DigitalCircle – Page 10

Are you FTW! or WTF?

Last Friday I was in the University of Ulster at Coleraine as a guest lecturer for the Interactive Media Arts and Media Studies and Production undegraduate students. The full Keynote presentation is attached. (380K) The content is mostly around what Digital Circle has done, what it aims to do, the sort of activities we have … Continue reading “Are you FTW! or WTF?”

The content is mostly around what Digital Circle has done, what it aims to do, the sort of activities we have to manage and some of our aspirations but that’s not all, it’s meant as a primer to the digital content industry for people new to the industry but could equally serve to educate folk unfamiliar with the territory.

In my opinion, this was the best slide in the slidepack, directed at the students themselves.

But the slidepack also includes a lot of comments from the local industry – workers and employers – and their best advice to undergraduates who may be joining the workforce in the coming weeks. I’d encourage you to read some of them.

(For folk who don’t have access to Keynote, I include a PDF version here (270K))

Photos from Thursday’s INGAGE

INGAGE = Innovation in Gaming in Education Related posts: So, about that game company… Education and Technology The Gaming Market: time to break in? Integrated Education – Segregated Education

INGAGE = Innovation in Gaming in Education

“Music: an aperitif for the maw of Digital”

In 2009, Infurious spent some of their hard-earned cash from the NBC Universal deal to send one of the team to SXSWi. So lurid were the tales of new technology, I resolved to get more of the Digital Circle to attend this conference. From Wikipedia: SXSW is one of the largest music festivals in the … Continue reading ““Music: an aperitif for the maw of Digital””

From Wikipedia:

SXSW is one of the largest music festivals in the United States, with more than 1,400 performers playing in more than 80 venues around downtown Austin over four days, in March. Though it is an industry-based event, SXSW Music links locally with events such as the annual Austin Music Awards show. SXSW is the highest revenue-producing special event for the Austin economy, with an estimated economic impact of at least $110 million in 2008.
In 1994, SXSW added film and interactive conferences. SXSW Film has become one of the world’s premiere film festivals, focusing on new directing talent. Similarly, SXSW Interactive has attracted a strong following among web creators and entrepreneurs. SXSW Interactive’s focus on emerging technology has earned the festival a reputation as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies. Twitter launched at SXSW Interactive in 2007.
The music event has grown from 700 registrants in 1987 to nearly 12,000 registrants. SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive events attract approximately 11,000 registrants to Austin every March.

So, this year a small contingent from Northern Ireland headed off to Austin facilitated by InvestNI Trade and Export. You can see their timetable for future trade missions.

Bruce Sterling muses: ‘Is the digital world eating the music world?’ with some select quotes.

*Man, they don’t know the half of that… But on the other hand, we’re not halfway there yet. The music world was a kind of aperitif for the maw of digital.
…
“There are definitely two different mindsets. Interactive people, all they do is go to panels with smartphones and laptops and music people are like, ‘let’s get to a club, get a beer and watch a rock band’.”
…
“By midway through the festival the city’s hotel lobbies are abuzz with activity as the techies check out to leave and, sizing them up a little suspiciously, the music crowd arrive and check in….”

This comes mere days after I read FREE, by Wired’s Chris Anderson which demands reading (even just listening to the audiobook made me want the hardback).

The music industry wants paid for music whether you listen to it or not. Even if you buy a copy of a track from iTunes DRM-free and you want to shift that to another media, like put it on your iPod or record it onto a mix CD for the car (currently against UK law), the music industry would like you to pay more. So I pay a little to get one copy of a single performance of a well practised track and rightfully, this price should be decreasing. The effort put into the multiple copies is spread over the number of copies so with wider distribution, the unit price per song decreases. This sucks for bands which have poor distribution (i.e. little fame) and sucks even more for bands who aren’t very good.

The software industry would also like you, in general, to pay per copy but in the case of both open source and recent developments in mobile (i.e. the iPhone), the mass market has pushed the price of this commodity towards zero. Developers in the AppStore might complain the pricing of apps are too low but they have to realise that they contribute to that precedent and they put the value on their work. So software as a whole is decreasing in price – you can get better products for less money (consider Apple iWork versus Microsoft Office) and for the most part the market is very equitable

The reason I find it easier to pay for a digital copy of “Plants versus Zombies” than a copy of “Mountains” by Biffy Clyro is that bands have other methods of bringing in income. They can tour, they can sell merchandise, open supermarkets – they can become rock stars and get into the whole sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll lifestyle. While this is the exception, it almost never happens for developers. The blood, sweat and tears which go into a good software product are, in my opinion, at least comparable to the effort put by musicians into recording a great song in a studio. Once done, the software developer puts the software on sale and can pray for sales. The developer will not tour, few will buy his merchandise. The exchange of small amounts of money for bits is pretty much his only income. The question of piracy therefore affects them differently – for the software developer, it undermines his only income, for the musician, piracy of the music track becomes marketing, a harbinger of the album, the T-shirt, the tour.

