Imran Ali

Bruce Sterling @ Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign

...from March 2007; thanks Semiot!

I first saw 'Chairman Bruce' speak in San Diego at ETech 2006, though I'd followed his writing since I was a teenager. I'm always kinda confused when I hear his talks; Sterling can alternately poke fun at his own ideas, embarrass the audience that they're buying into his 'mental loops and excursions'  and yet still leave you filled with a sense of wonder and a desire to explore notions such as spimes and blogjects more fully.

I couldn't even tell you what this talk was about - only that I now feel compelled to re-read Shaping Things and start, um, Shaping Things :)

Exposing the APIs of invisible things

Kati London was one of my favourite speakers at the ETel Fair in February 2007. Along with other ITP students, Kati saved our asses when a bunch of speakers fell ill and they were able to put together a replacement session showcasing projects such as Kati's Botanicalls to those who'd missed the Fair.

I was super-excited when I learned that Kati was part of O'Reilly's programme committee for ETech 2008 as well as a keynote speaker and exhibitor at the Emerging Arts Fest.

Kati's talk - delivered along with Regine Debatty - was oriented around the interesections between art and technology, highlighting a number of ecological, spatial, social, political, networked and even inter-species pieces; there are some great notes from Regine at We Make Money Not Art, to ride along with the slides below...

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Incidentally, Kati and I swapped stories her friend and my Uncle's respective experiences with the Libyan secret police...no happy outcomes :(

ETech Day Two... (*very* rough notes)

Nat strolled though some of the rationale for this year's ETech before handing off to Stanford's John McCarthy - the inventor of lisp!

Steve cousins, an open source platform for personal robotics...willow garage is an R&D lab for non-miltary robotics
. impact before capital. components include navigation, object recognition, object map, manipulation. domesticon bot poses an existential threat to my mum!

kathy sierra asked the audience to tell the person next to them what they really really wanted to be good at! how can we surpass dabbling and get a high-res of experience in a new field. neurogenesis and neuroplasticity implies it's not about natural talent but ability to put in the time to practice, focus and concentrate. real experitiuse is less about what they know but what they do; chess masters can recall the patterns on a board. 9 expertise hacks... mirror neurons allow us to visualise or run simulations of another person's brain (direct observation) reduce the interference or mental chatter. time between interruptions is too short...we can;t lose the ability for intense concentration and putting in the hours.

Tom Coates' talk on 'Ride the Fire Eagle: Open Location for All' driven by the need for a back end for ubiquitous computing, decoupling the creation and usage of location data. Fire Eagle enables location to be broadcast to a platform which brokers this data to other applications for permission control. dopplr is one of the first partners, supplying data that can broker location to other apps via fire eagle. spimes and sensors indicate some of the vectors that location can be drawn from.

peter semmelhack of buglabs (also an eComm speaker) speaking about the long taol of gadgets, what they refer to as 'community electronics'. LEGO mindstorms represents an OS for innovation in hardware...LEGO factory is one of the models for BUG. Most interestingly Peter demonstrated the BUG development environment. Pluggin in the base baord shows visually which modules are available as well as their scriptable properties. Each module produces a web service, abstracting a lot of the functionality, making for example the camera addressable by a URL (to retreieve the image)

talked to mehrshad and peter about european activities

bumped into gina, talked about oscon's mobile track and how well ecomm's doing - gnat manhugged me and i said hi to evan from brickhouse while picking his brain on eComm and  microhoo! :)

project sunspot - basic three layer device with a battert, processor board with radio and a sensor board that's application specific (accelerometer, light, temperature, push buttons, LEDs, analig inputs, speakers etc) demos include autonomous light air vehicles. automated helicopter piloted by sunspot drops another sunspot at a programmed location! also using sunspots to track ccondiions of sun's blackbox in transit!

came across scott varland of ITP and socialbomb.net between sessions :)

visualisation, beyond the RSS lava lamp (J.C.Herz) moving beyond beauty of visualisation to looking at utility of visualisation - what's the purpose? some principles...don't show everything right now - what's actionable and what matters - tracicalt precision and strategic sloppiness. what's a useful question? how do yo ask new questions? avoid being decor!

narrative vs hypothesis generation and testing - surfacing consequnces of the data (legislators and relationships to various parties). what're the impictions of scale and resolution, situating urself in data, broad/deep, trend analysis, statis or dynamic alerts, speed of data pipette/firehose, highly dimensional data demands choices

demo of tripledex 'necklace' no more than 100 dots on screen, visualising relationships between rael and other entities - number of connections and affinity (number between 2 entities). high affinity, low connectivity reveals clustering (e.g. pattern of coinvesments between silicon alley VCs)

Westward...

