AppsLab

For a few months now, I’ve been planning to write a post on how to get involved in your local tech scene.

I caught a tweet from Matt earlier today. He was on his way to Startup Rockstars DC#3.

Sounds like fun. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen me tweet about any number of Portland tech events, like Lunch 2.0, Beer and Blog, Ignite Portland, BarCamp Portland, the list goes on for a while. I’ll spare you.

Portland has a lot of geeky events and a strong tech community, but many of these events can be recreated just about anywhere, e.g. Lunch 2.0, Ignite, and BarCamp were all imported from other cities.

Others, like Beer and Blog, are easy to start. Beer and Blog was started by a group of local bloggers who got together to work on their blogs during Friday Happy Hour at a local pub. It’s now a work/social event each Friday, sometimes sponsored by a local company.

I’ve chatted with Chet the ORACLENERD about starting a Tampa Beer and Blog chapter, hoping he hasn’t lost interest. It really is good fun. Read More »

Thanks to Matt for covering Geode. I have to agree with his assessment of location as awesomesauce when mixed with Intertubes.

Continuing my mission to slog through all the unread feeds I have left over from the week of OpenWorld, I noticed an item from Mashable about the simple and elegant Umbrella Today?

The concept is dead simple. Enter a zip code, get a yes or no. They do ruin it a bit for me by offering to text me when I need an umbrella, a useful feature I suppose, but it takes away from the boolean simplicity, which I absolutely love.

I roadtested it for Portland, and the result was correct, except for the minor fact that anyone with an umbrella here in PDX is marked as a soft tourist.

Mashable compares Umbrella Today? to another site I love, Down for everyone, or just me?, which can help you diagnose your website is down problems.

Lately, I’ve been a bit obsessed with simplifying things, e.g. one of the features of Ubiquity I like is its potential to simplify complex actions into commands.

Think about for a second. All the “features” offered by Umbrella Today? can be got elsewhere, but if you go to the Weather Channel or NOAA, you have to filter through a lot of other information to get the answer to that very simple question. The same can be said for Down for everyone.

Simple just isn’t trendy though, e.g. Facebook just announced their integration with Microsoft Live Search. So now you can query the ‘tubes with your keyword search and get the results without leaving Facebook. Read More »

Curious? That seemed like a clever title, given the subject, and my lack of pithy title for the post.

I’ll back up a bit. I’m still slogging through feeds from before OpenWorld, which is pretty tough considering Paul’s got me cranking hardcore on a new project. I plowed through Slashdot today and found an item linking to “The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time“.

Stop now and see if you can guess the winner. No hints.

Error messages are an interesting subject to me, and I found it extremely funny (and awesome) that someone has built a t-shirt business around errors, called Errorwear. Bonus points for 403 Forbidden available in women’s sizes only, “You don’t have permissions to access /girl on this server.” Read More »

If you read here, you’re probably on the leading, if not bleeding, edge of the early adoption curve. Bit of a mixed metaphor, so let’s say early adopter scythe.

Anyway, Facebook is old news. For about the last year or so, I’ve rarely logged into Facebook; I guess the sheep-throwing and incessant poking and super-poking got monotonous for me, and I lost track of Facebook’s biggest and best feature.

The network and its effects.

Lately, I’ve been reminded of how much I like Facebook by a slew of adds from old high school classmates. As mentioned before, I don’t come from the generation of digital natives, so the appearance of my old chums from the late 80s and early 90s signals Facebook’s passage into the mainstream.

I also have a MySpace account, and not a single person from that same category of old high school buddies has friended me over there. It’s not entirely a fair comparison, but it says a lot for Facebook’s ascent to the thrown as the social network, erm utility, for people new the whole thing.

The appearance of these old friends has reminded me how really cool social networking can be. I’ve reconnected with a dozen or so friends lost to me over the intervening decades, which has made me realize again how cool, fun, and useful social networking is.

I’m pretty sure some of the people are simply collecting friends because some of them I barely remember, and I doubt they remember me any more clearly. But that’s part of the fun of networking, almost like collecting trading cards; you know you’ve done it too, don’t lie.

For many companies, becoming mainstream means a loss of coolness, but I think Facebook has done a good job maintaining their cool factor, even in the face (pun intended) of stiff competition from upstarts and MySpace.

While we’re on the subject of Facebook, am I in the minority for liking the new UI? I know Rich likes it too, but there seems to be a backlash against it. I’m not sure why. I think it uses space much more efficiently, and they’ve introduced a few neat elements.

I especially like the chat design and the applications bookmark. Segregating apps from the profile was a solid choice too.

What do you think? Like it? Hate it? Why?

