces field to a Facebook.com profile.
    • Copying a Flickr image from a web page and pasting into a desktop folder.
    • Copying and pasting a Flickr photostream feed into a folder populates the folder with live Flickr content. Is this a pre-cursor to WinFS functionality?

    Ozzie closed out his session with an invitation to help proliferate LiveClipboard support by helping to shape a common set of microformats, conceding that the success of LiveClipboard depended on collaboration between Microsoft and the wider web.

  • The Internet of Things

    Introduced of Cory Doctorow, science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, spoke on the themes of ubiquitous computation. Now based in Belgrade, Sterling continues to blog and write fiction as he observes the rehabilitation of a failed state. The Internet of Things, predicts Sterling, will take around thirty years (as did barcodes) to emerge fully…also predicting that at age eighty-six, he’ll be needing an Internet of Things…

    Currently, the field is still defining its vocabulary and terminology as experimenters begin to tinker with the technology. By ‘freezing’ the terminology of artificial intelligence and thinking machines, Sterling contends that AI’s potential was funneled into narrow directions. Google appears to be intelligent, but is not presented as a thinking machine like Microsoft Bob and Ask Jeeves…a linking, ranking and sorting machine, not a classical ‘AI’ – Turing vs Google! Artificial Turings and Feynmans may not be able to efficiently compute the cheapest local plumber…perhaps talking about sorting machines rather than AI would have produced a Google in the 1980s…

    The socially generated knowledge of the Internet is not about intelligance, but changing our relationship with the physical world through laptops, phones, PDAs and cameras. Objects can be labelled with electronic tags that can be sorted, ranked, located and connected…objects that are auto-Googled?

    Sterling goes on to describe spimes, fabjects and blogjects as the artefacts of an Internet of Things – our posessions are no longer inventoried in our heads, but by machines around us. Google my shoes! Trackbacks to my car! Interestingly, at ETel, Peter Cochrane spoke ot logistics and things as a large global economic growth area; Sterling seems to underline the potential here and reflect the timescales noted by Cochrane.

    After introducing ThingLink as a generic term to encompass identifiers for objects, Sterling contrasts spimes with Blogjects, with the latter providing a near-term realisation of the potential of Things. Evocative Knowledge Objects, Ubiquitous Findable Objects,

    BTW, I wrote about Sterling’s fabjects a couple years ago as part of a rif on fabbing and P2P….the napsterisation of things? Things 2.0…pick your meme 🙂

  • From Coder to Co-Founder: How to Move from Engineering to Entrepreneuring

    O’Reilly’s Marc Hedlund has run a number of how-to sessions on startups and entrepreneurial skills at ETech and ETel. Today’s tutorial, Entrepreneuring for Geeks, covers the technologist who wishes to build a business from an idea.

    Hedlund began with twenty amusing and useful proverbs for seeking VCs and investors:

