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It was very refreshing to hear the death knell of the brand last night at Iain Curruthers’ book launch, Great Brand Stories: Dyson. Iain had chosen his venue wisely - we were surrounded by the creative output of the psychotherapeutic department at the Regents Park Conference Center - and there were a pleasing number of people from Dyson’s team present for Iain’s independent investigation of their brand.

His talk, and ideas seemed more appropriate to stimulate a lively discussion rather than a book launch and I was itching to discuss his ideas further, although unfortunately we weren’t given the opportunity. It just felt so honest and refreshing to hear and read that despite the marketeers James Dyson remained true to his cause and his ethos. He wanted to know how things worked and wanted his marketing efforts to reflect this and not some vacuous marketing ‘position’. Iain rounded things off by asking ‘When someone spends two hundred pounds on a Dyson how much of that are they paying for the Dyson and how much are they happy to pay for the story of the great British inventor.’

Well according to the Dyson marketeers in the room the Americans are lapping up the concept of the latter. Although apparently Mr Dyson is resisting their attempts to make him wear glasses and a white coat. You can buy the book here from Amazon and read all about the final throws of brand at Iain’s new web site www.encounterbusiness.com. It’s another fully content managed web site built by Asymmetry, this time based on the fabulous wordpress blogging platform.

After the book launch it was off to Unique Digital’s pub, yes that’s right, Unique’s management team own a pub! I must thank the Unique management team for collecting all the faces new and old together at The Albion for a great party.

The PHP London user group put on an amazing day conference on Friday. It was fantastically well run, had a great set of talks and was only £50. Most people I know would laugh at a conference that cheap and would say it wouldn’t be worth attending. Well the organisers proved them totally wrong, I would have paid the £50 purely to hear Rasmus Lerdorf speak about the current status of PHP - he’s the guy credited with inventing the language and responsible for it’s future direction. What could be more valuable than hearing on it’s progress straight from the horses mouth? Not only did we have Rasmus (and the free lunch) but 4 other exciting talks. For those who php doesn’t mean anything too - well it’s the langauge that we (and major companies like Yahoo) use to create rich, involving dynamic web sites.
The day was run at the Keyworth Center which is part of the South Bank University which provided just enough space in the lecture room for the fully packed conference - about 260 delegates.

Cal Evans - My First Mash Up

First up was Cal Evans with a simple overview of how to create a mash-up - in this case combining a feed from UPS and a feed from Google maps into a web site where users can track the location and the path their parcel has taken to get to them. Pretty simple stuff, and it was great to be given a few pointers on how to make it even simpler, from an expert such as Cal. We do something similar for New Wine, but Cal showed us a few modules from Zend which would make the process even less painful.

Simon Laws: Web services - drop it into Apache and away you go!

Simon showed us he highlights of an excellent new initiative from IBM and others which allows companies to split their complex systems into their components and then access them as stand-alone systems. This is surely the future of web development - you can use this system to create feeds with API’s similar to the Google mapping feed, or the Flickr photo feed. Imagine how flexible your systems would be if your organisation could take it’s Contact’s information from it’s database and package that as one stand-alone system, which could then be hooked into any other diverse internal systems (say email) or external systems such as Google Maps (or Google Search). This was of thinking is just starting to make it through to the main stream and I’m sure that it’s another concept (like web communities) which after mentioning to our customers, and allowing them some time to consider it will come back to us and say, about that .. feed, can we have one please. The SCA system discussed by Simon will allow us to do just that, although from the post talk discussions it seems that it’s not quite ready yet - it will be soon, and I think it’s the future of web development, at least for Big and Medium size organisations.

Kevlin Henney - Objects of Desire

Even with the traditional post-lunch sleep slot, Kelvin managed to enthuse and excite us all about Object Oriented Programming techniques. His interesting lecture style and dynamic personality meant few of us could fail to pick up on his evangelism of OO programming styles. I loved his closing notes about test-based design principals - he managed to explain very visually the fact that you don’t want to have your bugs and errors caught when you system is live and viewable to the public - his examples were photo’s from airports and train stations of notice boards with error messages. I think the collective favourite was taken in Paddington when a screen showed a train from Aachen labelled “error: not a train”. Interesting his take on PHP 5’s handling of OO was that it had “interesting attributes”. I tried not to take this as an excuse not to use OO.

