Wow, it’s been almost eleven months since my last post!

I’m still here and still living and breathing technology, just having to juggle fatherhood in the mix.

Now that I don’t have as much time, I need to pick and choose which tech events I attend carefully but one upcoming weekend got me excited and negotiating babysitting duties with my partner - Adelaide Startup Weekend.

What Is Startup Weekend?

A startup weekend is a high intensity 54 hours that brings together developers, designers and business/marketing people with the aim of building a pitch or prototype between Friday and Sunday evenings. Along the way you get access to venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs to (hopefully) help steer you towards success.

The short runway limits the complexity of ideas which can be explored and prototyped but I think that the event is more about learning and networking than ending up with a world-changing business on Monday.

Am I Pitching?

Truth be told, I don’t know yet. I’d like to, but I need to find an idea that is practical to execute within the event’s constraints and is exciting enough to allow me inspire a team of people I’ve never met through a long, hard weekend.

I have thrown a few ideas into Google Moderator so please vote, discuss or add your own here or in the comments.

I expected any idea that I do pitch to evolve significantly over the weekend and even if I don’t pitch I’m very excited to get access to business (i.e. non-technical) people that are interested in using technology to solve problems.

Are You Going Along?

If you will be attending Startup Weekend Adelaide, then please get in touch. There’s no harm in a little pre-event networking.

Early-adopter trial reviews of Google TV enabled hardware have started to emerge: From TechCrunch’s scathing review of Sony’s hilarious RC to Rick Klau’s more thoughtful piece. There can be little doubt that integrating the web with TV devices means change for consumers and manufacturers as they both get to grips with the full potential of the technology.

Disclaimer: I’m currently working on a different IPTV offering, but it’s definitely making me think hard about how consumers can best be served by the little box next to their TV.

So, let’s look at some patterns of behaviour enabled by Google TV...

Surfing As A Group Activity

Sitting the family in front of the TV to catch up on the latest lolcats, augment storytelling, plan activities or solve family arguments brings a level of interactivity that TV alone cannot provide but also the bigger screen means and end to crowding around a laptop.

There is still one similarity to huddling around a laptop that hasn’t been addressed - one person has control. If the person with the remote (it’s probably the Dad) doesn’t keep his audience entertained or switches pages too quickly, he will lose their attention and it will be his fault, not the fault of a corporate broadcaster.

Contrast the scenario above to that which happens in many households (including mine): adults watching the TV simultaneously using a laptop/iPad/iPhone to access the web and switch the focus of their attention during the boring bits of broadcast content.

The Remote Control Must Evolve

The New York Times has bemoaned the increased complexity of using the full feature-set of Google TV. That is understandable and it comes down to the TV manufacturers’ blinkered thinking with regard to how a remote control should look and act. Sony’s Playstation controller with a keyboard deserves to be called an usability nightmare and attaching a USB keyboard is a step backwards.

Instead, allowing control over TCP/IP (as well as infra-red) and leveraging set-top-box APIs will mean that consumers can use their smartphone and iPod/iPad as a remote. Control from outside the home - such as recording a favourite program whilst stuck in traffic - can also be made possible with open APIs like Google TV.

Virtual keyboards available on touchscreen devices, like the iPod, would alleviate a lot of the usability problems highlighted by the NYT and make textual search a much more natural part of TV viewing.

Apple is obviously aware of the potential of the smart remote and the iOS 4.2 update to Airplay paves the way for greater symbiosis between the internet in your hand and on the screen.

A further impact of using third-party smart devices as remotes means that there will no longer be just one remote in control. Widespread smartphone ownership could mean that families will no longer fight over the RC, but for control of the display.

Personalisation Pain Point

Web 2.0 properties have been adding value through personalisation (and later social connection) for a long while now, but this will be much harder when displaying content to family groups.

Content customisation becomes about the makeup of the viewing group instead of previous input. Dad might love action movies but it’s not appropriate to recommend Rambo when kindergarteners are being babysat by the TV. Similarly, teenagers will be unimpressed by Mum’s favourite 80s romantic comedies.

There are likely to be many more sets of preferences than family members - one each plus family viewing, kids viewing, sports nuts etc. Fast, easy switching between these customised views should be a priority for user experience.

