It’s actually been over a year since I attempted to get loads of Sheffield web people together to chat about web stuff. So, after numerous proddings by Chris, I have set a date for the first one of 2009.
The format is simple, there is no format.
It’s a completely unstructured social event. Turn up, eat, drink and talk to people. Talk to people you know and to people you don’t. Talk about the web, talk about the weather. Whatever. I’d really like it if you’d blog/tweet/email what you talked about (or what you can remember). But whatever.
Rather than being the rather elitist and snobbish affair that it has been previous (yeah, right!) I decided this time to make it an all comers event. If you know of anyone who’d like to meet up for a drink and a chat about web stuff, please point them at upcoming.org.
After checking for conflicts with other local web events, I’ve set the date for March the 26th, and I see no reason not to meet-up at the Devonshire Cat again.
Please use upcoming.org to state whether you’re likely to attend as, if the numbers go crazy, I might have to warn them we’re coming.
I just thought I share something with you…
Have you ever noticed that if you fold a sheet of A3 paper in half it is the same size as a sheet of A4. This fact is what implies the aspect ratio of ISO standard paper (A3, A4, A5, etc).
If a piece of A4 has long and short sides sides of a and b respectively and a sheet of A3 has long and short sides c and d respectively, and the aspect ratio of A4 and A4 is the same, then:
a/b = c/d
and the long side of A4 is the same as the short side of A3:
a = d
and the short side of an A4 is half the long side of and A3:
b = c/2
so, substituting:
d/(c/2) = c/d
(d^2)/(c/2) = c
(d^2)/(c^2) = 1/2
d/c = 1/√2
so the ratio of d/c (the short to long side) of A3 (and therefore any ISO paper size) is 1/√2 or approximately 0.707
I don’t know why I find this interesting, but I thought you might too.
FOWA Dublin 2009
This is a shameless plug for FOWA Dublin 2009. By putting this logo on my blog, Carsonified say they might give me free tickets.
It’s shameless because I have no shame in promoting the FOWA events after attending and really enjoying FOWA London 2008.
This crazy train of thought started after our company had a Christmas outing to the local Laser Quest. As a bunch of geeks, plenty of people were working out the technology and one person, Pip, just said in passing ‘surely we could make it better by applying some new technology’.
That was enough to set my brain working. Being a web-ish person, I immediately starting thinking about how to extend the Laser Quest experience online. To me half the fun of the event is reliving the game in the pub afterwards. Working out who shot who and boasting about the excellent move you made on the opposition base that no-one saw.
So why not fit each and every player with a accurate location sensor, track their movements throughout the game and upload the data to the game computer with the shot/hit data. This means that you could replay the entire game, who was where and where shot where made. the game can then be replayed online in the pub (who doesn’t have a smart phone) or in the office the next day!
What technology needs to be in place to achieve this:
- First, the existing gun/vest packs need to record the time of kill shots not just the shooter and count. I’ve no idea whether different system do this or not.
- next we need some kind of location tracking technology. It needs to work in an enclosed spaces (with lots of walls), be lightweight and low power and be able to track to an accuracy of about 1m at a rate of perhaps 1 sample/second.
I had a bit of a look around at some tracking technologies, but found none that fit:
- rfid is very low power, but I believe that it is also very short range. I’m not sure if that is true of active RFID as well as passive.
- GPS doesn’t work well indoors, particularly in basements with no windows
- Wifi based tracking looks promising, particularly as wifi transponders are pretty cheap. However, they work on signal strength difference to mulitple wifi beacons. This might mean it works less well on a small area.
- Bluetooth seems to be based around proximity location rather than triangulation of actual position.
- RF fingerprinting, which infers position from the the pattern of RF signal received by multiple beacons. It requires that the system ‘learns’ room before it can determine position. I’m not sure how well this would cope with multiple sensors and a complex layout of perpendicular walls (with windows).
