Tech: Blog

With an average global combined market share of 85-95%, iOS and Android are by far the dominant players in the mobile operating system space. So why bother looking into or developing on any other platforms?

I have dabbled with a little bit of work in the tech/health scene and always knew that Melbourne generally had a large and healthy medical ‘industry’, but I had no idea that the Startup space was so large! Tonight’s event was held at the brand new Royal Children’s Hospital, which was very shiny, new and welcoming. The crowd was a good mix of clinicians, technical folk and business folk and there were quite a few speakers, so I’ll get on with telling you about them all in my usual very brief manner.

Another great 'What do you know' session from <a href="https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webdirections.org%2F&ei=yw5CU5rLDcmdkgWC4oDoCA&usg=AFQjCNFVeqPXVmE57AS0EUr3fdd42psoPA&sig2=HXz7xVEu8XhKCcZjXcFpTg&bvm=bv.64125504,d.dGI" target="_blank">Web Directions</a>, lots of short talks, lots of short descriptions...

My new tech collective, Gregarious Mammal is a proud sponsor of the next <a href="https://sf2014.civicrm.org/" target="_blank">CivCon in San Francisco</a>&nbsp;on the 24-25th April&nbsp;and as a sponsor we have a free ticket that we wont be able to utilise, so we&#39;re giving it away!

We had two local and two international speakers this month&hellip;

One of the peculiar aspects of Android is that theoretically, everything is replaceable. This includes phone features, which initially seems odd, the fact that you can replace your phone dialler with something else.

The old paradigms in software design have been on life support for a long time.

Every now and then along comes a piece of software that just does pretty much everything right, one of these is Dash.

This was a great <a href="https://productanonymous.com/" target="_blank">Product Anonymous</a> session with <a href="https://au.linkedin.com/pub/jason-cormier/15/131/744" target="_blank">Jason Corimor</a> of <a href="https://www.mashery.com/" target="_blank">Mashery</a> that covered the business and commercialisation of using APIs, I intend to expand on a few of these topics in the future, so will touch upon them here.

I have the fantastic opportunity to represent two of my favourite non-tech talks from last year, I&#39;m back at Laneway Learning to present my &quot;<a href="/cosmic-horror-hp-lovecraft">Cosmic Horror &amp; HP Lovecraft talk</a>&quot; on March 5th, you can <a href="https://melbourne.lanewaylearning.com/classes/cosmic-horror-and-hp-lovecraft/?utm_content=buffer21da4&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;utm_source=twitter.com&amp;utm_campaign=buffer" target="_blank">book in at the Laneway Learning website</a>. I&#39;m also presenting a segment of my &quot;<a href="/mapping-and-why-your-view-world-wrong">Mapping and why your view of the world is wrong</a>&quot; talk at <a href="https://thelaborastory.com/" target="_blank">The Laborastory</a> about John Harrison on the 1st April.

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A strange session tonight as we had a last minute cancellation, this coupled with the typical business session audience, i.e. High RSVP, high no-show, meant it was a quiet and quick evening.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Andrew Skinner confessed to not being a confident public speaker, however this didn&#39;t detract from his high quality, high content presentation. The presentation covered getting client / internal team buy in for developing apps and Andrew drew from his years of experience working with some high profile clients and projects. His practical take homes was an explanation of Business canvases for developing business models and how to use them.<br /><em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Connect with Andrew via LinkedIn - <span class="s2" style="line-height: 1.538em;"><a href="https://au.linkedin.com/in/andy2307" style="line-height: 1.538em;">https://au.linkedin.com/in/andy2307</a></em><p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Cameron Burns took a very different approach, being from a marketing background, throwing away his planned talk and just seeing what the audience were interested in. He covered sources of funding, choices of development stacks, using remote development teams, marketing plans for your apps and much much more in a quick fire sequence of tips and advice.<br /><em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Connect with Cameron via LinkedIn - https://au.linkedin.com/pub/cameron-burns/21/71/629</em>

This was a strange event for a couple of reasons, firstly it didn't run very smoothly with lots of minor technical issues and delays that made the event run very long and late, with the main event not really starting until 8pm after a 6:30 start. Secondly the pitches (I saw, see later) were generally a little unsure and not in the traditional pitch style, I spent a lot of time thinking 'and...?', it was never very clear why the pitchers were pitching, what did they want to win for, what did they need the money for? A lot of the pitches had references to 'how awesome' eLance was, feeling more like a pitch for eLance than their own products some of the time.

