Tag: events

See me Pecha Kucha on mobile gaming

Mobile Vader

Next Wednes­day, see me do a pre­sen­ta­tion on mobile game design at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Off_Corso, Rot­ter­dam. Pecha Kucha are super short pre­sen­ta­tions con­sist­ing of 20 slides. Speak­ers have exact­ly 20 sec­onds per slide to do their thing. Quite a chal­lenge! I’ve fin­ished my slides and a first draft of the talk, now to prac­tice the hell out of my lines… Here’s an Upcoming.org entry I made for the event, here’s the Dutch and inter­na­tion­al site and final­ly, here’s some cool Pecha Kucha tips by Yongfook.

Euro IA Summit 2006 themes

Euro IA Summit 2006 mind-map

The sec­ond Euro­pean IA Sum­mit has come and gone. The promised live updates from Berlin weren’t deliv­ered due to the scarci­ty of pow­er sock­ets and flaky WiFi (a les­son for the orga­ni­za­tion of next year’s event, IMHO). I do have a few hun­dred pho­tos to go through, includ­ing the con­tents of my Mole­sk­ine (chaot­ic mind-maps of each talk, for the real connoisseur.)

All in all, the sum­mit was great. It was nice to meet old acquain­tances and make new ones. We had quite a few laughs because of lan­guage and cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences, which is what a Euro­pean event is all about I guess. 

It was encour­ag­ing to see that the num­ber of atten­dees was con­sid­er­ably larg­er than last year. The vari­ety of nation­al­i­ties had also increased I think, which is good of course.

The con­tents of talks were of a pret­ty high stan­dard, while pre­sen­ta­tion skills of the speak­ers var­ied wide­ly, as could be expect­ed. It’s a shame when high qual­i­ty con­tent becomes hard to grasp due to bad pre­sen­ta­tion, and we had a few of those, but I still respect any­one who had the courage to step up and express their views.

On the way back I cre­at­ed a mind-map of all the big themes I picked up on dur­ing the week­end and intend to delve into the main ones over the course of this week in a series of mini-posts. The first one will be on strat­e­gy; the fol­low-ups will cov­er social search, process & deliv­er­ables, involv­ing the client and acces­si­bil­i­ty.

I’m a European IA

Tomor­row I’m off to the 2nd Euro­pean IA Sum­mit. This year’s con­fer­ence will be held in Berlin. That’s great because I’ve nev­er been there until now. I’m plan­ning on doing some mind map­ping of talks (inspired by Lars Ploug­mann) so keep an eye on the Flickr pho­to­stream dur­ing the week­end. Of course, I hope the orga­ni­za­tion has man­aged to get some open WiFi going (last year that was a bit of a prob­lem). Con­ve­nient pow­er sock­ets would come in handy too… See you there, or see you later!

eDay preview (open.info.nl)

“Ned­er­landse online mar­ket­ing lijkt steeds meer open source mar­ket­ing te wor­den. Lezend online en werk­end in meat­space kom ik steeds meer mar­ke­teers tegen die de ide­alen van de open source beweg­ing (al dan niet bewust) omar­men. Dat maakt deze open stan­daar­den aan­hang­er blij natuurlijk.

Info.nl staat vol­gende week met een stand en een work­shop op eDay. Hoe zit het met dit mar­ketingeven­e­ment? In hoev­erre onder­schri­jft het de ontwik­kel­ing naar open source mar­ket­ing? eDay werpt een blik op de trends “voor de komende twee jaar” en belicht het the­ma ‘cre­ativiteit’ als “strate­gisch bedri­jf­sin­stru­ment” en “con­sumer trend”.”

Lees verder op open.info.nl »

Reboot 8.0 photos are up

I spend the morn­ing going through my pho­tos of Reboot 8.0. I had near 800 of them, so that was quite the exer­cise. Now there’s 147 in a set over at my Flickr account. It was nice to relive the whole expe­ri­ence while going through the shots, made me real­ize I saw and did a hell of a lot in two days. No won­der I was so tired when I got home.

Here’s my favorite shot of the set, apt­ly sum­ma­riz­ing the theme of this year’s event, “renais­sance?” with Ben Ham­mer­s­ley danc­ing around the stage flanked by Mona Lisa and a bat­tered PowerBook.

Ben Hammersley dancing around the stage flanked by Mona Lisa and a battered PowerBook

Reboot 8.0 post mortem

I’m back in Utrecht after a few great days in Copen­hagen. Reboot 8.0 was sur­pris­ing­ly good this year. I was afraid it would­n’t mea­sure up to the awe­some qual­i­ty of last year, but I was wrong. Per­haps this year was even bet­ter. I’ll have to digest every­thing a lit­tle more before I can say for sure.