What about the mainstreaming of Facebook? Have you noticed this too?

Find the comments.

So now OpenWorld 2008 is over, and San Franciscans rejoice as Howard Street reopens between 3rd and 4th, or at least it will soon.

I missed my Wednesday recap, since we spent Thursday sequestered in that same old conference room in Pleasanton. Not a lot happened for me on Wednesday.

Rich and I trolled the exhibit floors in Moscone South and West, visiting Dan, OpenWorld King 2008, in his Piocon booth and Harold Green in his video production room. We were looking for stickers, the geek’s business card, but we found precious few.

Over in Moscone West, we tried out the game room; Rich skiied a bit, and I dominated him at air hockey, twice. We also found a Delorean on the show floor, pretty cool. I’m surprised the speedometer only went to 85 mph, since we all remember you have to go at least 88 mph before the cool stuff happens.

In the afternoon, we all watched the keynotes. After announcing X, Larry headed out pretty quickly. John (the Ontario Emperor) suggested that he hadn’t seen that my geek-speak session had been moved to Tuesday morning. I got a kick out of that.

Read More »

As is typical for me, the Monday of OpenWorld was the busiest. Now that it’s over, I can relax a bit. Yesterday was an action-packed day, so let’s hit the highlights. Roll the tape.

Our official session “Web 2.0 Technologies In the Enterprise: Lessons Learned, Tips, and Tricks from Oracle AppsLab” went pretty well. I’m not so good at counting people in a crowd, but it looked like about 70 attended, including several old friends of the ‘Lab and a lot of new faces. A nice mix.

Check out the slides.

They told us the session was recorded, so eventually, if I can get that, I’ll share it here.

After the official session, we headed to the Unconference for our “Adventures in OpenSocial” talk. Mickey Kim and Chris Shalk from Google attended and fielded some questions from the attendees and asked some of us.

Eddie was one of the 20-ish attendees, and he recorded a portion of it. The projected images are pretty hard to see, but you can hear what we’re saying. You’ll be hearing more about OpenSocial from us. So, if you haven’t been reading the older coverage, you can catch up now.

Chris decided to do an Unconference session today at 3 PM (Moscone West, 3rd Floor, Overlook C) about Google’s APIs. Here’s his abstract:

“Integrating Google APIs into your applications”

In addition to the Google Maps API, you may be surprised to know about all of the other Google APIs that are freely available to integrate into your applications. These include the AJAX APIs for integrating Google Search, Feeds and Language translations into your Web pages/applications. For server-side integration, Google’s Data APIs allows you to interact with many of Google’s online services including Calendar, Blogger, YouTube among others. Finally you can use the Google led OpenSocial Open Source software to build your own social applications and/or container to host social applications. This talk will cover all of these topics in a casual manner with an emphasis of showing working demos of Google technology integrations.

I wish we’d had this to promote before the conference began, and I really hope people attend. This is a great opportunity to combine the enterprise development talents of attendees with Google’s APIs. This is how mashups and composite apps are born. Read More »

To avoid overlapping with Larry’s keynote on Wednesday afternoon, as promised, I have rescheduled my Unconference session, “Are you insulting me? Essential geek-speak, FTW!” to Tuesday morning at 10 AM in Moscone West, 3rd floor, Overlook C.

If you’re interested, check out the slides on SlideShare.

If you make it, stop by and say hello.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll be winging my way to the Bay Area for OpenWorld.

One of the first things I need to do tomorrow is race to the Unconference onsite signups in Moscone West and move my Essential Geek-Speak session to a better time, like say one that doesn’t overlap with Larry’s keynote.

You may recall I released the slides for that session a week ago, hoping to get some early commentary and feedback.

I uploaded them to SlideShare, and over last weekend, they were selected by the SlideShare team as one of the “Featured” presentations. W00t!. So, they ran on the SlideShare homepage for a bit and were seen by a lot more people than I expected.

For example, Amit Ranjan liked them and embedded them on his blog, Webyantra: Ground Zero for Indian Web 2.0.

Then another blog based in India, Trak.in: Indian Business Buzz, picked them up from Amit. Love the Intertubes.

Now, looking at the embed stats for my slides (a very cool feature of SlideShare), there have been more views generated by these two sites combinged than from the post I did here. Interesting.

So I got to thinking about why the content would be so popular in India, or maybe it was just a coincidence. Then I remembered a tweet from Eddie months ago asking what I meant by “FTW“, incidentally the most overused acronym on Twitter.

But Eddie’s a hardcore geek, so what gives?

My guess is that since geek-speak features heavy doses of American pop culture, a lot of it gets lost in translation. Read More »