Matter Box

A couple of weeks ago I saw a Twitter from one of my contacts (I honestly forget who it was) that led me to discover the Matter Box. The idea is apparently that if you sign up on the website, every now and then you will get a box of marketing-type goodies. Not just any old leaflets, either – this is nice stuff.

The first box was delivered to subscribers this morning. There are already unboxing photos on Flickr, including a set from my friend Dale, who has also written about it. No photos from me, though – I did a quick video showing what is inside, instead. No prize for counting the number of times I say “cool”, either.

(the video is also on YouTube)

Quite fun. Neatly and tightly packed. My favourite item is probably the Wii armband, although considering I don’t yet own a Wii, it’s a little bit pointless so far

Update: there’s a description of the contents and some background on the Matter blog.

An excellent September Minibar

As I type this, I’m on the train on the way back from the September Minibar meetup at the Old Truman Brewery in Corbet Place.

Very cool to get along to a Minibar meetup again after a break of a few months. It was interesting to see the number of my Twitter contacts who wish they could have made it! I’d been hoping to meet Chris Dalby, and my colleague Shiyghan… neither of whom made it this time.

Instead, I had some very interesting conversations with, amongst others, Matt and Katherine Cashmore. Matt is from BBC Backstage and ran the BBC/Yahoo! HackDay in London. I’d seen him on stage at the event, but hadn’t had the opportunity to connect with him… so it was good to finally have an opportunity to talk to him about all the cool stuff that BBC Backstage does, and with Katherine about all kinds of social software topics. Matt also made the announcement that Backstage is about to launch a new website, which is something to look forward to. I also had a fascinating conversation with Martin Kamara from BBC World Service (who is very tall – definitely taller than Roo) about my social software evangelism, and what his organisation is up to.

Finally had a chat with Christian, the organiser, and Hannah from OpenBusiness … they are about to celebrate the first anniversary of Minibar with the next “special” meetup on October 19th in association with Seedcamp. It has been a great effort so far. Also, Hannah put me in touch with some really great people – looking forward to developing the new connections.

On to the presentations… which were a little hard to hear at times, thanks to a power blackout depriving the venue of a PA system.

Spreadshirt
Spreadshirt enable users to create their own t-shirts and other branded products… so far so standard… except that they also enable sites to embed the shop platform. It is all RSS and CSS-based, so it is highly customisable, probably more so than Cafepress (which I immediately thought of when Larry Ryan started talking about the concept). I’ve been burned by import duty on stuff from Cafepress in the past, and following a chat with Larry it sounds like Spreadshirt could be a great alternative. Turns out that these folks have been around for a number of years (they started in Germany in 2002, and expanded internationally in 2005). One to check out… plus they were handing out discount vouchers and free Minibar shirts!

School of Everything
These guys were funded by Seedcamp one of the Seedcamp finalists, and the alpha version of the site launched today. The concept is that “everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach”… you can set yourself up on the site as being able to provide training or education in a particular subject, and local users can find you. SoE will then take a small cut from helping to manage your profile and schedule. Apparently this is built on Drupal in PHP, and the presenters were talking about an API, although what form this could take was unclear. There were questions around how this would work though… at the moment, anyone can set themselves up as a trainer, and although there will be a user recommendation system to weed out bad ones, there appears to be no need for any kind of accreditation. Lots of enthusiasm from the team, an amusing presentation, and an interesting concept. Oh, and a man who needs help finding a place to buy a tank that he bought (long story, kinda).

Babyfy
Babyfy has been open for a couple month and is aimed at the ~1 million people who go through the “babification” (pregnancy and birth) process in the UK every year. The concept is that it is a social website to help new parents find products, recommend hospitals, and provide reviews and support to one another. I’m personally somewhat dubious – I see a bunch of potential holes in this, from disgruntled parents making unwelcome comments about hospitals, to companies pushing products more than having users recommend them… the main thing that sprang to my mind was a recent controversy in the UK about baby formula advertising, and whether the site would accept such advertising. It is early days though, and I’m sure the developers will have to think about these things as they go forward. I can see that it has some great potential, and who knows, I may even need to take a look at it in the future… (!)

