ThinkingNectar

It was a great event from the many one that I had attended. Lasting 6 hours, maybe 5 if you take away the food, Unconference 2008 prove to be a success from what I see. Many new faces and the exposure for the startups pitching there were good.

To kick off the event was a keynote address by Daniel Ingitaraj, Director, Developer & Platform Evangelism, Microsoft. It was a surprisingly good presentation, given the number of Microsoft-employee presentation that I had heard before. Daniel did a good job giving good input about the topic of the keynote, Innovation: Persevere or Perish.

Firstly he address sustained growth. Sustained growth is about how broadly the business is defined and how to gauge customer needs. Giving example like Shell, where the company redefined itself from a oil company business to a player in the energy business. Adding to this, he mentioned that when there are market and technological changes, new companies appears while old established companies may disappear.

Daniel then went into the main dicussion where he define 3 important areas for innovation.

User experience

User experience if getting more and more important from a business point of view as consumers are paying more attention to user experience. How they feel, touch and interactive with the product, given the same functional use of the product or service. CIting coffee, Starbucks have redefined how coffee is consumed with latte, mocha, double shot, long black and the many different names you can think of. It is user experience.

For example. the first version of Microsoft word starts with 20 menus and now the latest version have 200+ over menus and menus in sub-menus. User experience have to change, hence the introduction of contextual ribbon menu in the newest Winword.

Moving on, was the comparision between watching the Olympics on television vs on the web. Interactivity was the main feature in this comparision and the web offers a richer and much more selection for the consumers.  Daniel demostrated a replay feature of key moments in a basketball game and the replay function was abused to make Gary Payton throw the same alley hoop to I dunno who for a dunk 4 times! Of course there were more to it, with small pockets of windows that can be configured to show different channels on the screen. Think watching track in full screen, with small windows by the edge of the screen, each showing other concurrent sporting events.

But:

Advertisement: certain things are constant even when user experiences improves

We still cannot get rid of those darn advertisment when it comes on.

Collaboration

Collarboration was a not so well point that Dainel demostrated. It was a product demo of RoundTable. A live conferencing product that have 360 coverage, and a smart tracking software that can identify who is speaking and show the speaker face to the parties on both side.

A product demo, some might yawn, but was bearable as it was short.

The Cloud Effect

The cloud effect was the last item on Daniel’s list and he goes to say that storage and computing are getting cheaper and more accessible from a price point of view. Software hence can become a service and it is essential that business define how software plays a part in business value generation.

Not all software are considered equal. Some software gives you the competitive advantage while others are just required to run the business. Email, accounting are example of software that are just required to run the business.

And he defined software between DIY software and the required by business. DIY software gives business the competitive advantage while the other software are just functional for the business.

But for the shrewd listener, this is a for Microsoft’s software as a service pitch.

To round off his presentation, Daniel talks about the type of innovation

• Continued: Current product and continue to improve on it
• Match and Surpass: Take a current product on the market, make a comparable product and enhaced it to be better than the competitor
• Greenfield: Not in the market, create this product

Note that for the 3 points above, feel free to interchange product with service.

And the final gem from him:

Breakthroughs (change) + Moment of Reality ( Understand user needs) = Innovation.

Here we are again, the time of the month where developers meet.

Held at Microsoft Singapore. Thankful to Microsoft.

The meetup was nothing much technical. More like the unveiling of the PHP Society. Shawn Liao was to announce the society and he been the Exco of the newly formed society.

Shawn took a blockish view on PHP. It is like Lego blocks. Either it is a mess or well arranged to form a masterpiece. Generally the purpose of the society is to streamlines and govert developers.

The Society purpose is cater to the professional development of PHP developers. Both at the individual level and for the image of PHP developers as the whole. This can be achieved by:

• Governance
• Training/Certification
• PHP Job Hunter Guide
• References
• Seminars/Workshops
• Newsletter
• Job Placement/Training/Internship

And then Shawn touches the rational of the logo which is a Sextant. A path plotter.

Micheal aims to increases the quality and quantity of PHP developers. It pains him to be unable to furnish names when companies approach him month in and month out for good developers. The demand is there, and he is keen to provide the tools and training to achieve the aim.

His knowledge of potential enteprise users of PHP urge him to seek out good developers. Citing Mediacorp as one of the enterprise level user. Of course there are many more users of vBulletin, Wordpress at the enterprise level.

Adding to the effort so far, there is a Strategic Alliance with Zend Indonesia, signed just a day ago in Indonesia. Yes, Micheal flew down just the day before.

