ACTA as a threat to freedom of expression

ACTA as a threat to privacy

ACTA’s undemocratic institutional legacy

 (Peter Bradwell)

On the 9^th June the UK will take part in the Europe wide day of action against ACTA with events being staged in Birmingham, Bournemouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Chelmsford, Glasgow,  Liverpool and London (ACTA Demo 9th June).  Other countries are taking part in the protest incl. Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, Denmark, Poland etc. It would be quicker to mention the countries who are not taking part but I cannot do that to them.

Should you decide to support the protest or ignore it, make sure you read the following articles and then make up your mind.

Peter Bradwell gives a briefing on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement –

“We believe that ACTA pays insufficient attention to the interests of citizens and consumers and in doing so undermines the Internet as a tool for the promotion of freedom of expression and innovation.

For example, it promotes and incentivises the private ‘policing’ of online content through broad thresholds for its criminal measures. It exacerbates such problems by failing to provide adequate and robust safeguards for fundamental freedoms. ACTA may not be directly or explicitly aimed at our ‘everyday use’ of the Internet. But this is a target it will likely hit. Its provisions amount to a framework that encourages signatories to give away power over what happens online far too cheaply.

Similar problems afflict current EU laws on IP enforcement. With these laws under review, it is unwise to draft and sign an Agreement that binds Member States more closely to them.

For these reasons Open Rights Group believes that the European Parliament should reject the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and begin a more open discussion about the future of IP and copyright in the digital age.”

Please read the full article. 

 For those who cannot remember what ACTA stand for –

“The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a multinational treaty intended to create a new international legal framework for the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The treaty was formally published in April 2011, signed by Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, the US, and the EU. It will not come into force until six countries have ratified the agreement; so far, none has.” Taken from an article published by the Open Rights Group

And finally

ACTA Edinburgh: David Martin’s views by Jim Killock

“Last Friday, David Martin MEP organised a seminar on ACTA in the EU Parliament’s Edinburgh offices. He invited ORG to speak, alongside Susie Winter of the Alliance Against IP TheftInfringement, a chair from the EU Commission, and about 20 people attended the meeting.

Martin is the rapporteur for the lead EU Parliamentary committee for ACTA, International Trade. His views matter a lot, which is why his decision to recommend a no vote is highly significant.” Read on.

And another point of view –

Earlier this year, Michael Geist appeared at the European Parliament’s INTA Committee Workshop on ACTA where he reached the following conclusion –

“… ACTA’s harm greatly exceeds its potential benefits. Given ACTA’s corrosive effect on transparency in international negotiations, the damage to international intellectual property institutions, the exclusion of the majority of the developing world from the ambit of the agreement, the potentially dangerous substantive provisions, and the uncertain benefits in countering counterfeiting, there are ample reasons for the public and politicians to reject the agreement in its current form.  In doing so, governments would help restore confidence in the global intellectual property system and open the door to a new round of negotiations premised on transparency, inclusion, and evidence-based policy-making.” <http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6477/125/>

Now we can understand why Michael Geist “was unable to post the full report until granted approval by the European Parliament INTA Committee”.

Some great speakers were involved included some O’Reilly authors including –

• Dave Gray co-author of Gamestorming. I had a very embarrassing moment with Dave. I nagged him to come to the stand and do a book signing. We had everything set for 10.30 on Friday. At 8.30 on Friday I had to admit that we did not have any books to sign – all sold out. Embarrassing but great, it shows how popular this book is. I am also told that his workshop “Gamestorming” is brilliant.

• Peter Morville author or co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,  Search Patterns and Ambient Findability. Only had a very short chat with him. As well as a workshop “Cross-Channel Strategy”, Peter gave a talk on “The Architecture of Understanding”.

• Jeff Gothelf author of the long coming Lean UX. I am sure Jeff’s talk “Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business” was well received. Unfortunately Jeff did not visit our stand even though I had some flyers ready of his forthcoming book.

I could not say which talk was the best but be assured that talks and workshops are not the complete conference – there is always a huge amount of side activities included.

