Archive for the ‘reboot’ Category

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Small teams on big things (Jason Fried)

Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

Jason is the head of 37 signals (which I’m sure will tell you has no head guy but he’s the one getting all the public exposure), this american web agency behind some super-hyped products like basecamp and backpack. These guys make ok applications but manage to create a totally insane buzz around their work. The presentation was called “Making great things with small teams” as 37 signals consists of 4 guys (2 in chicago, one in Utah and one in Denmark) serving more than 200’000 users (“People that have used our service”, so it seems we’re not talking active users…). Summary: these guys make some ordinary things using ordinary methods in a very smart, elegant and optimized way. A very common approach very well applied.

The presentation started with some unusually empty advices (at least for the averagely educated person):

  • hire the right people, you’ll do well (did I just NOT learn something here?)
  • hire happy people, they are better than unhappy people
  • hire people that you can trust, it’s better than to try to work with crooks
  • with the internet, the customer is closer. Hum, really?
  • you don’t have a problem until you have a problem. …

    Then we moved in semi-interesting territory:

  • act your size, “let the big guys be confusing”, be yourself. Eh why not
  • cut features, not release dates or budget. Not really client/contract friendly but I’m sure more educated client could function this way in the future
  • do less software. I could have put this one above. Usually you don’t do software for fun, and it’s hard to start a task saying “this time we’ll try to do less software”. I get the idea, but it’s a weird way of saying it. “Choose your development platform wisely” is what he probably meant.
  • iterate, don’t create a 12 week project but 12 one week projects
  • start with the UI, listen to the user. Seems obvious to me but you guys should LISTEN (Steve I know you’re with me on this). Design and development should happen simultaneously because both are iterative processes

    Then the better part:

  • Feel the hurt of your clients, expose yourself to their critics so you’ll feel more pressure to react. Natural in a tiny structure by the way, but people in large organizations probably lost that as the tech support guy is a buffer for clients complaints.
  • You have 3 moving parts in a project: time, money, features. Usually clients will require that the three are freezed, but that’s an aberration. You can not effectively define features at the beginning of a project. So Jason suggest you fix Time + Money and make your adjustments on the features list.

    The the nirvana part: these guys are incredible at promoting their product, and here is how they do (here you should really learn some things)

  • Feature food
    They single out features that they promote in communities that will be reactive. Jason talked about how a tiny feature (ability to export to iCal from basecamp) won them communities of mac faithfuls. Identify what people will react to (in a positive way) then feed them with the news. The community will chew your news, then spill it further creating a free and effective buzz.

  • Promote through education
    Exactly what he was doing in front of us. Get recognition for your expertise, this will eventually draw people to your products. He gave the example of the “yellow fade technique” that they invented and that people refer to. This makes their brand stronger.

  • 30 days major upgrade
    After you launch a product, launch a major update quickly. Show people you are not done, make them feel like they get extended services for the same price.

  • Be transparent
    Be honest with people. Admit when you fuck up, when you’re down.

    • Posted in reboot | 6 Comments »

    Fight for your flag (Cory Doctorow)

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    Audio recording

    I almost insulted the guy thinking he was american (sorry again cory). No no no mister Doctorow (who’s going to save the world) is canadian and took us through an amazing presentation on digital rights management. Before his talk I was absolutely unaware that there is a huge fight going on between content producers (i.e. cinema studios and tvs) and the people on how the law will allow us to live with media in the future. There are huge things at stake and it was kind of a wake up call.

    Now on to cory’s talks:

  • Copyright seems to be a no brainer, protect what people produce. But when you reflect on history a bit it actually can undermine a business much more than it can help it develop. Cory compare the CD and the DVD. CDs are open, you simply need to read the freely available explanations from Philips to produce a CD reader. DVD are locked, you need to pay a fee to some hollywood studios to use the standard in a product. The consequence is that the use of DVD has not evolved over time where CDs has evolved to many different uses: CDs used to store mp3s, karaoke, video, ringtones, etc… A more obvious examples: databases that are closed in europe and open in the US (to some extent you can’t own a database in the US). The european market is moribond and taken over by american companies. Conclusion: copyright can be bad for business.

