A rather nice Xmas beer from the Vakka-Suomen Panimo.
A strong chocolate stout flavour. Very nice.
I then followed this with a nice scottish beer from the Caledonian Brewary. THis brewary is one of the ones I have actually had a tour round a number of years ago.
Posted in Uncategorized
This was my second time at FSCONS, but this year there seemed to be a lot more talks around “Open Culture” type themes.
Two that stuck out for me were; feminism (there are more women involved than thought & some advice on how to get more) and Open farming (the open source tractor in action video is rather cool)
The Qi Hardware folks seem to have a solution searching for a problem, but the hardware itself is very cool tech. The FAQ provides a good overview.
I also learnt of the Touch Book. An ARM based netbook with huge bttery life, detachable keyboard and touch screen.
The saturday night conversation about maths (and mutilple infinities!) ensured a complete fun weekend.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: events, fscons
So while in Göteborg for FSCONS, I found a rather nice little pub, The Flying Barrel. It seems that English stlye pubs are rather popular in Sweden as that is what they associate with good beer and good times.
I started with a couple of export only beers from the Ridgeway Brewary.
A nice stout, that tasted very nice. Was a rather strong beer.
On the recommendation of the barman, I took an IPA from the local brewary and it was very refreshing.
I then took their porter, again, very pleasant.
This was a joint idea between Suuret Oluet-Pienet Panimot and Karhu
Reasonable selection of beers from the small brewaries, and Sinebrychoff only had Karhu beer available (designed for their more discerning customer?). They were all strong beers (over 5% abv).
You could also get a one litre glass for a 5€ deposit.
The food was provided by Eat&Joy Maatilatori, it certainly looked good (not just standard Makkara!)
Seemed to be something like a 65-35 split men to women (is this higher than at other beer events?), seemed similar to similar to the small breweries event.
There was also a luxury toilet truck for your convenience.
Syystober toilet truck
The music got a little loud after 20:00, but that seems the norm nowadays (turn it up, cos the kids want it loud?)
How do you sum up a weekend like that?
If someone asked you “Hey, do you want to spend 50 hours traveling to spend 41 hours surrounded by 250+ people you have never met before?” you would think they were mad, but then they would have missed out some cool times and stories.
Would I do it again? Just show me where to sign up!
Would I change anything? Probably not
A sequence of memories
(with (other people’s) photos added where appropriate or relavent)
Eating FAR too much at the ship buffet (because we had already paid for it?)
Queueing for the ferry to the Island, “it’s ok, we have beer”, “wow that’s a lot of jellyfish”, “Arse, where’d that bus come from!”
Waiting for the boat
Damm, looks like the next boat then
The guys who brought a mannequin with them
maybe encouraging someone to hold KnitCamp (if you hold it, they will come)
Suddenly it’s dark, then it’s not so warm.
Waking up at 5am, going to toilet, then finding a flock of sheep wandering across the camp site
Sheep invade the camp
Attempting to get a network up and running, using only consumer grade equipment, and some guesswork.
let's use wires
lots of wire
Learning some cool stuff at various sessions.
Seeing Vesa power a boat with a broken oar.
Floating Sauna
quite a few inside
Being asked “ok to interview you for a podcast?”, then finding out it is actually being filmed and broadcast live to the web!
Handing out thepresents from Finland from their gift-box
The amazing night sky when you are far away from cities.
Talking with @lemonad and discovering that the JaikuEngine project has really high standards.
Being interrupted by actually good guitar playing by @emanuellantz (there was also some fun and games with the megaphone, but those videos don’t seem to be up anywhere)
Damm, but it gets cold on a clear night, but lukily it then warms up again quickly in the morning.
Damm, it's cold
Repeatably being surprised at how smoothly and well everything went, as this was by far the most people ever on the Island, yet all of the staff seemed constantly happy & helpful.
Happy Campers
Posted in Social Networking, beer, interesting conversation, sauna | Tags: events, social network, SSWC, SSWC2009, unconference
With the official announcement of the N900 Nokia now has a 3 pronged OS platform attack:
– S40 for the low end
– S60 mid & high end (old fashioned?) smart phones
– maemo to cover the new emerging market of internet oriented devices i.e. iPhone, Android, Palm pre
Nokia in recent history has been all about segmenting the market and having at least one handset that competes in every segement.
