Traveling Geeks

Traveling Geeks… scandal!

My God, Scoble, Did You Think We Wouldn’t See These?

What happens in London when a group of American blogger types heads over to geek out? They get drunk, put on wigs and get friendly with the locals, apparently. Former Guardian columnist Paul Carr (@paulcarr)
sends us links to a disturbing group of photographs, likely taken about
five minutes apart. What was Scoble, the poster boy for RackSpace’s new
Building 43 project, thinking?

“Because Content is the new Electricity, Open Source is the new Power Grid & the UK is the place to build it!,” John Newton, Alfresco #WDYDWYD #TG2009

John Newton, Chairman and CEO of Alfresco at Accel Partners London Traveling Geeks meeting.

John Newton, Chairman and CEO of Alfresco

My Traveling Geeks Meme: WDYDWYD? What is it?

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Will BT let JP create the first open network operator? One scenario for the mobile Web

The Web exists because Tim Berners-Lee didn’t require any network operator to rewire its central switch. Google exists because nobody has to ask permission to create a new way to use the Web. These affordances for innovation are no accident: Sir Tim could give away the Web and Larry and Sergey could make billions of dollars for themselves because the architects of the internet’s original protocols were wise enough to reserve innovation for the edges, not the center of the network. The authors of what has become known as the internet’s realized that control of the network – technical, economic, political – could be radically decentralized, and that by enabling anyone who played by the TCP/IP rules to connect anything they wanted to the network, future media that they didn’t even dream about in the olden days would one day become possible. So the Web, cyberculture, the dot com economy, digital media, the refashioning of global economic production by digital networks, grew extremely rapidly.

The merger of the mobile phone and the internet has not grown anywhere nearly as rapidly as the web precisely because there is someone you have to ask for permission in the mobile world – the network operators. And network operators evolved from regulated monopoly telephony providers, who have done their best to prevent, rather than to facilitate, an internet-like ecology of small and large businesses, heterogeneous media, decentralized control, and a rising economic tide that lifts small boats and threatens huge ships that take a long time to turn. We have yet to see an owner of significant telecommunications network open their network by providing an open application programming interface (api)

Which brings us to JP Rangaswami:

JP Rangaswami talks to the travelling geeks

(Source: JD Lasica)

JD Lasica’s photo was taken atop BT Tower in London, when British Telecom’s CIO of Global Services invited the Travelling Geeks to dinner in a private, revolving dining room in BT’s high-security antenna tower, a landmark on the London skyline I’ve often wondered about. How that dinner came to be is a story of how life happens online these days. A link from another blog brought me to JP’s blog, Confused of Calcutta, years ago; I read it via RSS regularly, and when I saw that the blogger was on Twitter, I started following him. When JP used Last.fm, it tweeted what he was listening to. I couldn’t help noticing that he listened to a fair amount of Grateful Dead music. So I started to correspond with him. When he visited the San Francisco Bay Area, he invited me (via Facebook) to join him for dinner. He had more than a few interesting things to say about the way media infrastructure might evolve in the future. So when I knew we were going to London, I introduced the Travelling Geeks to JP. He, in turn, invited us to dinner. It dawned on me that my blogger thinker Deadhead social media acquaintance wielded some clout at BT when we were greeted for dinner by the CEO of British Telecom.

It was probably JP’s idea to seat me next to Ted Griggs, the founder of Ribbit, a company JP had acquired. The seating was probably no accident. Here’s Ribbit’s elevator pitch. (Another way of describing Ribbit’s product, Griggs told me, as London revolved below us, would be “open API’s for [now BT’s] networks.”)

I’ve been writing about the future of digital media for a while now, and I think I’ve developed a pretty good spidey-sense for something that could change everything. When I met the people JP had collected and saw what they were doing (during a morning of demos after our dinner), I was reminded of nothing so much as the time I got to know Bob Taylor at Xerox PARC and started to realize that what they were doing on Palo Alto’s Coyote Hill Road with personal computers, networks, graphical user interfaces way back in the 1970s was going to be the foundation of the 21st centuries fundamental structuring technologies.

But Xerox management, of course, thought they were in the copier business and failed to take advantage of the fact that their research arm invented the GUI, the Ethernet, and the laser printer.

Will BT management realize that they aren’t in the telephone network operator business, and that someone in their midst has invited not only their future, but everyone else’s? Stay tuned.

“As tech & product developers; I get access to amazing stuff in the lab long before it gets in the outside world, AND get to work with the people that make this stuff real,” Patrick Pordage. #WDYDWYD? #TG2009

My Traveling Geeks Meme: WDYDWYD? What is it?

Patrick Pordage, Marketing Communications Director, Cambridge Consultants

“As tech and product developers; I get access to amazing stuff in the lab long before it gets in the outside world, AND get to work with the people that make this stuff real.”

