Wednesday, March 5. 2008
BarCampScotland2008 Roundup
Over a full month after the fact I present my summary of the BarcampScotland2008 event.
The event was split over two days. It kicked off on the Friday evening (1st Feb) in the main room of Alison House at the School of Architecture. It was just the one room with a decent communal feeling. I think most people were holding back with their presentations for the following day. Despite this two presentations did take place. James Littlejohn made the first presentation after the welcome session and talked about data portability.
It was a good summary of the current situation. I also happen to agree with most of his positions. He has taken the decision of making his homepage the hub of his social network. Although I think he has perhaps taken things a little too far my main criticism is the implementation. Looking at the site it took me about 20 seconds to figure out that aboyne is where he is based and not his surname. I couldn't find his surname anywhere on his homepage. After navigating around for a while I found it in the byline for his blog. It wasn't an easy process. I highly doubt that data was machine readable despite the importance he attached to this during his talk.
Ewan Spence was next up with an improvised talk he largely made up on the spot. This rapidly migrated to a conversation with some interesting points raised.
Following on from this Dave McClure set a small competition going. A excessive number of random words were gathered from the audience which then broke up into 5 groups to brainstorm company ideas around any pair of words. Somehow the team I was in won with sexydyslexia.com, a couple that takes standard prose and converts it into netspeak and vice-versa. I notice that the domain name is still available so although rated as the best apparently no one in the audience wanted to run with it.
All the details on the second day after the jump . . .
The event was split over two days. It kicked off on the Friday evening (1st Feb) in the main room of Alison House at the School of Architecture. It was just the one room with a decent communal feeling. I think most people were holding back with their presentations for the following day. Despite this two presentations did take place. James Littlejohn made the first presentation after the welcome session and talked about data portability.
It was a good summary of the current situation. I also happen to agree with most of his positions. He has taken the decision of making his homepage the hub of his social network. Although I think he has perhaps taken things a little too far my main criticism is the implementation. Looking at the site it took me about 20 seconds to figure out that aboyne is where he is based and not his surname. I couldn't find his surname anywhere on his homepage. After navigating around for a while I found it in the byline for his blog. It wasn't an easy process. I highly doubt that data was machine readable despite the importance he attached to this during his talk.
Ewan Spence was next up with an improvised talk he largely made up on the spot. This rapidly migrated to a conversation with some interesting points raised.
Following on from this Dave McClure set a small competition going. A excessive number of random words were gathered from the audience which then broke up into 5 groups to brainstorm company ideas around any pair of words. Somehow the team I was in won with sexydyslexia.com, a couple that takes standard prose and converts it into netspeak and vice-versa. I notice that the domain name is still available so although rated as the best apparently no one in the audience wanted to run with it.
All the details on the second day after the jump . . .
Saturday - Day 2
For day 2 the event moved to the Appleton Tower Concourse at the School of Informatics. As previously mentioned this was a big space with five lecture theatres and at least 2 sessions running at a time throughout most of the day. The following is therefore not a complete record of the events from the day.
I've already posted my slides from the day so I'll concentrate here on presentations made by others.
Skyscanner - flight search
One of the first presentations was from the people behind skyscanner which is an interesting flight search site. They also generously sponsored a lot of the refreshments available on both days. Some interesting questions were raised surrounding scraping content from websites. Skyscanner scrapes flight prices from airline websites so that they can be searched in its site. Then when a user finds the flight they want they are redirected to the airline website. As far as I can see they are doing nothing different to any other search engine and yet they are encountering some problems. Particularly from ryanair at the moment.
Alternative methods of promotion
The next presentation I was at was Paul Farnell from litmusapp.com. He had some wonderfully simple and striking slides. They were just single phrases on solid colour backgrounds. Completely useless without a speaker stood beside them (so hardly surprising I couldn't find them on slideshare. A slidecast would have still worked though) but really working well during his talk.