Miomi
This very nice-looking website is apparently built entirely in HTML and Javascript at the moment, which is impressive. The idea is that you can browse a timeline of history. Memories – both public (culled from Microsoft and Wikipedia) and private (your own audio, video, image and text feeds) – can be stored and browsed. This really reminded me of Rememble which I heard about at a previous Minibar (and which, incidentally, is due to launch publically soon). Apparently these guys will allow companies to sponsor events and timelines or years, and also allow users to embed the timelines on their own sites. A Microsoft influence is evident – the map is based on Virtual Earth, and the developers mentioned that a Silverlight version might follow soon. The idea kind of appeals to me, but a) in common with my reservations about Rememble I’m not sure how this differs from other lifelogging solutions like Tumblr or, increasingly, Facebook and an aggregation of Twitter, blogs and Flickr (apart from the timeline); and b) more scary than Rememble, there was discussion of automatically sucking data from the web, which bothers me as I’d rather explicitly authorise what content of mine becomes part of “world history”, in a way… maybe I misunderstood.

A lot to think about, new stuff to check out, and some great company and conversations. Well worth the time.

Technorati Tags: Cafepress, minibar, miomi, Babyfy, rememble, School of Everything, Spreadshirt

Slorpedo – the video

Thanks to Paul Johnston, the video footage of the SLUK event featuring Slorpedo is now available on YouTube!

It looks awesome. Well done to everyone involved.

Technorati tags: SLorpedo, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, gaming, HackDay, hackdaylondon, Jim Purbrick, Nigel Crawley, Paul Johnston, James Taylor, mixed reality

Is this the best button ever?

The East Midlands Conference Centre has possibly the best feature in the world. In this clip, Roo demonstrates my discovery

Moo – the party

Last night I went up to Exmouth Market in London for the launch of the new StickerBooks by Moo.

An excellent party. I think it was Suw who commented that they promised us a “hot and sticky” party, and given the weather yesterday, that’s what we got.

The venue was adorned with various Moo products. I like the look of my own Moo cards, but I’m continually astounded by the quality of the cards that other people come up with.

It was also a great opportunity to pursue my efforts to meet people in my social network. I finally managed to catch up in person with Suw, Kevin and Leisa (although the latter took some finding!). It was also good to reconnect with Myk, Al, Kim, Hugh and others. I managed to share a fair number of Moo Minicards, but fewer than I’d expected to hand out. Maybe I’m not so good at this whole networking thing

  

There were enough people there that they ran out of name stickers, and for the crowd to spill out into the street and nearly block Exmouth Market. I hadn’t been to that particular part of London before – it seems like a nice area.

Incidentally, if you were there and are reading this blog entry, and wondering whether you saw me – I was the person whose superpower is “reckless enthusiasm”. Ola found that rather ironic. That sticker is now on our fridge, as a reminder that I’m supposed to be enthusiastic…

As for the Moo Stickers themselves – very nice. I’d already ordered my own first set before the party, but I hadn’t seen the finished product. I picked up a free book last night. They are the usual high quality product that we’ve come to expect from Moo, although a bit fiddly to peel out of the book. The books themselves contain space for stickers from your friends, and have some lovely touches (all I’m going to say here is: you ain’t seen me, right?). I think they are going to be great for general decoration, sharing my photos with others, and giving to my nieces and nephews. The size of the stickers is also likely to encourage me to take more close-up shots. I’ve been adorning my own items with a few stickers already.

LaughingSquid also has a review of the StickerBooks.

On a related note – the first real signs of possible competition to Moo have appeared with the new PhotoBox MyCard. These are normal size / standard form factor business cards, but the trick they do have is that they can be double-sided, with a collage of photos on one side. On the negative side, the range of designs is a bit limited, their site is not hugely usable, and they do not pull images from Flickr or other websites… given the quality of the product, ease-of-use of the site and niceness of the people, I have to say that that my loyalty to Moo is strong, especially after events like last night, so I think PhotoBox may have an uphill struggle.

Check out the set of shots I took last night over on Flickr. And then go and order your stickers. You’ll be their new best friend.

Here’s the official write-up on the Moo blog. They used one of my photos. Yay!

