It seems like just a few short months ago that I discovered Poken – neat little USB keychain devices which you can touch together when you meet someone else with one, in order to electronically exchange social network IDs and contact information. Actually… it was only a few months ago – we talked about them on Dogear Nation episode 88 in February, and in an example of serendipitous discovery, I picked one up a week later at Twestival in London. I immediately thought the idea was cool, but I was disappointed to discover how much they cost, and how few people had them.
I mentioned Poken in my presentation at SOMESSO a couple of weeks ago. Whilst I love the idea, I simply haven’t come across enough people who have a Poken to have made it worth my while. My basic comment at the time was that I felt they needed to make themselves more widespread in order to be useful. Since then, I’ve continued the discussion in comments on a couple of blogs. To quote myself:
However, I think there are a few issues…
[they] cost more than most people are prepared to pay for what is essentially a small capacity but cute looking memory stick, and they are not very readily available;
the cuteness factor can also be off-putting to some people, particularly those with a business purpose in mind and the disposable income to buy them;
too few core connectors and salesmen have them (see Gladwell’s The Tipping Point), IMHO they should seed more;
the value-add of the site (which actually manages the contacts) is low, so the business model is presumably centred on selling the devices.
I had yet another conversation about Poken at a tweetup in London last week, and again heard comment that they were too toy-like for business users, and too few people had them.
This is all great stuff. I engaged with the idea of Poken as soon as I heard about the concept, and I hope that I’ll be able to share and manage my information more easily in future. Maybe Poken won’t be the answer, but I’m glad to see the idea broadening out, and hopefully reaching a wider audience.
You wait three weeks for a video, and then two turn up at once. No wait… that was buses.
The video of my talk from SOMESSO London 2009 has been made available. Unfortunately I’m not able to embed that here on my site, so follow the link if you want to see it. It’s about 20 minutes long.
I was also interviewed on camera by Daniel and Eduardo Vidal (hope you feel better soon, Eduardo!)… and my whole presentation was recorded as well, so those should appear over the next couple of weeks.
Oddly I seemed to spend a lot of time discussing Poken after the talk! I guess my use of Poken as a prop at the start of the presentation raised a lot of interest. My mention of Home Camp and sustainability also generated some additional conversations. I also detected a lot of interest as to how IBM had achieved the cultural changes required to adapt to a social web (answer: I’d argue that openness has been in our corporate DNA for some time now), and also in how we put together our Social Computing Guidelines. Again, I would draw attention to one paragraph in the guidelines which I think sums up the approach and background:
In 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet—at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access. In 2005, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate. We continue to advocate IBMers’ responsible involvement today in this rapidly growing space of relationship, learning and collaboration.
I thought the SOMESSO London event was just superb. A series of short (15-20 minute) presentations from some smart people who I was quite frankly honoured to be on the same bill as; and I really didn’t think that there was anything superfluous, it was just great content and information. The Emirates Stadium was a great venue, too… once I’d found my way into the conference centre in the morning, avoiding the queue of contestants lining up for X-Factor auditions! If my camera battery had lasted I would have posted a lot more to Flickr, but I’m afraid there are only a few shots up there.
Thanks to Arjen Strijker, Mary Harrington, Susan Kish and others for putting the day together. On the basis of yesterday’s conference, I highly recommend future events in the series, and would also encourage you to get involved in the SOMESSO community if you are at all interested in social media in the enterprise. I’m really looking forward to following up all of the new connections I made yesterday.
Finally, some links to some of the books I referenced in my talk or during the backchannel conversation:
Today I have been speaking at the SOMESSO conference in London. I inherited the topic from my friend Luis Suarez… it was billed as “Knowledge management: Security, Intellectual Property and Privacy” but I spun it around a little to look at how exposing your company’s expertise and ideas to the web can actually improve innovation.
I’m completely indebted to Adam Christensen for his words (much retweeted today as something I’d said) about IBM’s approach to social computing, and for allowing me to reuse a couple of slides. I also loved Dion Hinchcliffe’s recent post 12 Rules for Bringing Social to your Business, and reused his graphic from there. I thought there were some fantastic synergies with the previous three talks during the morning, and was able to continue some of the threads whilst taking them in a slightly different direction.
For more background on IBM’s approach, I recommend taking a look at an interview with Jon Iwata in which he discusses the loss of control, but the value of social media.
