Takeoff - review

So, today was the day of take off, a portuguese event on innovation on IT. Before I go to sleep, here's a small review:

The organization was good, and the event went well. It was awsome to see that many people, some presentations (like the one from Gonçalo Quadros) were so full that there were nowhere to seat, not even on the stairs. Wow. I hope that take off happens again next year, in an wider space.

The morning presentations were about "Palco Principal" (a Portuguese "version" of PureVolume that aims to be much more than that), Francisco Pereira's investigation on geolocalization (with Ejaki and YouTrack) and finaly Pedro Sousa giving us the talk about "how to start up", with references to the Portuguese scenario. His presentations are getting better everytime :-) A good review on those (in Portuguese) can be found here.

In the afternoon there was a terrible presentation from Microsoft (hey, you should learn about not calling your public liars, specially not doing it several times, and specially when your public is computer-powered people with wireless connection and evidences are online). I can't just stress out how this presentation sucked - you should listen to the podcast at the moment it gets available to check for yourself... The presentation was followed by a presentation about Linux, the same that subv3rsion did on Tecnonov. Another prespective of these two presentations can be found here.

That presentation was followed by Critical's Gonçalo Quadros, and I didn't manage to hear it since I was talking with several people outside, but from the comments I've heard, it was preety good. I'll check it out as soon as the mp3's are available.

After another coffee break, the last set of presentations: Fred from WeBreakStuff did his usual talk (that's getting better by the time) and also gave some highlights on how goPlan is commercialy going, and where is WeBreakStuff heading. Then, Pedro Custódio, one of shift creators, gave an awsome presentation about co-creativity: one I wasn't expecting and that found great. Finaly, Armando Alves did a presentation about the new was of doing publicity on the web. The presentation was good (but man, you should stop using that whatever-broken-thingie you used to create the presentation, it was not good, and the embeded videos were not working properly), and I was thinking it was about something different (and more useful for a personal project of mine)... But good, indeed.

Goodies

Yet, there were some things that I've heard in take off that can't go on un-blogged.

Palco Principal is going to have a "mini-stores system" next week

Palco Principal is also aiming to do something I'm really looking forward: a Portuguese "version" of SellABand!

And this unfortunate quote from WeBreakStuff's Fred:

"Já há muito tempo que não vejo os projectos que as pessoas andam a criar no goplan"

Man, did you ust admited you used to check out what content did people feed in on goplan? Am I the only one that thinks that this is just unbelievable? Have you ever considered that your clients don't want you to spy on their projects? Shame on you. Seriously.

Swaptree - review

Remember last year when I talked about Swaptree? I bet you don't. It was way too long from then till now: in July they were in private beta and they still are, yet they are expanding slowly Swaptree's userbase by inviting more people into the private beta, and last week I was a lucky one. Anyway, you probably don't recall what Swaptree is, so let me quote myself:

So, what's this "swaptree" thing? Swaptree is a free service that allows you to swap things you have and don't want with things you want to have. It just works like this:

You manage a list of books, CD's, DVD's or games you want to trade, and a wishlist with stuff you want to have. To simplify it, you can easily do stuff like import your Amazon wishlist to swaptree. Then, the site does it's own magic by itself and you don't have to worry about anything. When there's something you want available to swap with something you have, you'll be asked if you want to do that trade. If you want to, swaptree manages even the packaging issues so you don't have to bother with nothing:

And when you realize, the swap is done! Easy, isn't it? Well... This is the part when you start wondering about the implications of such a system: it can't be just as easy as that... Well, as you can see through the blogosphere, it really is as simple as that.

So, I've tested the application and I was really surprised about how neat it is. Yet, there were two things that gave me some frustration.

The first thing is that you need to give the ISBN or the UPC of the product you have for swapping. You can't just surf, think "oh, and I also have this and don't want it" amd click on it, as you can do for your "want list". When you click on the "I have this" button in an item, you must provide its UPC or ISBN. That makes things not as easy as they could be, but on the other hand it is understandable if you think that they want some warranty that (a) that product exists (as a tradeable product), (b) you have an original product, and (c) you really have it. But the frustration really comes when you pick a big pile of CD's, books and DVD's you don't want anymore and start inserting their ISBN/UPC's, just to recieve as reply an error message saying "Please enter a valid ISBN number (for books) or UPC code (for CDs, DVDs & games) below.". And, damn, some of those items I'm 100% sure have a valid ISBN/UPC code! First I thought that only "issued in USA" items were on their database, but not even that. Sucks, in a big pile of items I only managed to insert (by now) four.

The other thing is that I added four items and no one had them in their wishlists. OK, less then 24 hours later I could already swap one of those by one of these:

you can get 169 items:

66

|

100

|

3

|

0

but none of those things were in my own wishlist. So, is the model not working? Not really, that's not the issue here. This is a "relational value network", where the service value grows with the number of users and marked items (both as "I have" or "I want"). The growth is exponential, since a trade can be done in several layers: Imagine that I have something you want and you don't have nothing I want: that can be fixed if you have something a 3rd person wants in exchange of something I want. Now add up to 5 layers of complexity. Right! :-) The issue is that, for now, and being this a private beta it's no surprise that this is like that, Swaptree is lacking users.