• Pre-Conference Get Together

• Conference dinner – day 1 at the Buffalo Grill restaurant

• Conference dinner – day 2 at the “Senhor Peixe” restaurant

• After Party: Sunset Boat Cruise followed by yet another dinner at the Cervejaria Portugalia

As you can see this programme gives the attendees plenty of time to network, discuss work, technical issues and maybe just have a good old chat etc.

No I did not attend all these dinners – only one dinner and the cruise. The cruise was fantastic – cold wind and very dramatic sky and no rain.

What did I learn during this meeting? I did not learn what UX is as it seems that everybody has a different definition. A lot of the UX people seem to have a psychology background and a general complaint was that no university provide a UX course. I hope I convinced you that UX LX is a great meeting and hopefully I will see you there next year.

What is SourceDevCon?

.  38 speakers to share hundreds of years of experience in mobile and desktop web app industry

.  Desktop Web Apps (ext JS) – intermediate and advanced level topics presented by Sencha and community devs

.  Mobile apps (Sencha Touch) – Intermediate and advanced level topics presented by Sencha and community devs

.  Client side JavaScript – Coding conventions, Browser databases

.  Server side JavaScript – Node.js, MongoDB

.  HTML5 – Gaming engines, canvas, animations

.  Planning and Coding – Source code management, Social networks integration, Unit testing

For me the highlight of the conference was to talk to Douglas Crockford, author of JavaScript: The Good Parts (O’Reilly). Douglas’ talk sounded very interesting – Programming Style and your Brain. Unfortunately I was not able to attend. Douglas is working at Yahoo! and on that day, like all of us, he was awaiting the latest news. He also revealed that he was writing another book but keep being distracted… so it might or might not be written. If you meet him, please nudge him and do tell him that we are all waiting for a new great book.

But why does monitoring suck? No better an explanation than quoting John Vincent himself from his blog.

Monitoring is AWESOME. Metrics are AWESOME. I love it. Here’s what I don’t love:

* Having my hands tied with the model of host and service bindings

* Having to set up “fake” hosts just to group arbitrary metrics together

* Having to collect metrics twice – once for alerting and another for trending

* Only being able to see my metrics in 5 minute intervals

* Having to chose between shitty interface but great monitoring or shitty monitoring but great       interface

* Dealing with a monitoring system that thinks it is the system of truth for my environment

* Not actually having any real choices

You could also add the lack of automation possibilities to most monitoring solutions, as this is the criteria that limits choice most. So even with a huge amount of open source tools out there that bits and pieces of are right, people aren’t happy, and every couple of weeks a new effort to solve monitoring – or at least to improve it – starts. The monitoringsucks crew have set up a github repository pointing to all kinds of different tools that are around.

Most people agree that there are plenty of good tools around if your infrastructure is small-to-medium sized.  It starts to be more problematic when your infrastructure grows, when you have more and more items to monitor and more and more items to measure. With the introduction of “infrastructure as code” people want to be able to deploy a service automatically, and also include monitoring in that deployment; that’s one area where current tools are not ready. And another area of course, is scaling the monitoring solution itself. If you need a full time DBA to manage the database where your metrics are being sent because otherwise it is too slow to accept new metrics, there is a problem. Add to that the fact that most monitoring tools are written with static environments in mind, or at least infrastructures in a local network. Not with a flexible cloud style environment where machines are being decommissioned even faster than they were provisioned.

All of these problems are popping up in today’s web infrastructures. All of the larger web applications, the social networking sites, the online shops and their friends, are starting to feel the pain, so they are looking for problems. Should this be solutions?

As the devops community are pretty keen on monitoring, it’s no surprise that there is a huge overlap within both communities. This means there is a large group of people out there who are investigating new ways to tackle the problem, and they are sharing their experiences, sharing their code.

In February Inuits, the leading Open Source consultancy, hosted a 2 day hack session in their offices, which gathered people from different stakeholders who were trying to solve the problem of monitoring.  People from large sites such as TomTom, Booking.com, Atlassian, Spotify, and others were present to discuss and share their ideas.