By extending their experiement in the MID platform area to also include GSM capabilities Nokia should be able to get similar benefits to Apple i.e. a very small number of hardware platforms to support.
They can also expose the work they have been doing over the last few years with the Open source community, which is not to be under-estimated.
The other thing Nokia seems to have taken from Apple is to have the device available a month or two after the event it was announced at, rather than a half year (as was the case with the N97)
You can see a marketing type video here, and a more “human” version here
The Hardware specifications are listed on the site, but the really interesting thing is that Nokia seems to have listened to the information around the iPhone and seen it is all about the software, for example see this review over on maemo-guru.
The thing that may get ignored/glossed-over in all of the geekgasms happening all over the place (examples here and here) is Nokia’s moves to provide services targetted at the developing world.
I think at least some of this has to be caused by Nokia employing people like Jan Chipchase who was talking about something similar to Nokia Money over two years ago. It is also a nice complement to Nokia life tools.
These are HUGE markets that California (home of all the Web2.0, Social Media hype engine) currently does not seem to understand or want to work with, and while the margins may be very small, they are there!
Over the past few years Nokia has shown it understands how to work a very high volume, low margin business (at least for hardware) and it will be interesting to see if they can do the same with services.
The Nokia Booklet announcement resembles the begining of the partnership announcements made with Intel and Microsoft. I am guessing that although this product was being worked on before the announcements were made and may have even helped them along.
Of course i can’t find the article now, but I remember reading an article recently that pointed out that Enterprise IT changes very slowly (something like 3-5 years per cycle!) and even then is not keen on the change. As pointed out in this article by Tomi Ahonen, many Enterprises are currently married to the Microsoft stack (essentially Exchange and Active Directory), and for many this has also meant moving to Blackberry.
I see the combination of a stylish netbook alongside a small handset (for example the E52, allowing the modern road warrior to do their job more effectively, than using the compromise device that is the Blackberry (screen is too low resolution, can’t connect to a project, etc). The inclusion of Quickoffice on E-Series devices is potentially yet another string to this bow.
Posted in interesting conversation, mobile | Tags: mobile, Nokia, thoughts
The slides that Christian Lindholm used during his session are on slideshare here
As Christian’s session announcement was rather last minute (in true BarCamp style 
, the audience got to discuss the ideas in quite some detail.
During the talk (as is my habit at BarCamp’s) i was attemting to take notes and then posted them to this thread on Jaiku.
So these are my notes tidied up slightly. The text in [] are things I have remembered after the event and don’t have actual notes for.
—
The handset business is dropping – this is mainly due to consumers hanging on to handsets longer
People always need to talk so the operators are ok?
Phone to flute leap not possible for “normal” mind [referencing the Flute app demo at the recent iPhone announcement]
In-app purchasing is huge oppertunity for digital assets. [Most people have not grasped this yet?]
2 master copies (laptop/desktop & cloud)
From development of the Lifeblog software, there was two components; phone & pc. 40% of effort was assigned to sync, but ended up as 60% of cost. VERY difficult problem.
Mobileme syncing is not 100% fool-proof yet.
Privacy. Use a Box that lives physically at home but logically in the cloud rather than some third party
Figure out what a companies super rare eng skill is:
At Nokia it was the RF guys who were gods
At Yahoo it was the guys who understood backend scaling
The handset market is seperating out into high & low end, [middle is disappearing. Problems for Sony-Ericsson and others?]
Nokia is digital Coca-Cola [memorable quote from Christian]
Apple is the only b2c handset manufacturer all the others are b2b
–
Netbook:
most people are used to combination of screen & keyboard, and understand how to interact with a device with these physical characteristics. [touch-screen is too new method to interact with computers]
Operators have not figured out how to sell more than one [not sure exactly what this was in reference too, but i think it was that most people only have a single "thing" from an operator, and that Netbooks offer a chance for operators to upsell data packages]
Object is small & cheap – reverse gadget psycology kicks in, this enables women to buy in [Christian had a really good explantion of the difference of how men and women buy technology, but i have forgotten it]
Kids. Families need to be very affluent for everyone to have their own computer.
Hardware is the service – iPod is a physical service
Razr – beautiful design, super thin but horrible to use
Olpc – fucked? A “.org” is not able to compete with comercial market.
Olpc is the genes/ancestor of netbooks.
