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.

Being-Digital, Morning Session

So it’s been a few months since my last visit to a conference. Yesterday was Being Digital, organised by Tony Fish and Simon Grice, hosted at BAFTA on Piccadilly. There were various sessions throughout the day with different speakers, panel discussions and demos. Here are my takeaways:

Advertising

The “old” model still applies, i.e. commercial reality requires eyeballs to generate a return. However, consumers are now in control as they use technology to filter incoming messages, and make personal product recommendations to each other.

Other quotes, paraphrased:

Andrew Gerrard of d-marketing

• Large quantities of user-generated content mean that we need to filter this to identify the quality
• Mass audiences are disappearing, and are becoming fragmented
• Quoted from Lord Puttnam: “Technology can only ever serve as a bridge, never as a destination”

Helen Keegan

• There is too much focus on metrics; advertising isn’t all about click-throughs
• Good marketing begins and ends with good products; companies cannot now control what consumers say about them
• Mobile adoption is increasing faster than computer adoption
• The iPhone is a game changer for mobile internet advertising

Michael Bayler

• Digital channels are currently more important as inbound channels (it is up to companies to develop a service proposition in response)
• There are about twelve rings that you need to get through to reach the consumer (in the middle is “me” - I use technology defensively to filter marketing, followed by the “us” tribes)
• Consumers want to tell stories about themselves

Kate Burns of DailyMotion

• Advertisers don’t see that local advertising has critical mass
• Media is fragmenting, and the consumer is in control
• On the positive side, compaigns can be run with sub-10K budgets - more creativity is required (think Kate Modern)

Turlough Martin of WunderLoop

• It’s all about giving people what they want, while balancing with privacy

Identity

For this session Wendy Grossman began by observing that your online identity can be separate from your real-world identity; it might involve your role (e.g. as a commentator in rec.tennis) or purchases you’ve made from Amazon.com. Wendy recounted an anecdote that Martina Navratilova had told during a press conference where someone was impersonating her online so she created an account and posted “She isn’t the real Martina Navratilova, I am”. Nobody believed her, but they believed Wendy who was known in that community.

Simon Willison did well to compress his usual 45 minute talk into less than 10 minutes; some key points:

• OpenID lets you prove that you own a URL
• Spammers have OpenIDs too, so you need to check the morality of your users
• If you do want to put all your eggs / credentials you can go for a more heavyweight approach, such as Trustbearer OpenId which supports two-factor authentication involving a smart token or biometric device
• OpenID 2.0 improves usability by avoiding the need for URLs
• OpenID is decentralised

After Andy Thomas of Garlik, and Luke Razzell of iTogether, there was a discussion led by Simon Grice and the following observations were made:

• In a show of hands, most of the audience used the same user name and password for the majority of their online accounts
• OpenID potentially provides a mechanism for social networking sites to share data (e.g. contacts) with one another
• Wendy wondered whether eBay could share a person’s reputation
• SimonG: People rely on Twitter and SMS and there is no one dominant SMS provider
• Microsoft is trying to separate different roles with Cardspace
• SimonG: We are still bumbling along with username and password, but in 5 years time maybe it will happen
• Andy: The solution needs to be relevant to consumers
• SimonW: Identity is a big and vague problem; OpenID is a useful building block

Content
Will McInnes moderated a panel discussion involving Nick Brown (A2A Group), Peter Miles (sub.tv), Ave Wrigley (ITN), Joe Drumgoole (Putplace) and Ivan Pope of Sniperoo (who recorded part of the session).

Key points for me were:

Peter Miles:

• Is content FREE (i.e. little value) or free (where someone pays eventually)?
• Distribution has been democratised
• Branded content is the most popular form of all advertising formats with consumers (67% found it valuable or acceptable)

Joe:

• Content value can come from timeliness
• People pay for convenience (that’s why we use iTunes) but they won’t pay for the same content over and over in different formats

Ivan:

• People managed just fine before Hollywood, and are actually easily entertained
• Content implies that it lives in a container; what are we filling? (Previously this was media-controlled channels.)
• Predicts that in 20 years time there will be no more Hollywood blockbuster; people will remake their view of the world with fragments

In summary, Will McInnes predicts that 50% of big media companies will go bust. The future is in platforms for user-generated content. Content discovery is still a big problem - we need something like last.tv (last.fm are already working on this).