Rasmus Lerdorf - Fast and Rich Web Applications with PHP 5

I was really intrigued to know what Rasmus would be like and what he would talk about and after he managed to break his computer (reonfiguring the kernel of his Mac) and take too long to set everything up I thought he was going to be an uber-geek. But he wasn’t, and he explained his ethos for creating php: he hated programming and it just got in the way of creating things - I think this summarises php in a nutshell - it’s used to get the job done in the simplest, most efficient and effective manner. It does this perfectly. I may be at odds with the php purists of PHP London but those facets are what drew me to PHP in the first place and why we can use it so effectively in our business. If you can think of it then you can probably do it in PHP. The set of his slides are available on the php site.

Once he got his computer going he went on to tell us simply and practically how to make PHP faster, more scalable, more secure and simpler. It was perfect, just what the audience needed to hear to ensure that we call become better more effective deliverers of the code that he invented.

Bill Gaver - Designing for the Curious Home

I don’t think anyone knew what to expect in the final Friday afternoon slot - but what a treat from Bill. His thesis was that technological development should be so much more than just creating pink ipods (or I guess yet another community web site) but to really push the boundaries of what we do and how we interact with technology. I think we were the perfect audience to be encouraged to think out of the box, and his creations, although pretty worthless commercially managed to inspire and if nothing else make us all chuckle.

My favourite was the Drift Table, Goldsmith’s delivered it to a volunteer, didn’t explain how it worked or what it was and said.. enjoy… And then after a few months they sent an independent documentary team to interview the guy and see what he’d done with it. The lucky recipient called it his hot air ballon. The table had a little glass window in the center which showed aerial imagery of the UK. He found that if we put weights on the corners it made the images move (drift) in that direction. It was also oriented using diigital compasses to the orientation of his house. To start with he loved his hot air balloon table, and used to enjoy floating around his neughbourhood looking at things from a new perspective. Then he got frustrated that he couldn’t really control the drifting and wanted to use it like a playstation and then after he relaxed about it (and got better at controlling the rate of drift with strategically placed rocks). He started going on tours of the country with his A-Z, going to look at places he knew were desirable to live in, or phoning up his friends and telling them about some local knowledge he’d aquired about their neighbourhood. He even got to the point of inviting his friends round and taking them on tours of the coutryside and decided it was so much more interesting than TV! I think this was the most successful of their experiments and also the one closest to my mapping heart.

Overall an “out of the box” ending to a great conference.

We caught up with NMK too late to catch their excellent summer event called Content 2.0 but I’d spent many an absorbed tube journey listening to the podcasts of their talks. We’d been looking for another chance to join in and found out about their latest Beer & Innovation talk covering Aggregators and Upsetters. The venue was great, downstairs in the Albannach just off Trafalgar Square, and the line-up intriguing and the audience very well connected. These Beers and Innovation sessions are a mini-conference in a bar with a panel of 3 speakers given 5 minutes to talk, followed by a lively q and a session. Last night we heard from Paul Pod from the about-to-be-launched Tape It Off The Internet give us the low-down on why he created his web site. His refreshing down to earth approach about the issues of content aggregation (TV guides and show downloads) and the challenges of making his wbe site pay were delivered in his unique style. Richard Anson from the review web site Revoo showed the business way through this with a nice solid model of capturing and selling independent customer product reviews to online stores such as Currys and Dixons. Although he seemed to be going a little against the web 2.0 grain by making it a closed service and charging to aggregate these reviews to big business.

Harder to place and more opiniated and controversial was star blogger Umair Haque who tried to give us the low down on where the industry was going and why web 2.0 sites such as friendster failed so miserably. We met up with some great people from all parts of the industry, and one of the common topics of conversation seemed to be people wondering why all the online innovation is happening in the US and not here, some say size of audience, some say it’s down to the ease of V.C. funding, and by the end of the talks I was wondering if it was just an English personality trait: no-one seemed capable of agreeing with anyone else!

Well ex-colleague Richard Rutter’s company Clear Left managed to put on a fine event at Brighton’s Corn Exchange today: to summarise it was a day conference to discuss best practices for developing web applications. Note web applications! With the advent, and the marketing noise, of social networking, web 2.0, blogs, and flickr the internet has started it’s slow but sure transition from a document delivery mechanism, i.e. static web sites of text to sophisticated, feature-rich web based applications.

