Stack Overflow DevDays London 2009

Yesterday was the London leg of the Stack Overflow Dev Days tour, hosted at the Kensington Town Hall. This wasn’t your usual Carsonified conference because its goal was to cover a broad range of technical topics aimed at developers.

Joel started with a talk on Simplicity versus Power … when deciding on features for your product should you go for the 37 Signals approach of doing less? He suggested that the simplicity movement is gaining in popularity because there are more startups around now, and with limited resources they have to start with fewer features. Ultimately though, if you want to keep making sales you need to add features. Joel says you should focus on building elegant software in which there is nothing left to take away (from Antoine De Saint-Exupery). Good features help users achieve their goals; bad features (like unnecessary modal dialog boxes) interrupt users.

Also, give people features they care about (isn’t it ultimately about copying DNA??).

Users don’t like making decisions, so it is much better if you can give them sensible defaults and allow them to undo the action later. Joel gave Amazon’s One-Click ordering as an example; it seems simple but if you have to do without the confirmation dialog you must allow for the user changing their mind later. I remember, after reading Alan Cooper’s “The Essentials of User Interface Design” about 10 years ago, discussing with a colleague why we couldn’t come up with a better approach than the customary “Do you really want to do X? OK/Cancel”. I didn’t manage to persuade him at the time because it’s so much harder to do it properly, and this short cut is so common.

Those were the key points for me. There are write-ups of Joel’s talk from other DevDays here, here and here.

I enjoyed Remy Sharp’s introduction to jQuery, which covered the subject at the right level for me and moved at a good pace. Instead of typing examples as we watched, Remy’s approach was to display slides showing the evolving code with key sections highlighted.

This works much better watching someone talk, then type, then talk some more.

I didn’t get as much out of the mobile presentations as I would have hoped. Reto Meier’s talk on Android gave a decent introduction on the SDK features, but the coding demo could have been snappier. Pekka Kosonen’s humour and candour were popular with the audience, but I would have liked to see more substantial examples in the Nokia demos of Qt. Phil Nash gave a pretty good introduction to Objective-C (derived from Smalltalk, apparently) and my failure to enjoy this as much as some of the other talks was probably because my head was spinning at the unfamiliar syntax.

Jeff Attwood talked about the Stack Overflow team’s passion for building the best possible thing they can <3. He also mentioned that while the site has some semblance of being professional, behind the scenes it is actually pretty chaotic.

To be successful, you have to be prepared to fail pubicly … and to get up on a stage in front of hundreds of people who might laugh at you. Many people are afraid of doing this, so they don’t.* Jeff brandished a well-thumbed copy of Coders at Work, quoting from Joshua Bloch, EricJoe Armstrong, and Douglas Crockford. Joshua Bloch recommends reading the “Elements of Style” which isn’t a book about programming (or is it?); Crockford would rather see programmers get a degree in English than programming.

The last talk I saw was Jon Skeet’s, ably assisted by Tony the Pony sock puppet. Jon spoke eloquently and entertainingly about the various problems we have created for ourselves (it’s partly the fault of the users, partly the architects, and partly the developers). Examples: representing floating point numbers, reversing and splitting Unicode strings, ambiguous dates, and time zones (e.g. there are two different “CST” time zones in Australia).

There were around 850 people at the Kensington Town Hall; the lecture theatre was packed, and the foyer (where food was served) was too small to accommodate that many people at once. But overall Joel, Jeff and Ryan put on a good show and I enjoyed it.

* If you want to become a better speaker, I can recommend Toastmasters.

Update 30/10: Phil Nash has written about his decision to focus on Objective-C, and the bits he left out of his talk.

Update 3/11: Speaker write-ups from Jon Skeet, Christian Heilmann, and Remy Sharp’s slides.

Training for the Marathon (Six Months To Go)

As I mentioned in my previous post, after coming back from Lesotho I signed up* for the Marathon, and am running on behalf of Sentebale. This week I received the Information and Training Booklet which I’m working through. One point that struck me was the list of items that might be purchased with the sponsorship money:

• £10 for a school uniform (“these last a long time and encourage children to go to school”)
• £15 for one blanket (“Lesotho gets very cold, especially in the mountains”)
• £35 for one radiator (“In the winter months these can keep whole families warm”)
• £60 for one goat (“Animals are very valuable in Lesotho and provide important nutrients for families with milk and meat”)
• £100 for a bed (“… often shared by whole families so are very important”)
• £150 puts a child through school for a year

I’m not sure what to expect over the next 6 months. As I haven’t been a regular runner I don’t know how well I’m going to adapt to running long distances, but the uncertainty is part of the excitement of the challenge.

