I’ve been doing a bit of work on open Government data ovet the last couple of months. Post the State Services Commissions Perspectives on Open Data workshop a few of us interested folks got together and started the open.org.nz group. As part of that I developed and launched the Open Data Catalogue which has been gaining a bit of traction and getting some good press coverage in the NZ Herald and Computerworld.
One of the other things that has come out of the group are plans for an open data barcamp on the 29th and 30th of August.
The details?
When: Saturday 29th (barcamp) + Sunday 30th (hackfest) August
Where: National Library (Wellington)
Cost: free
More Info: To find out more, subscribe, sign up etc: http://groups.google.co.nz/group/nzopengovtbarcamp
The Pitch: The New Zealand Open Government Bar Camp is an “unconference” for people who are interested in making government-held data more freely available for others to re-use. An “unconference” is an alternative participant-driven event, that avoids aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations. Web 2.0 developments have shown the potential of combining data from different sources made freely available on the Internet. The government holds a huge range of non-personal data which could form the basis of innovative services and applications by others on the Internet.
You should come if you are interested in government information policy, exploring ways to provide data, making entrepreneurial use of the Internet, or building working applications during a weekend.
See you there.
Over the last 3 months I’ve been working on a new website with the team at realestate.co.nz to launch a new property information website. The project has been really fun and it has been great to be able to launch something into the market which really is different to the current offerings. Although most of the information on the site can be sourced from other websites you have to go hunting for it and it is sometimes hard to find. With Zoodle all the information for a property and its suburb is available in one place making it easy for people to get a . Simplicity and a focus on the user were some of the key goals for the site and I think we have achieved this with the first release. Over the next few days, weeks and months we will be adding more features, cleaning up some of the existing features based on user feedback and overall adding more spit and polish. I’m looking forward to it!
And I would be amiss if I didn’t mention the others involved in the site:
Dave Cooper from netconcepts – They developed the site and did a great job of getting the site launched.
- The team from Terralink who do the data wrangling and all the geo work.
- Alistair Helm from realestate.co.nz and the rest of the team there.
On a side note if you need someone to help get your next web project off the ground then drop me a line (my details are on the right). I fit best in a Product Manager/Project Manager roll – Taking the basic ideas for a service and refining them to a usable and innovative site. Working with both the development and business teams to come up with a plan for a great site and helping getting it implemented.
The big news of today is of course the closing of Ferrit. I’ve had the pleasure and the pain of working with Ferrit over the last 3 years and it was interesting to say the least. When it comes down to it the biggest problem with Ferrit is the same issue that has tripped up Telecom time and time again. That was the fact that it was run by marketers and not technologists. A few misteps along the way:
- Ferrit launched with a comparison shopping engine with no e-commerce. This in itself is not a bad idea – It has been done successfully before. The problem here was that the comparison engine was rubbish and was never updated.
- They launched a massive marketing campaign 2 months before their e-commerce offering was going live. Instead of pulling back and waiting until the site could at least have the opportunity of making some money they drove traffic to a site which was universally derided. The general public would have gone to the site and would have never come back.
- The e-commerce site was built on a platform that was not built to handle that many products. The core technology simply did not work. At the high point of the implementation they must have had at least 30 developers trying to get the thing working.
- They targeted the large retailer. Flying them to conferences in the US, spending lots of money educating them and generally trying to bring them onboard. Large retailers are slow to move. Ferrit would have been better to provide a great interface for managing a retailers store and
opening the gates to a range of smaller retailers who were willing to compete on price, service and range of goods.
- They faked it. Right when everyone online was just getting the idea that you need to be authentic they fake customer reviews.
- Ferrit bought lots of expensive research. Now I used to work for Nielsen Online and was one of the suppliers so I guess I profited from this but some of the research was confirming the obvious to anyone who uses the internet. Common sense goes a long way.