Let’s face it what’s the point of building your event booking system, or calendar so that it can only be accessed from your company’s office: why not build it using current web technologies and ensure that it is inherently available 24-7 across the internet, can be scaled to deliver it’s funtionality to a global audience, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

Ok so it’s only an emergent technology,it’s early days, with the primary examples of flickr and google maps. But these feature rich applications have been made available to developers like ourselves so we can integrate them into our applciations for you. OK not specifically very exciting per se but if Google can build such a slick web based Calendar application then why can’t we deliver similar functionality to you using similar technology. Well we can and have.

The d.construct running order included:

Web Services from Amazon - you know they offer you unlimited online data storage for anything and virtual servers for a very very reasonable cost. They are also in the process of releasing the most interesting product on the internet ever - the Mechanical Turk. The Amazon mechanical turk allows you to programmatically use human beings across the world to solve problems for you. Say you need to recognise if a picture contains a human face for example, you have two options, 1. write a complicated artificial intelligence program to determine the attricutes of a face or alternatively you use the mechanical turk to emply humans at very low cost to determine it for you and then return the results.
Web Services from Yahoo - they offer the ability to integrate photo sharing, mapping, and their search technology into your site. Well! Unfortunately they’re a little late - we’ve already built this functionality and shipped it with the Mewburn web site and I’m afraid it uses Google functionality. I really appreciate the effort Yahoo are making to win over the techie developer market, they’re showing up to events, they’re speaking, they’re releasing stuff to our community and they are sponsoring our activities: Google aren’t. It’s just Yahoo have got a few years to catch up on.

The Joy of API - an overview of some of the available web services from a pure wow or cool point of view, unfortunately there were a few key admisions - namely Google and Ebay.

Flex My Mash Up - Aral Balkan showed us how the new Flash plug in is going to enable us to build amazing new feature rich applications that run from the internet. Applications that go far further than your normal web application - they can deliver a really responsive intuitive experience from searching properties for sale to mixing live video and audio. Oh how I wish we had the time and energy to investigate this delivery platform - Flash has come out of it’s accessibility douldrums and is back with avengeance.

Accessiblitiy and Web 2.0 applications - basically Derek featherstone told us that if we build our applications to deliver usable solutions, following te existing guidelines we’d be half way there to delivering web applications to the partially sighted or blind users. And if we take this methodology and go one step further and really think about how our users would use our web application without sight we’ll be fine.

Understanding Folksonomy - I was really excited about this talk and looking forward to categorising and tagging our products and the web sites we have developed for you. However the actual logistics were a little dissapointing, only 4% of internet user understand tagging. the top level analysis of this talk was that if you are a big business you can gain vital market insight from the Folksonmies people tag your products from but erm that’s about it.

Designing the Complete User Experience - Jeffrey Veen, one of the major interface gurus from Google took us through his development process. Basically the story is simple: be strong; stand up to your internal politics: for your web site to succeed you must deliver what your users want not what your CEO wants and you mut consult your users early in the project and frequently - otherwise how are you really going to know what they really really want? Jeffrey’s project management evangilism followed on nicely from Marcus’s talk last night about Agile Project development: please please remember it is far cheaper and cost effective to change your projects (and take on board user feedback) early on in the development process rather than after launch!

Overall clear left’s D.construct conference reinforced our beliefs in project development, our techniques and our delivery, and on top of that it meant I got a great day out by the sea side and gained two free t shirts too!

I arrived late to the monthly php london meet after a day putting the finishing touches to our Brandgauge project for Unique Digital (more details coming soon) - the pub based event for php programmers. This had the disadvantage of being left near the door rather than cosily sitting at a table for the pre talk networking - although this meant i got to meet an outsourcing consultant and the IT advisor for The University of Hertfordshire.

The event was well attended and the talks fascinating, Marcus Bointon spoke on xdebug - a powerful tool to make our (and your) web applications quicker and more responsive. Followed by the other Marcus’s talk on the Agile development process - one that is dear to our heart: decide on the most important functionality and deliver junks of it quickly and effectively: rather than spec out a mammoth project and wait 2 years for it’s inevitable failure (for examples of the latter see any Government project - NHS Software System, Tax Credits, Air Traffic Control Software, The Census Web Site). For examples of the former see NASA’s launch of it’s first rocket and the order “if anyone in the room doesn’t know what they are doing don’t do anything.” followed by the Britsh Navy’s order after the loss of their Flagship The Hood - “Sink The Bismark”. The moral of this story is close to one of our first customers hearts - “The Encounter Business” have published books about telling stories to make people change their way of thinking. There is a time and a place for different methodologoies and the ones to choose must be based on your experience - chose the correct method of operation for the appropriate time, client and project.