One of the core ideas that came out of this discussion was to go back to the old unix philosophy and build a chain of tools that work closely together, each specialized in their own area. With small changes to existing tools, a tool chain could be built that would collect data and throw it on to a message bus. Then other tools could be listening to that bus to transform that data, make statistics out of it, base alerts on it, graph it, archive it, or perform analytics on top of it.

Plenty of tools exist in the area and plenty of new tools are popping up almost weekly, but one thing is for sure… monitoring is not a solved problem yet. It still sucks.

Kris Buytaert is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant. He’s one of instigators of the devops movement, currently working for Inuits.

Kris is the Co-Author of Virtualization with Xen ,used to be the maintainer of the openMosix HOWTO and author of different technical publications. He is frequently speaking at, or organizing different international conferences

He spends most of his time working on Linux Clustering (both High Availability, Scalability and HPC), Virtualisation and Large Infrastructure Management projects hence trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th floor test, better known today as the cloud while actively promoting the devops idea !

His blog titled “Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem” can be found at http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/.

I have a slide deck where I tell people that a Devop is a  30 something Senior Infrastructure guy with a strong Development background, a lot of Open Source Experience, who is mostly European (.be / .uk) who likes Belgian Beer and Sushi. Of course that is an absolutely correct description the people involved in the early days of the Devops movement, but it has nothing to do with what Devops really is about. It’s just a fact that the first Devopsdays conference was held in late 2009 in Gent, and a lot of the people involved in the early days were these Senior Infrastructure guys.

But devops started out much earlier than this, but  we’ll never know when it started because it’s nothing new, it’s just a new common name for things people have been already doing for ages. Devopsdays Europe started because a group of people met over and over again at different conferences throughout the world. These people were talking about software delivery, deployment, build, scale, clustering , management, failure, monitoring and all the important things one needs to think about when running a modern web operation. These people included Patrick Debois, Julian Simpson, Gildas Le Nadan, Jezz Humble, Chris Read, Matt Rechenburg , John Willis,  Lindsay Holmswood and Kris Buytaert.  On the other side of the ocean O’Reilly put on a conference that sounded interesting to a bunch of us Europeans : Velocity, but on this side of the ocean we had to resort to the Open Source , Unix, and Agile conferences. We didn’t really have a meeting ground yet.  At CloudCamp Antwerp, in the Antwerp zoo,  Patrick Debois decided to organise Devopsdays Gent.

Devopsdays Gent was not your  traditional conference,  it was a mix between  a couple of formal presentations in the morning and open spaces in the afternoon.  And those open spaces were where people got most value. The opportunity to talk to people with the same complex problems, with actual experience in solving them, with stories both about success  and failure. How do you deal with that oldskool system admin that doesn’t understand what configuration management can bring him? How do you do Kanban for operations while the developers are working in 2 week sprints? What tools do you use to monitor a highly volatile and expanding infrastructure ?

Yet I still haven’t defined devops! :)  So .. what is devops ?  Lets start off with agreeing that we haven’t agreed on a real definition yet, and never will, but there is a lot of common ground that defines the ideas behind it. The idea that there needs to be more communication between the different stakeholders in an IT lifecycle -  developers, operation people, network engineers, security engineers – need to be involved as soon as possible in the project in order to facilitate each other and talk about solving potential pitfalls ages before the application steps into production. Some people therefore say that devops is the wrong terminology and that it needs to be *ops,  but if you say that out loud it becomes starops, which might lead to the confusion that it’s about rockstars in operations, which is not really the goal we’re trying to achieve, we’re trying to build teams that work together cross discipline with a joined goal.

Lots of people also think the devops ideal includes continuous delivery. The idea that you should be able to deploy multiple times a day, that automation will help you make such deployments possible and not problematic, not that it’s about being able to, but about having to.  Obviously a full chain of automation from development to production helps here, adequate testing needs to be in place on all levels – functionality, scalability, availability, security.