I’ll get back lat­er with some thoughts on impor­tant issues that were brought up dur­ing the event. But first I’m off to Italy for two weeks of vaca­tion and some much need­ed rest. 

So pho­tos and in depth analy­sis will have to wait a lit­tle longer. Back in a few weeks!

Rough notes from Euan Semple — There’s something going on here that is bigger than any of us

What does it all mean?

Print­ing press anal­o­gy. Press changed the way we saw the world. We’ll have sim­i­lar shift in the future (long term). But: they used to burn heretics as well. Not every­one will want to adopt this.

7 years since Clue­train: lots of stuff is still the same

Change will not hap­pen thanks to tech. 

Three myths

  1. Hier­ar­chy is the only way to orga­nize stuff, from church through mil­i­tary, etc. but: hyper­links sub­vert hier­ar­chy. Once peo­ple start employ­ing them it has a dis­rup­tive effect, break­ing though hierarchies.
  2. If we take cer­tain steps we’ll be suc­cess­ful. But suc­cess got scrambled.
  3. Carte­sian anx­i­ety: stress due to sep­a­ra­tion of indi­vid­ual and rest of the world (per­spec­tive). Mis­un­der­stand­ing of evo­lu­tion, it should be about pass­ing around what works (faster), not killing off the weak.

“It’s eas­i­er to do good than to do bad” — Jim­my Wales

LOVE: that’s what makes the inter­net hang togeth­er (and it’s not about the huge amounts of porn). Tol­er­ance, the need to con­nect. Reboot is very much about this. 

Inter­net cre­ates oppor­tu­ni­ties for bet­ter under­stand­ing of shared meaning.

Every­thing is moti­vat­ed by love or fear and fear is just absence of love.

He did­n’t get where he was today… by using fear.

Col­lu­sion: peo­ple don’t want to admit to what they’re doing is wrong.

Anar­chy actu­al­ly means the ulti­mate in democ­ra­cy. Is it so bad to frag­ment huge institutions. 

Every soci­ety has peo­ple that see them­selves as main­tain­ers of order (although they don’t know what that order is). 

The web cuts out the mid­dle men (main­tain­ers of order).

The idea that the online world is imma­ture and dan­ger­ous is wrong. Google nev­er for­gets. Think about the stuff you say.

Don’t com­plain, don’t say no.

Do the right thing.

Stat­ing the obvi­ous, say the way you think the world should be and it’ll turn out that way.

See­ing some­thing inter­est­ing, then judg­ing your­self if it’s valu­able enough and pub­lish­ing it. Oth­er peo­ple doing the same as an effect and on and on.

It’s not about tech. but it isn’t utopia either. You should take respon­si­bil­i­ty for what you do.

Dalai Lama quote: it’s about rela­tion­ships and being social.

http://reboot.dk/wiki/There%27ssome­thinggoingonherethatisbig­gerthananyof_us

Rough notes for Chris Heathcote — A mobile Internet manifesto

It isn’t Nokia pol­i­cy, he’s try­ing to be provocative.

1b inter­net 2b mobile user 5b unconnected

many net­works, you’ll be con­nect­ed to the internet

100% voice, 50% java, 10% native apps

these are not barriers:

dis­play device speed text entry net­work speed

1000 bln. text mes­sages in 2005

we might be the last gen. that uses querty

fixed 1000M wire­less 100M fixed inter­net 10M wire­less inter­net 1M

peo­ple want ter­abyte speed, we need to think what’s good enough now

we’re there already

bar­ri­ers: data cost, bat­tery life, 2 hour prob­lem, smart networks

a pic­ture used to cost 15 euros to upload

fixed price is real­ly impor­tant in data

bat­tery has­n’t seen inno­va­tion like the rest of mobile tech.

in the west we’re always less than 2 hours away from a “real” computer

David S. Isen­berg: fat pipe, always on, get out of the way

assump­tion is that mobile phones can’t work in a dumb net­work, rich client sutuation

they are

mobile inter­net does not exist!

good mobile browsers, they’re here

oth­er impor­tant stuff: smart clients — easy to devel­op: Flash Lite, Python

brows­er is like swiss army knife

E.g.: Back­pack. Nice web app. He’s been try­ing to make a mobile ver­sion of Backpack. 

Why is that different?

He can’t release it pub­licly yet, but he will soon.

PC + mobile: home + away

They’re far more use­ful togeth­er than seperate

What’s use­ful? 10 x eas­i­er 10 x cheap­er 10 x a day

Mind like water (GTD) mobile is excel­lent for this, you can action them

Mobile is social

Timekilling? Com­pe­ti­tion: books, iPods, etc.