Things I’ve learnt from reading and talking to people so far (in no particular order):

- For longer distances, it’s important to drink not just water, but fluids with salts in, otherwise you can develop hyponatremia.

- “Hitting the wall” at around 20 miles happens because the body is limited in how much glycogen it can store

- Eat 3 hours before a long run, and drink at least an hour before

- Do longer runs off road

- Map My Run has a good selection of training runs

- Join a running club in January or February, which will help with the training when it’s cold

- If you’re out for long runs in the cold you will get cold unless you have hat / gloves / running tights

- The Virgin London Marathon web site has a comprehensive section of training advice

- When you reach the finish line, check who’s around you in to make sure you aren’t being passed by a Teletubbie or octogenarian!

I bought some suitable trainers, short and socks yesterday. Watching the video of my feet on the treadmill was interesting … the left foot tends to come down harder than the right. I need to improve on this (e.g. Allow the knees rather than the feet to lead the movement forward.) Improving core strength, with the Plank exercise for example, will mean that it is easier to maintain good balance and therefore use less energy.

I’m going to aim for “getting round” comfortably, which means a 14-16 week schedule 4 times a week. Looking forward to trying out the trainers today.

* If you want to sponsor me, any amount would be welcome.

HIV in Southern Africa: It’s Worse Than You Think

Over the weekend I was in Lesotho for my father-in-law’s funeral. Lesotho (pronounced luh-soo-too) is a country of around 2 million people surrounded by South Africa; to get there we flew down to Johannesburg and then on to Maseru, the capital. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but discovered a a ruggedly beautiful country, a small community of  hospitable ex-pats,  and welcoming locals.

The tragedy of this wonderful country is that it is struggling with a very high rate of HIV infection, one of the highest in Africa, and estimated at around 20% of the population; in the 15-40 year old group it is probably closer to 4 out of every 10 people. Average life expectancy is now around 35 years.

The high rate persists for a number of reasons: although condoms are available, young people don’t like wearing them; free HIV tests are available but the stigma associated with HIV means that potential carriers are reluctant to take the test; some believe that since AIDS makes you thin sleeping with a fat person is safe, or that having intercourse with a young virgin will cure you. Unfortunately, I’m not making this up. And since HIV/AIDS suffers usually die from secondary causes such as, e.g., pneumonia or tuberculosis, it is convenient to deny the underlying cause when someone dies.

There are around 400,000 orphans from AIDS; the boys seem to prefer living on the streets than taking up orphanage places, while the orphaned girls who aren’t looked after often become concubines. Africa has a system of extended family where an aunt or uncle will look after children if anything happens to their parents, but with one wage on average supporting 8 people (and a minimum wage of ZAR 900, or around £70, per month) the demand on the income earner becomes too great, and this system breaks down. Antiretroviral drugs are effective only when combined with a proper diet.

As desperate as this situation is,  it’s important to keep trying to get it under control.  Getting assistance to the people that need it is difficult but not impossible. There are numerous organisations working in Lesotho, such as Kick 4 Life (who work with 12-17 year olds through football), the Durham-Lesotho link, and Prince Harry’s charity Sentebale which is working to transform the lives of Lesotho’s orphans and vulnerable children.

I know that money is tight for most of us at the moment, but if you feel like improving someone’s life you may be surprised how much of an impact a contribution could make. Please check out these links and make your own mind up.

Update: I have signed up to run the London Marathon on behalf of Sentebale. I’m not a regular runner, and I haven’t run the Marathon before so dragging my forty-something body around 26 miles is going to be tough. But I know it’s going to make a difference to the lives of some of the children out there. Please support me to whatever degree you can. Thanks!

MySQL Java Connector Problem on Windows Vista

I’ve just been setting up Eclipse for Stripes development on my home PC and hit a problem connecting to the database. I haven’t seen this on any of my Windows XP machines and it seems to be specific to Windows Vista, which was bundled with the PC.

Versions in use are:

• Windows Vista Home Basic
• MySQL Server Community Edition 5.1.37
• Eclipse JEE Galileo (based on Eclipse 3.5)
• JDK 1.6 Update 16
• JARs: mysql-connector-java-5.1.6-bin.jar, ibatis-2.3.0.677.jar

I tried re-installing MySQL with User Account Control turned off, and verified that it wasn’t being blocked by the firewall. Still no joy.