  • Cory talked about the history of the music industry. At first imagining a performer owning his work was as stupid as “a piano demanding money for his play”. Value were in composer who played pieces reproduced by “monkey” performers. I remember reading a story a long time ago about how the guy who did the first ever record had a hard way to make people understand why it would be useful to record music as it was an evolving construction: every time you played it you would change something, so why record?

  • Cory then illustrated with some quite bright examples how industries will spend more on restricting usage of a product rather than promoting the product. He also explained why, in pretending that it’s for the sake of tranquility that we’re beginning to have our phones seized at the cinema’s entrance it’s in fact under pressure from the studios looking to accustom us to not have our phone in cinemas. So we’re all “ready” when phones with videos recording capacity come to market.

  • so his presentation was mainly about the current talks (happening in geneva btw) about the broadcast flag, a technology that will make the TV market even less open and badly violate consumers rights. Studios and TVs want to close the possibility to record and redistribute certain things. In doing this they obviously violate our rights (I get a DVD recorder, the day I buy it I can record stuff then 6 months later a flag prevents me from copying certain programs) but these people are probably shooting themselves in the foot. Some entire industries starter on “view source” (I’m talking about the web, precision for the normal people out there).

  • Some closing comments, random quote: – hollywood is trying to take control of our media consumption. – hollywood is an insignificant industry, smaller than video games, phones, etc… – don’t go to bed with these guys, their business model is dead!

    • Posted in reboot | No Comments »

    Lifelogging (Christian Lindholm)

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    Audio recording

    Works at nokia, really strong presentation (apparently some people don’t share my opinion around here but I really thought the guy had room, managed to be interesting while it seemed he was telling us 5% of what he knows) in a nordic manner. Straight to the point, no bullshit, slow word debit.

    He started by defining a mobile device: something you have IN your pocket all the time. He asked how many people in attendance have an ipod: 90% of positive answers. “How many people can show me their ipod right now”. 3-4 people. The iPod is not a portable device. Not really overwhelmed by the demonstration but at least they have a clear definition at nokia.

  • on devices convergence: he does not necessarily see all devices merging into one. “Half the population of this planet is made of women, and women have no pockets. They consequently care less about carrying one or two devices”

  • using a 3G phone regularly, he says as a daily user he’s already pushing 3G bandwidth to its limits.

  • In the coming years, the following things will happen:
    1. mobile mass storage will change everything
    We’ll be able to put our entire personal data on our phone.
    2. wifi will change everything
    We’ll connect to the web anywhere from different devices.

  • The consequences of this is the apparition of the need/possibility to log your life. And here comes Nokia’s rightfully names service: lifelog – it’s an automatic multimedia diary built from the pictures, messages and videos that pass through your phone – it’s really neat and simple, just like you would expect. Nokia put special emphasis on the horizontal scroll-bar that sits in the top of the screen, huge, feel-good button that allows you to “travel” in time. We’re still talking about a scroll-bar but the guy was excited ;-) – the quality of the multimedia content is the same as the 2 mega pixels camera (personal opinion) – you can search your pictures from the meta data – they have put a strong emphasis on meta data entry interface. Obviously this is one of the key success factor, and users hate metadating (not sure this is a happy contraction of words but…). – country data is directly embedded in the pictures and videos, the information being retrieved from the network.

  • Christian’s visual summary of the mobile data situation:

    Nothing really new here except the notion of super data. Super data is for him meta data that may not be relevant as meta data. Example: I gave this picture to friend A. This information is meta data, but it’s not really relevant to another friend I would send the picture. Meet superdata. Later in the day David Weinberger was screaming on the same stage: “meta data is data, there is no difference”. Hum.

