Cloud Four Blog

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend and speak at SXSW’s Interactive Festival for the first time. After hearing about SXSW for some many years, it was interesting to see what the conference was all about.

I’m not sure I’ll attend SXSW again.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the conference in many ways. I got to see friends that I haven’t seen in months. I met people that I’ve always wanted to meet. I had fun speaking with people about the iPad, and it was great to experience Mobile Monday in another city.

Austin is an amazing city. I had a blast in the city, and I feel like I saw and experienced more of the city than I typically do at conferences.

Unfortunately with a few notable exceptions, the conference itself was not terribly good.

I’m not sure why this is. I have read others talking about how this conference was worse than previous ones. It saddens me to think that when I finally manage to attend the reknowned SXSW, that it has jumped the shark. But it appears that may be case.

One of the main problems in my opinion is the dominance of panels at the conference. I find panels to be of lower quality overall than presentations by a solo presenter.

I’m not sure why SXSW has so many panels, but I have a few generous and not so generous theories.

The generous theory is that SXSW values the input of the community. It starts with allowing anyone to vote for session, continues with selection of panels, and is demonstrated by their core conversation sessions designed to foster discussion instead of presentations.

The less generous theory is that people propose panels solely to get free passes for themselves and their friends.

I was told essentially that on my return trip to the airport. I took a shuttle and bumped into a friend. He asked what I thought of the conference, and I lamented the fact that the sessions had been so poor.

Two of the other passengers in the shuttle told me that my mistake was that I didn’t get a pass for the conference. They didn’t know that I was a speaker at the conference so they proceeded to tell me how I needed to get on a panel so that I could get a free pass.

Then they laughed about how once you have a pass and are on a panel, you don’t have to prepare anything. You just roll into your panel, answer questions, and then use your pass to network and party.

I was extremely offended. I couldn’t believe that they could have such disrespect for people’s time and money.

Even though I only had four minutes to present during my panel, I started researching as soon as I knew I was going to be on the panel.

I had several pages of notes in addition to my slides. I decided to hack the format to make the panel more interesting by treating my presentation like an Ignite talk which meant I had to practice extensively to get the timing right. I also set up a script to tweet background information during my presentation.

And I wasn’t the only one. Everyone on our panel took it seriously. We prepared ahead of time. The audience response to our session was great.

I know a lot of people don’t attend conferences for the sessions. My friend Aaron Hockley’s recap of SXSW is talks about how the value of conferences is not the sessions, but in the connections that are made.

I agree with Aaron that tremendous value comes from the connections, but that’s no excuse for treating the people who attend your session poorly and wasting their time.

The contrast between the attitude of the fellow passengers on my shuttle and the work that Jay Rosen and his fellow panelists put into their SXSW session couldn’t be starker. In fact, it seems completely inappropriate that those who treat SXSW panels so disrespectfully should be able to share the metaphorical stage with Rosen and others who take the conference seriously.

The attitude that some have towards SXSW reflects poorly on those of us who take our roles as speakers and educators in the technology community seriously.

I don’t know if this is a pervasive attitude of speakers at SXSW, but I can say that the quality of content way not what I expected. I expected to be inspired as Jeremy Keith was. That’s what I want from any conference.

Perhaps I just picked sessions poorly, but instead of being inspired, my final and lasting impression was of a conference that didn’t deliver.

One of the recurring subjects of conversation at SXSW was the many competing location services. Attendees were using Foursquare and Gowalla extensively during the conference to help find their friends.

I decided to give them a try during the conference. That is until Foursquare decided to give me a “Hookup Badge.”

Apparently, the Hookup Badge is given to someone who checks in at two different hotels.

For anyone visiting Austin who doesn’t stay at the historic Driskill Hotel, there is a good chance you’re going to check in at two hotels during your trip. The Driskill is a must see and you will likely check in at the hotel you’re staying at.

That is what happened to me.

I checked in at the Driscoll Hotel when I met friends there. I purposely asked Foursquare not to tweet the check in because I feel like it is spam in my Twitter stream.

However, I didn’t remember that I had allowed Foursquare to post updates about badges that I won. Foursquare didn’t tweet the check in, but it did tweet about my “Hookup Badge.”

So part of the blame is mine. I shouldn’t have let Foursquare post to Twitter at all.

At the same time, I had no expectations that Foursquare would be posting inappropriate tweets. I’m a happily married man. Joking about hooking up while I’m on business travel is not funny.

Thankfully the damage was limited. A few months ago I disconnected Twitter from Facebook. Otherwise, my new “Hookup Badge” would have been shared with family members who would have no idea what Foursquare is nor understand Foursquare’s idea of a “funny” badge.

When I relayed this story with Péter Green of Finnish Mobile Association, he told me how he had received the “Hangover Badge,” and received many comments from his friends back home.

Those comments were funny, but imagine how quickly they would have turned into concerned or panic if the Hangover Badge was handed out to a recovering alcoholic who was half a world away.

I like the idea of gaming mechanics to get people to participate in a location-based service, but Foursquare seems to be making some big mistakes here:

• The incentive structure in the game should be known instead of a surprise. For example, if you check-in more times than another person, you become mayor. That’s well known and easy to understand. The Hookup and Hangover badges use rule combinations that you don’t known until you unwittingly unlock a badge.
• The badges indicate a lack of perspective on what issues they may cause for the people who receive them.
• The overall impression of the service based on these badges is one that is designed for party-going twenty-somethings. It’s hard to take such a service seriously.