Also the idea that the involvement of developers doesn’t end at their last commit, so that operations just pulls in the code and makes it run, but that they are also involved in keeping it running smooth. After all software with no users has no value.  The involvement of the developers in the ongoing operations of their software shouldn’t end before the last end user stops using their applications. This also means that software developers need to provide the nessecary hooks in their application so we can automate testing, and measuring different components of the application both during test and during operation.

Summarizing this in  an acronym  coined by John Willis and Damon Edwards -  CAMS. CAMS says devops is about Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing, but its definitely not a SCAM.

On September 8^th, Prague will be holding/hosting the MATTONI Grand Prix – a chance to run at night through the illuminated streets.  The Old Town Square and its surroundings will be animated with live music, dancing and many other great attractions. I am sure that you can feel the joy and the wonderful sense of achievement – that is until you meet my friend Bogomil Shepov aka Bogo.

After being an employee for many years, Bogo has decided to start his own company. Nothing new or particular about this you will say… but promotion of the new company is a little different as Bogo is using Twitter and his legs.

For every re-tweet Bogo receives, he will run one meter during the Grand Prix, he will put the sender’s twitter name on his t-shirt and donate $0.05 to either:

• Creative Commons
• Mozilla Foundation
• Electric Frontier Foundation
• Eclipse
• Apache

I should say that I never saw Bogo run – he is as athletic as I am.  My favourite picture of him is sitting in a restaurant with a pint of beer or a bottle of Rakia discussing the state of politics or some techie innovation.  Read more about Bogo here. And please retweet his message, I want to see him run and run… To do so click this message and add a comment together with your Twitter username.

I don’t think Bogo understand the art of sponsorship but I am sure he knows how to promote his company.

]]> http://www.josetteorama.com/events/twitter-as-a-marketing-tool/feed/ 0 http://www.josetteorama.com/events/twitter-as-a-marketing-tool/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Josetteorama/~3/Ki6wC05DPaE/ http://www.josetteorama.com/events/microsoft-windows-azure-cloud/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:21:58 +0000 Richard Conway http://www.josetteorama.com/?p=5083 Elastacloud, in conjunction with Microsoft, will be holding a one day conference on Windows Azure in Fulham, West London. There will be prolific speakers discussing all aspects of the cloud across a range of new and interesting topics.

The day will see speeches by prolific Microsoft authors and evangelists as well as members of the UK partner community. The conference is open to a wide variety of individuals from different backgrounds who may be new to Windows Azure. We are looking to reach out to the PHP and Java communities to show them that an open source (WAMP) stack is wholly compatible with Windows Azure. There will be talks on PHP, Java and node.js by well-respected developers describing the how-to as well as projects which have successfully implemented on Windows Azure.

In addition, there will be talks on mobile and Windows 8 integration with the cloud demonstrating how the cloud has become a fundamental part of Microsoft’s newest operating system and mobile offering.

Talks will be held on other aspects of Windows Azure such as High Performance Computing, Big Data, Cloud Storage. Newer concepts such as Infrastructure as a Service, advanced messaging and the creation of secure hybrid applications will be discussed in depth as well. There will be a keynote speech given by a prolific member of Microsoft in the morning and in the afternoon the conference will break into 3 tracks.

All conference registrations will be free up until the 20^th May and £25 thereafter so get registering now!

The day event is being run via the UK Windows Azure User Group which has built a strong community presence evangelising the use of Windows Azure to developers throughout the UK. The user group can be found at here and on Twitter @ukwaug.

Richard is the founder of the dynamic Windows Azure User Group. He is the first point of contact for user group members wanting to participate in community codeplex projects.

Fluidinfo is a shared online datastore based on tags with values. It allows anyone to store, organize, query and share data about anything.

Users add information to Fluidinfo by associating data to things via named tags. It’s easy to extract information and there’s a simple query language to search the datastore.

Five core concepts cover how Fluidinfo works:

• Objects represent things (real or imaginary).

• Tags attach information to objects.

• Users use their own tags to to attach data to shared objects.

• The permission system controls who can read and write each tag. (Objects do not have owners, so anyone can tag any object.)