  • To finish, some appreciated (because quite unusual at reboot) bold predictions on the future: – we will access the Internet through many different screens (so forget that dream of one device to do everything). There will be, on the publishers side, tags to remove content depending on the device that is requesting it. – there will be a gigantic business around the communication of personal memories. An analysis I share: who will you trust to keep track of your life material. A commercial company that’s mining you like google, or your bank? I think I know the answer. – life recording will be mainstream. Nicole Simon will have to move beyond her wonderful recorder to continue achieving her amazing level of coolness ;-) (private joke sorry guys und hallo Nicole)

    • Posted in reboot | 6 Comments »

    Social objects (Jyri Engeström)

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    He was presenting on the following subjet: “Why Some Social Softwares Work and Others Fail: The Case for Object-Centered Sociality”.
    Personal note: Nico tu devrais checker ce guss il est vraiment bon.
    This guy (his blog is here) did some serious ass kicking in his presentation. That’s what I love in these scandinavian speakers (Christian is the other example): they make some really super charged presentations on a quiet, calm, and low profile tone. You get out of the room and you wonder: “is it really this young boys-band-leader faced guy dressed as a sk8er who just made the most disturbing points I have heard in a while?”. Weird, but I prefer that over the sometimes empty yet really energetically presented shows you get from north america (and it’s my time at Arthur Andersen speaking here, not impressions on anyone at reboot).

    Now on to the facts:

  • Jyri said that some early social softwares failed in the past. He gave two examples:

    • firefly -> bought by MS and apparently terminated
    • sixdegrees -> went out of business

    We now live in a world with 10-15 majors social software applications: friendster, flickR, Meetup, tribe, Plazes, Livejournal, Linked In, Meetro, etc…

  • A social network is a map of relationship between people. But people do not connect for the sake of connecting. They connect because they share some objects. Objects can be a date, a location, a job, an activity, a passion, etc… In fact, real world society centers around these objects. When objects disappear, the network usually follows. How many friends do you still know from your high-school days? Not too many probably because you lost your common ground (nights out, classes, sport, etc…)

  • Humans have of tendency to turn objects into games and challenges.

  • Social Software should not only offer the possibility to socialize, but also offer objects for people to work with. If there is no object people will at first have a tendency to turn networking into the object, then will get bored. He gave the example of linked in: first you get excited because you create this artificial goal of adding as many people as you can. Then you get sick of it because it’s basically useless, and you close your account.
    Conclusion: the sociality part of sociality does not interest people.

  • Good objects add value. They also allow:
    – tagging
    – crafting
    – tuning
    – hacking

  • Blog posts are a great example of social networking objects.

  • Finaly, Jyri gave a recap of the current objects used to create social networks:
    – Books (amazon)
    – discussions (blogs)
    – bookmarks (del.icio.us)
    – photos (flickr)
    – music (last.fm)
    – movies (netflix)
    – events (upcoming.org)

    We should see social networks develop in these domains: – places (plazes, dodgeball, meetro)
    – products

    Overall one of the best presentation of reboot. Really nice guy I chatted with a bit afterward. He appreciated the praises on his presenting style and acknowledge feeling sometimes a bit bad about being so low key. When he’s taking the stage after 3 american presenters he feels people can’t even hear him ;-)
    If you run a conference that is somehow related to the Internet it’s probably the guy you want to have on the speakers roster.

    • Posted in reboot | 8 Comments »

    Social Interfaces (Lee Bryant)

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    He was talking about “Negotiating Language and Meaning with Social Tagging”. He’s running headshift the company who is behind the famous bbc tags (but only one of their many interesting projects). You will probably (and just like me) learn a few things here so here we go:

  • tags today are: – an open flat structure – public facing, created by the people who care first about themselves when tagging (which can be problematic, the technorati tag “blog” really does not help anybody)

  • How do we communicate? 4 things need to happen:
    1st: we have to share a situation
    2nd: we need to share a common perception of things (ex: ability to see the same thing)
    3rd: we need to share the same cognition (ex: categorization, interpretation of things)
    4th: we need to have a common language

    Language is interesting, because it actually evolves over time to describe a concept. Here is an interesting graph from some french researchers (I couldn’t grab the url sorry):

    Conclusion: polysemy (spell checker proposes “polygamy” for that…) often declines quickly for new concepts as dominant terms emerge.
    Tags are a useful tool for this: reducing the number of terms used to describe something.

  • Example number one: the BBC
    Their most famous piece of work. You can tag a story. From here you can: – see all stories tagged with that same word – see delicious links tagged with that word – see blog posts (via technorati) – see flickr pictures
    Nice, tyni app. Juste what you would expect. I’m saying that this should be the default on all websites.

