Last night entertainment was visiting the Insync Technology 2.0 event presented by Dave Green of NTK. The 01Zero-One centre is conveniently located just behind the main red light area in Soho. The event was packed (about 100), interestingly, given last weeks conference, there were around 25 -30% females. The highest proportion yet seen by me at a geeky type event. An excellent evening, if very rushed, it started at 6.30 and the place HAD to be emptied by 9pm with 6 very good presentations in between and a couple of wine breaks. All my photos are on Flickr tagged Tech2.0@Zero1 The talks in order of appearance:-
Nick & Robert Ludlam Promise TV -Unshackling you from the tyranny of television scheduling
Nick gave a quick review of the past history (Ludlam family have been into TV for over 50 years) history of VCR and Greg Dykes greatest achievement with Freeview which gives the UK 5 analog and 30+ digital channels for free. The VCR/PVR markets havent kept up ie Watch one record 2 is current max.
Demonstrated their very neat box that can record simultanously 18 channels in their entirety for a weekend. It has a seperate thin client that allows access through a remote control with elegant on screen software to access a recording or part thereoff . The box allows upto 4 thin clients. Comments from the existing (2)users:-
You watch less TV
Engagement threshold moves up
Last Nights TV in Metro can be watched!
Considerably less live TV watched
News primarily comes from Radio
They still buy The Radio Times
They are currently going into beta mode making a couple each week themselves. A really great product but I can’t help feeling they are never going to reach its huge potential without a radical change in strategy which will be hard for them. But still an amazing family. and product.
Tom Armitage then gave an amazing animated talk on why game console controllers are killing creativity in videogames. Apparently about 31% of households have consoles but the market has zero growth even though gaming is bigger than Hollywood. Tom speculates that this is due to the complexity and user unfriendliness of the game controllers, which apparently gain two extra buttons at each evolutionary stage. Hence, new gamers find them aesthitically uninspiring.
More detailed write up of Toms talk at etech is here
Liz Turner then spoke about her work at revisualizing the time line data obtainable at Harpers. She displayed some pretty cool isometric layouts of timelines with icons. Really impressive software which she says is a bit buggy but maybe she will open source her work.
Charles Armstrong of Trampoline then described his experiences on living for 12 months in an isolated community of 80 people on St Agnes in the Scilly Islands. Things he learned-
Groups have implicit authorisation parameters that govern how they interact.
Groups pool intelligence on who needs to know.
Groups function as targets.
Semantic tags attach to each person or group.
F urther away two people are the higher the threshold to pass information.
Then showed how this can be used to change distribution of knowledge in large enterprises.
Dan Catt then went into a little tirade of how he hates the telephone companies and the OS for holding onto all that locational data which could be used for doing interesting things with photos etc, Dan works at Flickr. Instead people are having to re-invent the wheel with the openstreetmap project (a group are descending on the Isle of Wight to open map the island).
Yoz Grahame of Ning then had a really good demonstration of how ning makes it really easy for anyone to make cool Social Web applications by cloneing previous apps and putting in your own details, appparently there are some blog apps too. For a fee they will even do the hosting of your domain name. Yoz then showed as his bunnie which apparently can detect wiFi networks and then using using Ning you can write applications that wiggle its ears.
The cool thing is Ning is all self-financed. I’m sure Google or Yahoo will buy them out – this stuff is just soooo cool. Or maybe Robert Scoble can get his lunch mate Bill to buy them.
Right I’m off to write that killer Ning application right now 🙂
Great comments and wish I had been able to attend. Very interesting that the OS is not keeping up with the times. I guess that BT tried to hold onto its lines and that is changing. So OS will have to change as well.
Glad you liked the talk! (And also glad you got a good shot of me with the Nabaztag 🙂 ) If you need any help with Ning, don’t hesitate to give me a yell: yoz (at) ning.com.
“Interestingly, given last weeks conference, there were around 25 -30% females. The highest proportion yet seen by me at a geeky type event.”
A friend commented on this, too. However, you must bear in mind that the money is back these days, so we’re all just looking for husbands, obviously.
Sounds like it was brilliant. What a pity I coudn’t make it. 🙁