It is a shame that the most talked about experiments of music into the digital realm have all been either shams (Arctic Monkeys) or efforts by big bands with established fan bases (NIN, Radiohead). I’d love to hear more successes and failures of bands embracing digital and I’d love to see some software developers becoming rock stars.

End of the day, I want smart, creative people paid for their work.

XCake Belfast November

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 … Continue reading “XCake Belfast November”

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.

I’m so full of interesting information, I feel like the latest edition of something or other.

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 … Continue reading “I’m so full of interesting information, I feel like the latest edition of something or other.”

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?

Open Data

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 … Continue reading “Open Data”

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?

iPhone Course at the Urban Arts Academy

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 … Continue reading “iPhone Course at the Urban Arts Academy”

iPhone Training Course

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.

Channel 4 surveys Digital Natives.

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 … Continue reading “Channel 4 surveys Digital Natives.”

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 â€œIâ€™d rather stay at home than go on a holiday with no internet or phone accessâ€

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, youthâ€™s obsession with technology is around communication.

What they took out of this was:

The TV is still young peopleâ€™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?

Pre-WWDC Meetup, Wednesday 27th May, 4 pm

Jeff LaMarche writes a long article on how to survive and indeed thrive at WWDC. My earlier WWDC First Timer’s Guide posting was so positively received that I’ve decided to re-post it now that we’re only a few weeks out from the conference. I’ve also made some corrections and additions based on comments and feedback … Continue reading “Pre-WWDC Meetup, Wednesday 27th May, 4 pm”

Jeff LaMarche writes a long article on how to survive and indeed thrive at WWDC.

My earlier WWDC First Timer’s Guide posting was so positively received that I’ve decided to re-post it now that we’re only a few weeks out from the conference. I’ve also made some corrections and additions based on comments and feedback I got. This posting really has been a community effort, so please feel free to ping me if you think there are additions or changes that should be made.

WWDC is Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference and runs from the 8th June to the 12th June.

In June this year, we’re bringing 30 Northern Irish developers to WWDC and having a Pre-WWDC meet-up of attendees in The President’s Club, Talbot Street, Belfast at 4 pm on Wednesday 27th May. If you’re attending WWDC and want to meet up to talk to experienced developers (some of whom are experienced at WWDC as well), then come along, attend a brief presentation and network with other folk who are travelling to San Francisco.

WWDC 2009

As many of you will know, I was in California in March, talking to Apple, talking to some VC folk and eating some really nice breakfasts. Some of this was as a result of the XCake group that John Kennedy and I started last year and some of it was due to serendipity – meeting some of the most excellent people along the way who were more than glad to open doors for others. To be honest, I’d never encountered such a can-do attitude before so a quick shout out to the “band of brothers” who blazed a trail in Cupertino. Here’s a pic of us outside Apple in Infinite Loop.

Following on from this, we have the two iPhone developer days and now, as part of my work with the Digital Circle, we’re planning to take some companies out to WWDC in June to learn about the iPhone. If you’re working for a Northern Ireland company and are interested in spending a week at a developer conference, then get in touch. At the moment we have 35 names of folk who are interested in attending the event which will bring over 1000 Apple engineers into a big hall to talk to many more thousands of developers about web standards, the Mac, IT and, most importantly, the iPhone.

In 2008, there were 5,200 developers there in addition to Apple staff – the conference sold out. I can only imagine that this year they will have vastly increased the amount of space or it’s going to sell out even quicker. To give a comparison, have a read on the Google Mac Blog about the report from 2008.

And when I accidentally opened my laptop with the WiFi still on, it found three computer-to-computer wireless networks on my flight to SFO. I didnâ€™t think much of all this until I looked up the aisle of the plane. Three rows up on the other side of the aisle, some guy had his laptop open. At a glance, I could see he was using Interface Builder, one of the tools developers use to build software for both Mac and iPhone. Then he picked up a book on introductory Cocoa programming, and it hit me: the conference was going to be big this year.

I’d like to point out that this was before the AppStore was open. This was before the first of the “59p millionaires“. People just knew that the iPhone was going to be massive.

I’ve posted this image before. It was taken at 0930 on the day before we were due to go to Apple. The iconic nature of this simple window display really struck me.

I asked which was more important, Apps or iPhone. Apps. Which takes up more room in the picture – the app icons almost obscure the iPhone itself. This should help ram it home to anyone running a business today that is grey panels with embedded text boxes that needs to run on a desktop PC. Mobile is here. It’s getting bigger. And if you don’t do something now, you’ll be eaten.

So, get your act together. Get in touch. Talk to me and book your place on the WWDC rollercoaster. We’ve got 35 names already registered – folk willing to take a punt. At this rate, we’ll take over an entire hotel.