Location

Moderated by Andrew Gill, the location panel included Tim Warr of Multimap Microsoft, Richard Varham of Locomatrix, Judy Gibbons of Accel and Rob Hinchcliffe.

I didn’t take many notes from this session as I was too busy listening, except to note Tim Warr’s comment that we haven’t got the interface right yet for location-based (mobile) apps.

ThoughtWorks Keynote at QCon

Martin Fowler, Thoughtworks‘ Chief Scientist, and Jim Webber (SOA Evangelist) were speaking at QCon last night in a talk entitled “Does my Bus look big in this?” Martin Fowler’s books on software patterns, particularly Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, probably get the most use out of my collection, so I’m particularly interested in what he has to say.

I have personally experienced what I believe is a lot of unnecessary complexity in Enterprise software, and it is refreshing to see Martin and Jim cut through this to come up with a set of principles for effective (lightweight) delivery. I’m also pleased that ThoughtWorks are actively promoting (J)Ruby on Rails in an Enterprise context as this seems a natural successor to “traditional” Java development, and in my opinion they seem to be one of the most enlightened consultancies on how to deliver Enterprise software effectively. (They’re also agile.) Martin and Jim’s recommendations are as follows:

• Adopt an agile approach with two main notions: (1) accept change as an inevitable part of the software process, and design processes accordingly; (2) the most important part of the process is the people.
  Various techniques are becoming more prevalent to support this notion (see Test-Driven Development: A J2EE Example, Pragmatic Unit Testing, Refactoring or Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns).
• De-risk projects by beginning with a small system that works.
• The web is middleware (and low risk): why bother with proprietary middleware when you can use the internet?; provide innovation at the edges, and “heavy hitting in the cloud”

On SOA:

• Services host business processes
• Business people own our architecture
• Prioritise and deliver services incrementally (it might be messy but at least it’s delivering business value)

The key to good software design isn’t to allow for everything you think you’ll want it to do (You Aren’t Gonna Need It), but to enable it to do things you haven’t thought of yet.

Some proposed alternative definitions:
SOA = databases wrapped in WSDLs being orchestrated
ESB = Erroneous Spaghetti Box

Martin and Jim don’t like ESB’s … but if you really really feel you need one, use a proxy server (e.g. Squid).

On Twitter

When I first heard about Twitter I thought it sounded like a waste of time, but was intrigued by the reports I had read from JP Rangaswami, Meg Pickard and Robert Scoble.

The people I’m in regular contact with haven’t yet signed up, so I started by trying out the BBC News feed provided by http://twitterfeed.com. Twitter limits you to 250 messages per week in the UK, and I wonder how long it will be before it starts trying to squeeze more revenue out of users.

Russell Beattie observes that Twitter’s design helps to prevent spamming or trolls, but “if I am an idiot, I only get to bother those people who are stupid enough to follow me”. This seems to be partially true, because you can also “reply” to the most recent message from someone you follow (even if they don’t follow you).

Last week I thought I’d add some of the people I’ve heard speak at conferences, or on podcasts, as I’m interested in what they have to say. I notice that some have chosen to make their updates protected … whether this is to stop others messaging them, or because they don’t consider their updates for public consumption isn’t clear.

There seem to be a number of ways people use the service:

1. Self-promotion
2. Sharing information (micro-blogging, or e.g. a particular view of the world)
3. Updating existing friends on what they are doing
4. Experimentation
5. Taking part, with a view to understand it better

The information sharing and experimentation works better for me than “I’m eating lunch”. Dave Winer’s coverage of Twitter vs Pownce (also on TWiT), and the Democratic candidate nominations was also useful.