I’m not going to run down all of the announcements that came out during the first day of IMPACT yesterday – you can take a look at Sandy Carter’s video summary for some of the key ones, like Smart Work, and the new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance (it’s very purple – and I want one!). There is a slew of cool new stuff being announced and coming out over the coming year.
Sitting in the keynote yesterday morning I was feeling as though several of the worlds that I live in / things I’m interested in were really coming together. It’s an exciting time. For example, we had:
throughout the conference, social media at the fore, with YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and blogs all being used to connect and collaborate.
As an “SOA event” it’s easy for me to see it as all to do with IBM’s WebSphere brand of software alone, since that’s what I’ve work been working on for almost a decade now. The truth is that IMPACT spans everything that IBM does, particularly in software. We are talking collaboration and social software (Lotus); monitoring and intelligent management (Tivoli); modelling and productive development (Rational); and sophisticated data analytics (Information Management). It’s a real showcase for the broad reach and range of IBM’s software portfolio.
Highlight of the day for me was absolutely nothing to do with IBM software – it was the opportunity to hear Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester speak on the Future of the Social Web. Jeremiah clearly understands this stuff in all the many facets that have been expressed by other people I follow, like Don Tapscott – I did recommend his book already, right…? I am glad to have made the connection with @jowyang, since I’ve read and followed much of his work in the past couple of years, so it was a bit of a treat to hear him speaking. I tried not to take over the Q&A completely
Oh, and the play part? Billy Crystal was the compere for the morning session and kept us amused despite the early start – and there were plenty of opportunities to catch up with friends and Twitter connections at the networking sessions. I call that a win. Oh, and wait a second, I almost forgot – we had a tweetup yesterday, with a couple more scheduled later in the week. Looking forward to them.
Photos I’m taking at IMPACT 2009 are up on Flickr – this slideshow should auto-update as more are added, since it selects from the tagged images in my account. I’m taking snapshots using my compact Canon camera (often without flash to avoid distracting the presenters) and uploading via Eye-Fi so the results are varied
If you missed today’s discounted tickets, I have a discount code for you – XYSO09CANDYP – sign up online via http://www.somesso.com and insert the code where it says “Click here to enter a promotional code”. Oh, and if you’re a blogger, you might even be able to get a free ticket.
There are some nice pre-event writeups on the Greenmonk and Redmonk blogs.
It’s a shame that due to unforeseen circumstances I’m no longer able to attend, but I’m looking forward to following remotely if I can, and otherwise catching all the content tagged ‘homecamp’ on Flickr, blogs, and Twitter.
The event is open to anyone, so if you are interested in home hacking automation and energy efficiency, you will definitely want to get involved.
For me, the place to be is IBM’s IMPACT SOA conference in Las Vegas – in just a couple of weeks’ time. Barring unexpected circumstances, I should be in town for the duration of the conference.
I’ve been heading to Vegas on a regular basis for the past few years, but it has always been for internal events rather than customer ones. In my role, I’ve always been excited by technology and the innovation we get up to internally – but much, much more importantly, I need to be talking to customers and partners to understand how that technology and innovation is being used in the real world. I’m very much looking forward to talking to WebSphere and other IBM customers about their experiences with our products, what they are looking for from Service Oriented Architectures, and taking those messages back into our labs.
I’m also looking forward to finally meeting a bunch of my colleagues such as the legendary “Social Media Sandy” aka Sandy Carter herself, who I’ve known for a number of years now through various networks, but have never had the opportunity to talk to face-to-face. Incidentally, Sandy has some great background info about different events and partners at IMPACT on her developerWorks blog[*]. I’ve just read her most recent book, Marketing 2.0, and I’ll try to post some comments on that soon as well.
I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.
The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.
Some very general comments on the day:
Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
It seems like just a few short months ago that I discovered Poken – neat little USB keychain devices which you can touch together when you meet someone else with one, in order to electronically exchange social network IDs and contact information. Actually… it was only a few months ago – we talked about them on Dogear Nation episode 88 in February, and in an example of serendipitous discovery, I picked one up a week later at Twestival in London. I immediately thought the idea was cool, but I was disappointed to discover how much they cost, and how few people had them.
I am glad to have made the connection with @jowyang, since I’ve read and followed much of his work in the past couple of years, so it was a bit of a treat to hear him speaking. I tried not to take over the Q&A completely 
