you want to start something?

XCake, the local developer group for folk who use XCode had an interesting meeting last night. It was held in the very impressive University of Ulster Belfast campus and was catered for with cake and traybakes by Digital Circle.

The first presentation lasted about an hour and detailed the developments in the OneAPI, a GSMA Reference model for interoperability of network services for telecommunications operators. That’s the long way of saying it’s an easy way for developers to get access to call control, SMS and location services from cell networks. We had three clever folk (Seamus, Richard and Michael) from Aepona who very ably demonstrated the services and answered developer questions. More usefully, however, they were asking the developers about their opinions regarding the use of SOAP and JSON. This is all above me – but it was entertaining to hear the opinions (which were essentially: making XML for SOAP isn’t an issue for most developers but JSON is lighter and simpler).

After that we had a short discussion about our future meeting with Translink, the developments we’ve had with accessing their data and the renewed enthusiasm considering that the Ordnance Survey in Great Britain is opening up it’s 1:10000 map dataset to the public. I hope you’ll join me in encouraging the Ordnance Survey in Northern Ireland to do the same. For what it’s worth, we also have our baleful eye cast in the direction of the Postcodes held by the Royal Mail. At the end of the day if there was government money (our taxes) used to pay for datasets, then I’m determined not to pay for them again.

And we finished with a discussion of future events:

• An Intro to InterfaceBuilder
• NimbleKit, PhoneGap and Titanium: do they do what they say or is it all bollocks?
• Developing for iPhone without InterfaceBuilder
• Unit Testing for iPhone

We’re kinda unaware of other developer-related events in Belfast but we did mention that Monday night is Demo Night at MobileMondayBelfast.

Tags: Code4Pizza, DigitalCircle, Location-Aware, cocoa, iPhone by mj
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It’s been a while since I blogged and it’s entirely because of keeping confidences.

Last week was the culmination of a lot of planning, a lot of thinking. Some of it started the previous week, when John Hartnett of the Irish Technology Leadership Group (ITLG) had a meeting with InvestNI, QUB, the University of Ulster and, at my insistence, Momentum and Digital Circle. But part of it started 90 days previous, when David Kirk asked me to participate in putting together a document which would form the framework of what we thought needed to happen in Northern Ireland’s technology landscape. Even more relevantly, it started back in February this year when we had the audacity to travel to Cupertino and make a pitch to Apple Inc about the talent and innovation available in Northern Ireland. All of this, from pitch to pitch, has made great dividends for Northern Ireland.

Fail Fast, Fail Often
For my part, at a meeting last Thursday with John Hartnett and John Gilmore, both of the ITLG, I pitched for Digital Circle and my pitch was simple. I want an onion skin approach to involvement with our cousins in the ITLG. I want to start by getting them to take notice of the companies in the digital content and software sector. I want to ask their help in identifying real world opportunities and, in many cases, we want them to help us to fail fast and fail often. This will be the first groundswell of culture change in Northern Ireland which regards failures as something to be despised (and only marginally less palatable than successes).

Get Involved
I also want them to use their experience and presence to advise those ideas which survive the fail test and nurture them. This can be as shallow or as deep as required. In truth, I would hope this would range from a couple of hours a month spent on Skype giving out advice to face-to-face visits in order to secure a small amount of equity. And if things worked out and the people involved liked each other, the individuals would have opportunity to become intimately involved with the company, joining the board, investing, becoming a de-facto salesman for the company as they move in their circles.

This isn’t going to happen overnight, but it ties well into some of the things we came up with in the document I contributed to which has become known as “NISW”. I’m putting a lot of effort into this, even outside of the day job, because it’s the way forward for the sector and, to be honest, in 18 months I’ll be looking for a job and I’ll want a process like this in place already for whatever I do next.

As for the confidences – I’m yet to see an announcement so I can’t say anything at all about them. But what I can say is that I am looking to meet up with the smartest folk in the province, with the best ideas and the biggest vision. And I’ll put them in touch with the first layer of the onion and we’ll see if we can create something amazing?

Tags: Commentary, DigitalCircle, Startup by mj
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After not travelling long-distance for around 15 years, I found myself in San Francisco twice this year. San Francisco has many similarities to Belfast – a plethora of neighbourhoods, a strong history of civil rights activity and the majority of economic activity being firmly in the ‘S’ part of SME.