Then I found this thread on CodeRanch which suggests that the problem is something to do with resolving localhost. So I checked c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts and found this:

::1             localhost

It isn’t clear why the standard loopback IP address isn’t included, but adding it back in fixes the problem (also see Microsoft KB article):

127.0.0.1       localhost
::1             localhost

Activate 09: How to Change the World through Technology and the Internet

Last Wednesday I went to a different type of conference for me. Normally I focus on keeping up with the technologies that may be relevant in my job (which I find Future of Web Apps good for), but Activate 09 caught my eye. I enjoy listening to Tech Weekly, and have been watching the various Guardian initiatives including their Open Platform API,
and the MPs’ expenses site, built by Simon Willison and his team in an amazing five days. The objective of Activate 09 was really to explore how can we use this technology to make a difference. The event has been covered by the Guardian Activate 09 blog, James Governor, Roo Reynolds, Martin Belam, and Matt McAlister has described what the Guardian was trying to achieve with the event. Roo’s is the kind of post I would hope to have written after deciphering my copious notes. Rather than recounting in detail, this is more of a summary of the bits I felt were interesting or thought-provoking.

Humanity, Technology & The Web

Werner Vogels talked about reducing the risk of launching your site, by using Amazon’s infrastructure, just “in case no-one comes to your party”, and gave plenty of examples including the Facebook app Animoto & Playfish (with 27M users). Livestream has no infrastructure, but on U.S. election night they supported traffic of 40GB/s, and 90,000 concurrent channels.

Arianna Huffington made some great points: when trying to create reform, raw data by itself cannot be viral [you need a mechanism by which people can process it]. Also, the internet is self-correcting; in the 2008 Election it was much harder for the Republican Party to convince the American public that Obama was an angry black Muslim fundamentalist who wanted to undermine the Constitution. In the Q&A session that followed Arianna suggested that we should aim to combine the best of old media (story telling), with the best of new media. And we should shift the debate from “how to save newspapers” to “how to save journalism”. Intellectual property and licensing came up a couple of times. In his talk, Ed Parsons mentioned that the National Rail app on the iPhone is one of the most expensive because
of the licensing fee that the developers have to pay to ATOC. And in a later session, Tom Watson criticised the Ordnance Survey, saying it was disgraceful that their data was not generally available for geomapping applications. I missed the later session with the Ordnance Survey representative, but understand the somewhat disingenuous argument was used that it doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything because they charge people to licence it.

Politics, Democracy & Public Life

Emily Bell spoke to Thomas Gensemer, whose company Blue Digital built the site behind the Obama campaign. On a crass level, as he put it, they helped to raise 80% of the money for Obama’s campaign. But there was also a customer service angle of the campaign, such that if someone volunteers in Ohio they get an e-mail in 48 hours. He says “If you have a group of supporters, and ask them to do something that has clear tangible benefits, they will do it.” And “Ask yourself: what do I want my supporters to do today? If you can’t answer that, technology is not the answer.”

Tom Watson was supportive of the Conservative innovation agenda, as put forward by Adam Afriye. Adam’s talk followed a party line rather more than Tom’s; as well as criticising Ordnance Survey for not making its geodata more widely available, Tom also suggested that we need to have a government where tolerance of failure is accepted; if an initiative doesn’t work, try something else. Tom is very keen to put public data out there, and see what can be done with it. It will be interesting to see how the Tories’ election campaign evolves, as Adam alluded to them using local news sites to spread their messages during the campaign. Thomas Gensemer was not optimistic about the digital aspect of Labour’s campaign: it will be under-resourced, and there isn’t the space between now and then to start listening to the electorate.

Zimbabwe

Gerry Jackson’s talk was a story of successes in extreme adversity. Gerry set up the first independent radio station in Zimbabwe, which the government has repeatedly tried to block. Emigrating families leave mobile phones in place to contact their friends and family, and SMS is proving helpful as a means of enabling transparency on what is really happening in Zimbabwe.

Reinventing Heathcare

Jay Parkinson gave an original perspective on healthcare, based on the principles that 65% of doctor pay is overhead (i.e. paperwork), bad behaviour is what kills most Americans, and patients should be in charge of their own health. So he has built a platform, hellohealth.com, which puts patients in contact with experts, and has various tools available to support the relationship, e.g. by sending an SMS once a week to check patient details / weight.