• Queries select objects by specifying properties of their tags and values. The selected objects can be read or tagged.

Objects representing “things” are identified by a globally unique “about” value string. There is a (lazily instantiated) object in Fluidinfo for every possible unicode string—”paris”, “☾♠♣♥♦☽”, “book:getting started with fluidinfo (nicholas j radcliffe; nicholas h tollervey)”, “http://oreilly.com”, “3.14159265″ and so on.

Each user attaches arbitrary named tags to any of these objects. The tags can have typed values; for example, I might tag the object about “paris” with a numeric rating (ntoll/rating=10), a string description (ntoll/description=”Belle”) and a JPEG image (ntoll/photo=<a jpeg blob>).

The permissions system lets users to control who can read and write each of their tags, and a simple yet powerful query language allows them to select objects and read data based on their own tags and those of other people (subject to the permissions). For example the following query matches objects that I (ntoll) have added a comment to, that both the user njr and I have added a rating greater than 6 to and whose about values contain the string “book:”:

has ntoll/comment and (ntoll/rating > 6 and njr/rating > 6) and fluiddb/about matches "book:"

Notice how tag names are scoped by a username (for example ntoll and njr in the example above) so the provenance of the data is apparent.

A RESTful API

At the lowest level, interaction with Fluidinfo is via a pure HTTP, RESTful API. Being HTTP-based, the API can be queried directly from a web browser. For example, you can directly read my rating of Paris by visiting: http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/about/paris/ntoll/rating (the result will probably be downloaded as a file containing the value 5) or (better) by using cUrl or wget from the command line:

curl http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/about/paris/ntoll/rating

Similarly, you can find all the objects I have rated greater than three and retrieve the “about” value and my rating by navigating to:

http://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/values/?query=ntoll/rating>3&tag=fluiddb/about&tag=ntoll/rating

The response will be JSON. If you have any familiarity with URL semantics, you’ll be able to see that this URL goes to the /values endpoint of Fluidinfo, passing the query parameter “ntoll/rating>3″ and two tag parameters “fluiddb/about”, which is the name of the object identifier (Fluidinfo’s so-called “about” tag), and “ntoll/rating”, the tag I’m using to rate things in Fluidinfo. This is the Fluidinfo equivalent of the following faux-sql:

SELECT ntoll/rating, fluiddb/about WHERE ntoll/rating>3;

Writing data is only marginally more complicated than this, requiring authentication and sending the appropriate data in JSON.

Client Libraries

While it’s entirely possible to work with Fluidinfo via curl, it’s probably a better idea to use a client library. For example, the following Python session illustrates the simple fluidinfo.py module which forms a thin layer on top of the HTTP API (there are more abstract libraries such as FOM [the Fluid Object Mapper] and the event-driven fluidinfo.js).

Use the pip tool to install the fluidinfo.py module:

$ pip install -U fluidinfo.py
... lots of downloading/unpacking messages...

Import the required modules (we use pprint to make the output more readable):

$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Apr 16 2010, 13:09:56) [GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import fluidinfo
>>> from pprint import pprint as pp

Ensure we’re logged in:

>>> fluidinfo.login('ntoll', 'secret_password')

The library returns the HTTP headers and the data from Fluidinfo as Pythonic data structures you can use immediately:

>>> headers, result = fluidinfo.get('/about/paris')
>>> pp(headers)
{'cache-control': 'no-cache',
 'connection': 'keep-alive',
 'content-length': '424',
 'content-type': 'application/json',
 'date': 'Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:41:25 GMT',
 'server': 'nginx/0.7.65',
 'status': '200'}
>>> pp(result)
{u'id': u'881d95b2-e9f0-40c8-a11e-964f349e01b1',
 u'tagPaths': [u'fluiddb/about',
  u'musicbrainz.org/related-artists',
  u'wordtools/gcide',
  u'wordtools/foldoc',
  u'musicbrainz.org/related-albums',
  u'terrycojones/testing/test1',
  u'terrycojones/rating',
  u'musicbrainz.org/related-tracks',
  u'en.wikipedia.org/url',
  u'r/r',
  u'book/related-books',
  u'book/r',
  u'fergusstothart/rating',
  u'fergusstothart/Old_Map',
  u'fergusstothart/Map',
  u'ntoll/rating']}

