Month: March 2006

Last week I attended the Geek Dinner and CTO Breakfast, two unrelated technology events in the area.

My notes from the Geek Dinner — speakers were David Spann and Alistair Cockburn:

• A tech manager shouldn’t know too much (he won’t allow others to do the work) or too little (others won’t trust his judgment.)
• Ask two questions often (daily? weekly?) of your development teams: What went well? What could be improved?
• IBM studies showed that companies focused on process didn’t deliver results. Those “flying by the seat of their pants” delivered.
• Software development is like a cooperative game — like a reality TV show — in which you solve problems today, get past the current obstacle, and then repeat it tomorrow.
• Responding to change is better than following a plan
• Customer collaboration is better than contract negotiation
• A working product is greater than comprehensive documentation
• People’s interactions are greater than processes and tools
• A greater development model is to shut 4-6 people in a room with a whiteboard, give them access to the customer, and have them ship something every month or two
• The typical “iron triangle” is “time, spec, budget — pick two.” It’s a cop out.
• The VC model is you keep performing, we keep paying, bit by bit
• Don’t ever go a month or two without releasing something
• Develop a list of features you want, pick the one with the biggest bang per buck, then renegotiate the list (feature reprioritization instead of feature creep.)

My notes from the CTO Breakfast:

• Several people have had good experiences with Vonage for voice over IP.
• Smart phones will be full fledged computers within a few years.
• Bruce: Too many OS’s and platforms for mobile systems right now. When that consolidates we’ll really start seeing a lot of apps.
• Bruce recommends going to China and taking a tour. Impressive infrastructure. Lots of engineers.
• Can you build a mash up on parts you don’t control?
• Flickr’s API makes it easy to get photos in, provides a natural, social lock in. Data is the new “Intel inside” — the value of the app.
• Instead of exuberant VC funding of pre-bubble era, the new model for web companies is to sell out to Yahoo or Google.
• Infrastructure now much cheaper, methodologies much faster, outsourced work much higher quality. Show stringing now possible. (Low budget or no business model is the model!)
• One person paid $1200/month for an experienced CS grad in the Philippines who had worked at the IBM lab there.
• Phil: When there’s no competition you can use Java. But when development can be outsourced for $10/hour you need something more agile.
• Mystical force drives innovation, precisely at the time it’s needed. Necessity is the mother of invention.
• The business model should be to take existing technology and execute on it now. Focus on now not the future. (Though you have to watch the future)
• Matt: If you’re early you can fail. Established technologies with better execution makes more business sense.
• Google, Bluehost examples of great second movers.
• Google Ads with phone calling coming soon.
• $1200 offered to boot Windows on a Mac.
• GPS cheap, could be built into cameras with compass, tagging every photo with location information.
• Use cases, Q&A, architecture, testing most important skills to learn now.
• Scott: New Mac Book Pro ripped and encoded DVD in 80% of real-time as opposed to 200% time with Power Mac.
• The up and coming $100 laptop and a steady income from Mechanical Turk might make a big difference to the poor in other nations.

I’m fascinated by the way computers and the Internet can empower people who might not otherwise have opportunities because of disability, poverty, or distance.

The NY Times has an interesting article on a quadriplegic man from Centerville, Utah, who works from home as a call center operator for Office Depot. Technology makes this and other jobs possible.

Computer Technology Opens a World of Work to Disabled People

MIT is leading a project called One Laptop per Child that is producing, in partnership with several tech companies, a laptop that costs just $100. This price point will hopefully make it so accessible that countries like Brazil and Thailand can buy one for every child. This would give them access to a wealth of information and the opportunity to communicate with the entire world.

Sites like Elance bring outsourcing to the masses. Anyone can post a project there and gets cheap bids from programmers, designers, or writers from all around the world. It’s not right for every situation, but you might, for example, get a great deal on a programmer in India who will welcome the work for an amount we’d consider cheap. I recently met an entrepreneur that used Elance to get 200 quality articles of 500 words each for $5/article. The articles were written by a college-graduated, stay-at-home mom in the midwest who bid on the project. What a great deal.

I’ve mentioned this before, but Amazon’s Mechanical Turk pays out small amounts for completing tasks that computers can’t do. It doesn’t amount to very much per hour, but on the Internet these tasks can be done by those whose time is worth it to them. That might be a 14 year-old in Utah or a mother in India, in any case a paying job for someone who wants it.

I think the Internet will continue to have an equalizing influence on the world economy.