  • Local aggregator for the city of Brixton
    The idea here is to integrate all information related to the city in one place. So news, blogs, links but also official information. The system grabs the information, derives common themes from content then lets people create tags to link content together and navigate it.
    Lee gave a few figures on the project:
    18’000 different words the first year
    100-650 recurring themes

  • Extranet for mental health professionals
    These people have a vocabulary problem. They don’t use the same thing to designate the same information. So they built a website that gives access to information that people can then classify their own way. You do some topic mapping from tags. If for you “Mental” and “Retarded” equal to “French soccer fan” then you can merge these two tags into that new name. You’ll get further information this way (FSF), not the way it has been entered by the publisher.

  • Negotiating language
    Amazing project (a big part of it comes from the fact it’s for the NHS and will reach so many people) to get feedback from people on medical services without using forms of pre defined language. These guys actually try to bridge the gap between two worlds (the people, the NHS) that each has it’s own words and structure. Actually every single person has it’s own words and structure.

    So the system works the following: – patients send unstructured feedback to the system – text analysis identifies patterns it matches with the NHS taxonomies – the system constantly improves by analysing tag clouds generated by people.

    Interesting supplementary note: after the conference I talked to Lee and he said that they actually ask people to tag their information, but also ask for a “mood stamp”. They have to say if the send a complaint or a praise. That allows better interpretation of some ambiguous tags.

  • So where do we go from here with tags?
    A great visual answer that I struggled to reproduced in 5 sec while the slide was up. Amazingly slides are not available during the presentation on the reboot wiki (will come for reboot8 me thinks).


    The graphic kind of speaks for itself. People (at a personal level) wil receive information from data stores via feeds and, in return, provide links via tags. Groups of people will have the same kind of two way interaction with directories, feeds and links. To allow groups to interact with data stores and individuals to interact with directories we will need to build light social interfaces the way these guys are doing. Take a long look at this thing it’s quite interesting.

    • Posted in reboot | 14 Comments »

    People don’t adopt technology for social reasons (Ben Hammersley)

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    Audio recording

    Quite a character this guy. One of the reasons tech fairs are interesting: you always get these speakers with weird backgrounds, or interests, or education, or dressing code. It seems Ben is cumulating all these particularities so that made up for an amazing 45 minutes of presentation. His main point: technology has evolved faster than social codes. We the tech people of the world need to care about the gap. Details follow:

  • A bit of history first. When Europe moved from the medieval era to the “Lumières” (enlightment?) period, something interesting happened: the dress code that was allowing everyone to situate people on the social ladder disappeared. Fashion stopped showing rank. You couldn’t tell anymore who the other guy is.

  • Mobile phones are another major social change. Proof is this new concept of “proxy meeting”: “I’m in town can we hook up for a beer?”. On the fly scheduling has changed our habits in a decade

  • Blogging is also a major social change. Some nobodies can suddenly reach audiences, and even anonymously at that. That create many new capabilities for these people, including the one to be some pretty “total bastards”

  • But guess what: new technologies are rude. They do not easily let people in. They exclude, punish, humiliate (so we’re in a windows context here probably).

  • Another issue: etiquette has not evolved as fast as tech. We have these mobile phone whose use is not clearly codified yet. Is it rude to send an sms while you’re with some friends? Is it rude to pick-up your phone while dining, get up and exit the restaurant? We’re in some kind of grey area here, people do things that when done by others bother them. Ben showed some stats I couldn’t pick up on the subject so if he’s technorating his fame and end up in my humble home may he take one minute to help on this?

  • Now on to the key point we have: Ben came to the conclusion that technology scares people because they are afraid of humiliation. People don’t always know how to integrate tech in their social environment. See the reasoning here? – we face constant social changes – codes are always (and naturally) behind – some people are scared to embrace change because they are afraid to fail in these non existing codes.
    He gave us to examples: his wife does not like to play Starcraft, not because she does not enjoy the game but because she does not want to look ridiculous in the eyes of other players she’ll btw never ever meet. Wives are weird anyway.
    Second example: his grand mother would never ever buy a phone for a simple reason: she does not want to be in a situation where she would be noticed (and hated) by people in the bus because her mobile is ringing and she needs time to take it off her bag.