The Rules of Civilisation

In the session, “the means of production in the hands of the many; will the internet lead to a rewriting of the rules of civilisation”, William Perrin noted that 19th century laws (on which the UK is largely run) don’t work with 21st century tools. William PerrinHeath noted that we have lots to learn about how we listen, how to achieve measured constructive self-expression, and mutual self-respect; we are now in touch with more people that we disagree with. A number of times throughout the day, the point came up that systems based on secrecy and privacy are harder to maintain when there is more transparency. Tom Steinberg believes we need someone to enforce this transparency. The questions were also posed: Does our educational methodology need to change? Should children be fed knowledge, or (instead) how to locate it? The best person to act as steward on the journey through that system is the person whose data it is; we need personal, portable education records. Tom thought about other ways that we can help people when dealing with government, e.g. when lots of people are doing the same thing at the same time, such as filling in a tax return. Also, would what be the effects of getting many more people to read laws before they are ratified?

How Children Can Self-Organise to Educate Themselves

By the end of the day my brain was fairly full. But I stayed for Sugata Mitra’s fascinating talk on how children who don’t have any other option can self-organise to learn how to use a computer. He covered the same material at TED, which is well worth watching.

Open Data

I came away from this conference feeling rather optimistic about what could be achievable with technology in this country during my lifetime, and impressed by the line-up that the Guardian had put together. The Cabinet Office’s announcement involving Tim Berners-Lee to advise on how to open up non-personal public data was a very positive step; I realise that technology isn’t the answer by itself, but I hope that this government or the Conservatives will take the opportunity to harness the ability of the many talented developers in this country, and give them the tools they need to create useful applications.

Technorati Tags: activate09

What I’ve Been Doing

I’m about to post on the Guardian’s Activate09 conference, and as it’s been a while since I’ve written here, a bit of an update is in order.

For the last 18 months or so I’ve been working at Carphone Warehouse on their CRM application, focusing on performance, and making sure it can do more with less as the number of customers increases. The application (it’s Java-based) seems to be holding up well and I’m probably going to need a new challenge soon.

There have been a few other things going on, like a 3 month home renovation, and the frenetic pace of family life; what free time remains has been spent on a project which plans to do a better job of presenting up to date information about local businesses. It’s an increasingly crowded space for startups, but when I launch, which should be this year, I hope people will find it useful. As part of this I’ve been exploring new languages, including PHP, Ruby and Groovy.

Homecamp08

A week or so ago I saw a post from James Governor on Twitter mentioning an “unconference” called Homecamp. Always keen to learn new things I investigated and found a link to the Current Cost meter, which provides a way to monitor one’s home electricity usage easily. Thinking of the days before large electricity bills this struck a chord, so I ordered one and spent the tail end of last week turning lights and electronic devices
off to see how low I could get the figure.

Homecamp08 took place on Saturday 29th November at Imperial College, and was organised by Chris Dalby, with help from Andy Stanford-Clark, Dale Lane, and James Governor.

The Current Cost Unit

Dale Lane started off by talking about the Current Cost meter, followed up by Andy Stanford Clark. Andy had already built his own DIY electricity monitoring solution, and then came across the Current Cost people. The Current Cost team were persuaded to add the serial port which has allowed people to do interesting things with the unit. It currently provides (every 6 seconds):

• Temperature
• Current Watts used
• Hourly usage for the last 24 hours
• Daily usage for the last 31 days

Code samples are available online in various languages to allow experimentation. The new unit, due out in December, will keep daily history for 90 days, and allow sensor readings on 9 input channels, as well as supporting a higher data rate.

Andy talked about other monitoring devices he has built, and how it is possible to build a monitoring system based on a low-power PC such as the NSLU2 running Linux or Viglen MPC with a small message broker (such as RSMB) that supports the MQTT protocol;
other devices can subscribe to published events and act on them (such as Twittering). Andy’s team have even equipped the Hursley bus to Twitter its location (how we could do with that on London buses).

Motivation

So why should we bother about all this? Well, from a purely selfish perspective, one watt per year costs roughtly £1. So given that the meter costs around £30 (from Eco Gadget Shop) it doesn’t take long before it starts paying for itself. Having the meter constantly showing you how much you are paying (it is accurate to within around 10%) does encourage lower usage. And it shows you how much ambient energy your house is using when you are getting no benefit from it,
i.e. from devices left running, or on standby. We aren’t yet at a point where electricity is sufficiently scarce that this is an issue, but it could be in the future.