This was a great session with a myriad of conflicting opinions and points of few, that always sparks a good debate :)</div>&nbsp;</div>First up a great set of introductory resources for startup founders from Scott Handsaker, with a lot of new initiatives arriving in Melbourne. His slides will be available on the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Melbourne/events/160212272/" target="_blank">event&#39;s meetup page</a>.</div>&nbsp;</div>Secondly was a very constructive talk on outsourcing that actually gave some great constructive advice on best practise in this sometimes thorny field. Advice covered finding, briefing and using outsourced workers as well as more details on creating a brief, making sure they follow it and how to evaluate their work coping with time differences and other infrastructure and culture differences. Finally, in a nice positive twist, the speaker recommend being generous and encourage to your workers.&nbsp;</div>&nbsp;</div>Final came a panel with a mixed bag of local and international entrepreneurs, Susan Wu, Leni Mayo and Brendan Lewis. They discussed the Melbourne startup ecosystem and how it compares with others around the world, especially in the UK and US. Here&rsquo;s a few tidbits I garnered and remembered to write down.</div>&nbsp;</div><ul><li>People only look for success, not necessarily actions when weighing up the impact of startups and/or a city. Connections and support for these startups are equally as important.</li><li>Those individuals and organisations who are successful should give back.</li><li>London had been a recent case study of government encouraging growth through backing and legislation, but London scale is vastly larger than Melbourne.</li><li>Melbourne&#39;s lack of size and geography makes us look more outward, also our lack of plan B if you fail, there are no massive employers Like Google or Apple who will value you.</li><li>Australia is too full of safe investors, non risky investing.</li><li>Lean and tech startups aren&#39;t the only startups in Melbourne, there are many others participating in different scenes such as medical.&nbsp;</li></ul>

When did you last use the references feature in Microsoft Word?

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Over the weekend I saw <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/" target="_blank">Her</a>&nbsp;and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2007360/" target="_blank">Computer chess</a>, very different films about technology that were delivered in very different ways, but there were several similar threads running in them that got me thinking, these similarities were&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">They ended up not being about what I was expecting and (more seriously), they were about the interactions of computers with humans, albeit at very different ends of the spectrum.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">At one end, the amateur made Computer Chess dealt with the early days of computers interacting with humans (taking place in the 70s), in the film the programers are seen playing out the moves that the computer programs suggested, with the computers effectively playing &lsquo;each other&rsquo;. The concept of the computer playing a human is still seen as a crazy idea and the computer winning, even crazier. In fact, one of the plot twists is that a particular chess program, actually performs better against an &lsquo;unpredictable&rsquo; human instead of a &#39;predictable&#39; computer.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">At the complete other end of this is Her, a film that I equally loved and/or hated depending if it was satirical or not. In Her, most are seen in almost completely subversive relationships with their technology, entrusting just about everything to them. It was a reality that wasn&rsquo;t too far in the future from our own, but the scariest thing about it was how self absorbed everyone was, even away from their technology, all they did was talk about themselves and their problems. Again, I&rsquo;m not sure if this was intentional satire or just an americanisation, but it showed just how comfortable people were with having their technology interact with them.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This got me thinking about &lsquo;Computer Human Interaction&rsquo; as opposed to the more traditional &lsquo;Human Computer Interaction&rsquo;. Of course, for as long as we&rsquo;ve been interacting with computers they&rsquo;ve been interacting with us,&nbsp; but as we have more services and products like Siri or Google now that pre-empt us and often are the initiator of an interaction, we need to think about new paradigms for those interactions that are helpful, but not creepy.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Interesting times.