The list goes on but from the word go it was over spec’ed, over-funded, over-staffed, over-marketed and ill implemented. Next time Telecom please, please, please before you build anything ask yourself “Is this the right thing to do? Would I use this?”.
And please, be truthful and authentic. It is going to take a long time until people start to love you again.
There has been a bit of a stick over at the Start Up blogs in the last couple of days when a guest post gave some ‘advice’ on how a boot-strapping entrepreneur could get things going in San Francisco. The first piece of advice was:
1. Buy Photoshop: I can’t afford the $2000, 3-day-search-engine conference pass and so I needed to make my own. You may get thrown out, but everyone does it and it’s worth the risk since you gain a heck of a lot of knowledge from these events. But the most value comes at night, when you hit the local bars with contacts you’ve made during the day. That’s where deals get done.
This caused quite a stir as Mike Brown from Webstock and others chimed in on the ‘advice’. Basically it is just not cool to defraud people. If you can’t afford to go to a conference then simply don’t go. By all means lobby surf and go to the parties if they are open invites but don’t fake passes.
The issue is that the blog post has now been deleted from the site. I don’t actually think that this is the right way to deal with the situation. Shutting down a post because people don’t agree with it is just plain wrong. Start Up should have updated the post with an explanation and possible redaction from the author. If they are truly sorry that they posted that information them let them come forward and say so. Don’t try and hide it, it’s been on the net and so it has been archived.
Do you think this is the right way to deal with this issue? Or do you think that deleting the post is OK? Comments welcome.
Mintshot recently celebrated their first birthday with a giveaway of “over 8000 pressies” but the giveaway was somewhat lagging.
All well and good. Who doesn’t want a free gift for just entering your confirmation code right? Well the gift was a month worth of ‘free’ movie rentals.
And this was the voucher that I received:
So a month worth of free movies isn’t too bad but
the problem is that Fatso already gives you a *free trial anyway. Their normal trial is only for 2 weeks but this changes fairly regularly between 2 weeks and 30 days depending on the competition and current marketing promotions.
It is standard practice for online DVD rental companies to offer this to everyone.
Now nothing against Fatso (I used to use DVD Unlimited and DVD by post services are highly recommended if you like watching movies) but I think Mintshot could have done a little better on the giveaways and made sure each prize really was worth something. If you are going to give something away make sure you are providing real value to the winner. For example a free mid-week movie ticket is far better than a 2 for one coupon. With the later you are still forced to pay for something to get your ‘free’ ticket with the former you can go along and truly get something for free. Most people will still take a friend or buy an ice cream which will re-coup any costs associated with the gift.
FREE GIFT is a loaded term. Make sure you can justify the free bit.
*Note to Fatso: You might want to point out how long your trial is for on the sign up page. Also your terms and conditions for the deal are no longer at http://www.fatso.co.nz/mint even though the gift runs until 31 December.
Alistair has been on my back about not blogging and others have been wondering what this ‘Devour’ feed is in their news readers so I guess it is about time I started posting a little more!
Last week was the last Auckland Web Meetup for the year and John asked me to present. The idea for the segment was to get about 5 people to present on anything they liked for 10 minutes and selecting up to 5 different things. I chose 4 things and my talk ended up clocking in at around 9.20 which wasn’t too bad. The slides are below but they don’t really mean much without a commentary so I’ve added some below.
TripIt
TripIt is the best service I have used in the last 12 months. You just forward your travel bookings to TripIt and it creates and itinerary for you. You can share your trip with others and access your plans via iCal, printed PDF’s and mobile. This saves heaps of time reentering data from booking confirmations and collaborating on trips makes keeps everyone on the same page. The other great thing about tripit is that you don’t even need to sign up for an account to start using the service. Just forward your plans to plans@tripit.com and it creates everything for you an emails you a link.