We’ve heard a lot about location-based services and cell phone logs getting people in trouble for their infidelity. There’s no need for services like Foursquare to create problems where none exist.

As far as I’m concerned, this was inexcusable breach of trust. I deleted my Foursquare account and will not use their service again.

When we’re not working on mobile projects, there’s a good chance we’re working with a standards setting organization or an association on their public web presence.

More often than not, we’re building that site using Drupal. We believe Drupal is a perfect fit for organizations and associations.

Before we started started Cloud Four, Aileen, Lyza, John and I had all worked for several years at Kavi which is focused on providing software for organizations.

John was one of the co-founders of Kavi. Lyza was one of the first employees. And Aileen and I had been at Kavi for over seven years.

Needless to say, we have a lot of experience working with these organizations.

After we left Kavi, we searched for a new web platform that would fit the needs of these organizations. Our experience had taught us that while there are some common characteristics of organization web sites, that each organization has unique goals and functionality that they need implemented on their site.

With that experience in mind, we tried many different solutions before settling on Drupal. Drupal provides:

• Top-notch content management features
• Support for simple or complex user management
• Foundation that provides for future expansion
• An active development community
• Ability to build custom solutions on top of Drupal if needed
• Integration ease including the NTEN favorite membership management suite, CiviCRM¹

In addition to these core features, we found that Drupal supports other things that organizations often talk about such as:

• Revisioning
• Authoring Roles
• Content Syndication
• News Aggregator
• Tagging
• Localization
• Blogging
• Forums

All of this goodness wrapped in an open source platform that is widely used by both companies and non-profits.

We’ve been talking to our customers and partners for quite some time about why Drupal makes sense for organizations, but have been waiting for the perfect showcase site to make the point to a larger audience.

As you can see from the recently launched JEDEC.org site, Drupal makes it possible to build beautiful and powerful web sites that accomplish the objectives of standards-setting organizations and associations.

If you’d like to learn more about how Drupal can help your organization, association or your company (Yes, it works well for corporate sites as well!), please contact us.

We’d be happy to talk to you more about how Drupal can help your organization.

1. As an aside, if you run an organization and haven’t looked into CiviCRM, we highly recommend that you do. It is a full-featured, open source membership tool that integrates fully with Drupal. Not only that, but our friends at raSANTIAGO + Associates provide a great service called CiviServer and are experts in helping organizations utilize CiviCRM effectively.

First & 20 is web site about iPhone applications describes itself as a “collection of Home screens of some of the best and brightest developers, designers and tech writers.”

The name comes from the fact that you can only have 20 applications on the iPhone’s Home (or first) screen.

To date, the site showcases 35 home screens from various luminaries. The site also lists the most popular applications as:

• Tweetie – 21 home screens
• Things – 11 home screens
• Facebook – 10 home screens
• Birdfeed – 9 home screens
• Instapaper – 8 home screens

Unfortunately, First and 20 was wrong. These are not the most common applications on these 35 home screens.

Here is my count based on reviewing the 35 home screens. I gave extra credit for applications that were listed in the dock because they remain visible on every screen—not just the home screen.

The most popular applications are Phone, Mail and Safari. These are the only three applications that are on all 35 home screens.

Looking at the table now, it seems obvious that these applications would be the most popular applications. Of course people want to make phone calls, send email, and browse the web.

But as I mentioned in a previous post, because of the focus on the the iPhone and the iPhone App Store, massive changes are happening right in front of everyone’s noses and most people are missing them.

The number of articles talking about App Stores and strike-it-rich application stories vastly outnumber those talking about the explosive growth of the mobile web.

Consequently, many businesses are focused on how their going to build an iPhone application and missing the fact that those same iPhone owners are already probably trying to access their web site on their mobile phone and failing.

Should it be surprising that the most popular applications on the iPhone are Phone, Mail and Safari? No, but if you believe what you read in the media these days, these applications are underdogs when competing against the explosion of apps.

Making calls. Sending email. Browsing the web. There are apps for that too.

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker gave a fantastic presentation at Web 2.0 Summit that I’ve been meaning to post here for a few weeks. The presentation is rich with information and the slides are dense.

On slide 29, Meeker starts her argument that “The Mobile Internet Is and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think.” I encourage you to read her slides and watch the video of her talk. Both are embedded below.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how her title speaks to what is going on right now in most people’s minds when it comes to mobile.

There is so much focus on iPhone applications and the iPhone generally, that massive changes are happening right in front of everyone’s noses that aren’t being noticed or are being taken for granted.

Perhaps the simplest example of this is the explosive growth of the mobile web. We have analysts predicting that 1 billion mobile web users in 2010—more than the number of PC users accessing the web.

Opera continues to report exponential growth in usage of its Opera Mini browser—a browser designed for low end feature phones instead of smart phones like the iPhone. The biggest growth is happening in developing countries.

And despite all of this mobile web growth, most businesses aren’t taking the steps necessary to optimize their web sites for mobile devices. Some have iPhone blinders to such a degree that they undermine their own iPhone applications.

And its not just the mobile web. The same could be said for SMS, MMS, GPS, or cameras.

In her presentation, Meeker stated talked about this as a trend for 2009, but I don’t see this disconnect between the size of the mobile Internet and most people’s perception of it going away any time soon.

In fact, Meeker summarized succinctly what I’ve been writing and about presenting about for the last couple of years.

Therefore, I’m adopting her trend title as my theme for next year.

• 2010: The Mobile Internet is Bigger than You Think

That’s right. The mobile internet is already here and it’s bigger than you think. Are you ready? If not, what are you waiting for?