    • it’s good to be king – entrepreneuring is fun, lets you explore all aspects of work and yourself.
    • losing sucks – the risks of personal finance, health and relationships can suffer from unsuccessful ventures and are heightened.
    • building to flip is building to flop
    • prudence becomes procrastination – by thinking & talking to too many people can lead you to be discouraged from taking a risk and ignoring confidence in your ideas.
    • momentum builds on itself
    • jump when you are more excited than afraid – just make sure you’re more excited than afraid.
    • the idea – pay attention to the idea that won’t leave you alone…if you have to convince yourself to work on it, then it’s the wrong idea.
    • whom should i tell my idea to – potential customers YES, other entrepreneurs NO…don’t keep your secrets from the market or the market will keeps its secrets from you.
    • immediate yes is immediate no – run away from the ideas that have instant support, if you read about it in the NYT ideas section in December, it’s time has passed!
    • build what you know – easy to focus on things for people who live in front of computers, but also build from your own experiences in life.
    • give people what they need, not what they say they need – think about the answers your getting and ensure you have confidence in the providers of answering.
    • your ideas will get better the more you know about business – a hard pill to swallow for technologists, but like anything, you’ll perform better the more you know about anything.
    • people…three is fine, two divine – two people leads to a good dynamic, one requires strong motivation, three+ can lead to crippled decision-making.
    • work only with people you like and believe in – advice from Eric Schmidt…if they’re good at their work and you like them, hire them. Equally, work with people who like and believe in you, just naturally.
    • great things are made by people who share a passion, not by those who have been talked into one
    • cool ideas are useless without great needs – SETI@home proved there were few customers for grid installations and hence no enterprise idea. Is there a great need that people would pay for … even people who don’t like me or know me! del.icio.us – selling companies limits your customers (maybe five big acquirers), selling services can yield millions of customers.
    • build the simplest thing possible – don’t build for perfection…race to a working product and make the simplest thing that addresses the need.
    • solve problems, not potential problems – you only have to solve a scale problem when you have scale!
    • test everything with real people – grab Starbucks customers! Customers make the obvious mistakes and help you to correct.
    • start with nothing and have nothing for as long as possible – idea>got VC>started company, this is unusual as VCs usually only come to a running company. Use your salary to fund your startup – you can then ask yourself after days and weeknights ‘should I quit my day job’.
    • the best pitches are plainspoken and entertaining (not in that order) – businesses that can be explained simply are usually the most powerful.
    • never let on that you’re keeping a secret – your secrets will be shared, so better to be open and honest but direct unwanted questions to questions you really want to answer.
    • no means maybe, yes means maybe – keep giving VCs an investors updates regardless of outcome…they may eventually come around.
    • for investors, the product is nothing – market size, team, competitors are more interesting. Don’t do twelve slides on the product and one on the team…say more about the team.

    When questioned on best practices for ‘entrepreneuring from within’, Hedlund found it difficult to generalise but suggested that it’s down to convincing company leadership to exchange part-ownership for the freedom to spin-up a new company.

    Moving onto fundraising, Hedlund covered a lot of the same ground from ETech 2005 in outlining the behaviour of VCs and the patterns to look for when seeking investment.

    • VCs don’t start new companies – for initial funding go to customers, consultancy, angels, loans, grants and yourself (you can invest some of your money at a trusted online trading platform).
    • focus on the business first – if VC funding is available, you can go faster, but you must be prepared to fund a business.
      • Build the product
      • Get users
      • Make money
      • Don’t spend it
      • Get to break-even
    • VC provides money, credibility, guidance & review, some introductions and advocates for the company.
    • The best way to get VC is not to need it (!)
    • Think of investors as a continuum, not a YES/NO boolean…try and understand their level of enthusiasm plus what worked for them and what didn’t.
    • Funding is more than a full-time job – someone needs to be present consistently at all investor pitches in order to see the patterns and act consistently.

    Hedlund sought to conclude his advice with a series of questions that the entrepreneur must consider when seeking to startup or indeed seeking investment:

    • Will customers care about this product?
    • Are they high-margin customers?
    • What has changed to allow a startup to grow?
    • Are there enough customers willing to pay?
    • Is there a sales channel that will be profitable?
    • Do want to work with these people for five years?
    • Are the numbers believable?
    • How much to get to profitability?
    • Do they know the competition, how well are they positioned?
    • Do I believe these people can win?

    Hedlund went on to comment on the idiosyncracies of recent startup flips, including Bloglines, del.cio.us, FeedBurner, Flickr & Odeo, before leading into a case study of a startup proposed by Hedlund himself. GripeJuice was collective bargaining site for consumers hit with bad customer service.

    GripeJuice did fulfil a need, for people stuck in call-centre interactions, addressing poor user experiences. Users that shared a bad experience with others could collectively leverage the service provider. However, the service required some significant effort from the user, also the correlation between service frustration and the desire to pay for that resolution was disconnected in that payment didn’t solve the customer’s original problem immediately. Also, ironically, the best customers will be those that complain the most and are likely to be most critical of GripeJuice!

    In the closing Q&A Hedlund took questions on internal entrepreneurship in large organisations – I spoke briefly with him about potentially bringing some of this expertise in France Telecom, perhaps through our upcoming User 2.0 conference.

  • A (Re-)Introduction to JavaScript

    Simon Willison‘s tutorial on Javascript is very timely – a number of other Web 2.0 services have brought JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest and the DOM once more to the fore of web development. AJAX-based rich internet applications, such as Gmail, Google Maps and Flickr, have come to characterise current web development paradigms, with JavaScript overtaking Flash as the RIA toolkit of choice.