Cambridge Consultants

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UK Diary: Tuesday – Back To Soho and Dinner With Agency.com

[Being a Traveling Geek takes stamina. I challenge any traditional journalist to keep up with our daily agendas. Not only are we interviewing people and staying up late writing, editing video and posting but we are also being interviewed by others, taking part on panels, and reporting on the same panels, and taking part in lots of other inside-out media activities.]

Our fourth event for Tuesday was dinner with Agency.com and assorted clients and friends — in Soho at Soho House. It was great to be back in this vibrant part of London because this is where I got my start in journalism in 1982.

It was a great place to work and a great time to be a young man around town, with plenty of small bars, restaurants, cafes, and after-hours clubs.

We sat at a very long table and we introduced ourselves and spoke briefly about what it was that attracted us to social/new media. I managed to get video of most of the replies, my apologies because I missed a couple of people.

http://www.blip.tv/file/2353961

Please also see Susan Bratton: DishyMix: Susan Bratton Podcasts & Blogs Executives

UK Diary: Tuesday – Guardian Newspaper Media Panel . . .

We left BT and managed to hail a few black cabs amid the rain and made our way over to the Guardian newspaper for a panel on the future of media.

I was thinking that maybe the death of newspapers is just nature’s way of helping us all to reduce our carbon footprint.

Some of our fellow Traveling Geeks were on the panel, our Geeketes were at the front of the room, which must have had a distracting effect (see photo – by JD Lasica) while the rest of us were mostly at the back Twittering onto a big screen at the front of the room.

Here was my take on it, an extract from: A Guardian Newspaper Media Panel, Twitter, From Back to Front And Beyond…

The Butcher of Fleet Street

I was sitting at the back of the room next to fellow TGer Craig Newmark of Craigslist. And inevitably, the panel’s moderator couldn’t resist asking him to stand up and explain himself for killing the newspaper industry.

Craig is mightily fed up with this question. And I agree. It is not his fault that the newspaper industry is in trouble. But Craig handled it all very well, throwing in a line “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” which drew laughs and distracted the panel from further pursuit of a tired line of questioning and drew the discussion back to the favorite subject of the day: Twitter.

Ayelet Noff posted a video of the event:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FUs9acyk4o&feature=player_embedded

Here is JD Lasica:

The podcast just went live. Stream or download (Time 51:13):

(You can also listen to it, naturally, on the Guardian site.)

A few highlights

The entire 51 minutes is well worth a listen — I think it’s one of the smartest podcasts I’ve been a part of. A few snippets:

• I returned to the problem of newspaper culture that punishes, rather than rewards, experimentation, innovation and failure (without which innocation is impossible). But harping on newspapers’ failures is like shooting dinosaurs in a barrel.

• Sarah Lacy suggested that we may see 10 metropolitan cities without a daily newspaper by the end of the year. (I think the time frame is more likely on the order of two to three years.)

Time for innovative news models

Here is Jeff Saperstein:

…The Barbarians are at the Gates in every sector of the communications industry. Advertising agencies are being decimated by the Google model, Encyclopedias and paid resource media have been annihilated by Wikipedia, Network television conglomerates have been supplanted by Cable subscription channels and digital narrowcasting, and the movie studios are enraged by You Tube and other web sources to download feature films outside the movie theatres, on and on with the music industry and I-Tunes , etc.

In other words, the journalism industry is not unique in its economic viability being challenged. The Internet/digital media content delivery model is not just a hiccup, but a tectonic shift. Our Traveling Geeks are players and informed commentators in that shift.

The Guardian Dialogues « Traveling Geeks in London

Here are some of my Tweets during the event:

– Blogging and traditional media have a lot in common – lack of a viable business model 🙂

– Paper or electron is shouldn’t matter. Newspapers need to transition into news services imho…

– The media is dead long live the media! We have more media in more forms today than at anytime in history!

– Newspapers have been communicating in 140 characters or less for hundreds of years: In news headlines!

– The panel has seems to have an “us verus them” attitude. Surely media today is about “us and them” which is a good thing

– If a blogger blogs in the blogosphere does anybody blog it? Takes time to build an audience

– Blogs build credibility over time, they don’t get it just by being. It takes time to build a media brand

– Bloggers aren’t all very free wheeling, they have reputations to defend just the same as regular media

– News has always been a collaborative venture, taking the story further. Why should it be a problem today?

– Why is there a distinction being made between blogger media and newspaper media? It’s all media.

Next stop on this rainy Tuesday: Soho and Agency.com dinner

“Because I don’t do average :),” Errol Damelin. #WDYDWYD? #TG2009 @ed_wonga

My Traveling Geeks Meme: WDYDWYD? What is it?

Errol Damelin, Founder, Wonga.com @ed_wonga

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uberVU Social Media Commenting Tracking & Reply System #TG2009

Two of the things I’m tracking right now are social media meta tools and social media data mining for marketers.

uberVU, a European start up from Romania has created a clever social media meta tool that solves a real problem for content creators in the social sphere.  With uberVU, you can track conversations that happen anywhere on the web and see the responses in a single interface.