What leads me to yet another issue, this time about something that could greatly enhance this service "social networking". I'm not a fan of social networks, and I really feel like social networks like Hi5 and Orkut are completely useless, but sometimes they are well-explored: take Flickr as an obvious example. In Swaptree you can see items you want, but you can't see "who has this item" and "what do those people also have". See, if I start browsing over SciFi books, for instance, I might want to see who has some books I liked, and, if they do, what other SciFi stuff are they into.

Finaly, in the previous post I asked this: "is this going to work overseas or only on USA?" Now that I'm in, the answer is... I don't know. Now, you can only choose, on the countries list, United States, but there is a Country list, so I guess they'll soon add more countries. At least I hope so, because until Portugal is in their orchard my swaptree can't give good apples.

Tecnonov 2007 - Review

So, this sunday was basicly spent on resting, since Saturday morning I woke up to go from Lisbon to Coimbra with Manuel, for Tecnonov 2007, an event that was amazingly superior than I thought it would be.

After arriving at Coimbra and having lunch, we went to FNAC, where the event was held, and helped setting up everything: laptops, the mic, puting free Ubuntu CD's (we also had free t-shirts) anywhere and stuff like that.

By 14:30 the event started, and while I was opening it I was surprised by the number of people who was there specificly to attend to the event. Octávio started his talk about "Linux as a path to productivity", and - I've noticed - while there were no news for those who know how cool is the Linux world, it was an interesting talk for those there unfamiliar with Linux and Open Source.

There were no questions, and Rui Seabra, representing ANSOL, gave a speech about the upcoming GPL v3. As I thought that Octávio's presentation had a preety nice theme for opening talk, Rui's talk couldn't fit anywhere better in the program than after it. Rui is an amazing speaker, and started with a nice introduction to Open Source Software, (Open Source) Software Licenses, GPL's history and then about GPL v2 and v3. While I don't agree (and made him some questions about the issue) with two key points on GPL v3 (the issues regarding software patents and DRM), I'll surely make my contributions on the issue in the propper place, and not by creating a discussion on Tecnonov.

After his presentation I did mine, on the Music Industry, with special emphasys on the dangers of DRM. I'm not quite sure how much time I took with the presentation, but I know that I sopped the "after debate" (not quite a debate, since no one showed disagreement with me on the issue) because Octávio told me to do so, and when I took a look on the watch the coffee break time was almost over. I was amazed with the afluence of people listening to the talk - maybe I was somewhat exhalted and talked loud enough - and then maybe it was simply lunch time - but several people came in to listen to it, and I even got some reactions from non-tech people, like, for instance, a guy there that made a comparison between what's happening in the music industry and what lead to the creation of IP rights (I might make a full blog post about that later).

After the coffee break we got a presentation about the IMAGE project - what seemed to me an interesting project: a web-based virtual world focused on creating profit on an world-wide economy, based on real-life metrics and statistics. They told us that it was too soon to know about quite a load of things, but since the project is to be concluded in two years, it's easy to understand the lack of definition about some of those issues. I hope I'll remember to check out about IMAGE in an year or so...

Then, Fred from WeBreakStuff made a presentation that I've already seen at Barcamp, but in a much improoved (and caustic :-) version: "Innovation (and the lack of it in Portugal)". He made strong postions there and quite harsh critics - which I liked - and, while I think that he had a narrowed vision in a way to strict market on his presentation, I generaly enjoyed it - and the reaction it created on the public was quite funny :-)!

Then, the couple of talks that, retrospectively, I think were misplaced: Nelson Ferraz with an introduction to Perl, and a great focus on its community, and that should have been the first after-coffee break talk since it was quite lite and social, and the presentation that was to be about WeSpendMoney and turned out to be about "Innovation (and a little bit on WeSpendMoney)", that started by giving a preety-actual example of success on innovation, Nintendo's Wii, and then, in a way softer tone than Fred, about the lack of innovation in Portugal. It was nice, but would work better as an introduction to Fred's one.

After the event we gave the last t-shirts, packed up everything and the resistents went to dinner: nine people, and from those only 5 were speakers, which I liked since it basicly shows that it was that kind of event where speakers are close to the public, and we're all doing the same thing: sharing experiences.

The after dinner was made in a nice bar where we talked about several things including two topics I'm to write about for a long time in a propper way: small communities and sub-cultures. We basicly unanimously thought that this kind of meetings are way to cool to not happen, or happen only once per year. It's time to gather a community of individual like us and start making something great happen!

Some other reviews, in Portuguese:

• Mario
• Marco
• Octávio