I've been learning to drive (again) recently, with an aim to finally actually take my driving test, I'm also a keen (legal) cyclist… None of this has any real bearing on me deciding to attend tonight's event, that was more to do with my fascination in knowing about and understanding the various data sets that are available from our government agencies.

Joomla! Day Melbourne 2013 polo shirt, very nice but a little large for me.

I love this towel, but being white it gets dirty very quickly, so not really sure what to do with it...

I've been sitting on the post for a while, a series of (comical) screen shots on what different people want from a website during it's design process. You may recognise some...

November has been a great month for meet-ups, perhaps everyone wrapping up for the year is making organisers up the ante.

It seems as the year draws to an end, we&#39;re having some of the best talks! Damn Christmas&hellip;

First up, I find it strange how different sectors describe the same things with different names and have the same problems. It&#39;s simultaneously refreshing and depressing that small and large organisations have exactly the same problems with their projects.

A great session tonight with two case studies from local Drupal shops...

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A few weeks ago I quit my job, I&rsquo;d been there for two years but it was no longer right for me anymore.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;m not one to rest on my laurels, so what&rsquo;s next? After a process of figuring out who I am and what I want to do, quite a lot is on the horizon, allow me to introduce you to some of the potentials&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Wrapping up my involvement in Green Renters</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This has been something that Cate and I have been trying to do for a while and we realised it needed more focussed work than we initially thought and we&rsquo;re weighing up quite what shape this will take, if you&rsquo;re interested in knowing more about that, <a href="https://greenrenters.org/news/time-new-lease" target="_blank">read this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Starting a new cooperative organisation</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The shape that this will (possibly) completely take is yet to be decided, but I&rsquo;m resurrecting and changing an old tag line from my past and starting a new Community development and Technology co-operative business called &ldquo;Large Gregarious Mammal&rdquo;, if you&rsquo;re interested in that or want in, <a href="https://largegregariousmammal.com/content/introducing-large-gregarious-mammal#overlay-context=" target="_blank">see this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;">Writing more</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Wether it be on the very blog or on other more established publications, I want to write more&hellip; About technology, ideas, other people&rsquo;s ideas and&hellip; My book&hellip;<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Lean Agile nonprofit</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;ve mentioned this before, but I&rsquo;m stepping up working on my timely and needed (at this time) volume (but also consultancy, blog etc&hellip;) on applying lean and agile methodology to the non profit world. <a href="https://theleanagilenonprofit.com/" target="_blank">Follow those exploits here</a>.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Tools for Changemakers</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Inspired by the reception from my sessions as part of the Chagnemakers Festival I have decided to turn it into an ongoing project, not only more such sessions, but also a website resource that will weigh up and review tools suitable for Changemakers.<br /><a href="https://toolsforchangemakers.com" target="_blank">toolsforchangemakers.com</a><p class="p1">Or I might just get a job&hellip;

Jonathan Teo (originally from Sydney) from General Catalyst Partners, a leading VC firm in Silicon Valley. Jonathan has personally led early-stage investments in 3 of the hottest companies of recent years including Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat, so a body of great knowledge.