  • Adoption of technologies is a social problem, not a software/hardware problem. It’s obviously not true all the time (nobody got a copy of windows me because it really sucked, software problem) but you get the bigger picture. nice point.
    A good example: video phones. These are slow to take off because people do NOT want their interlocutor to know where they are.

  • So in change we should remember three things: – new technology should always come with out of the box etiquette – people need time, you can’t do much about it – for some times manners will have to make it for inexistent rules

  • As a designer you should always worry about the social conventions you break, and propose some new ones eventually.

    • Posted in reboot | No Comments »

    Map your brain to your designs (Matt Web)

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    Audio recording

    Author of Mind Hack. This guy’s job is to work on improving the relationship between how your brain functions and computer interfaces. His point is that our brains work a certain way wether we like it or not. It’s important that we first understand these ground rules at first so we can design effectively afterwards. He compared his approach to crime: crime always starts with small things like a broken window. Then slowly but surely conditions degrade and insecurity rises. To fight crime you better fight the little things first because that will fix the big picture.

  • Our brain perceives via various channels: – vision (color, shapes) – linguistic
    etc…
    We constantly have competing stimuli arriving to the brain. He gave the famous example:
    Read this: red blue black green.
    This will be harder: red blue black green.

    Another exercice that I can’t reproduce here but trust me it’s true: imagine the following setting.

    The pluses will turn into a colored dot

    ● +

    and you have to press the appropriate button. If the colored dot is on the same side than the button, you’ll systematically be around 5% quicker to press it. Just because it’s closer to how your brain works.

  • Example of an aberration in software when you consider how our brain works: the visual buffer. When you watch something usually it’s aspect does not change in a millisecond. Things transition between their states. A door opens before it’s opened you get the point. In web browsers you sometime have the page reloading, 95% of the screen is the same but 5% has changed and you’ll need time to find what has changed if you don’t get strong hints from the UI.

  • Example of a good (yet imaginative) interface. Matt played a few minutes of Minority Report (with the express consent of his local Blockbuster ). Tom Cruise is playing with pieces of video on a transparent screen. I’m not going to describe this as it’s obviously visual. This interface has at least three very interesting characteristics: – it works with pre-attention -> when items arrive for Cruise to watch, they stand by on the side of the screen for a while until he picks them up. – the user has to voluntarily center things when he is paying attention to them – closing is not immediate, it happens with visual clues that scream “this thing is actually closing right now”

  • Matt then talked about bodymaps, how stuff can actually extend a person’s feeling about it’s capacity to operate. Give me a sword and my brain will start thinking outside of my body as it knows I can reach further than my arm. Designers create bodymaps.

  • Bottom line is: design will eventually have to work the way the brain works.

    • Posted in reboot | 6 Comments »

    The european blogosphere (Loic Le Meur)

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    The french blogger foreigners love. His presentation was made from a wiki page and was mostly about the state of the european blogosphere (=figures galore) so check the page there is not much to add. Two things thou:

  • Loic talked about LaFraise (“The Strawberry”), a blog-born T-shirt business that has the coolest business model I’ve ever seen.
    The concept is the following: LaFraise will handle the physical part of T-shirts creation. They (actually the guy runs his business alone) will take a photoshop, prepare it for printing on textile, order the tees from some cheap chinese shop and then send them to the appropriate customers. Nothing really fancy until… until this: T-shirts are actually designed by anybody that wants to. All entries are put into a voting page, and visitors rate the designs they like. So product creation and product cool-hunting (thx ben for the expression, he used it when talking about Régine whose presentation I could unfortunately not attend), the most critical part of the business, these are handled by people that are the customers.
    Isn’t it more likely that you’ll buy a tee if you’ve actually created it or voted for it as really groovy? Me thinks so. The guy has the best business model of the century: – anonymous people create his products – anonymous people decide what products are going to see daylight – he “builds” tha shite, taking care of the part nobody can handle as an individual – anonymous people then turn into proud customers.
    Did you hear me talk at some point about “marketing costs” or “R&D”? No no no not here monsieur not here. That happens, just outside the company and for free.
    Social T-shirting, nice, really nice, and happening in France right now!