What is Next?

• PHP training coming in August 2008 and Zend Framework Training
• PHP-Zend Ceritfication
• Workshops and Seminars
  • Zend enterprise PHP Workshop (Oct 2008)
  • Oracle Workshop (TBA)
  • IBM system i5 Workshop (TBA)

And with that, the Society is looking to gather developers and have their time well spend during the meetup.

Welcome to the Ph.P Society. (For a fee)

• Associate Member $88.00
• Student Member $48.00
• Corporate Member $888.00

And to round off the night (rather early), e27 is there to pitch their coming event this Saturday. Unconference 08.  unconference.e27.sg

Law.com have a interesting article about some Telcos in the States sueing cities for wanting to build publicly owned optical systems to bring high speed internet access, telephone and even cable television to its people.

In short, the telcos are stating that the cities government have an unfair advantage:

Attorneys for telecommunications companies say the litigation is needed because municipalities with the ability to borrow money cheaply — and not hobbled by the need to return a profit — have unfair competitive advantages.

I find it rather amusing. Socialistic intention up against capitalistic greed?

“Our position has never been that it is unlawful for cities to do this, but you can’t use your powers as a city to create an uneven playing field,” said David Goodnight in Stoel Rives’ Seattle office, who has represented Qwest Communications International Inc. against cities in numerous suits since 2000.

Unevent playing field? In the first place most cities government are appointed by the people to look after the welfare of the local society. And that should concerns issuing business licenses, airwave licenses and other regulatory work. Some government also own the local power and water supply system.

If the local authorities deem fibre network should be made available as another utility like water and electricity, I do not see anything unlawful in that. Have access to information in this modern age is vital for society. Do we see bookstores crying for blood should the local authorities intent to create a massive library network?

And looking at the scenario at Singapore, we are fortunate to have free access via Wireless@SG. True, it may not be comparable to the speed we might have if access was via fibre network, but the local telcos did not cry foul then. But instead they came to sell premium services on top of the government initiated infrastructure. Of course the service was not perfect but as far as I am concern, it gets the job done most of the time.

Forbes has a interesting article on a rather alternative type of business owners. Those that have a daily 9 to 6 job (or career) and holding regular hours (as well as a regular pay) but turn small business owners at night. Officer worker by day, self declared boss by night!

Read Don’t Quite Your Day Job

First of all, I will state that not all all entrepreneur are created equal. Conventional media (read local media) tend to favour the next big time. The potential big winners and the award winners. The local authorities have funding and support also for the next big idea. And more often than not, the next big idea requires research, development and insights. Not all entrepreneur are created equal and not all entrepreneurial pursuits fit the popular model.

Drawing another scenario. Someone who is in the 40s and 50s, having an established career and possibly a sizable investment portfolio may spend a couple of hours after work in his/her portfolio. He or she may spend effort creating value (read monies) for his or her retirement or other lifestyle goals.

For someone younger and starting out on a junior position in his or her 9 to 6 job, he or she can spend the after hours in some entrepreneurial pursuit. Be it doing some simple freelance work or some simple personal projects. It is happening all around. Young adults giving tuition, while others are into MLM (*which I kinda frown upon) and other sales.

Some might fear that running a business on the side might incurr the wrath of the employer. I feel that as long as there is not conflict of interest, or/and a formal and former understanding of such an issue, the employer have no rights over whatever a employers do with his or her after hours time.

I find it encouraging that there are many who are post 9 to 6 entrepreneur. Look at the many shopping blogs out there. Look at the many flea market booth operators. And look at those who are selling on eBay. People are doing that. What should be next is operations, management and scaling expertise to help such players move on to the next stage.

Anyone who reads this post and is an after office hours entrepreneur or busines owner, do leave a comment.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

This is written by Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

Simple yet insightful words that shows how dependent we are of each other.

I spend a good hour reading a Martin Gardner book over the last weekend. I will say it kept the mind occupied and it is always good to revisit some books that you had read when you were younger. If my memory does not fail me, the first time that I touched Gardner’s book was when I am 17. Pretty late I will say.

The current book have 2 rather interesting parts which I like to share. Those who knows me well enough will uunderstand that I do have a keen interest in understanding how and why human make mistake, or mis-judgement.

The ten travellers

Ten weary footsore travelers,
All in a woeful plight,
Sought shelter at a wayside inn,
One dark and stormy night.