San Francisco also has an initiative to open City data such as crime statistics, restaurant health codes and municipal recycling information. This will be stored at DataSF.org. Northern Ireland’s equivalent is the recently launched OpenDataNI initiaitve.

These efforts are aimed at the citizen as well as the entrepreneur. There’s nothing stopping a smart developer/designer from building and marketing a service that uses open data in a new and interesting way. Whether that’s directing individuals to recycling spots around the city or mixing school and crime data together with a property rental service (something I’m guessing we’ll see coming out of Propertypal judging by some of their recent tweets – smart guys!)

We already have some innovators in this arena and Momentum / Digital Circle is working to foster additional development. I’ve been working to develop the already exciting iPhone development community in Northern Ireland. DevDays in April attracted 155 people and Refresh Belfast last Monday got 90 people through the door focusing on iPhone Design despite a literally last minute venue mishap due to double-booking.

Momentum / Digital Circle are launching a Mobile Application Challenge in the coming weeks. The premise is to get folk out there displaying some of the work they are doing in Mobile Applications (featuring but not limited to iPhone development) and getting them in front of potential investors and also a potential audience. By focusing on the areas of Consumer, Health & Wellbeing, Public Service Value and Enterprise, we’re showing off some of the excellent work that goes on behind closed doors or under license to other companies in other countries. We’re putting together a series of workshops – highlighting design, Connected Health, applications which use the Cellular network and assistance in protection and exploitation of intellectual property.

For open data the possibilities are still yet to be realised and the OpenDataNI staff would love to hear more suggestions on data sources which would benefit the general public. What have we, the public, paid for and yet we don’t have access to?

Tags: Commentary, DigitalCircle by mj
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By now the second day of the Urban Arts Academy course “Beginning iPhone Development” will be well underway. The course started yesterday and has 18 folk, one of whom flew over from England to attend it, sitting down and learning from Philip Orr, programmer for Infurious and Blue Pilot Software.

The machines they are using are borrowed from Giant Associates, Mac-Sys Ltd and a local school. A lot of this wouldn’t have been possible without some quick thinking from Marty Neill (head bucko at NoMoreArt and Digital Circle Steering Group member), the rest of the folk at Trans and a heap of other folk.

Is this going to create iPhone experts?

Of course not. The attendees range from some who have never used a Mac, to one used to OpenGL|ES programming (the API used to program 3D graphics on iPhone as well as other embedded platforms. mobile devices and some consoles).

What it will do is remove some of the fear for some. And spark an interest for others. For some experienced programmers, they should be able to get a taste for Interface Builder and XCode and see whether jumping to that platform is something they want to do. For others, it’ll be the start of something. Or maybe not.

Tags: Commentary, Cool, DigitalCircle by mj
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Channel 4 just published some results of a survey into how “young people” interact with the telly, with the web, games and each other.

• They personally own 8 devices (including MP3 player, PC, TV, DVD player, mobile phone, stereo, games console, and digital camera)
• They frequently conduct over 5 activities whilst watching TV
• 25% of them agree that “I’d rather stay at home than go on a holiday with no internet or phone access”
• A quarter of young people interviewed text or IM (instant message) friends they are physically with at the time
• They have on average 123 friends on their social network spaces
• And the first thing the majority of them do when they get home is turn on their PC

Above all, youth’s obsession with technology is around communication.

What they took out of this was:

The TV is still young people’s most popular way to consume media, though in terms of time spent, TV time is pipped to the post by spending time on the internet.

I’m only really bothered by the words “consume media”. I rarely watch TV programmes linearly and spend a lot more time “consuming media” using my phone or notebook computer. In addition – using blogs, tools like twitter, I’m involved in the creation of that media – be they debates, micro-conversations or social plans.

I’d be interested in seeing what percentage of ‘old fogeys’ like myself would agree with the bullet points listed above. Do you watch TV with your laptop and mobile? Ever sent a message via text or Twitter to someone sitting in the same room? (I’ll excuse husbands and wives texting each other in interminable visits to relatives with the sentiments “Can we go yet?”)

So, what about you? Are you a digital native or a digital immigrant, new to these shores?

Tags: Commentary, DigitalCircle, Made me laugh by mj
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