Technorati tags: Moo, Stickers, StickerBook, Minicards, Flickr, photography, party, moostickerparty

SLorpedo revisited

A much-reduced Team Supernova was at SLUK 07 this weekend and managed to get SLorpedo finished off - complete with torpedos, explosions, and sinking subs.

Check out the YouTube video.

Well done to Jim, Nigel, Paul and James. 

Technorati tags: SLorpedo, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, gaming, HackDay, hackdaylondon, Jim Purbrick, Nigel Crawley, Paul Johnston, James Taylor

Greatly perplexed

“Have some of these, Andy”, said Roo, passing me a silvery packet of cards. And thus began my current frustration – Perplex City.

Roo, you see, is secretly evil.

Perplex City is essentially a series of collectable puzzle cards of increasing difficulty, all tied in with a website where you can register and enter the answers, scoring points for each card you solve.

There’s also much more to it than that. Perplex City is – or rather, has been until very recent cancellation – also an Alternate Reality Game, where the puzzles and the stories told on the backs of the cards, combine with real-world clues and other media to act as an interactive game. Fellow eightbar writers Ian, Roo and Nick have all blogged about it before.

I’m late into it, and I’ve never played ARGs before… so I can’t claim to really “get it”. Unfortunately, on the very day that Roo handed me those cards, Mind Candy (the makers) announced that the current “Season 2” of the Perpex City ARG had been cancelled, although the cards will continue to come out. Still, I’m left with a stack of, well, far too many cryptic Perplex City Season 2 cards, to tease my poor brain. Maybe the ARG part would have blown my mind completely.

I’m really not sure I can solve them all…

Technorati Tags: arg, mind candy, perplex city, virtual worlds

Meeting real people

One of the things I love about using social networking technologies is the ability to extend my real life, physical networks. That’s what it is all about.

Some examples:

• Thanks to the magic of Dopplr, I found out that Richard Brown was due to be in Edinburgh last night, and we had a long-overdue chat over dinner (but I think I failed to interest him in Twitter). Not only that, looks like Leisa might be in town next week – so far only an online acquaintance.
• Through an earlier blog entry, Marten Gustafson got in touch to arrange a meeting, so I spent much of this evening in a bar with about 90 Swedes, several of whom apparently read my blog. Very cool. I’m in awe of these guys – all of them with perfect English, polite, good-looking and big fans of WebSphere Message Broker. What more could I ask for? hi guys! check out Twitter, please…
• Luis pinged me on Google Talk to ask if I had a Dopplr invite to share with a contact of Euan Semple’s. I know Roo knows Euan, and I know of Euan, but he probably doesn’t know me. Anyway, as a result, Geoff Jones is now on Dopplr… and he was just asking for an invite over on Steph’s blog, too. I don’t know Steph personally, but I listen to her podcast with Suw, and I read her blog (and I read Suw’s blog… she doesn’t know me, but knows Roo… and I twittered her something via Jeff Barr recently – twitterchains?)
• James asked me to pass on a Dopplr invite to Werner Ramaeker. Turns out that Werner was amongst a group of people I presented to in Hursley last year.
• Going further back, before the last Minibar, I learned that mattb was going full-time at Dopplr (via Twitter), and then met him at the event a couple of hours later.

There are lots of other examples, these are the recent ones. I love this stuff!

Technorati Tags: blogs, dopplr, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, twitter, WMB

MOO Notecards

The awesome MOO have moved on from their wildly successful Minicards to produce Notecards – 10cm square cards which you can post, and which stand up with a little folding flap to one side.

I just ordered my first pack, and at the same time ordered my 3rd box of Minicards – not quite in time for my trip to Las Vegas next week, which is a shame – think I’ll run out during the week, I only have about 20 left from the current batch.

The very easy-to-use interface has seen some interesting tweaks, too.

You can now choose your buddy icon, no icon, or a range of icons with flashes like “invitation”, “new baby”, the Creative Commons logo etc., on both the Notecards and the Minicards. You can also have MOO fill in photo details from Flickr (title, date etc.) instead of just putting freeform text on the cards, and they have a tiny URL system so that people can find your images online with minimal fuss.

I like it. They know how to win my continuing custom.