Capistrano
Capistrano is a deployment tool that was written to help deploy Rails applications but can be used to deploy any web application (I use it to deploy Rails, PHP and plain HTML apps). A one line command ‘cap deploy’ will checkout you code from the repository, copy it to the server, update the database, symlink any files that are needed and restart the application. There is a base deployment script that works for most applications and you can modify that to suit your needs. An hour spent upfront setting up an application saves heaps of time and headaches down the track.
MacBook Air
My old 12 inch MacBook Pro was just getting a little tired so I upgraded to a MacBook Air earlier this year. This computer rocks. I love it because it does less than everything else. It is lighter, smaller and has less ports which means there is nothing to break off, it is simple and does exactly what I need.
Building Things
I’ve been building a back fence and deck at home over the last month and the rewards of doing ‘real’ stuff is very satisfying. Some times it is just good to step away from the computer and do real things in the real world.
Right, that’s it from me – I’m off to finish my deck!
Not exactly tech related but being married to an architect/urban designer it is hard to avoid!
The Jasmax Film Festival is coming up in September (11th – 17th to be precise). If you have never been it is a great little festival with films about architecture and urban design. Highlights for us this year are:
The cool thing about the festival is that you get to immerse yourself into a totally different group of people. It is just like Meetup – They are all geeks in their own way but everyone is dressed in black turtlenecks 
One of the cool features of the iPhone is the ability to tap and hold the ‘.com’ link when typing an email address to bring up other TLD’s such as .net, .edu, etc. What is missing though are other country level domains. Sure if you live in certain countries with their own keyboard layout you can get these to appear but what about everybody else?
Consider this: the iPhone knows where you are in the world. It also knows what country you registered the phone in. So why doesn’t it always add your current countries TLD and your home countries TLD to the options? It makes perfect sense and would be one of those touches that normally make Apple products so great.
Photo CC by robertnelson
So iPhone Jonny was a plant by the Yellow Pages and their agency AIM. A few people thought it was a pretty lame stunt but I’m going to give them some credit for keeping it a secret until after the event. It is not often that a mainstream agency can pull something like this off and not get caught doing something stupid.
But were there missed opportunities?
Lets look at what Jonny stood in line for – An Apple iPhone. One of the key features of the new iPhone are the custom applications which you can download. There are hundreds of the applications now available spanning the gauntlet from games, eBooks, photography applications and of course Yellow Pages directories. The thing is Yellow Pages did not launch an iPhone application for their site. This was the biggest mobile launch in New Zealand and Yellow Pages had a perfect opportunity to be slightly hip and fashionable and they didn’t take advantage of it.
Yellow Pages have had some appalling ideas over the years. Check Go Yellow Life for an example of a pointless application. This was a golden opportunity to piggy back on the iPhone launch with something that would actually be useful to a lot of people. We have very talented developers who would have been able to develop an application in a fairly short amount of time to do the basics of mobile search properly. By launching with a mobile application they could have help convert the early adopters away from the likes of Finda and back to Yellow Pages.
Maybe next time?
So Barcamp Auckland 2008 is done and dusted for the year so check out the site for photos and a write up from Ludwig. I (along with Ludwig) wrote a scheduling application for Barcamp which was used to display the schedule and allow commenting on the sessions. Overall I think the application was OK for a prototype although there were tons of things that were broken and functionality that could have been added. A few stats from the application:
- The average load was around 48 requests a minute (we had live commenting which polled every 30 seconds)
- There were 152 people in the database but we only had around 100 at the actual event
- 26 people commented at least once. One person made 34 comments!
- The ‘Timeslot’ view was more popular than the ‘Room’ view which makes sense. In the next version We will have a nicer interface to the views.
We also had an iPhone version of the app which was pretty popular. I actually found this a really nice way to view the sessions.
The whole thing was hosted on an old top loading VCR that I had retrofitted into a Asterisk box:
Let me know if you have any questions about Barcamp App. It was fun to build and version 2 will be way cooler.
Oh and lastly it was written in Ruby on Rails. Without Rails I would have found it impossible.