Social is more inter­est­ing, you want to take those ele­ments from web apps to mobile

Inter­net is push + pull

Demo time!

Mobile web brows­er: access to all kinds of phone stuff. 

He loves it, he wants to see peo­ple build stuff with it.

Out of sight mes­sage: because he want­ed a domain he’s going through a proxy.

Not being online all the time is inter­est­ing from a pres­ence point of view.

no need for sep­a­rate mobile sites

basic acces­si­bil­i­ty and web stan­dards still rule

lots of web­sites are assum­ing users have lots of band­width — that’s bad on both the web and mobile

data is very impor­tant (use­ful data)

APIs are great, XML is great, as long as they work

we’re not spe­cial: Google tries to be help­ful by forc­ing you into the mobile version

Don’t repur­pose con­tent for mobile. 

Peo­ple are peo­ple… they’re the same. They have the same needs. Make sure they have access.

Cre­ate mobile sites. Aim at the 2b, not the 1b. 

Mobile is going to be the main way to access the inter­net in the future.

Voice is inter­est­ing as well. 

Q One thing you men­tioned is flat rates. We can’t solve it as devs. Any ideas to force car­ri­ers to do it? A Car­ri­ers aren’t as uncan­ny as you think. They real­ize that mon­ey can be made from flat rate. 

Sites can be built for mobile using web stan­dards eas­i­ly. That’s key.

Q What do you need for the mobile Back­pack? A The series 60 phones run­ning Python. We want to open source it so peo­ple can port it.

http://reboot.dk/wiki/AmobileInternet_manifesto

Rough notes from Robert Willim — I’m taking a ride — curve surfing and speed mania

Hard to start after Doc’s talk.

Ph.D. on Fram­fab. And on new econ­o­my and dot com boom and bust.

What hap­pened back then? To see if there are any similarities…

Open ques­tion

How do we pre­dict twists of history?

How do we make sense in heat­ed times?

Fram­fab:

Start­ed 5, at top it was 2000.

He made a ethno­graph­ic study of their office and looked at the soft­ware called Bricks.

Envi­sion­ing / claim­ing / cre­at­ing the future — the future factory

CEO is good visionary

Com­mu­ni­cate vision through spa­tial metaphors

Ex. vir­tu­al land grab, idea of pio­neers and movers

Oth­er: curve surf­ing — s‑curve often used to graph innovation.

Web 2.0: how can you tell where you are on the curve? Men­tal­ly you can surf the curve.

It’s like trav­el­ing on a train track. Tech­no­log­i­cal deter­min­ism. It’s not that easy, soci­ety is much more com­plex, tech isn’t the only dri­ving force. It has to do with what we use it for.

What are visions? 

Con­jur­ing, mak­ing a future tangible. 

One way is to extrap­o­late trends through curve surf­ing. This is quite simplistic. 

E.g. think­ing about bridge between Den­mark and Swe­den in 1930ies.

Oth­er ex.: think­ing on com­put­ers in 1980ies — peo­ple will become robots.

Vapor­ware: lock­ing a con­sumer’s mind. E.g. Mac­Book vs. PowerBook.

Speed mania, when speed is seen as inher­ent­ly positive

First mover advan­tage, escape velocity

The suprema­cy of speed was idea behind Framfab

…con­cep­tu­al congruity?

Flow / reflexivity

Go with the flow… but where are we going? (Good one!)

Peo­ple dur­ing dot­com boom were reflex­ive, but still they did­n’t see it coming?

Back to the two questions…

How to find twists of history?

Book on 404 — lack of mem­o­ry on inter­net. SS19 mis­siles in USSR: after cold war they’re still made but now to launch satel­lites. Nice exam­ple of reap­pro­pri­a­tion of exist­ing tech.

Mak­ing sense in heat­ed times?

When do col­lec­tives become intel­li­gent and when do they go stupid? 

Rec­om­men­da­tions: keep ties loose, have a diverse collective

End­ing…

Q Do you see a bub­ble 2.0? How does it com­pare to the first one? A It’s much hard­er to get that amount of mon­ey. Finan­cial mar­ket is dif­fer­ent now. Focus is on prod­uct itself. Old­er com­pa­nies aren’t eas­i­ly cheat­ed by web people. 

Q Does he see any rhetoric trends? A Idea of tech deter­min­ism is still there. In a way tech is the start, but it does­n’t hap­pen automatically. 