“Nine rooms, no more,” the landlord said,
“Have I to offer you.
To each of eight a single bed,
But the ninth must serve for two.”

A din aroise, The troubled host
Could only scratch his head,
For those tired men no two
Would occupy one bed.

The puzzled host was soon at ease–
He was a clever man–
And so to please his guestes devised
This most ingenious plan.

In room marked A two men were placed,
The third was lodged in B,
The fourth to C was then assigned,
The fifth retired to D.

In E he sixth he tucked away,
In F the seventh man,
The eighth and ninth in G and H,
And then to A he ran,

Where in the host, as I have said,
Had laid two travelers by;
Then taking one– the tenth and last–
He lodged him safe in I.

Nine single rooms– a room for each–
Were made to serve for ten;
And this is that puzzles me
And many wiser men.

It got me the first time. Seems on the first count that some how the inn keeper threw the pigeonhole principle out of the window.

For part 2, we have a simple maths equation.

a = b +c

Multiply both sides by a-b to obtain:

a² – ab = ab + ac – b² – bc

Move ac to the left side:

a² – ab – ac = ab – b² – bc

Factor:

a ( a – b – c ) = b ( a – b – c)

Divide each side by a-b-c to get:

a = b

Again, find how where is it that your mind got lead astray.

This is a follow up on my post on Barcamp Singapore: Maps and Mobile Unconference.

I was playing around with Google Maps and looking at what other have done. Zefrank have a rather interesting and amusing, if not useful, application that shows anyone who is interested to know what is on the other side of the Earth on where they are standing now.

So for Singapore, we have the following:

On the other side we have:

So imagine if anyone starts digging vertically downwards now, he/she will end up in some rather mountainous area in Ecuador. At least we know we have a strong backing!

Pardon to any poster who had tried and failed to comment on this blog for the past few days. I had tried to be smart and change a little of the Maths comment Spam filter only to have it backfiring on me. How nice.

Thanks Lesile Huang of E27 of informing me of the malfunction. I do not have a contact form on this blog and he was kind and resourceful enough to drop me a message via facebook.

My bad.

May the comment god have mercy on my blog

I was at BarCamp Singapore last week. Yes, this post is overdue but still it should give a good insight to what (some of) the speakers had offered.

The topic to discuss is on Maps and Mobile. Mainly Google Maps and generally anything mobile. 2 tracks and I attended the Maps track. But before going on, the event was the first public event sponsored by Google Singapore and supported by NUS Enterprise, e27/Garag3 and Singapore PHP User Group.

Derek Callow (Corrected after by Lesile of e27 update me on the actual speaker) Andrew McGlinchey (Geo Product Manager for SE Asia, Google Singapore) was first to present on the overview of Google Maps API. Nothing much technical but generally what Google Maps aims to be and what are the possiblity. In summary of what he said:

• 80% of data have location related meta information
• Geospatial long tail: most geo location information collected by government are limited to landmarks and places of general interest. What about parking lots and places to walk dogs? Hence the long tail of geospatial data.
• Google Earth have managed to map a pixel to a meter square accuracy.
• Enterprise Level user agreement: A paid service level agreement for power users, whom which none of Singapore Google Maps based website have yet to require.

He always suggested that we check out the following:

• KML
• Sketchup
• Mapplets Gallery

A useful introduction to Google Maps. Too bad he spoke without a microphone and it was pretty hard to hear him from the back of the room.

Second up was Gerard Lim, CTO from bak2u to talk about Secured Mobility. For this I was not paying too much attention as my area was way to noisey with dis-interetested participants.

Nokia managed to get the first presentation slot and was presentated by Gary Chan. His presentation was (sadly) a close duplicate of what Derek covers earlier. Thunder stolen maybe. But Nokia Maps are like Yahoo and MSN maps, competitors in the Maps API arena with Google. Just maybe the geek culture just prefer the Google’s touch better?

Singeo was next with Jon Petersen. Singeo have maps on many kind about Singapore. He have maps on wifi location in Singapore and general stuff that the public will be intereted in but may not be captured by the governement.

He mention Fire Eagle which is a location broker which allows a user to allow certain controlled access to his/her location so that certain services can be provided to him/her with such information on her current location.

Then he touch upon some concept of locating a person’s location via wifi based trigulation and/or GPS or event mobile phone location. Such the ability to location on person will allow an intelligent system to show nearby bus stop to anyone, to cite an example of his.