Adding a new value to the object about “paris” is simple:

>>> headers, result = fluidinfo.put('/about/paris/ntoll/comment',
... 'I prefer the tower in Blackpool. :-)')
>>> pp(headers)
 {'cache-control': 'no-cache',
 'connection': 'keep-alive',
 'content-type': 'text/html',
 'date': 'Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:42:34 GMT',
 'server': 'nginx/0.7.65',
 'status': '204'}

The 204 status code shows it was a success. The same applies for deleting the value:

>>> headers, result = fluidinfo.delete('/about/paris/ntoll/comment')
>>> headers['status']
'204'

It’s possible to sign up for an account via Twitter at the http://fluidinfo.com website. You must ensure you set your password for API access (click on your user profile to do so).

Flying Spaghetti Monster

If Fluidinfo sounds interesting, give it a spin. And if you have any interest in the back end, you could do worse than to check out the new O’Reilly book “Getting Started with Fluidinfo” with a magnificent jellyfish on the cover. Alternatively, if you’d like to find out more about the story behind Fluidinfo then check out Fluidinfo – An Unfundable World-Changing Start-Up.

(About the author: Nicholas H.Tollervey works for Fluidinfo and co-authored the O’Reilly Fluidinfo book. He’s a classically trained musician, philosophy graduate, teacher, writer and software developer. He’s just like this biography: concise, honest and full of useful information.)

Here’s the summary notes I jotted down while trying to make sense of what I was watching:

• A re-imagining of a data store in the cloud.
• Openly writeable (anyone can add data a la Wikipedia philosophy).
• Simple to find useful information by mashing up data from many different contributors.
• An evolutionary model of data / emergent schema.
• Bottom up rather than top down.

After a couple of hours of unlit, uncut and rather shonky video shot in the hacker’s apartment in Barcelona, my first thought was, “this hacker’s either a complete nut-job or he’s on to something”.

I had to find out more.

It turned out that the hacker was called Terry Jones and, as they would say in the Matrix, went under the “hacker alias” of terrycojones.

Terry, it appeared, had balls.

A quick look at the biography on his website indicated that he’s actually Terry Jones BSc MSc PhD ~ unicyclist (see below), mathematician, chess player, computer scientist, virologist, writer and entrepreneur (not necessarily in that order). I sent him a long rambling email asking for more information about the [r]evolutionary nature of Fluidinfo.

Three months later I got a reply with detailed answers. There was obviously substance to the ideas and claims first made in the Scoble video. At the end of the email Terry invited me to proof-read the developer documentation for the soon-to-be released Alpha version of Fluidinfo. Contained therein was a thing of beauty: a simple RESTful API backed up by an elegant philosophy of how a data store should behave.

I was hooked.

I was also going to the next EuroPython conference in 2009 and so, it appeared, was Terry: the very first talk of the very first session was called “Introducing Fluidinfo”.

Terry and I chatted for a while after his presentation and I learned that he’d been thinking about and planning Fluidinfo for ten years. It quickly became apparent that Fluidinfo was a labour of love. Terry had sold his apartment to finance development of Fluidinfo, given up a career as a computational biologist at one of the world’s leading universities to work full time on it and was in the process of getting a round of funding sorted out before the money (and any chance of getting his apartment back) ran out.

Terry deserved his “hacker alias”.

As with many developer conferences, some of the best stuff at EuroPython happened in the “corridor track”, that setting halfway between Josette’s O’Reilly book stall and the coffee bar. It was serendipity that had me sit down in the corridor next to someone I initially thought was an Irish hacker (by the look of him at least: he had a ruddy complexion, a reddish beard and was wearing green – to me that looks “Irish”, perhaps I was thinking leprechaun). I was wrong, the guy was from Barcelona, a member of the Apache Software Foundation and called Esteve. We had a long and often funny conversation at the end of which I asked the inevitable, “so who do you work for?”. His immediate answer, delivered in the same way that Inigo Montoya introduces himself in the Princess Bride, was “I work for Fluidinfo and we’re going to change the world”.