An issue related to personalisation is that of parental controls - many set-top-boxes use passcodes to block access at certain times or to specific channels.

The Homepage On Your TV

Homepage is probably the wrong word, but Internet TV needs a jumping off point for surfing, just as the EPG makes a good starting point for your evening’s TV viewing.

It is my belief that a widgetised homepage is more appropriate to IPTV than Google’s minimalist web search box. Large, colourful icons that can be recognised from a distance can lead to fullscreen applications, customised for TV use. Here is Google’s TV Spotlight gallery, which provides a similar idea, but uses brands and logos instead of icons, but the navigation is interesting.

So now I come to ask for your help, dear reader, what would you like to see on the homepage of your future TV?

Here are some (fairly obvious) ideas:

• TV guide - duh!
• Informational apps - weather, stock prices etc
• Games - with the success of Angry Birds this is a no-brainer but the user interface will have to be very different
• Social apps - Twitter, Facebook etc have to be there but, again, user interfaces will need to be great
• Home messaging - not quite email but a means of leaving notes for other household members
• Media library - UPnP devices on your network should be able to communicate seamlessly with your TV

What else would your family like from the TV of the future? Let me know in a comment, please!

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Creative Commons licensed photos by Will Lion and Djenan.

When South Australia’s Country ire Service started to provide an RSS feed of incidents last week, I (along with many other SA geeks) immediately thought:

Map Mashup!

So, slightly hungover after a great New Year’s Eve celebration, I fired up Yahoo Pipes and set to.

It was a pretty straightforward task - strip the suburb name out of the feed title, append "South Australia" to help the location builder module and grab the output as KML. You can see the pipe here so feel free to make a copy and mess around with it.

Here is the finished map (RSS readers will need to click through to the story to view it)

View Larger Map

When government agencies open up their data like this, cool things happen. Hope you like it.

I try to keep my political views out of this blog but with recent news that the Australian Government is to introduce mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level, I must add my voice to those that are crying out against this massive reduction of freedom of speech.

If you haven’t heard about the Australian Labour Party’s plans, they involve forcing all ISPs to implement a Chinese-style great firewall that will prevent access to domains and URLs that are listed on a secret list.

NoCleanFeed Elsewhere

A great deal of discussion has centred around this issue and I won’t go into why censorship is bad or why the plan is doomed to failure. Instead here are a bunch of links discussing (well, attacking) the Communications Minister’s position far more eloquently than I can:

• Cory Doctorow, on BoingBoing.net - Great Firewall of Australia will nationally block sites appearing on a secret, unaccountable list
• Duncan Riley of The Inquisitr - Australia Confirms Censorship Plans, Tells Fibs On The Filtering Trial
• Slashdot Geeks discuss the issue
• Even the Australian Government’s own report suggests that the filter can be easly bypassed

For more up-to-date commentary, see the No Clean Feed site from Electronic Frontiers Australia or even see the #nocleanfeed hashtag on twitter.

NoCleanFeed Censored Twitter

I’ve made a (admitedly frivolous) twitter toy to raise some awareness of this issue, that shows the #nocleanfeed twitter stream and Kevin Rudd’s tweets with random words blacked out - unless they contain some swearing.

I hope you enjoy it and it provokes some discussion, so please RT!

The NoCleanFeed Twitter Toy is here.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by Tarale.

First, an apology: it has been far, far too long since my last blog post. Emmigration, moving house and a well-deserved holiday have kept me away from the keyboard. I’ll be getting back up to speed and putting a few projects together in the coming weeks.

I am currently back in Leeds, visiting friends and whilst I’m annoyed that I missed this year’s Think Visibility, organiser Dom has teamed up with mad scientist Tim Nash to put together a hack day and I can make it!

Hack Day Ideas

I need to think of some project ideas to fill my time at Hackday, so here are a few initial thoughts. If any interest you or you think I would make a good addition to your team, do get in touch.

SMS

The event is being held in AQ Ltd’s headquarters in Leeds. AQ offer an excellent (and easy) SMS to CGI gateway that I have used before so I’d like some kind of mobile/SMS element to the project. Twitter has shown that integrating SMS technologies with the web can be hugely successful - largely due to simplicity and accessibility of the ideas.