Dynamic Demand

Phoebe Bright talked about how dynamic pricing, based on demand throughout the day. There is typically a peak between 6pm and 7pm in the evening, which means that generators in the UK need to work at low capacity and then ramp up their output for the peak. Ideally we would like to spread demand throughout the day. Joe Short, who is involved with Dynamic Demand, joined Phoebe and described how it is possible to evaluate how well the UK generators are coping with current demand by measuring the frequency of the mains supply.

The IBM Hursley team have created their own network involving an element of friendly competition to compare and highlight energy usage. There was general consensus among the Homecamp attendees that social factors have a powerful impact on behaviour, more-so than economic factors. (Pachube – pronounced “patch-bay” – was covered on a later session and builds on this idea.)

Arduino

The majority of the home automation and monitoring solutions being used are home-built. A very useful potential component for this is the Arduino module, which Nicholas O’Leary took us through. The unit has a number of digital and analogue inputs and can have other boards piggy-backed on top (for example, to introduce ethernet support). Nicholas has built an ambient orb based on the Arduino, which incorporates an illuminated sphere that provides constant feedback on the home’s
energy consumption (green / amber / red, for example).

Monitoring Gas, Water and Petrol Consumption

Other home-grown solutions involve monitoring gas based on light reflected from read-out digits, the pulsing LED, or boiler flame height. Andy Stanford-Clark was able to get another water meter installed which has a magnetised needle whose rotations can then be counted. And petrol consumption can be monitoring through the On-Board Display connector.

Honourable mentions go to Ben Hardill for his water monitoring unit that would be suitable for a flat, to Nicholas O’Leary for rigging up his doorbell, and to Adrian McEwan who is working on a fridge monitor.

In summary, there was lots to think about, much of it new to me. I felt a sense of excitement arising from the progress that people had already made, and that through a combination of social, economic and technological factors it is possible for us to continue encouraging individual and collective energy reduction.

Links:

Onzo designs in-home energy displays and smart meter solutions that enable utilities to put the end user in control.

Rob Veck is taking retirement early in order to work on Green Home Diary.

Write-ups from Dale Lane, Phoebe Bright and Tom Taylor.

 

 

 

Getting Started with the Current Cost Meter

My Current Cost meter has been running for just over two days. Apart from the microwave, oven and kettle it seems to be an accumulation of other items (such as leaving lights on, or the PC running) that racks up the cost. This probably sounds obvious, but seeing a monthly cost displayed with a pound sign in front of it helps to reinforce the point.

I wanted to understand what data was available from the unit, and compare it with the feed that Andy Stanford-Clark is producing on Twitter, to get me thinking about the possibilities.

1. I downloaded the Java code written by Dale Lane and imported it into Eclipse.
2. Dale’s code needs a class that is available in Trent Jarvi’s RXTX package; version 2.1.7 for Windows is installed by copying the rxtxcomm.jar into your Java Runtime’s \jre\lib\ext folder, and the rxtxSerial.dll to \jre\bin
3. Windows wouldn’t install the the USB-serial converter for the USB cable but I found a link on getsatisfaction, also courtesy of Dale, to the Prolific drivers.

Now I can run the CurrentCostSample, which produces the following:

Stable Library
=========================================
Native lib Version = RXTX-2.1-7
Java lib Version = RXTX-2.1-7
27/11/2008 7:00 = 2.0
27/11/2008 13:00 = 2.8
27/11/2008 23:00 = 2.0
27/11/2008 21:00 = 1.8

etc.

The unit actually returns the data in XML format, which Rich Cumbers has helpfully detailed.

For some fairly short-term gratification I plan to plug the unit into my Linux box that is currently used for recording TV so that I can do more fine-grained / longer term data capture and think about publishing some useful events (perhaps over Googletalk initially). I expect there will be plenty of ideas at Homecamp tomorrow. In the spirit of power reduction I have also bought a NSLU2 network storage device
to run as a small server, which takes only about 4 Watts; not set up yet, but on the to do list.

If you are thinking of experimenting with the Current Cost unit, you might want to listen to Andy Stanford-Clark on the Tech Weekly or Automated Home podcasts. I also found Chris Dalby’s post pretty useful.