Q It seems that bub­bles are nec­es­sary for evo­lu­tion. Rev­o­lu­tion has already hap­pened. We’re at the fore­front. Which is nice. A Back then the rhetoric had bad timing.

http://reboot.dk/wiki/I%27mtak­ingaride-curvesurf­ingandspeed_maniaThe

Rough notes for Doc Searls — Keynote

He’s in busi­ness drag (kin­da like Ben). Dropped it into puddle.

Mar­kets 2.0

Beyond a whole bunch of isms.

Mar­kets are con­ver­sa­tions: they’re not just (a whole bunch of things). Stuff that reduces is to transactions.

Want­ed change it.

Mar­kets used to be real places, where cul­ture was produced.

Feed­back on Clue­train from the real marketplace:

Mar­kets are also relationships.

Also trans­ac­tions, and conversations. 

Killer app is rela­tion­ships. We’re just begin­ning to see it.

Search for Reboot 8 on Google. Rel­a­tive­ly sta­t­ic stuff, not live. 

Yahoo! and Google actu­al­ly do search the live web. 

They make a dis­tinc­tion between blogs and the web.

Shows Google Blog search results, pret­ty live.

Tech­no­rati — pret­ty live. (I’m there too!)

Why is Tech­no­rati inno­vat­ing where Google is just performing?

It depends on where we come from.

Google comes from the sta­t­ic web.

Why make a dis­tinc­tion between blogs and the web?

They could mix them in…

There’s branch­ing off going on.

Branch­ing between time and space.

Sta­t­ic: looks for bil­lions Live: lis­ten­ing to millions

time-to-index of under one minute

Respond only to signs of life.

Live web is time and peo­ple, those that have relationships…

Sta­t­ic web is a haystack, here’s one vir­tu­al straw… [url]

Every­thing after domain name is chaos, that’s why we need search.

Live web is orga­nized chrono­log­i­cal­ly. Isn’t a haystack, it has struc­ture. It has a history.

“we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp, deal with it”

live web, demand sup­plies itself

on sta­t­ic web too but slower

Live web is a lot more than blogging

Best blog­ging is pro­vi­sion­al not fin­ished or final

indus­tri­al pub­lish­ers cre­ate fin­ished products

best of blog­ging is about rolling snow­balls, not push­ing rocks up the hill

you roll out an idea, if it grows and gets some­where it’s not yours

pod­cast­ing as exam­ple of snowballing

The great unbundling: e.g. YouTube, Tivo (video)…

More con­tent: hor­ri­ble world, sounds like pack­ag­ing, you can’t snow­ball it, it’s fixed.

It’s about con­sumers becom­ing producers. 

Val­ue chain is replaced with val­ue constellation. 

Live web will help dri­ve the inten­tion econ­o­my. ETech: atten­tion econ­o­my, eye­balls — crap. Move to intention.

atten­tion > deci­sion > intention

This is vir­gin the­o­ry, most­ly because we’ve been focussed on marketing.

Why are sales & mar­ket­ing VPs from sales and not marketing?

Sales is real, mar­ket­ing is strate­gic… Mar­ket­ing is bullshit.

Searls law #14: it does­n’t mat­ter what car you want to rent you’ll get a Chevy Cavalier.

His car sucks… so he rents cars.

Car rental is good study for inde­pen­dent iden­ti­ty. They’re all bad.

On the web they’re all mar­ket­ing silos. 

Rent­ing from Bud­get: he might get a Ford Focus. Good han­dling, MP3’s. But he gets a Chevy Cavalier.

Less focus on cap­tur­ing cos­tumers and try­ing to meet demand and improve ser­vice and enlarge marketplace.

Users have lots of rela­tion­ships that are use­ful, they have needs that aren’t in CRM.

Inten­tion econ­o­my has inad­e­quate infra­struc­ture. Free mar­ket is still choice of silos.

We need to know how civ­i­liza­tion grows, pace lay­er­ing, Long Now, Stu­art Brand.

Mar­kets rely on infra­struc­ture. Grow a mar­ket? Cre­ate infrastructure.

Com­merce con­tributes infra­struc­ture, infra­struc­ture sup­ports commerce.

Earth to com­put­er indus­try: com­modi­ties are good!

Hol­ly­wood wants a silo.

Com­merce gov­erns infra­struc­ture and the natives can go to hell.

Will the net route around Hol­ly­wood and the carriers?

Enor­mous pow­er of because-effect.

Fight for new civ­i­liza­tion. Net wants to be as fast and open as your hard drive.

Car­ri­ers will fight that knowl­edge. Workarounds: enter­pris­ing customers.

Peo­ple are already fight­ing. Bet on the people.

E.g. Lafayette Pro Fibre, Munic­i­pal Wireless.

Let’s talk…