Innovation in Software

Whilst it was announced by the conference itself a week or two back and it appeared via @vagueware, I realised today I’d not mentioned it here: I’m speaking at ThinkVisibility on the 12th September.

It’s the first scheduled talk I’ve done in a long while – perhaps the first I’ve done since I started attending/organising BarCamp conferences – so it’s a bit weird actually planning it all this far in advance. I am however looking forward to it, as my talk for online marketers is focused on a subject area I’ve not been able to discuss publicly for the several years I’ve been learning it.

Whilst I’ve sworn to the organisers that I won’t discuss Kagtum per se, a lot of my talk will focus on techniques and technologies that underpin it. My abstract reads like this:

Why do marketers exert more effort trying to convince people who have never heard of their companies – whether it be through SEO, CPC campaigns and building social media audiences – to spend money, than they spend using technology to understand people they already have a relationship with?

Do you know how many of your current customers or site visitors are pre-disposed to buying a particular type of product online? Do you have statistics on cross-selling opportunities at checkout? Do you even know where to find that data? Or how to use technology to make sure your e-commerce platform does?

Applied software engineering, advanced data sets and a little bit of lateral thinking means your website can do your customer’s searching for them, before they know they need to search for something themselves. All you need is a little bit of knowledge, a friendly developer or geek and a leap of imagination.

In a talk tailored for people who are more curious about what’s possible rather than studying the status quo, we’ll briefly cover how centuries old mathematics can help your online presence as much as it has helped your inbox stay junk-free, touch on collaborative filtering and the possibilities unlocked in your software through just one or two key pieces of information about a customer. Finally we’ll touch on how software can constantly learn about your customers and automatically work to increase conversions.

An abstract – and hopefully intellectually stimulating – talk, you might leave wanting to learn some maths and computer science to understand how your website can serve your customers better, even if the thought of such a prospect appals you right now.

I’ll be tweaking it a little bit as I always do when developing a talk properly, but that’s the main gist of it.

A short/cut-down version will probably get done as a screen-cast for some time in later September or early Ocotber, but if you want to hear the full thing or discuss what I talk about in detail in person, I’d suggest you go and register now. The focus is around online marketing and SEO, and my talk will of course reflect the audience who will be there, so if that’s your bag there should be plenty of other talks to grab your attention and make the fee worthwhile. I hope to see you there.

I received an invitation to Hack Day in London this weekend. I’ve been mulling it over since I applied, and I’ve made the decision I won’t be making the trip to London. I thought I’d explain here what those reasons are. I’m not suggesting anybody else not go, I just thought I’d like to explain my own reasons: if you’re going, I hope you have a great time and I can’t wait to see what you produce.

1. It’s a marketing event

   I made this comment on a mailing list the other week, and one correspondent expressed surprise at this statement. In his own words it was “just a chance to hang out with other geeks”. I know where he is coming from, but the thing is, it’s not. They are shoving Yahoo! and BBC Backstage APIs down people’s throats in return for free food and drink. They’re entitled to do that, of course. However, their terms and conditions (which have to be signed on entry to the hall) state that you may not in any way be “disparaging towards the event sponsors”. They are very clearly keeping the reigns on the event and it belongs to them. It’s like somebody has told a traditional academic conference organiser about Web 2.0 and they’ve got confused…

   Like it or not, this is going to be more about selling APIs to developers than it is developers being able to do what they want. That’s up to the organisers, but I’m not sure I can handle 2 days in Alexandra Palace just for a marketing gig – no matter how cool a marketing gig it is. If they were running something like BarCamp and wanted to run a side-competition, it’d be a different proposition: it’d be the developer’s event, not the sponsor’s. I don’t begrudge them wanting something for their marketing money, I just don’t want – on careful reflection – to let them think I support their business or services just because I attended.

2. Yahoo!

   People who know me well, know I can be a bit of a political animal at times. The simple truth is Yahoo! are doing things that make me feel sick and as I’ve explained before I don’t think they’re doing much to fix the underlying problems.

   Given that I already have a problem with this being a marketing gig, the fact that I now consider it to be a marketing gig for a company doing as much harm in the World as Yahoo! just compounds my objections to being involved. I’ve boycotted all Yahoo! services for two years now: I would be a hypocrite for taking their beer and pizza and telling the World how swell their APIs are (which, incidentally, compared to Google’s they’re not).

   I did consider doing something a tad naughty: I was going to build an application that took a non-Yahoo! API of historical share prices, and show on the dateline of the graph a mapping of news stories from the BBC Backstage News Search API to see correlation. You’d be able to graphically see if certain news stories had an impact on share price, in other words.

   My demo would have been Yahoo’s share price correlated with stories on dissidents being locked up in Chinese jails.

   I expect it would have been a demonstration of depressing indifference however. I might still spend my weekend doing this project, but doing it from the comfort of home and not under fear of that “disparaging towards the sponsors” clause in the T&Cs (section 9, paragraph “c” if you care).

3. It’s in London

   I suspect I’ll get flamed more for this one than I will any other point. However, I want to let you in on a little secret:

   All the interesting web and digital media stuff going on in the UK right now is in the North.

   Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds: they’ve all got interesting people doing interesting things. I know because I’ve met some of the people involved and I’m constantly impressed by the ideas I see coming out of the Northern Quarter and the SMEs in the North in general.

   You know who is going to be at an event in London? Mostly Londoners. That means large, corporate agency types. That’s fine, they’re happy, they’re great at what they do, and it might be interesting to see what their thinking is these days. However I’m thinking they’re going to be somewhere behind where the North is right now – large agencies can’t afford to be right on the edge, because that’s not where their customer base want them to be. The North is small companies doing stuff that is edgier because they have to get noticed. In my book, risk-taking and being prepared to fail gets merit.

   This isn’t just me being North-vs-South-ist here, I watch the industry pretty carefully and I really do think that the leading edge stuff in the UK right now, whilst still behind the US, seems to be happening in my backyard. Most of the cool kids aren’t going to London. I know it takes bravery for Yahoo! UK (London based) and the BBC (still mostly London based – for now at least), to think about running an event “up North”, but I think it would have been a better event.

4. My laptop is fux0red

   And I can’t be bothered getting another one sorted out before Friday. I could have gone out and picked up something from one of the Mancunian resellers tomorrow, and be up and ready for the event, but I’ve got more interesting things to do than try and get a development environment onto fresh hardware for a one-off.

And that’s it really. They might seem like stupid reasons to some people, but they all swing things in favour of staying in Manchester. I was really looking forward to meeting up with people down there and have a laugh, but I’d rather wait until a more interesting and local event happens around here. One friend suggests that by Saturday morning I’ll be regretting not going, but I think I would have regretted going a little more.

UPDATE: I received an e-mail from Tom Coates involved in the organisation of the Hack Day event. The important points are that he’s had the T&C’s changed so you can now disparage the sponsors. Please feel free to do so. He also explained the London location as being because it’s a “pan-European event” and apparently London is a better transport hub. That to me just suggests he doesn’t know a lot about Manchester, alas.

I’m still not going, but he tells me that means the ticket gets opened up for somebody else who might appreciate the huffing and puffing of the Yahoo! UK staff protesting that they’re lovely people really.

Meanwhile, I decided to go to the pub this Saturday and invite some friends. We’re going to call it AntiHackDay and that link takes you to the wiki page where we work out what to do with our afternoon. So, if you’re in Manchester, can’t make it to Hack Day (or weren’t invited), sign up.