Terry wasn’t the only one connected with Fluidinfo who had balls.

It turned out that Robert Scoble was wrong: a few months later Fluidinfo received funding through Betaworks and can count Joshua Schachter (Delicious founder), Esther Dyson (journalist and investor) and Tim O’Reilly (whose tweet originally brought my attention to Fluidinfo) as investors. Last year, when Fluidinfo won the “Best Technology” category at the Launch Conference, Scoble was heard to say, “I was wrong”.

When Fluidinfo got funded I joined as employee #3 (we’ve since grown to around nine people spread around the globe working as a distributed team via the wonders of IRC, Skype and Github).

Having high profile investors is very helpful. For example, during an interview at the South by South West gathering Tim O’Reilly named Fluidinfo as his favourite start-up. Such PR gifts are usually followed by a flurry of blog-posts and tweets from people who, upon discovering Fluidinfo, announce how amazing the concept is. A typical example being, “this should blow your mind: Meet Fluidinfo, the most disruptive start-up you haven’t heard of”.

Herein is perhaps the biggest challenge facing us: despite being lauded by the tech-cognoscenti we need to take the abstract philosophy and existing technology that underpins Fluidinfo and make it available and understandable to everyone.

To this end we’re working with and learning from various large companies who would like their own instance of Fluidinfo running within their organisation for the purposes of data sharing and information management. We’re also listening carefully to our existing “early-adopter” users and introducing new features where required. Furthermore, we’re experimenting with a web-based front-end for non-technical “civilian” users. We hope that the fruits of our labours will be arriving within weeks.

In the meantime, there is an O’Reilly book called “Getting Started with Fluidinfo” (with a magnificent Flying-Spaghetti-Monster like jellyfish on the cover) which explains the API and philosophy behind what we’re building. Alternatively, a simple technical introduction to Fluidinfo will be appearing on this site very soon.

More information about Fluidinfo can be found at our website or at our blog.

(About the author: Nicholas H.Tollervey works for Fluidinfo and co-authored the O’Reilly Fluidinfo book. He’s a classically trained musician, philosophy graduate, teacher, writer and software developer. He’s just like this biography: concise, honest and full of useful information.)

Talks

On Friday, the conference was divided into 5 tracks:

• Hot topics
• Web
• Mobile
• Innovation
• Enterprise

On Saturday, we had 7 tracks:

• Open
• Web
• Languages
• Methods
• Gaming
• Security/HW
• Web/Mobile

With almost 100 talks, all the hot topics were covered:  Cloud, JavaScript, HTML5, Agile, Arduino, Big Data, Hadoop, JAX-RS 2.0, Gamification and much more.

Don’t forget your CV

All the sponsors had a stand at Codemotion but they were not there to present their products but to collect CVs. This event allows people to present themselves to key companies, drop their CV, have a chat with HR people and hopefully they will get the job of their dream or at least start the hiring process. The Codemotion people also offer tips on CV writing, presentation etc. Sponsors included Samsung, Telecom Italia, Oracle, Red Hat, Microsoft and many more.

Design

I liked the design by Woma – I like the idea of cubes that can be piled up in different ways to say different things.

Fellow traveller

Surprise! On Friday morning, as I was setting up, I met Arun Gupta (Oracle) who very kindly brought me breakfast. Nice! I first met Arun during the first part of the week at the 33rd Degree conference in Krakow. He came to Rome to give his talk on “JAX-RS 2.0: RESTful Java on Steroids” and then flew to Codemotion Madrid before going back home to the US. I don’t think I could have attended yet another conference without a little break.

 Future

See if we can make it to 4000 attendees next year. Hopefully see you there for a well-organized, great meeting and “Non omnia possumus omnes” but coming to Codemotion might be the first step towards your goal.