Location

Maps are favourite tool of mashup makers and 24 hour hackers are no exception, so a location element would be a good addition to the project. Getting location data from a mobile phone can be tricky though, any mobile developers going to Hack Day able to offer assistance?

As the YDN are a sponsor, Fire Eagle might also be a good fit for the location data.

Data, Data, Data

A nice big dataset is always useful for a quick mashup (saves a lot of time entering or discovering the data yourself) and there are a lot available on the web if you know where to look. (BTW Wikileaks has the entire UK postcode database avilable, have a search).

Another event sponsor is SUN Startup Essentials who offer (amongst other things) MySql licenses and cheap hardware, so a big, fat RDBMS could be on the cards.

My Skills

I should outline how I can help your team or why you should join up with me for the event: I have over fifteen years of experience developing software across a range of platforms and industries, I can write Perl, PHP, Javascript, C++, SQL and HTML. I have experience of network programming, database design and user interface design too.

So, if you want to discuss project ideas or put a team together then please get in touch or leave a comment below.

There are still tickets left, get yours free now if you haven’t signed up already. See you there!

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Creative Commons Licensed Photo by wEnDaLicious.

Over the years I’ve amassed a bunch of domain names that I planned to build something with or were just too good a bargain to miss. It’s time for a clear out so I am offering these three and four character domain names for sale.

Short domains are great for domain investors as the number of available character combinations is small and demand is constantly rising, or you could use one of these domains to build your own URL shortener for microblogging services like twitter.

They are all currently parked at sedo and registered with hosts that allow free transfer (like name.com, GoDaddy, etc.) Check the WhoIs data for the full details, including domain age and expiry date.

If a domain catches your eye, then contact me to make an offer, or you can arrange the sale through sedo if you prefer.

Three Character Domain Names

1g1.org

jc7.net

Four Character Domain Names

00gb.com

00mb.com

1kis.com

1xel.com

4dac.com

7cvs.com

7kia.com

ae02.com

dab3.com

dr4g.com

hcs5.com

lez3.com

ses7.com

ssg0.com

If this sale is a success, I’ve got some more domains that I might put on sale. The offer is for the domain name only, no website or email. Payment via PayPal or escrow.com for large sums.

It’s first-come, first-served so get your offer in quickly!

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Creative Commons licensed photo by woowoowoo.

On the day of the year when it seems like every site on the internet tries to fool its readership, posting false statements to the internet has been officially banned by government leaders. Heads of the G20 nations meeting in London today issued a short but grave statement decrying frivolity during these dire economic times and announcing a global internet censorship program.

During the press conference, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Barack Obama and President Hu Yoo of China stated that in future every internet post must be held to the highest standards of factual probity.

An international body will be formed to vet every file, blog post, page and comment uploaded to the internet. Formed under the auspices of the United Nations, the body will be known as the International Standard for Truth In Network Communications and will be led a chairman appointed by treaty signatories. Former Vietnamese leader, Saloth Sar has been tipped by insiders to head the organisation.

Successfully pulling off an excellent early April Fools prank yesterday, Smashing Magazine claimed that IE 8 might actually be useful. This is thought to be the last ever hoax to be perpetrated through the internet and the world’s police forces are poised to arrest any merrymakers that might be tempted to ignore the ruling today.

Here is a video of the full press briefing at the G20 summit - check out the disbelief in the reporters’ voices at the end!

It’s the day after ThinkVisibility, Leeds’ first SEO conference. I had a great time, learned a lot and met some great people.

I won’t repeat the content of the talks (most of the speakers are going to publish their slides) but I do want to give out some props. Every single speaker was great - there was not one duff talk - and everyone I spoke with was having fun.

Some of the off-piste discussions were hugely valuable too (sometimes it pays to be a smoker, you meet the most interesting people outside) and the after party was great for networking and exchanging notes.

Thanks to The Hodge for doing a sterling job with the organising, thanks to the speakers for their hard work and hello to everyone who I spoke to during the day.