I should have been more selective on whom I followed because on Tuesday this tweet appear in my IM window:

Since this happens to be quite similar to my bio, and I’ve never met Matt, I felt this was slightly out of order. Matt’s personal situation is rather different to mine, so I’m not sure why he feels qualified to pass judgement. I suspect it is partly that the profile he currently enjoys has gone to his head.

Matt, if you feel the need to indulge in grandstanding rather than having the balls to share your opinions with the recipient directly, then ask yourself as CTO what image you’re projecting for yourself and your company.

I have updated my list to include those that I know a little better, and all is well. Now I need to get more of my friends and colleagues signed up.

Update: Marshall Kirkpatrick has some good advice  on getting the most from Twitter (via Mike Butcher).

Notes from PHP London 2008

I was at PHP London on Friday so it’s time to get writing again …

What caught my interest initially about the day was the opening talk on Enterprise PHP; as I work with Enterprise Java, which tends to be a heavyweight development approach, I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought to what comes next … is it Ruby on Rails, JRuby on Rails, Django and Jython, Groovy? Too many to choose from. I’ve started with PHP (keeping one eye on JRuby) because I think it’s hard to beat for getting going quickly and it’s mature. With PHP5’s OO support it is now gaining credibility as a “proper” language … also the syntax makes it easy for Java developers to pick up.

So it turns out that Enterprise PHP development is going on outside of Yahoo!, and Ivo Jansch from ibuildings described a familiar Software Development Lifecycle. Because of a clash with the PHP frameworks comparison, I couldn’t attend the later talk on IBM’s Project Zero, but this is an intriguing mix of Java and PHP technologies which might interest some Java development shops.

Marcus Bointon gave an accomplished talk about the intracies and subtleties of handling mail. Marcus is the architect for smartmessages.net, which handles 1M legitimate e-mail messages per day. Unfortunately, book publishers have so far been less than keen for him to share his experience with others. Key points from Marcus’s talks:

• Don’t use mail() - if you do you’re probably doing the hard stuff yourself; better to use one of available libraries
• Both PHPMailer and Zend_Mail are decent options (Marcus does support for the former)
• ezComponents “tries to do everything”, and has a deeper notion of MIME so can do arbitrary nesting
• Alexandria from OmniTI keeps it simple, and has a unique feature of supporting asynchronous SMTP queueing thorugh a PHP extension
• If you’re sending to one message to one recipient, use the To: field, but don’t include more than one recipient; for multiple recipients use the Bcc: field, and set the To: field to something sensible (e.g. sender’s address)
• Most regexes reject some valid e-mail addresses: this Linux Journal article, and E-mail validator can help you to get it right
• Use VERP for handling bounces

The main afternoon session involved a comparison of three popular frameworks, which were well represented by Ian Kitchen, Toby Beresford and Rob Allan.

The consensus seemed to be that Symfony is a relatively heavyweight framework, and difficult to pick up quickly, but is supported by Yahoo. Zend’s main advantages are the company behind it, and that you can pick and choose which bits you want to use (and mix with other libraries), which will allow organisations to adopt it gradually. CodeIgniter is small, fast and simple to use … great for mashups but may not be so appropriate for enterprise use; there was also some discussion on its longeivity.

Derek Rethans delivered the wrap-up keynote, and covered a wide range of areas which left me with a few things to look at, including Suhosin and the Xdebug extension for code coverage analysis when unit testing.

Overall it was a worthwhile day away from the office, with some enjoyable speakers and the food was pretty decent too.

HMRC loses 25 million Child Benefit records

Two disks sent from the HMRC to the National Audit Office have gone missing. The disks are apparently password protected but contain the names, addresses and dates of birth of every child in the country as well as the bank account details and National Insurance numbers of ten million parents, guardians and carers.

Does anyone still have confidence in the Government’s ability to run a National ID card scheme?

Update: The BBC’s Today programme yesterday morning (MP3) received around ten e-mails claiming to be from current or former HMRC employees pointing out that there are ongoing problems at HMRC due to staff cutbacks following on from the merger between the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise, and also that the IT infrastructure is inadequate. Alistair Darling was then interviewed and commented “… there were procedures that don’t appear to have been followed … this sheer scale of information should never have left the building in which it was stored … new procedures have been put in place involving encryption … it is not the merger [or] the reductions in staff that led to procedures being breached”.