  • Foreigners have this strong perception that Loic is the main reason behind the french blogosphere being that big. The guy strongly denies it (fortunately) and evidently that’s a huge simplification. What you guys reading in english might not realize is that Loic is actually a very controversial person in France. As he is portrayed in the media as the “leader” he is the guy to supplant. We the french all think we own the truth so it’s not good to be too visible (or the coach of the national soccer team). Actually some french do own the truth (but not all) and that shall be the subject of another debate.
    So that said it was really impressive for me to see how Loic portrays France. Here is basically a charming (the guy’s always smiling), dynamic and young guy, making things happen, and giving a very positive image of France. He talks about all these amazing initiative that reflect democracy, openness and innovation. Seriously, when was the last any of you associated France with “innovation” and “openness”? Seriously.

    • Posted in reboot | 2 Comments »

    Conversation is knowledge (David Weinberger)

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    Audio recording

    This guy is really crazy, the extreme american presenter constantly switching between 10 and 130 decibels. Speaks so fast I barely got half of his one liners (doc got the others luckily). He’s talking about knowledge and comes from some probably very prestigious american university. He lives here.

  • What were the effects of the Internet on knowledge? Many many of course, chaos, dissemination, disinformation, universal access, etc etc…

  • He started on taxonomy: principals of organization mirror the physical world, and therefore the physical world limitations. Something can only be at one place at the time. But why do we have to proceed this way for knowledge?
    Does that mean that if two persons have different view on something, one is always right and the other always wrong? It’s how we proceed these days, and that is why we have gatekeepers that are in fact judges, they decide what is right and what is wrong.

  • what are the differences between the online and offline world then?

    Online Offline
    leaf can be on many branches leaf can only belong to one branch
    messiness has a value messiness is a threat
    nobody owns the order of information somebody orders information and you better be this guy or cope with it
    metadata comes from users metadata is usually not entered
    if entered it’s centralized

  • The traditional media are david’s favorite punching ball. So here we go: – traditional medias are an echo chamber. NYT only links to itself (except for ads of course…) – traditional media’s is more and more like a show. Btw the best journalist (John Steward from the daily show) is a comedian. – blogs are open, generous (“bloggers link, so they basically tell you to please don’t stop here too long and go away please”)

  • Some new things are happening: – multiple subjectivities are competing on the web – the content metaphor is wrong. Fixed content is not knowledge anymore. Knowledge comes from the interactions => knowledge is becoming the conversation, not the result of it. – we face semantic segmentation (tags are the best example) – there is no difference between data and meta data. Data can change status: a quote of a book is data but becomes meta data when someone finds the book via this quote in google. – knowledge does not have to be right or wrong anymore, it can be just good enough for somebody at some point.
    This happens because online people have to co-exist. Very interesting thinking here: in the real world, someone HAS to win the conversation. So people tend to become super rational and the conversation narrows and loses its usefulness. Online there can be no end so better prepare to coexist with all the freaks out there.

  • The bottom line: we’re completely re-meaning our world at the moment, it’s a great time to be alive.

    Great presentation, really funny guy. I just wish we could have had a live example of co-existence between david and christian who earlier in the day introduced the super-data (“beyond meta-data©”) concept.

    • Posted in reboot | No Comments »

    Wikipedia and the social construction of knowledge

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2005

    A great follow up for the rebooters out there: today Jon Udell is (by pure chance I guess) talking about Wikipedia, and how it’s “greatest innovation is arguably the framework it provides to mediate the social construction of knowledge, advocate for neutrality, accommodate dispute, and offer a path to its negotiated resolution”.

    He then offers a few examples of what that framework is made of, examples that Jimbo Wales did not mention explicitly in his speech: disputed pages will find their way onto the list of disputed topics. When they settle down they may later migrate to the watch list of previously controversial issues, “a location for articles that regularly become biased and need to be fixed, or articles that were once the subject of an NPOV [neutral point of view] dispute and are likely to suffer future disputes.”

    Nice reading. Link

    Update: more from cory doct. on the matter here.
    This thing is really amazing

    Posted in reboot, english | No Comments »

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