Videos of the #gadgetshowmob meetup at Somerset House 20/03/2009

To be screened on Channel 5 on Monday 04/05/2009

I am breaking the first 2 rules but lets press on shall we? Every thursday night near Latimer road tube in London, from 7pm there is a 5 a side football kickabout, involving colleagues all in mobile technology.

This night involves football, beer and mobile (and invariably watching Spurs or Rangers perform really badly in the UEFA Cup), though not necessarily in that order.

The rules are listed below:

1 – The first rule of thursday night footy night is, you do not talk about thursday night footy night.

2 – The second rule of thursday night footy night, you do not talk about thursday night footy night.

3 – If someone says stop, goes limp, taps out, the tackle is over.

4 – Two guys to a 50/50 ball.

5 – One 50/50 ball at a time.

6 – No half pints, no alcopops.

7 – Matches will go on as long as they have to.

8 – If this is your first time at thursday night footy night, you have to go in goal.

Occasionally when it looks like we are going to be bodies short I will be tweeting from my @reyes looking for a few good men!

Here are more videos taken of DecisionsDecisions. Two status meetings and the intro to the final presentations:

It is blink and you’ll miss it but at 6 minutes and 28 seconds into the footage I am on camera for 2 seconds! Maybe next time I’ll be on for longer, say the length of an escalator ride because I’m pitching a startup

Here is the full episode of techfluff.tv if you want to watch the remaining 10 mins and 35 seconds of footage:

Number of videos from DecisionsDecisions #launch48 weekend 

With the assistance of mled@twitter I posted my first blog post on another site. This is part of the #launch48 project and charts day one of Decisions Decisions’ efforts to produce a web app in 48 hours.

Check it out here

This is the idea I pitched at #launch48 event. Although I managed to get an impressive 11 votes, alas it was not enough to progress to the next round. Here are the details of the service for you to see and consider whether it should have progressed to a 2nd round of pitching:

Back’em up! – the intelligent online backup/recovery service for the individual in the web2.0 world

The idea is that users who share + tag data online be able to save a secure copy for themselves of everything. This information is then stored in a database that allows for easy download in a standard format

At any one time you could have user generated data in a number of places such as:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Plurk
• flickr
• Delicious

The current situation is people are beginning to share increasing amounts of data online and storing it up in the cloud. This data is stored in a number of different locations with services that are invariably ‘in beta’ and offer no real solution for helping users backup and protected their generated and tagged data. The Back’em up service would empower users to take ownership of their generated and tagged content.

-Possibilty to offer data synchronisation service with users’ own networked storage

- Data Portability, users could download all their data in some standard database format for easy search and import/export

-Service aggregates social media information that the individual is sharing and tagging but for backup purposes – not a social media profile aggregator.

Above all, for the system to work it has to be simple to use and give off a ux experience that it is handling all the complexity in an automated fashion in the backend. The user would merely associate the accounts they want backed up.

• Free version which backups up links from rss feeds
• Education edition which backs up links and data for students/teachers
• Premium edition which will back up link + data for everyone

Another possibility for a future service would be to combine the Back’em up user data with a simple web dashboard and networked storage hard drive with web server . This could take the form of selling network storage devices with preinstalled software to operate the synchronisation or a paid for web server/web server plugin that could then be set up to turn someone’s networked hard drive into an intelligent backup drive server.

1st iteration of product

could just scoop up rss feeds and save them in a database with all data tagged and searchable

Premium edition would be backing up the rss feeds and the actual textpicturevideo data it is pointing to. So user would not only have rss link data backup but the actual data (web pages, texts, pictures, videos etc…)

2nd iteration of product

Introduce support for standard authentication tools to allow seamless integration with user account level access to their chosen services, this would provide a more detailed access to target data for backup

3rd iteration of product

Networking tools to provide synchronisation services

Early Adopters – as web 2.0 gets more popular so the marketplace potential would increase

Education – allow time-stamped data copy records to be kept of online sources used.

In under a week the event Launch48 will kick off in London.  Around 80+ people will split up into teams with the remit of creating and launching a web app in 48 hours.  It is a huge opportunity to get a taste of the startup scene and pick up vital experience of what is needed to bring together such a project.

On hand to assist the groups will be a team of mentors from a variety of different backgrounds; people who among them have the following companies on their CVs: Mozilla, Google, Yahoo, Amazon Web Services, Spark PR and WAYN.

The event welcomes people to participate who are “interested in web apps, business, technology, or networking with like-minded people”  This should prove to be an exciting 48 hours for the people involved and the opportunity to see if you have what it takes to be part of the start-up scene.

At the time of writing, there are only 10 spaces left so act quickly if you want to be involved: http://www.meetup.com/Launch48/

Future of Web Design

I have managed to secure myself a ticket to the first day of this event run by the excellent people of Carsonified.  I hope the event will will prove to be as good as the Future of Mobile 08.  There are a number of fascinating sessions whch are listed but I will be looking forward to the following specifically:

• The Future of Web Standards: Is There One?
• Designing for All in a Web2.0 World
• Tearing up the Web Design rule book
• Designing Effective Mobile Interfaces

If you are going to this event on April 30th 2009 ping me a message and I’ll keep an eye for you on the day.

I have been to two conferences recently where the twitter conference backchannel turned out to be as important as the event itself.  The two in particular were Social Media Camp London 08 - #smclondon08 and Future of Mobile - #fom.

At these events the real time conversations provide a deep layer of interactivity with the organisers, speakers, fellow attendees and ‘virtual’ attendees.  This results in being able to see instant feedback as to how the crowd is reacting as well as further exploring subjects mentioned in presentations.

Apps I have used to tweet away to my heart’s content during a conference have included:

• Twitter web
• Twitterlator
• m.slandr.net
• dabr.co.uk

Now the problem I found was whilst all the apps have been very good, they were not great for following and replying quickly within the conference backchannel.  I find that they all have the same issue, you have to switch between 2 views one is your twitter home view to send updates and the other is the search view.  Now this can present problems to the avid conference attendee who likes to tweet updates like their life depends on it, it requires a lot of jumping about to follow the thread and then reply to it.

What I’d like to see is a new ‘conference view’ it would break down into two sections – the top section would contain space to enter an update and the bottom section would contain the conference feed which would update in realtime.

I’ll get into a little more detail and feel free to correct me as I am not a prgrammer/designer and have no idea whats in the twitter api, but in the spirit of Web 2.0 I don’t see why that should hold me back, I therefore give you twitconf:

Like Twitter but at a conference man!

Okay so there might be an issue with the api limit that requests can be made of a user’s account.  Well my stab in the dark is that we avoid that by using two communications from the twitconf page, it would play out like this (please click on the picture link and peruse my magnificent drawing before continuing):

• The updates box uses the standard api calls to tweet from the user’s account
• The hashtag box prepopulates the updates box and the message count for the updates box is worked out as 140 characters minus the hashtag length. The hashtag box also provides the search string for search.twitter.com
• The results of the search.twitter.com are displayed in the largest box on the page and this can be done using standard http request thus not affecting the api call limit and allowing you to have a real-time experience of the conference backchannel.