<p class="p1">I feel slightly cheeky writing much about the event as I didn&rsquo;t really end up doing very much and felt somewhat humbled and embarrassed by the other attendees.<p class="p1">Anyway, to start at the beginning.<p class="p1">HealthHack 2013 was a weekend hackfest solving problems that medical researchers face. HealthHack brought together medical researchers, bioinformaticians, software developers, data analysts, data visualisers and designers. Together, they created new software tools to analyse, visualise and communicate data.<p class="p1">Organised by a great team in a very welcoming atmosphere it was a surprisingly well attended event considering the niche topic.&nbsp;Read about the weekend and the winners here - <span class="s2"><a href="https://healthhackmelb.com">healthhackmelb.com</a><p class="p1">I turned up on Friday night and enjoyed being very well fed and watered and finally got to meet <a href="https://twitter.com/FCTweedie"><span class="s2">@FCTweedie</a> in the flesh after much mutual twitter stalking.<p class="p1">I listened to the problem statements and must admit it was all a little over my head. I come from a technical background and despite having studied &lsquo;proper programming&rsquo; at University it has been a very long time since I really did any and I realise my web work is very light really. Also the technical scientific nature of the problems was a little out of my depth, I vaguely understand what things like DNA are, but when it comes to reporting, analysing and visualising them, way out of my comfort zone.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Still, I found one talk spoke to me at a level I could understand, which was about visualising the quality of academic papers on particular subjects. Working a lot within content management systems, this seemed like an ideal fit to my skills, so I joined the team. However, mixing with a bunch of far superior programmers to me, it was immediately obvious that they had far more complex (and probably more appropriate) solutions in mind and I was a little lost again&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I meandered around for a bit watching what people where up to and went to see if the organisers needed any help, they didn&rsquo;t, but were incredibly nice to me about everything and we had a very interesting chat about Hack events in general, but I think that&rsquo;s a discussion for another blog post.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Great stuff and congratulations to all involved.

I am excited to be the track chair for site building at DrupalSouth in Wellington next year and it&#39;s time to get your session proposals in!

An ever growing miscellaneous list of travel tips and thoughts that occur to me. These are about travel itself, not my actual travels.<ul><li>After flying international, getting low cost flights for remainder of the journey isn&#39;t worth it.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Don&#39;t always go for the cheapest option for transfers etc, often not worth it the long run.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">British airports suck and so do most of the associated services, they have some of the worst customer service around.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Going off the beaten track is worthwhile.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Hotels are the past, airbnb is the future.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Being an English speaker is an amazing luxury when traveling.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">There is a gap in the market for a decent travelers sim card with good data. <a href="https://www.lebara.com.au/" target="_blank">Lebra</a>, and <a href="https://uros.com/" target="_blank">Uros</a> come close, but still not quite, please let me know if you know of anything better available in Australia.</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Is it me or do airlines not want to give away add much alcohol as they used to?</li><li><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">One travel power adapter is rarely enough.&nbsp;</li></ul>

<p class="p1">I am travelling on a three stage international flight today, it has a few hours stopover in each transit location, but that&#39;s little enough time that on upset can throw the whole flight out of whack.<p class="p1">I woke up this morning to see Google Now telling me that my first flight from Melbourne to Sydney had been delayed (I love big data and personally don&#39;t rely mind what services now about me, as long as I am aware) by two hours, which would mean I would miss my second and longest flight leg. I checked my emails, nothing from Virgin, no SMSs either. I checked the flight statuses on their website, which confirmed that my flight had been delayed (I&#39;m intrigued to know how you know a flight is going to be delayed in advance, but that&#39;s another discussion), so rang their customer service line to see what was going on.<p class="p1">After a bit of fathing about, which I always seem to get with Virgin customer service, it often takes three explanations to make them understand what you&#39;re talking about, I was informed that I had been moved to a flight an hour earlier. Still no emails or SMS regarding this, so what if I hadn&#39;t had rung?<p class="p1">I was still a little unsure about the change, but I figured there&#39;s certainly no harm in getting to the airport early, so left aiming for the earlier flight anyway.<p class="p1">Finally at a little over 2.5 hours before my new (unconfirmed) flight I finally received a phone call telling me to call Virgin about a flight change, so after ringing their customer services line and more fathing about, it was confirmed again that I had had my flight changed.<p class="p1">I am lucky to live close to the airport and I am also lucky that I have technology telling me my every move before I even know it myself, but what if I had been living a fair way out and wasn&#39;t so connected? Is three hours notice really enough time to get to the airport and checkin to an international flight on time? I guess this is a sign of when automated internal systems can fail.