For example, this blog post is posted to my DishyMix blog, but will also automatically be Twittered and will get syndicated to my Facebook page. Anyone can reply to the blog post, reply to me @SusanBratton or comment on Facebook. uberVU lets me see all the comments in a single location and then allows me to comment from that UI.

Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca of uberVU are in private beta now and public beta soon on their comment tracking and reply system.

Vladimir Oane, co-founder, uberVu

Here are some screen shots I got while meeting them at the Seedcamp US/UK Speed Dating event last week in London at part of my Traveling Geeks trip.

UberVu Single Conversation

You can track your own work or track stories from other sources. Select a blog post or Tweet for example and uberVU compiles the reactions to the story from where ever that story appears – blogs, Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, Disqus, YouTube and many more.

You can see all the responses to a story as a threaded conversation. And you can respond from the uberVU interface to any or all of the comments across myriad sites.

In my interview with @DaveTaylor at SXSW, he says the often overlooked but most important activity he recommends is posting blog comments around your key areas of expertise to stay active in the blogosphere. With uberVU, you can see what’s being said AND COMMENT ON IT from a single interface.

Susan Bratton & Dave Taylor on Social Media Commenting Strategies

uberVu is a web app that uses the ContextVoice API to track what’s being said across social graphs, using sentiment analysis, search and filtering, giving you near real time results.

UberVu Conversation Tracker

The acceptance of failure as a spur to innovation

Recently, I was part of the Traveling Geeks tour of UK tech, including the
Reboot Britain conference. (The Geeks are a collection of talented
journalists, and myself.)

I was struck by the repeated comment that failure is stigmatized in UK
business culture. In Silicon Valley, failure is just a normal phase of
one's career. You might succeed in your first endeavor, probably not, so
you're ready to persist in subsequent efforts.

That is, there's some expectation of failure and the expectation that
you'll get over it.

This is not unique to Silicon Valley, but it's far more expected here than
anywhere I've heard. The attitude is the norm here, but in a lot of
places failure continues to be stigmatized, and it's hard to recover.

It seems that widespread innovation and success requires the acceptance of
failure, and then a readiness to move on.

That's generally true in Silicon Valley, maybe needs to be true in the UK
and maybe everywhere else.

UK Diary: Tuesday – It Never Rains But It Pours . . . More BT Innovation

Tuesday afternoon with the Traveling Geeks and we are over at BT HQ seeing half-a-dozen presentations from its business units.

We were a little wet from dodging torrential rain bursts. But the afternoon sessions are interesting.

Meghan Asha was impressed by BT’s programmable broadband service:

BT’s Open Broadband is a BRILLANT solution to broadband issues for businesses. What is it exactly? As far as I can understand, it allows companies to easily program broadband strength with a couple paragraphs of XML for specific websites. This is fantastic for stream gaming where you’re gaming via the cloud. In short, this is perfect for any application that needs guaranteed bandwidth. I love this idea, if only someone would implement it in the US. My first site request would be YouTube (bah!).

Click here for more info on the development of Open Broadband.

BT’s Programmable Broadband!

Innovation apprentice

We also heard about BT’s apprentice program, which involves several hundred high school students every year. BT sets up day camps where young people brainstorm new ideas. Then it offers to show them how ideas are developed into commercial products. It’s an excellent program. Interestingly, school drop outs are encouraged to attend — it’s more about ideas and passion than it is about how well someone did at school.

A level playing field

BT is tightly regulated and it must provide equal access to its telecom infrastructure to any company. This is fine for BT because it is keen to have many companies create innovative applications on top of this platform, in addition to the new services it is rolling out itself.

I asked JP Rangaswami, Managing Director of Innovation and strategy at BT, how does BT avoid the impression that it could become a competitor to the companies it is hoping will use its advanced communications platform.

“We make sure that we only innovate around platform services and leave the applications alone,” he said. “We want to avoid the criticism that others such as Microsoft have had about this issue.”

I mentioned that four years ago I was at an event where Rob Hull, a business development manager at BT Group was talking with local entrepreneurs and hoping to lure them to the UK and have them use BT’s telecom platform. Mr Hull said that BT would split the revenues with the startups 80 percent, with 20 percent for BT.

However, should their service become hugely popular, BT reserved the right to port the application to its machines and reverse a 20 percent / 80 percent revenue split in its favor! I was shocked.

(Silicon Valley startups told: Come to London … BT wants your business! – SiliconValleyWatcher)

Mr Rangaswami said that this provision no longer exists. Since he joined BT in 2006, he’s made sure to ensure there is very competitive platform for developers without fear of BT coming in and scooping up the rewards from popular services.

Next: We’re back into the rain and off to the Guardian newspaper…