Wow - flying from Manchester to JFK and onto San Diego with no delays or interrogations? I almost don't believe it...maybe America's loosening up in anticipation of a new President, maybe it's no longer realistic to put Husseins on the Do Not Fly list or perhaps I just got lucky :)

During the next few days I'll be hopping around California and Washington for...

• O'Reilly's Emerging Technology 2008 conference. I've been to three prior ETechs between 2004 and 2008 - the first two did nothing less than change my world-view on technology and the third helped me to find the confidence to strike out on my own. 2007 was a bif of an O'Reilly bust for me with the cancellation of ETel, being unable to travel and deliver my talk for Web 2.0 Expo and having to cancel plans for Foo Camp. San Diego holds a lotta good memories for me, so it's lovely to be back in the City and also a programme that returning ETech to its roots, away from the noise of Web 2.0 and back to the cutting edge of knowledge - this time including personal genomics, hacking UAVs, emerging tech in emerging markets, policy development and data visualisation. Holy crap I think I'm going to pass out from the anticipation!

• Next up, I'll be spending the coming weekend with my great friends Aaron and Chrissey in Seattle. hanging out, discussing world changing ideas, shopping for a Time Capsule and maybe - just maybe - a trip to the Evil Campus. If I had more time, I'd love to return to Vancouver or visit Surj and Rael over in Portland.

• Finally I'll be back in the Bay Area for Emerging Communications 2008. I've been part of the advisory board since late last year and throughly looking forward to meeting many of the people we've got scheduled...I'm pretty sure we can keep the ETel movement alive through eComm.

• During eComm, I'm planning to sneak out and meet Marina Gorbis from the Institute for the Future and some of the people working on IFTF's Future of Faith programme...I'll be trying to find out how Believr should work with IFTF...also I'm planning to swing by Citizen Space to meet Tara and pinch some coworking ideas for Old Broadcasting House.

My usual group isn't around - but I'm hoping to see some familiar faces this evening... :)

Think and a Drink

Last Thursday I was invited by Gareth Rushgrove to speak on a panel at Codeworks' Think and a Drink event in Newcastle.

Each month Codeworks orients the evening around a theme of interest for the (paying) audience...this month, the focus was on Web 2.0 & Business with a pair of talks from Gareth Rushgrove and BT's Chief Web Services Architect, Paul Downey. Both talks largely focussed on Web 2.0 in general, rather than a particular focus on business or enterprise - that's OK, maybe I misunderstood the brief :)

The panel session - which also included Hedgehog Lab's Sarat Pediredla - was much more broad ranging, exploring disruptive innovation, startup culture, routes to investment, consumer technology's impact on the enterprise and the positive impact of that on productivity.

Some highlights included...

• Newcastle itself. We didn't get to see much, but glimpses of the Angel of the North, the Millennium Bridge, the Centre for Life and St. James' Park all point to an awesome urban renaissance.

• Meeting Codeworks' CEO, Herb Kim for coffee just before the event - Herb has a really interesting background and seems to be making quite an impact with Codeworks' role as a publicly-funded shepherd of the industry. I'm not sure how Codeworks compares to the MDDA or CSY, but they certainly put bmedi@ and Leeds Media to shame.

• A cute demo of mojo from Paul Downey.

• Meeting Sunderland-based Dutch entrepreneur, Dirk Kok of IsMyMusic.com as well as Codeworks' PR & Comms Manager Lewis Harrison and Aoife Ross.

• Managing to squeeze references to Foo Camp, dot:north, The Net Start, Paul Graham, Y Combinator, digital reputations, personal rights management, and open data into my answers! Actually, I wasn't that calculating - I'm glad I was able to contribute something of the wider world to this community :)

• A couple of guys who wanted me to explain how money could be made from social networks and open-source; I explained that I didn't feel Facebook had longevity and that companies like Amazon, eBay, Google and countless startups are minting money from the utilisation of open source to create new value :)

My general impression is that the North East seems to be where Leeds and Manchester were perhaps in late 2006 and where Sheffield and Liverpool are right now. There's a lotta energy and optimism but Newcastle's tech+creative+digital communities are just starting to get a feel for how to find each other and collaborate; I'm pretty sure meetups like Refresh Newcastle, Think & A Drink and the upcoming Thinking Digital conference are only gonna make this a whole lot easier.