Of course, any solution must be cheap enough for the Laser Quest arena operators to invest in. By the look of Sheffield’s Laser Quest arena, this price threshold is pretty damn low. I’m thinking open source software and hacked consumer hardware will be the way to go.
Anyone else got any thoughts?
I just joined the OpenID foundation in order to take part in the current board elections.
I’m reading the mailing list traffic with interest trying to figure out which candidates I should support, which ones are going to provide the OpenID with the right mix of skills and experience to make it have even greater success in 2009.
For me there are a couple of obvious choices, Chris Messina is an incredibly smart guy. As well as already taking several projects to widespread success (BarCamp, Firefox), he also has the right UX focus that I think OpenID desperately needs.
David Recordon is another obvious choice for me. Having seen him speak at FOWA London, I found him smart and articulate, this is added to his obvious commitment to OpenID (and the rest of the open stack).
As for for my other 5 votes, well, I’ve got to the 24th of December to decide, so I’ll carry on lurking on the mailing lists.
If you too are interested in having a say in how one of the most important elements of the open web will be driven in the coming months, then et yourself over to openid.net and pay just $25 to beome a foundation member. Worth every cent
This weekend at Sheffield BarCamp I saw a presentation by Tim Nash about how some SEO providers are achieving high rankings using web spam.
He explained, quite eloquently, how a technique called Markov Chains is used to create alternative copies of some source content that, to a search engine, has the same keyword profile, but cannot be linked back to the original content or to any of the other Markov derived versions.
Of course to a human reader the Markov derived versions are absolute nonsense, but to a search engine, they look like legitimate pages of human created content. So when sprinkled liberally with links to the spammer’s target URL, the search engine rank that URL higher as a popular destination.
Now, I have no problem with people who use ingenuity to find kinks in the systems to bend to their own advantage, but it seems to me that it is not the (big nasty corporate) search engines who are being conned here, and it’s not just the users or the people who just want to create interesting and useful content but it’s the whole community that eventually loses out.
As the spam-arms-race spirals it becomes harder for us to find useful content or to get our useful content found.
While writing this I found that Seth Godin (unsurprisingly) put it much better..
Recently, while making an online purchase, I was asked by a online store to opt-in to the Verified by Visa anti-fraud mechanism. On face value this seemed like a very sensible thing to join up to. All I have to do is provide a password of my choosing that I re-enter each time I make a purchase online using my Visa card.
The structure of the Verified by Visa (and its Mastercard equivalent, 3D-secure) means that an online seller will not be able to keep my credit card details and re-use them later (for nefarious purposes) as I only provide my password directly to Visa NOT to the seller themselves.
Great, I thought! Until I noticed that the site that was asking me to setup my password (and I would presumably have to re-enter my password at a later date) did not identify itself in any meaningful way. Check it out for yourself https://www.securesuite.co.uk. Notice that the ‘site owner’ does not appear in the Firefox/MSIE7 location bar and even if you examine the SSL certificate it seems to be registered to a company called CYOTA Inc. The only mention of ‘Verified by Visa’ is buried in the Organisational Unit entry in the certificate.
Now we can obviously google our way to finding out that CYOTA Inc are owned by RSA who probably provide the systems for Verified by Visa, but really…
The whole process is predicated on the buyer knowing that they are providing their password to Visa and no-one else so I find it incredible that Visa, CYOTA and the issuing banks are not addressing the confusion they are causing.
Worse still they aren’t just confusing the public about Verified by Visa, they are also positively ENCOURAGING user to ignore the warning signs of phishing attacks.
I have a friend who works in the innovation team of one of the big banks. He recently asked an open question about the future of retail banking. I’ve had the questions running round my head for past few weeks and feel that I have some thoughts that are fermented enough to be aired. Aden, please forgive me if this stuff is just old hat to you – they are just random ramblings of an over active mind, not the result of any market research.