If you didn’t make it (shame on you), there’s another planned for September so look out for the announcement when tickets go on sale. Hopefully it will coincide with a planned trip back from Australia so I can attend.

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Creative Commons licensed photo by marciookabe.

Twestivals are being planned to happen simultaneously in cities all over the world tomorrow (Thursday 12th February) evening and Leeds is not going to miss out.

Charity

A twestival is an event where local twitter users band together to raise money to fight global problems. All the money from tomorrow’s event will be donated to charity : water, a non-profit organisation bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

From the twestival homepage:

We all know that Twitter can be a powerful communications tool. It can connect, mobilize and inform people around the world instantly.

Those of us on Twitter know of its ability to organically create interesting communities from those people who find and follow each other. It is proven from the first Twestival that bringing the Twittersphere together for a special event is not only a memorable night; it has momentum to bring about social change.

Fun And Prizes

It’s definitely a worthy cause but the evening should be a lot of fun too!

Attendees will get to meet some of the faces behind the avatars and I know from previous events like Barcamp and Ignite there are some clever and funny people that get involved in nights like this.

Get your hands on a load of raffle tickets, because there are some great prizes on offer. I’ve got my eye on the rib eye steaks from @cwildman, yum!

As well as the raffle, there will be Wii tournaments and a chance to play with a FriiSpray but I suspect that the networking opportunities will be most valuable to some. Quite a few of Yorkshire’s top 50 Twitter users are going.

Having SEO problems with your site? Maybe you can bribe The Hodge with a charity donation in exchange for some advice.

Other people attending have expertise in Ruby programming, machine learning, photogrpaphy and food and wine matching. Of course, I’ll be happy to answer questions on web development issues for you.

Tickets

Buy your tickets online for just five quid and raffle tickets at a pound each.

You’ll need to bring your own drinks along too, but if you are coming, let me know and maybe you can have one of my beers!

See you there!

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Creative Commons licensed photo by rhosoi.

Ignite took place at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds and was very well attended with OBH staffers commenting that they’d never seen the place so busy.

If you’ve never been to an Ignite event before (and I hadn’t) the format is a little unusual, but very effective. Each speaker gets five minutes to present twenty slides with each slide automatically advancing after fifteen seconds. This keeps presenters on their toes, the audience interested and topics fresh.

It also means lots of speakers and not much time to take notes so I’ll only be blogging a couple of key take-aways from each presentation.

Craig Smith from O’Reilly Media’s GMT blog gave the introduction and was giving out some O’Reilly books throughout the evening. I didn’t get one.

Katie Lipps

First to present was Katie Lipps talking about the CoffeeBuzz iPhone application and what her team had learned during its development and subsequent marketing. You can find reports of their findings at theAmazingiPhone.com with two reports tailored for business people and developers released under a Creative Commons license.

• Paper prototyping paid off
• Design important for Mac users
• Field test, localise, be nice to bloggers
• Pricing is not easy yet

Jeff Allen

A fascinating talk from Doctors Without Borders volunteer Jeff, covering the ways that technology is being used in Africa and the unique challenges faced by techies operating in deprived conditions there.

• Skills exist in Africa
• Wifi good for village-village relay
• Offline wikipedia
• Kiosk to download content to USB
• HIV treatment has difficulty with registration. Use a dedicated registrar using a locally made system, powered by windmill & battery.
• Fix problems as they occur. Not pre-specced, expensive or centralised

Tim Panton

Tim wants us Web 2.0 developers to consider integrating voice into our applications. Thankfully, he didn’t mean to add speech synthesis to websites but to use the telephone as part of the customer funnel.

• Public thinks phone & web are closely linked
• First time mobile callers get an SMS back with link to phone-friendly content
• Use the tel: URI protocol & associate web session with phone call, eg. know what the customer was looking at
• Open-source PBXs or hosted services

Michael Sparks

Michael came from the BBC’s R&D department to give a talk about embracing concurrency - a tricky (and techie) subject to fit into five minutes.

He argued that because of poor tools, insufficient teaching and language traction, frameworks and design patterns are necessary to effectively apply concurrency to modern architectures. As an ex-real-time developer, I agree but I think a few people’s eyes glazed over.

Dean Vipond

Barcamp veteran Dean covered perfection in design.