Technorati tags: MOO, Minicards, notecards, Flickr, Creative Commons, business cards, buddy icon

Travel plans

I’ve been quiet and I’ve been on the road (although like many people, I’m twittering wildly).

• Last week I was in Sheffield.
• This week I am staying in Edinburgh, working with a customer in Scotland. My first time stopping in the city, and it is lovely – I only wish I had a camera with me.
• On Friday night I’ll be at Minibar in London. Hope to meet some of my blog and Twitter contacts there.
• From Saturday I will be in dazzling Las Vegas, attending and speaking at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference[1], an internal IBM event. I’ll be speaking on File Handling Choices in WebSphere Message Broker v6 on Wednesday afternoon, and generally enjoying the huge opportunities to learn from my peers for the rest of the week. I had a great time at the event last year, and this will be a good chance to get together with colleagues again, so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll try to blog the event, and suggest a tag of wstc2007 for other attendees who might want to follow suit.
• On my return, I’ll be back here in Edinburgh for most of May.

Thanks to Roo, I’m now also starting to play with Dopplr. It’s a remarkably simple idea – mark the dates when you’ll be in a particular place and work out when contacts might be in that same location. In true Web 2.0 style it has the usual feeds, tagging, Google Maps mashup, etc.. Looks very useful. The information is limited to you and the group of trusted other travellers, and it is invite-only (and I’m currently out of invites), but I think this “trusted circle” idea is probably a sound one. Looking forward to seeing how the service develops.

[1] aka “webspherepalooza”… that is, if you are Kelly…

Technorati tags: travel, Dopplr, Web 2.0, social software, Twitter, work, Edinburgh, Las Vegas, WebSphere Services Technical Conference, wstc2007, minibar

Scrapbooks, now Scrapblogs

A few weeks ago I had a play with Tumblr. My “scrapbook” is still there, and getting automatically generated by my adding links to del.icio.us or finding new Plazes… but I haven’t done a great deal more with it.

Today I was reading Tara Hunt’s excellent HorsePigCow marketing uncommon blog and learned about Scrapblog, a new startup with yet more interactive web candy for us to play with. Except… this time, it’s really about building scrapbooks. It’s a very rich Flash-based application (possibly soon to run on Apollo) which allows you to build galleries and screenshows in a scrapbook style. You can upload photos directly or pull them from Flickr, Yahoo, Photobucket or Webshots; you can add “stickers” (logos and patterns), change backgrounds, add frames and text. Once you’ve done all that, you can publish your Flash-based Scrapblog on their site, or share the static images on Flickr, where you could create a photoset and run a slideshow in a similar way.

I liked it – very easy to use, with an “iLife” feel to it, and of course it just runs out of the browser. I don’t generally build these kind of slideshows, but this was fun to play with. You can take a look at the results.

Once you’ve uploaded the scrapblog, the site offers tagging, profiles, comments, and feeds – everything that we’d expect these days.

I’m not keen on the name, simply because I’m wary of all of the attempts to brand things as blogs when they are not. Other than that, a very cool site to play around with.

Scrapblog hasn’t formally launched yet, but if you read to the end of Tara’s post, you’ll discover a way in to try out the preview version.

Technorati Tags: apollo, flash, photos, scrapblog

Settling in with OS X

It has been over a month since I got my MacBook Pro. I’d never really used OS X before, and apart from a lightning introduction in the store (backed up by some sound and invaluable advice from Adrian) I’ve been essentially on my own since day one. Roo suggested that I pick up the Missing Manual, and I will do that, but I’m going to wait for Leopard to appear first.
I’ve been promising to write about my experiences, and it is about time. Long post on the ins-and-outs of Mac OS 10.4 follows.

The biggest adjustment has been getting the hang of the keyboard layout. I’m pretty much acclimatised now – to the point where I hit Alt on Windows expecting it to be the Command key! I know that I need to hold down Ctrl for my right-click menu; I know that Alt-3 is the hash symbol; I try to remember that Shift-Cmd-4 lets me grab a screenshot. I find it weird that there’s no Delete key, but I can live with it. I still forget to hit Fn when I want to use Expose, and end up turning the brightness down. I’m getting there. I’ve never been a fan of touchpads, and yet here I am using one like a pro.