My first thought about a concept of banking follwoing a utility model. At present we commit to provider for a financial product and service i.e. deposit account, personal loan, mortgage, home insurance. We commit to this provider based on explicit criteria (lowest interest rate, best cover) and value judgements (trusted brand, customer service). When we want to swicth between providers we have to go through a world of pain or pay exit fees.
Now if we could give an online agent our criteria and allow it to move our deposits and loans between providers we would have a utility model for money.
The problem is what needs to happen to enable this:
- standardisation of services – not necessarily just one product (like 240 volts of electricity) but at least a way to be able to automatically compare products. The comparison websites are already moving the industry in this direction.
- low cost of service setup for the providers – I have no idea how much a credit check/score costs a lender, but if this cost is passed on to the customer as a fee, it becomes a form of tie-in.
- better data exchange facilities between customers and providers – if I can’t quickly, easily and automatically setup my direct debits with my current account provider, I am prevented from changing providers. Again, a tie-in, but this time imposed by the destination provider.
- and, most significantly, a significant provider in this marketplace to introduce financial services on this basis. Actually the real problem is that it needs more than one provider else there is no choice of provider.
I find the likleyhood of two or more financial service providers who are willing to disrupt the market by moving to this kind of model pretty slim. Especially as it moves the whole marketplace further from a value-add model to a price driven one.
Crazy thought eh?
My second thought was more grounded. In this age of tightening purse strings I am wondering why my online bank is not providing me with visualisation tools. Something that lets me see where my money goes each month and therefore where I could make the most significant belt tightening moves.
Sure I could (and occasionally do) download my statements and import them into a spreadsheet to categorise and analyse my outgoings. But, surely my bank could save me a lot of trouble by not only allowing me to view my outgoings as graphs and charts. It could use its understanding (or the aggregated knowledge of all its customers) to automatically categorise my expenditure. Perhaps visualisations of my outgoings over time would also help me too. Particularly if they could be compared against the aggregation of other users too.
So how about it banks? Two options there, one that leads you to compete more on price, the other that adds value to your online services.
I’ve been trying to find a way to manage my huge number of website passwords and perhaps store my private data. I came across passpack.com a few days ago and thought I’d give it a try.
After attempting to import my Firefox password list only to told that I had exceeded my allocated number of of entries by -97 (yes, minus 97). Hmmm! a few emails back and forth to the (very helpful) Passpack support team, plus the dicovery that I have third party cookies turned off on Firefox (forgot that) and I got it up and running.
So do I like it? Well it’s exactly what I wanted, but not actually what I need. You see it forces me to be a bit too secure. In order to login to a website without remembering the password, I have to:
- login to Passpack – no problem it supports openID (and I can have ‘remember me’ turned on my computers)
- perform the humanity test (a nice one actually – just click the black square)
- provide my packing key – which must be a fairly long and safe key. This is slightly annoying as I am an incredibly bad typer and have trouble typing more than 2 keys in the right order at the best of times. So trying to get a 20 character packing key right when I can’t see what I’ve typed takes numerous tries.
- locate the appropriate entry for the site I wish to visit.
- click the link to be forwarded to the site
- click the ‘Passpack it!’ bookmarklet (if I have the bookmark tool bat turned on – I don’t normally)
- and there, Robert’s your mother’s live-in-lover.
Now I know that this would probably be a lot easier if the domains in my password file (not sure why the don’t), but it’s all such a bloody palaver. Compare that to the Foxmarks experience:
- I go to the site I want to use
- Firefox prefills my details
Okay so there is a downside.
- I can’t store any data, just passwords
- I can’t use other browsers
- I can’t use a public access (or a friends) computer
Well, I’m thinking that I’ll stick a copy of Firefox passwords on my Truecrypt encrypted USB key to cover most of those issues. Sorry Passpack – but you’re just too secure for me!
Now if only Foxmarks would support openID, I’d be have just one password to remember. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about my accessing on my iPhone though! Any ideas?