--

It's easy to forget that the four other cities of the North are all handily arranged along the M62 and M1, less than an hour's drive from each other. The North East is maybe physically more distant, but that could help avoid an echo chamber effect and lead to some distinctive digital culture for Newcastle and its neighbours.

If the M62 corridor can evolve into the North's Silicon Valley, perhaps the North East will be its Seattle or Portland :)

Going Solo

Stephanie Booth was the first person I met exclusively through Twitter. Steph met my friend Ian at a conference last year, she mentioned her grandmother was from Leeds and Ian suggested we meet next time she came to visit her family from Switzerland.

As a prolific blogger, and someone with an emotional bond with Leeds, Steph's someone I've tried to stay involved with the city's burgeoning geek culture. When she told me she had a new venture in mind, I couldn't help be curious.

When she explained she was getting into the conference game I offered to help with a little advice and experience from my work on Design+, ETel, eComm and BarCamp Leeds.

I'm really stoked to see Steph announcing her first conference Going Solo - a one day symposium on freelancing - in Lausanne this coming May. It's gonna be an insightful and fun day set in a beautiful location with a lotta good advice. Yay Steph! Please bring Going Solo to the UK sometime soon too :)

UPDATE: Steph is speaking at LIFT08 this week.

Leeds City Centre Vision Conference 2008

Last Thursday I braved the howling winds and driving rain to attend the 2008 edition of the Leeds City Centre Vision Conference, at the invitation of the city's Chief Economic Services Officer, Paul Stephens.

Upon entering the main hall, I felt immediately out of place as the only person not wearing a suit - though I found later that the gallery above was full of students exiled from the main floor :)

The 300+ delegates were largely made up of the great and the good of the property development sector, local/regional government and large employers...ranging from Harvey Nichols, the BBC, Arup and Balfour Beatty to KPMG, to the universities and a handful of media outlets.

It's a shame that the conference was invitation-only - this in a single stroke excluded a diversity of talents and perspectives, leaving the city's future concentrated in the hands of BigCorp with no representation from grassroots groups, citizens, indeed even elected officials!

There was perhaps a great opportunity here to unlock the schedule with a parallel unconference, opening the agenda to broader commentary and input as well as surfacing important ideas in an environment that seemed to lack bold thinking.

Though the roster of speakers included the city's chief executive, it's civic architect and also the director of city development, by far the most engaging and thought provoking were those with an internationalist perspective, able to comment on Leeds' place in the world and its emerging regional and international rivals; the city's made great progress, but its unguided and lacking vision. Each speaker held great hope for the city but warned of short-termism in planning the built environment...some notable quotes included...

• 'look to define outcomes not projects'
• 'to date, Leeds has been practicing Urban Dentistry'
• 'we need a city park!'
• 'we need a tall place to see the city from - like a space needle'
• 'more tree-lined streets'
• 'be able to rent a bicycle when I arrive at the train station'
• 'the city's full of full-stops, gates, blocked paths'

Perhaps the most notable discussion was from Wayne Hemingway who (rightly) acknowledged the city's transformation, but argued that it lacked ambition, vision, an attention to detail (iconic pavements, not towers!) and the guidance of the city's creative class, noting the absence of an organisation such as the South Coast Design Forum. Hemingway's talk raised some eyebrows, but I felt it carried the necessary boldness to shake the delegates up a little...

• Style guru's warning over city's future path
• Hemingway attacks 'unsustainable' Leeds
• No Holds Barred!

I wasn't able to stick around for the workshops in the afternoon, but I've a feeling they weren't particularly inspiring or productive. Prior to the event I offered to articulate a vision of Leeds as part of a Silicon Valley style hub of startups, coworking and creative+tech culture...just one possible vision to encourage debate; not a solution, just a scenario. I didn't get a single response.

I hope some of the day's material will be shared online - particularly speaker presentations, delegate profiles and (if they exist) videos of the day's talks. It's too important a discussion to remain behind closed doors.