Shopelette was next and it is a presentation on their site and services. Pretty site, and rather appealing for the shopahoplics. Generally is a site for people to state their purchases. Mainly for the less mainstream from what I saw. Of course, he mention 3 key points which strikes me:

• Shopping is a social activity
• 95% of purchases happen in-store
• Location, location, location

Overall, a insightful view to something which I have little interest in. Which is shopping. If ever I was to use Shoplette, I guess Sim Lim Square is all I see. Right? Throw in Funan Center too. The presenter’s blog here.

On a side note, Shoplette is done in Ruby on Rails.

Lilihood was next. They have a highly interactive map (location) based social network. Pretty fun as users can claim a turf and see who shared the turf with you and then you get to make friends and such. What caught my attention was the ability to switch the underlying map from Google to Yahoo and if I am not wrong, MS Maps too. A site with great technical effort placed into.

Last on the Maps track was on homespace.sg. This in my opinion worth my effort that day. As they covered the problems which they faced. Highly user-centeric based problems but should serve as a guide for anyone starting out on Google Maps API.

Problem: Display information – Information overload

Solution:

• Proper Planning of relevancy.
• Reduce loading of irrelevany information
• Grouping of information
• Reduce visual distraction
• Uses clusterer plugins to reduce information shown on map and group markers together

Problem: Design and Aesthetics – textless markers

Solution:

• Design markers to symbolise information
• Consistent theme for different class of markers
• Custom markers for School and MRT lines, 2D markers vs 3D markers to differential importance
• Making use of info windows, uses Danmarvelous

Problem: User behaviour – dragging and zooming requests

Solution:

• Limit request by understand user behaviour
• Separate type if request.

In short, I think it as a great presentation on their experience with Google Maps. 2 thumbs up.

Of course, Preetam Rai sneaked in a short presentation on tagging a real life object and generate a shared communication/sharing of thoughts between users of that object/place/item. It is better explained with his blog post named tagging real world objects.

And last but not least, Widgeo.us did that beta launch and do support them and register for their service.

SimplyJean have a article (on a newspaper article) on this local company VueStar going around sending letters to local companies to enforce a patent which they (VueStar) have.

At the time of writing, Jwong had commented on SimplyJean the following:

Back to the point. The patent(s) were awarded sometime from 2001-2003. We all know that the ‘invention’, in this case the HTML ‘HREF’ tag, has been public since the early 1990s. In fact, because the method is HTML code, it should probably belong to Tim Berners-Lee instead.

Seeing as to how they were neither the inventor, and the invention isn’t new, it’ll never hold any water in court. I’d love to have them come and try me.

VueStar looks to be another company preying on the public’s misinformation to make a quick buck. Just like how another local company, Odex, cheated people of thousands of dollars by claiming copyright ownership.

They relied on the (Singaporean) public’s fear of the law, to make a quick buck, and never ever really brought anyone to court. They were just after the gullible, and VueStar looks to be just like that.

I find Jwong to be correct. Webmaster follows the current HTML standards. If there is any infringment of IP of any sort, we should be hearing it first from the W3C. Not in some form of legal letters having a go at smaller players.

What VueStar did amused me greatly. How do they think that they can pull such a thing off?

I did some digging and IPOS returns the results at here for Patent Number is 95940 with application number 200301820-7.

I took lunch time to read the patent details and its seems that it is applicable to the search results return by search engines. Hence if you do run a search engine (many of us do not) you are pretty safe. But if the nitty gritty comes in, and if you do run a search feature on your site, the feature maybe be covered by the stated patent. And that if the search result returns image to faciliate/enhance the visualisation of the search.

That brings me to the next point which can be found in the Q and A on VueStar site:

I do not have a search capability, why do I have to pay?

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has entitled you to conduct your and others viewing. They will also have to take up a licence because they are causing or contributing to your use of the VUESTAR System (TM) and using our patented technology.

This is a strange rule I will say. I created my site and if someone present it in a different manner, I am liable for fees with regards to this new presentation which I did not explictly wanted. Sounds like taxes to me. I am not a laywer by training but if the search engines or any service provider wants to show my site with a image linking back to my site, I thank them for the recognition but that is all I can do. Most website are in a as-if format. Go after those who causes the patent infringment, namely the search engines?

I guess it will be a wait and see now. The local webmaster and site owners are pretty much wiser from the Odex case and will be more than happy to wait out for the first, if any court case on this matter.

On a parting note, what on earth was the officer at IPOS thinking when he/she issue the patent?

Kind Words:
Companies were conducting this activity with out announcements to the patients.