Now it seems that the National Audit Office requested that the data from HMRC should be desensitised, removing bank account and other personal information. However an e-mail from a senior business manager from HMRC stated the the data would not be desensitised (and the reason subsequently given for this decision is that it would involve an extra payment to EDS).

From my perspective, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling opted for blaming a junior IT official who wasn’t following proper procedures, a claim which has now been somewhat undermined. If the government really took our data security seriously they would have spent the money to undertake a proper risk assessment, and put systems in place to reduce the likelihood of unintentional or deliberate misuse to the appropriate level.

Al Gore Wins Nobel Prize, Despite Film Inaccuracies

Al Gore, and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for “their efforts to build up and disseminate knowledge about man-made climate change”.

I think Al Gore deserves credit for his part in articulating the issues to the masses, although I did find his film “An Inconvenient Truth” over the top in places. The UK government seems to think it’s a good way to make responsible citizens out of the next generation as they decided to screen the film in more than 3,500 secondary schools. However, a school governor in Kent then objected to the film being shown to his children, because he said it contained inaccuracies and political propaganda.

Judge Michael Burton identified nine inaccuracies in the “political” film but ruled that it could still be shown if accompanied by guidance notes.

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

After England’s depressing 0-36 defeat against South Africa they’ve been getting their act together, culminating in the close-run 12-10 victory over Australia yesterday. England’s pack were very strong, while Jason Robinson took a beautiful inside pass from Simon Shaw to demonstrate that England can open up gaps.  Wilkinson’s kicking was good enough, although he missed an important kick in front of the posts at 75 minutes; fortunately Mortlock also missed a rather more distant attempt from half-way 2 minutes later.

After the South Africa game the post mortems involved talk about the lack of succession planning following the 2003 World Cup win for England, but yesterday the England team were fantastic.

To add to the Northern Hemisphere’s triumph, France also beat New Zealand. Currently, the bookmakers seem to be going for a SA v France final. I didn’t see France play yesterday, but I wouldn’t rule out England yet.

Taxpayers’ Information Stolen from Car of HMRC Employee

HM Revenue and Customs has had a laptop stolen from the car of one of its employees on 20th September, which contained details of at least 400 people involved in an audit and supplied by a number of financial institutions. HMRC are playing down the risk to taxpayers because the data was protected by “top-level encryption”, however according to yesterday’s Moneybox there was also a printout accompanying the laptop which contained individuals’ names and financial details.

HMRC are leaving it to the financial institutions to inform those affected.

Time for a Change

Apologies for not posting in a long time … I’ve been somewhat preoccupied by work matters.

The aspect of my job that I enjoy is designing and building software, and that isn’t where the main focus has been at Lloyds TSB recently. Also, I have my doubts about Lloyds’ decision to offshore some development to India. I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought to whether offshoring is really a good idea - for those affected by it I recommend Chad Fowler’s My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job (Pragmatic Programmers) - and it strikes me that while the immediate cost may be much lower than for UK-based consultants if you don’t keep an eye on the software quality then longer term costs may suffer. I’m also mindful of Fred Brookes’ suggestion in the Mythical Man Month that good programmers are up to 10 times more effective than mediocre ones (there are plenty of good programmers in India, but it’s important to be selective).

So when Lloyds offered my a renewal I decided not to take it. It wasn’t easy moving on - I developed a high regard for many of the people I worked with (freelance and permanent) and wish them well.

I now have a new challenge at Carphone Warehouse working on architecture/design, which I’m enjoying.

The other area that I feel needs a change is this blog. There are a number of technical posts I’ve been thinking of writing, but it doesn’t seem appropriate to mix them with more general interest posts. So I’m going to keep this blog for general stuff and will start a separate blog for posts on software design/development. When it’s up, I’ll post the link here.