One very encouraging sign was a brief chat with Paul Stephens - he felt the initial event had to cater to large organisations but was very keen to move onto a broader base of representation; my suggestions of an unconference track, discussions on municipal broadband and helping some of the Civic Architect - John Thorpe - work find a way online as a kind of 'digital civic map room' enabling citizens to direct the city's futures.

All in, my expectations were low, but the conference was thought provoking and holds some promise to start some interesting discussions :)

ETel & eComm 2008

We first started talking about an O'Reilly telephony-themed conference around the time of Foo Camp 2005. A few months later we successfully pulled off ETel 2006, one of the most critically well received tech conferences in the O'Reilly portfolio, followed just over a year later by ETel 2007.

Each edition created a space for communities that would ordinarily never encounter each other; the big telcos and network players of the telco sector and the hackers and entrepreneurs at the bleeding edge of human communication. Both communities found that they had some common purpose and mechanisms for working together.

I learned a lot from being part of the advisory board for both editions of ETel and it was an immense honour to be listed as an O'Reilly writer, at the ETel blog, joining some of my industry heroes :)

Personally, I made some lifelong friends following the first ETel - Aaron, Rich, Sheldon -  people with whom I have a lot in common, who've inspired me to think bigger and just plain some of the smartest people I know. Coupled with the usual cohort of FT+Orange+Wanadoo people - Norman, Ian, Ian, Sunil, Surj, and Jon, each edition was pleasure to work on :)

The 2008 edition was due to be co-hosted with ETech, in San Diego, giving us the opportunity to reach a bigger audience and potentially infect ETech with some of the enthusiasm of ETech delegates. Sadly, O'Reilly were unable to continue supporting the ETel community and the conference was canceled.

Many of us felt the unique conversation between these two key communities needed to continue and also move beyond telephony into 'communication' in all its forms - social media, telephony, ethnographics, TV and mobility. Thanks to Lee Dryburgh, probably the most energetic of ETel's programme advisors, ETel will be reborn as EComm, Emerging Communications 2008, next Spring in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum.

Several days ago I accepted Lee's invitation to join the advisory board for eComm. Over the next few months I'll be helping round up speakers and contributors on the themes of human connectedness, open hardware, the future of TV and a bunch of interesting, random developments...

 

 

We Made A BarCamp!

Wow. We did it. We made a BarCamp!

We've been pinching ourselves that we pulled it off in just 28 days - sponsors, ticketing, food and venues. But that's only half the story, in the end it was you guys - the BarCampers - that made everything work.

We wondered if people would show, if people would present. You didn't disappoint. The board filled up within minutes; one-third presenters, two-thirds audience. We had a couple technical hitches and the drinks never came, but no one complained, everyone ignored the hiccups and just had a great time.

So in the afterglow of Leeds' first unconference, we thought we'd share a few interesting facts from the day...

• 150 people registered, 106 confirmed and 90 showed on the day.
• We had 16 women and 8 people from ethnic minorities. That's 18% and 8%.
• We hosted 31 sessions divided into 4 tracks.
• Currently 7 presenters have posted their slides to Slideshare.
• We had 2 British Sign Language interpreters that a couple of hard-of-hearing deaf BarCampers brought in.
• We had 1 real-live American, 1 graduate of MIT Media Lab and 1 graduate of IDI Ivrea...here's how they fought each other to the death.
• We ordered 30 pizzas, 112 cakes, 300 sandwiches, 168 sodas, 168 bottled waters, 125 smoothies, 56 juice boxes, 100 teas, 250 coffees and 8 pints of milk. You guys polished most of it off and we took the rest to the St. George's Crypt homeless shelter.
• We gave away 2 iPhones, 1 PRODUCT (RED) nano, 108 mugs, a Wii and PhotoShop CS3.
• Collectively we've published 574 photos on Flickr.
• The R* after party included 3 Wiis running Table Tennis managed to run up a £600 bar bill :)
• There are 18 posts tagged barcampleeds at Technorati.

They're not just numbers, but the metrics and the datapoints that show that the North is a place for technology and creativity. We had people from as far as Dundee and Brighton, but the greatest concentration came from Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and the North East; right along the M62 corridor, home to 15m Brits, a quarter of our country. Could we make this Supercity the next Highway 101...the Pennine Parallel?

Interestingly, the maps to the right show that visitors to the BarCamp Leeds site, were concentrated in London and the M62 corridor, but the attendees map clearly shows that no one from London bothered to show up...the lazy bastards.