From day one, I knew I’d be wanting to install a whole bunch of software, despite the excellent suite that comes with OS X (this led to the Mac beating a PC in last night’s Gadget Show face-off between the two systems). Here’s a summary of what I’ve installed.

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Essentials

Firefox is a known quantity to me, I’ve been using it for years, and I trust it. I did start out playing with Safari, but it doesn’t have the range of extensions offered by Firefox (although I’ll post on an interesting FF limitation I’ve discovered shortly). I do think it has some memory management issues, but that could be due to my habit of running with ~50 active tabs. I’ve downloaded Camino too, but that doesn’t support extensions either, so it hasn’t seen much use.

Thunderbird was another obvious choice. I’ve not tried OS X Mail.

Beyond surfing and reading mail, a good blogging client and a good RSS feedreader were essential. I’ve gone with Vienna for reading feeds, and ecto for blogging. Both seem to work well, with some reservations. Vienna doesn’t let me follow track comments, while GreatNews on Windows does. ecto has some annoying limitations when compared to the elegance of Windows Live Writer… limited ability to format my posts; inability to post images to WP.com at the moment; no way of grabbing my Flickr photos without installing 1001, which I didn’t like; and the multiple windows get on my nerves since they don’t all come to the front when I click on one of them or on the program icon. ecto is the only piece of software I’ve had to pay for so far.

For photo work I’ve got Lightroom, and I upload to Flickr using jUploadr, which just works brilliantly – exactly as on Windows, and looking entirely OS X-native. I love it. Gimp solves my image editing requirements.

I’ve already posted about office applications: NeoOffice over OpenOffice.

For media, so far I’ve basically only needed to installed Realplayer, Flip4Mac and VLC and I’m good. Oh, and for grabbing / transcoding audio streams I have CocoaJT and ffmpegX. I’ve also dropped the current version of Songbird on the system.

Social networking

For IM, I’ve configured iChat to use Jabber for my Google Talk account. I downloaded Adium too, but it doesn’t support voice or video, and I rarely use the other networks I’ve got accounts on. I’ve also installed Skype, although I’m frustrated that the Mac version appears to lag behind the Windows one (2.5.x instead of 3.1.x currently.

I’m using the Twitterlex widget for the Dashboard to post and view updates on Twitter, although I also use the web interface a lot.

For Last.fm, I’ve got the full client installed. I have also found a nice tool called Amua, but it doesn’t scrobble tracks from iTunes, so it isn’t quite as useful as I’d hoped (the official client won’t start silently, which is annoying).

Plazer works fine on OS X.

Development

I’ve installed Eclipse, but not really played with it in depth. I’ve also been over to the Apple developer site, and installed Xcode and Dashcode. I installed the Subversion client today as well.

For editing, I started out using Smultron, which seemed to be a nice text editor. More recently I’ve discovered TextWrangler, the free version of BBEdit, which seems even better.

Tools

The uber-tool on my machine is Quicksilver. I’m far from being a ninja with this software, but I can basically launch any app with a few keypresses, and don’t have to open the Applications folder very often. Check out the various tutorials on the subject.

I’ve replaced Terminal with iTerm, which is far nicer and more reminiscent of the terminal program I used under GNOME on Linux.

I had a lot of trouble opening archives until I discovered that Tiger doesn’t include StuffIt Expander by default. I installed it, then found something even better – The Unarchiver – it handles pretty much any archive file format I might throw at it.

Google Earth is a must these days, on any machine I use.

I sometimes use VNC for connecting to other machines. I’ve installed Chicken of the VNC, but I’m disappointed to find that UltraVNC on Windows is incompatible with it. I’ve also installed the Microsoft Remote Desktop client for OS X, which is handy for controlling machines on my local network.

I installed a bunch of other little utilities to help me get my head around OS X – Growl, Bonjour Browser, GeekTool, Lingon, coconutBattery…

Games

I’m no longer a big games player, but for fun I’ve installed Frozen Bubble, krank, Battle for Wesnoth, Second Life (of course!!), and I await EVE Online.

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That about does it. Right now I’m fairly comfortable with the system. If anyone has any suggestions as to important things I’ve missed, I’m willing to listen, since I’m still a total beginner

Technorati Tags: Mac, OS X, software