Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

I was trying Perfomancing extension for Firefox (I am still looking for a decent desktop based blog post writer) and after posting several posts, I realized that all the formatting is screwed up. I am not going to be able to fix that without spending too much time so I will just live with it (and unninstalling Performancing and continue looking for a good blogging tool).

Update: Performancing does actually have a simple way to update content of recent posts (and it does work not like Bloggar that does not work when I am trying to update and already posted entry) and when retrieving the post it shows the formatting mistakes (it did not when I created the post, possibly because I was cutting and pasting from Word to be able to use their spell checker). So I will stick to Performancing a bit longer but continue on the look for a better tool (why Apple does not make a Windows version of iWeb that works with any blogging service??? That will solve my problem. Or perhaps I should just get a Mac and a .Mac account….).

CD

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Monday tutorial by Marc Henlund, best described as “From geek to entrepreneur”. I do not think that I learn too many new things but Marc was an inspired speaker and I really like his talk. Best part, some of the advices to some of the geeks to be entrepreneur like keep things simple and do not over engineer your product. To illustrate his point, he told the following joke about the wife of a programmer that after several years of marriage is still a virgin and how her husband keeps telling her to wait because when it is done, “it will be really good”. Other important piece of advice, look for VC money since there more than 150 VCs in the US compared to 5 companies that might buy a Web 2.0 type company.

CD

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The multi-touch user interface keynote by Jeff Han at ETech was pretty impressive (and for a change it was not about Web 2.0), specially the light table demo and the GIS demo using NASA’s World Wind (referrer to it by Jeff as the “open source version of Google Earth”). I can
see how that will be very useful to a professional photographer or to the military (it remained me to the interface that Apple has for Aperture but much better and usable). Check out a transcript here but you will have to wait for the video to fully appreciate what this is. I wonder how far is from being a commercial product.

CD

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 Linda Stone on attention: “We are overwhelmed, over stimulated and unfulfilled”. She was the only speaker that did not use any slides, very academic.

CD

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The AppExchange presentation at ETech by salesforce.com was very interesting and these guys might be into something since they have the potential of finally popularizing ASP business software by lettting people develop on their ASP platform and reducing the barriers of entry (it is not trivial how to take software even if it has a Web interface and make it available as an ASP where many users migth be running multiple instances of the software in the same hardware). Their model is somehow limited since it only is accessible to salesforce.com users (the “somehow” in the sentence comes from the fact that they have 400,000 users which is pretty large). On the other hand, it is very favorable for third party software vendors since it is basically completely free and they do not ask for a revenue share model or anything). I will definitely keep an eye.

The speaker had a funny remark when demoing an app using Google Maps that he referred as the “canonical mash-up” (another speaker today actually made a point of showing a mash-up with Yahoo! Maps “since everyone else is showing mash-ups with Google Maps”).

He also referrer to Web 2.0 companies as the Triple AAAs: Ajax, Arrogance and Absence (of a business model).

CD

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Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability talk at ETech got better as the talk progressed. Since I had already read the book some of his examples and theories were known to me (but I always like to see the author). My favorite sentence from his talk: “A wealth of information creates a poorness of attention”. I also like his point about how librarians are important again (”the revenge of the librarians”) and how metadata has become sexy again. Very relevant to what we do at my company was his point about how the new tagging and collectively defined clusterings of information (like Flickr is doing with images recently) is not necessarily the best way for corporations where the amount of users is not large enough and therefore the classical approach of building taxonomies and using metadata with a control vocabulary is better suited.

CD

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Clay Shirky’s did a very interesting talk on how architecture of social software drives user behavior. He showed a graph that has “freedom” in one axis meaning the freedom of a person to create group communications vs.. “Annoyingness” of some of those group communication in the other axis. The graph had a steep knee in the curve where the annoyingness level skyrockets when there is too much freedom. He went on describing how slashdots cops with that. I see this in my company where we want to give freedom to employees by not restricting who can email to the all employees mailing list but that drives certain level of annoyingness in some instances when a company wide email is replied (to all the company) by several other employees with the quality of the comments and the relation to the original topic degrading
exponentially as more people reply to it. I still do not want to restrict freedom so perhaps I should make employees aware of Clay’s theory…

CD

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Really like this slide from this morning keynote by Yahoo! at ETech. I see this every day with software products where the ones that really succeed long time are the love ones and not the ones with just a large Wow factor. You have to keep in mind the Wow factor as well since this drives initial adoption but make sure users are move to Delight and later to Love stage to build a long term sustainable business.

CD

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DSC01229
Originally uploaded by carlosd - unpokodtodo.

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Only on day one but having a lot of fun, keep posted and check my pictures here http://www.flickr.com/photos/unpocodetodo/sets/72057594077555449/

CD

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