Paul talked about some of the ways they have promoted litmusapp. The focus of their product is allowing designers to quickly view their website and newsletter designs on a variety of platforms. Essentially it is an advanced screenshot service. They have promoted the site in a number of ways. They have a 'labs' section on their site where CSSVista is given away for free. The app allows changes in CSS to be visualised in both firefox and IE instantly and simultaneously. The app will be useful to their target market and hopefully some of the people who download the app go on to become customers. They have also created communities for their target groups, including seeed which focuses on the business of web applications. Paul stressed the importance of building sites because you're interested in the issues and not just as a marketing tool. These were the big issues raised but he also mentioned how he tried to send new customers a personal welcome message. This is not automated so would scale badly but can be a nice extra touch in the early days. Finally Paul mentioned that a large number of of their customers first used the chatroom on the site to contact the owners before signing up.
Chaotic Attractors and great images
Next was Dom Crayford who talked about chaotic attractors. He has developed a software package to model strange/chaotic attractors which produces some very nice images. The software is available to buy though I have no idea what the target market for this is. Dom said he was as much interested in learning about the process of selling software as generating income which is probably a good view to take.
Flexiscale and utility computing
Next was a presentation by the folks behind xcalibre and flexiscale who also offered sponsorship. I had previously come across this company at the FOWA conference last year but I still felt this session was probably worthwhile. One of the issues I had was whether this utility computing approach merely shifted the excess capacity from your servers to your providers. Someone still has to have enough computing power to handle the times of peak usage. Apparently flexiscale have agreements with some users who need a lot of computing power but don't need it at any particular time. By offering computing capacity at a discount to these users during the quiet periods usage is maximised while having the 'spare' capacity available when it is needed. I think this is what is really needed to make utility computing viable. It's important that you are not bankrolling those quiet periods.
I'm probably not going to migrate any existing sites over to flexiscale but for any future projects I'm going to take a serious look at utility computing. Flexiscale seems to have some genuine advantages over the competition. Having said this the competition is likely to get hotter. One of the things that really caught my attention during this talk was the comparison of revenue for the provider. For a standard colocation setup revenue is approximately £1000 per square foot of space per year. For the utility computing setup flexiscale predicts their revenue will be £10,000 per square foot per year. That difference will partly exist for a datacenter offering 'traditional' dedicated servers but a big part will be the added value, and efficiency, in offering a utility platform. This is going to be a big driver for innovation.
Distrubuted Source Control
Next up was Tane Piper discussing distributed source control using mercurial. It looked interesting but I couldn't find anything in it which would greatly improve my work.
WebKit
Julien Chaffieux then discussed WebKit, the layout engine behind the Safari web browser among others. The main message was that WebKit was gaining market share quickly. Particularly in mobile devices.
Flash based graphs
Pallav Nadhani from infosoft global then talked about approaches to graphing data on websites. Infosoft global develops a flash based approach for this so flash is where the talk focused. The presentation showed a few things I had not come across before but it was a little too like a sales pitch for my liking.
Business Models
Next up was Dave McClure discussing "Business models and startup metrics for scottish pirates". I seem to have taken an excessive amount of notes during this presentation but first of all I'll embed the presentation.
Looking at the presentation again this was the polar opposite of the presentation by Paul Farnell. I think this stands up alone without my notes repeating what is on the slides. As such, lets move on.
CodeCamp
The next talk discussed CodeCamp, a short (24hrs - a week) and intensive event to learn about some targeted aspect of programming. These events seem to be very different to a Barcamp with a strict timetable decided prior to the event. It sounded like it would be a useful approach for some situations.
Affiliate Marketing
I had the opportunity to speak with Tim Howgego on the Friday and saw him a couple of times throughout the day. Towards the end of the day he gave a presentation looking at his experiences with affiliate marketing on a site he set up looking at fishing in online games.
There is a shockingly large amount of money to be made even on the periphery of online games.
Social Gaming
Finally Ewan Spence hosted a session, it wasn't really a presentation, looking at social gaming and freedom of expression. It was an enjoyable session but I didn't pick up anything I felt was immediately useful. I was, along with everyone else who attended, too busy playing games to make notes.
Summary
Overall it was a great day and a bit. I was impressed by the high quality of the presentations especially given that anyone who turned up could present. I picked up a decent number of tips which I expect to be able to utilise in the near future.
Above all though BarcampScotland2008 was an opportunity to meet people interested in similar areas to myself and the variety, number and successes of the people who attended was perhaps what was most impressive about this event.
I am already looking forward to BarcampScotland2009.
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