    After a brief history of JavaScript and it current renaissance at the core of AJAX development, Willison proceeded to review the core features of the the language – types, data structures, object design, functions, exceptions sequencing & control – describing best practices learned from over a decade of real-world usage.

    The session is a good review of a powerful language and reminds me how simple JavaScript development can be, However, some hands-on examples, case studies, how-tos and deconstructions of contemporary RIAs would be very welcome…I want to Flickr my work!

    Willison did name check a few interesting resources and frameworks for Javascript development – MochiKit, Prototype, Yahoo UI Library, script.aculo.us and DojoToolkit. One of the more interesting tools was a JavaScript shell which allows live scripts to be run within the context of the currently loaded browser page.

    Finally…

    • Phil Windley has a very comprehensive set of notes from this session.
    • One of the books recommended by Willison is available in an abridged edition (four chapters as a PDF) from SitePoint.
    • In the course of this tutorial, I came across inetWord, an AJAX-based word processor.

  • Google 2.0

    Googleredux "What Google does not do well is apply design appropriately to its search engine interface. Other online application interfaces from Google are often done rather well, or at least not too badly. The search engine page, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Mind you, we’re talking about the most successful search tool on the Web. But it is no stretch to observe that the design of this page is pretty bad." – Google Redux by Andy Rutledge

    Nice, but I disagree. Google may lack the aesthetic polish of other web designs, but if design is about solving a user’s problems, then Google is the epitome of great design, simply giving the user what’s neccessary to get them to where they’re going, no more and no less and getting out of the way…it’s practically invisible.

    [ Thanks Samira 🙂 ]

  • The Urban Long Tail

    An interesting idea: the urban long tail. Steven Johnson suggests that "the long tail premise has a tacit anti-urban bias to it, since it used to require big city scale to find obscure long tail books or albums that are now readily available to anyone with an Internet connection." But he goes on to argue that "some long tail services can’t be Fedexed or downloaded — people, for instance", and describes how you’d have more luck meeting other fans of Scandinavian doo-wap if you’re in Manhattan rather than the middle of nowhere. Elsewhere, he goes on to describe how Dodgeball addresses this urban longtail of people.
    I would also suggest that urban environments supply experiential longtail services. Cities can provide direct access to a plethora of niche experiences, buildings, places, views, things – as well as people. I look forward to the day when locative services are capable of mining the richness and diversity embedded within cities, according to the specific needs of the user.

  • ABCs Of Design

    From Frog Design’s column at Gizmodo:

    A. Hire a competent designer at the C-Level in your company, and trust her/him to help integrate design into your infrastructure. Apple follows this model, as Jobs serves as the CDO (Chief Design Officer). He has a great aesthetic and works closely with his design team to build superior products.

    B. Take a user-centered approach to product design. Seek out real people and engage them in the design of your products by asking them what they need, prototyping the possibilities and getting feedback from them on the result. I’m not talking about focus groups, either. Groups end up being ruled by one or two strong-willed people, and the rest of the group will defer to their opinions. Do one-on-one interviews in people’s homes to get their personal opinion, and observe their surroundings. What they say and how they live will tell you more than the lemmings that comprise most focus groups.

    C. Craft a distinct look and feel for your entire product line, thereby setting your products apart. NAD has such a distinct look, and one could easily pick them out in of a line-up of components. The design isn’t award-winning, but at least it’s recognizable.

  • A Grand Piano

    PegasusThis month’s Wired profiles Schimmel’s Pegasus Grand and Pegasus Upright – bold and astonishing remixes of time-honoured piano form factors. Where the Grand dreamily levitates several feet above the ground, the Upright is reminiscent of late 90’s era Apple…the iTinkle?

    Schimmel is a very traditional instrument maker, so it is gratifying to see such a company extending their heritage into the future with daring industrial design.

    If your PCs, Liveboxes and signature phones can’t be similarly evocative and delightful…then why should anyone buy them 😉

  • Virgin Territory

    Virgingalactic Philippe Starck has been commissioned to design Virgin Galactic’s first spaceport in New Mexico as well as rebranding the company as it prepares for the world’s first commercial spaceflights.

    Find out more here and here.

  • ‘Pardon Our Dust’

    Spike Jonze does The GAP…