Apple will get into the netbook market at somepoint. Will they be able to be as game changeing as iPhone? [waiting for the market to settle before joining?]
Still dont have good linux build for netbooks
–
BBC iPlayer users more Bandwidth than youtube in uk
Kids using bluetooth to pirate/copy content (new sneakernet). Adults forget that they have “send via bluetooth”, kids don’t as it costs less [one reason for popularity of SMS was the lower cost of sending SMS than making a call]
[there was an example of kids exchanging 1.5GB movies via Bluetooth]
–
Companions – Limit is battery life
iPhone if used as intended, always runs out of juice very early in the day
Number of devices is increaseing. Christian has an iPhone, iTouch & e71, all three can have empty batteries by end of a busy day
[don't want to be without some form of connectivity, so share the laod between the devices to extend battery life]
–
Lots of activity in android driven by smaller operators & manufactures
Still imature
Android has lots of inovation in ui
Need to build then analyse in mobile space (this costs lots of time time and hence money)
With an OS just need to grind on it! [to drive out all the small edge case?]
Google hiring superstars who don’t have patience to grind it out?
Difficult to make a platform that is not fragmented [I think this was in reference to the many partners in Android]
Palm – beautiful but screwd
100M is small change for existing players
anaology of “Football player being sent on in tennis shoes” [does not matter how talented, if not on the field with totally the corect equipment, then will not be able to perform]
–
Syncing. Palm (currently) is a good demo [everyone is waiting to see what the reality is]
Problems of duplications, and loss (not able to define where and when so hard to file a bug)
No one has a working solution yet.
Sync is definatly a forward in the final winning team. What the other players are is not so clear.
–
On touch:
Don’t know what will be dominate entry form
Swipe. Check it out as an input method [christian was refering to a contact of his who had developed this (faster input method for touch screens), famous for developing something else]
Blackberry test that abc was faster than qwerty [comment from Jesus around some test Blackberry had done on keyboard layout. Thinking was that people were used to phones being layed out in Alphabetical order]
Chrstian has another company working in area of sensors that could help extend life of physical keyboard’s [he provided this as a disclaimer i think]
Posted in interesting conversation | Tags: BarCampHelsink3, BarCampHelsinki, events, Fjord, Predictions
Following on from this Jaiku thread there were two questions asked:
What’s your take on location based services?
So far, i have not really be able to find a real use for any of the ones i have tried so far.
Playing with LBS is fun and justifies buying a top of the range device (although now, GPS is moving down the range, in the same way that cameras did).
Currently the purpose of most of the LBS out there today are they allow you to connect with other people who are interested in experimenting with LBS.
So far, most of the services i have tried are (to me at least) obviously the result of people who are coming from a non-mobile development background. The experience on the web is so much better than the mobile experience. The mobile is only thought of as a place to *generate* data, and not as a potential primary consumption location.
The two exceptions to this are buddycloud and Google’s Latitude.
Both succeed as they offer an excellent experience on the mobile and currently the desktop use is more of a “second choice”.
What in your view are the best opportunities or use cases with LBS?
As Andrew says at the end of his article, Location in and of itself is not really that interesting.
It is the context where the value is and it is no great surprise that Jyri picks up on this in the Jaiku thread.
There might be some small use case in the sharing of your location as a “fuzzy” entity. I think brightkite had this at one point, but like Plazes before it, the interface became too complicated and it put location in the center, and location is rarely a social object that people care that strongly about.
As i see things, the Jaiku team created something that was one of the earliest real uses of location, by tying it in with your phone book. It is just a shame that more people did not make use of this feature.
Privacy:
Privacy is something else Latitude seem to have got mostly correct (because of the strong influence of Jyri Engeström?).
It seems that many people have missed the fact that there are actually THREE levels of sharing; hide, city and accurate (which if you are indoors is not actually all that accurate as it is cell tower based).
This extra city level allows for a level of the serendipity of meetings similar to the one that Dopplr has going for it, whilst still retaining some privacy.
The other thing that this simple 3 level scheme has going for it is that you apply it as you connect with people rather than having to think of some complicated grouping, or forcing people into the limited groups offered by the service.
As i see things today, the future will involve something like fire-eagle, where location is both easy to generate and consume. Probably in a similar manner to how things like atom and XMPP were created.
original article is here
Posted in interesting conversation | Tags: LBS, mobile, response