We think we can, and the next few months will see more of OpenCoffee, GeekUp, BarCamps and Geek Dinners. You can follow news of the North's digital culture on the forthcoming .north. Hopefully those of you that were disappointed on the waiting list will be able to grab tickets next timearound. In the meantime, here's a little of what people have been saying about this weekend...

Everyone's blogging...

• Simon Wheatley
• Graeme Moss
• Tom Smith
• Tim Waters
• Kevin Whitworth
• Ian Hay
• Mike Nolan
• Connect Yorkshire
• Peter Childs
• Jen Dodds
• Paul Stanton
• Tom Smith
• Dom Hodgson
• Ian Green
• Alison Bryan
• Paul Sergeant
• Uberhype
• Paul Bacchus
• Lorna Jane
• John Hudson
• Mark Rushworth
• Dave Hudson
• Matt Grest

What happens next?
We're already thinking about BarCamp Leeds {2008}, perhaps in the Spring, but we want to make sure you all can be a part of it again, so we need your help, your ideas, your suggestions and </coughs> your money!

• Can we keep your email details to keep you informed about future events?         
• What do you think went well? What should we make sure we keep doing at the next BarCamp? How would you like to see the format, venue, networking, side events and sessions work?
• What could we do better next time? (apart from making sure the after party drinks arrive at the right time!).
• If you're one of the few people who got a ticket but didn't attend - why not? What put you off at the last minute?

You guys made BarCamp Leeds {2007} work, so we're counting on your help, your ideas and your guidance to put together an even better BarCamp for 2008!

Lastly, we'd like to put a shout out to people like Linda Broughton of nti and Leeds Met, Katherine & Johnathan of Kooji Creative, Richard Hamer of Blue Sky PR, Mohsin Ali's 300+ photos, Yuuguu's Phil Hemstead, Rockstar Games, Stewart Townsend from Sun, Ian Green at Green Communications, Plusnet's Dean Sadler, Stickyeyes, Apple and Adobe for all contributing their time and resources to make BarCamp possible for the rest of us. And of course, to all of you.

See you all in the Spring.

Deb, Dom, Imran & Tom :)

UPDATE:

• In the iPhone prize draw, we found some irregularities in voting for best presentation...though we rectified this by running a live query on screen for the BarCampers, the husband of one of the organisers won! So much for transparency...
• I only made it to several full sessions - Ben Dalton's Paleo-futures, Mark Sailes' TV3, Valerie de Leonibus' Civic Regeneration and Ian Green's co-creation...however, sessions are just a means to meet people and I had a blast hanging around the corridors and spaces just chatting :)
• I got to meet Keith Mcmahon of Telebusilis and Telco2, Ikechukwu Nzeribe and his Doodol concept, Vagueware's Paul Robinson, Paul Bacchus from the University of Leeds and Ross Brown, with whom I had a great chat about the flailing regeneration projects in Bradford :(
• My old friend Ian Hay re-ran a new version of our Web2Expo Berlin talk.
• For anyone interested, you can download the Google Analytics report on barcampleeds.com here.
• Some of the staff asked us to polaroid BarCampers as they checked in - this turned into a cute networking wall throughout the course of the day.
• Though the linkup with BarCamp Ottowa didn't go to plan, Peter Childs and i started talking about organising some stand alone DemoCamp events for early 2008.

From Cellphone To Computer

Two broken teeth, a missing passport, a closed airline route, two delayed flights, several sleepless nights and a set of wonky video-chat tests later, our Web 2.0 Expo Berlin talk - From Cellphone To Computer - finally made it to the stage on Wednesday afternoon; here's the final presentation...

Rather than speaking about a singularly staggering new insight into mobility, we chose to take the audience on a whistlestop tour of all the things we're finding interesting in the mobile space right now...from ethnography and UI innovations, to open platforms and open source hardware...essentially a playlist of the stuff we'd lined up for ETel 2008!

Ian tells me the session went well, with 30-40 people attending and handful of questions (including one from a Nokian). We also picked up some votes on the official feedback page and quite a few downloads from the presentation's Slideshare post.

Coincidentally, Tim O'Reilly mentioned yesterday that he thought one of the most significant trends he's observing is the evolution of cellphones into computers. Well done Ian :)