In a fun talk, he pointed out that design classics still have problems (often with usability for the disabled) but he had found his own design nirvana:

Boots own brand paracetomol packaging.

Alexandra Dechamps-Sonsino

I hadn’t heard about the Arduino before this talk on hardware hacking, and I suspect that the talk was a thinly disguised plug for Alexandra’s product. But the device looks like it might be fun for someone with a greater interest in hardware than I do.

Ian Pringle

Ian wanted us all to think about what happens to our digital assets after we die - a fairly morbid subject that was presented in an interesting and, at times, light-hearted manner.

• Digital wills
• Physical assets are useful for historians etc but digital assets are treated as disposable
• Personal assets, social assets, public assets
• Legal issues - Ts & Cs, data protection
• Digital next of kin? 3rd party key holders?
• Are people still around? Dead man’s handle

Dom Hodgson

SEO Dominic talked about the future of search, a topic I covered in my predicition for 2009.

• SEO = Google
• Personalisation & localisation important
• Video search inside podcasts
• 10 blue links work
• Natural language search

Edward French - Enterprise Ventures

Edward gave us the skinny on funding for tech startups as his company specialises in early stage ventures. Despite powerpoint problems, he delivered an interactive talk asking lots of questions of the audience.

• Might take a year to finalise the deal

Tom Scott

After a short interval, Tom gave us a funny warm up for part two: My life in 20 graphs.

Stuart Chils & Richard Garside

Describing their project, the FriiSpray which provides a cheap interface to create virtual graffiti. They used Wiimote whiteboard with some Macromedia Flash code they have made a cheap electronic whiteboard.

They ended with an appeal for help from programmers and artists who want to get involved.

Kate Brown

Kate described how Leeds’ mental health professionals are using technology and especially social media to bring information and services where they are needed.

Check out her Tumblr for more.

Arturo Servin

Arturo’s talk covered a topic that I am very interested in - Practical AI & Machine Learning. He gave a good introduction to AI & presented some useful resources, covering a complex discipline well in a five minute talk.

Glenn Smith

Using saddle making to illustrate the concept of mass customisation, Glenn showed how automation can free up resources for product improvement.

• Customisation = expensive
• Leave the math to the machines
• User chooses features, clever tech specs it, machines make item

Guy Dickinson

A surprisingly interesting talk from Guy on his vision for the future of reading. After the hype of Amazon’s Kindle and e-book readers from Sony, he had really considered his subject well.

• Mobile phones not e-book readers
• People read in toilet, bed & bath - technology impact
• Writing will be shorter and easier to consume in short bursts: pamphlets
• Books can be customised - great for students & Harry Potter fanfic
• Social media to share annotations & reviews
• DRM

Philip Hemsted

Start-up founder Philip talked about psychology as it applies to team building.

• Six facial expressions common to all races/cultures
• Co-operative instincts benefit mankind
• Psychometrics measure personality traits so you can predict how your team will perform
• Bulding teams is essential skill for entrepreneurs

Ian Forrester

Ian gave us a preview of his sex & twitter startup TweetFoxxy.com, to much sniggering. It promises to be very like Mr Tweet but finds people for you to hook up with. Twitter users send DMs stating the attributes of a partner that they’re looking for and eventually TweetFoxxy sends you a DM with a recommendation. Users then chat via an intermediary (so there is no face-to-face rejection) then introduce themselves and chat directly when they feel able.

It will be a free service but advert supported.

James Boardwell

James talked about the politics of patterns as they apply to his work on folksy.com - a UK etsy.

• Shops have a place in seller’s heart. Their page is “theirs” - owners don’t want links to other sellers
• Needed ways to promote new sellers - not just old favourites
• Taste affects sellers - don’t sell plates next to a woolly penis
• Users of the site imitate each (and other sites) which affects the tech & community
• Design challenges of managing different stakeholders

Conclusion

As you can see, it was an interested and varied evening and I consider myself a fan of the Ignite format. Hopefully, there will be some Ignite events in Adelaide when I get there, in which case I’ll definitely be attending.

Thanks to the organisers, sponsors, speakers and attendees for an enjoyable evening.