Down But Not Out

So, my last post was back in June. I’ve been spending my time with my head down at work, and trying out Twitter and Friendfeed. Out of hours I’ve also been getting up to speed with PHP and CodeIgniter, and Groovy. However the main priority has been catching up on sleep as I’ve been borrowing from that to work on these other things. There are still a number of things I want to write about here, so while I thought about closing the blog down I’ve decided to give it another go. More soon.

Being-Digital, Afternoon

This is the second part of my notes from Being Digital on 10th June (speakers list).

Social

Panel members: Ashley McKorkle, Loic LeMeur by video, Chris Seth of Piczo, Andrew Scott of Rummble, Ankur Shah of Techlightenment and Jerome Touze of WAYN.

Ashley McKorkle is a Mobile Futures Analyst at Intel, and talked about their Intel Atom chip which is optimised for Mobile Internet Devices (e.g. low power video codecs). Future mobile consumption will be more contextual and more immersive. At Intel they are thinking about how to help consumers answer questions like: “What is a good kebab shop?” or “Is this a dangerous neighbourhood?”

Loic LeMeur (Seesmic) then chipped in by recorded video to answer some questions Simon Grice had posed. His view:

• Everything is social (it’s a way of thinking about software … currently limited to geeks but will become pervasive eventually)
• Social software is becoming more decentralised; centralised comments (e.g. on blogs) are no longer the norm … you have to get your comments on Flickr, Facebook, Friendfeed; the most important thing is the conversation
• Twitter is a model in terms of platform … anyone can grow things on top of Twitter by using their APIs; you can build on it, as well as get the data and put it somewhere else; openness in any future platform is essential
• We’ve only scratched the service with mobile location services; thanks to Twitter we know what our friends do but we don’t know where they are in real time (yet)
• Another trend – to get the experience as human as possible, e.g. with video (which brings gestures and feelings) – this is an area that Seesmic is focusing on

There seemed to be a consensus among the panel that for a media business (at least) a social networking site is a destination and not just a feature. Ankur Shah suggested that users are happy for companies to have their data as long as they get something back (and the other panelists seemed to agree).

Predicted trends included (Andrew Scott) more adoption of mobile and location-based features, as well as portable social graphs; Chris Seth echoed the points on mobile and unlocking of data, and added vertical networks.

Retail

Panel: Brent Hoberman of mydeco.com, Adri Kraa of IKEA, Lisa Rodwell of moo.com, Richard Anson of Revoo and Jason Smith of shop.com.

Brent Hoberman talked about his new venture, mydeco.com, which is one of those “why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?” ideas. It allows users to create designs and share designs, and furnish their house according to a given design and budget. The home furnishing market has been highly fragmented, with the market leader having only 6% market share.

The consensus among the panel seemed to be that online retailing is threatening the high street (e.g. Dixons); the challenge for high street retailers is to build strong brands and use online to drive offline sales. Brent mentioned that with more and more user data, online shopping has the potential to get much better, while Richard Anson observed that a “buy locally” option on the web provides an opportunity for retails to engage with customers in a different way (instead of purely on the basis of price).

Search

Panel: Giles Palmer of Brandwatch, Jeff Kelisky ex-CEO of Multimap and now GM of Commercial Search at Microsoft, Kristofer Mansson of Silobreaker, Dominic Blackburn of 192.com, Ariela Freed of Jumptap, and Simon Grice.

In his presentation Giles Palmer observed that there is a continued blurring going on between ads and other info, and between PR / Search Engine Optimisation. More metadata means more connections (between, for example, people, products and locations). Kristofer Mansson pointed out that keyword search is very limited, while Jeff Kelisky talked about what Microsoft is doing with real world (3D) search. There was also a discussion on linking real world items to online, and how we do this (barcodes?); 192.com are now geocoding news stories.

Simon Grice recounted an anecdote from Loic Lemeur who was looking to hire a raccoon (Seesmic’s logo) in San Francisco. Not having had much luck through more traditional channels, Loic posted a request on Twitter and received a number of replies. So perhaps Twitter has potential as a product search engine?

Demos

After each session and throughout the day a number of companies gave a one minute pitch on their company. I mostly didn’t follow up on these, but bumped into Joe Drumgoole who I’ve met before, and he gave me a demo of the latest version of Putplace (which allows you to Secure, Backup and Organise your data online). It looks like a useful product – I like the clean interface, file versioning, and icons showing in situ which of your files have been backed up (reminds me of Subversion).

I use ZYB for synchronising my N95 address book, and thought that YouGetItBack, Liquid Data, zoomorama, u-myx, Singtones, and KiWork looked interesting.