Bcak4 – lightning talks

Lance Wiggs – pacific fibre

  • General background on company
  • 900 Gb/s current capacity in aus/NZ
  • Proposal to double
  • Single cable aus-NZ-USA 5.1 Tb/s
  • Maybe other landing stations

Day without media project

  • Withoutmedia.wordpress.com
  • Asked 200 to do without media for 24 hours
  • Many students couldn’t finish
  • Students used addicts language
  • No loyalty to any news source
  • Lots of txt and facebook messages
  • Strong loyality to iPhones
  • Read out interesting quotes

meta programming

  • Likes eval()

Seth from Interclue – Browser extension devel

  • Hard to know userbase, most don’t know what a browser is
  • Hard to market
  • What browsers makers will allow
  • What browsers to target
  • How to make money

Scott Judson – ipad

  • Agents filling out forms in field
  • Gives list and addresses of jobs
  • Different screens for picking up jobs, on site and stock used, post job
  • Server side – timesheets, stock codes, etc

Augmented reality

  • Cute demos
  • Mirror in toyshop you hold up a toybox and shows what is inside
  • Zugara YouTube demo shows clothes on you
  • Markers ( symbols on sheet that camera spots) or markerless detects face or objects directly
  • Facial recognition displays info on person you hold your iPhone up to
  • Navigation aids display directs and info over the camera feed
  • Tools: artoolkit, flartoolkit, layar
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Bcak4 – wikiphobia in schools

Works at Learning skills centre at university of Canterbury

Students have limited general IT skills, can txt or use facebook but does translate into other areas

Academics tend to dislike wikipedia

  • unreliable
  • non-experts can contribute
  • culture clash wikipedia vs academic
  • inappropriate
  • used as a primary source
  • in actual case students tend to actually use wikipedia correctly
  • plagiarism very easy to detect

In business if you were asked to research something and just pointed to wikipedia page then you’re done

I missed some of the talk here

Assign wikipedia writing to students

  • published in public
  • critiqued by strangers
  • defend argument
  • have citations and sources
  • favourable to group work, track individual contributions

See wikiteach.info

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Bcak4 – open data

Lots of momentium in last year

MPs expenses
Couple of conferences

Open govt conference – went fairly well

Data.govt.nz

Grabbed Linz data and chatham islands in openstreet maps built using it. Rolling out to mainland next 6+ months

Igovt login being rolled out across government sites

NZ transport has open API – infoconnect
Real time bus infomation often sold to or maintained by 3rd parties

Govt depts tidying up contract to clarify ownership of data

See cat.open.org.nz

NZ book cover images provided by national library

Often councils make very little per year for data they are charging for

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Bcak4 – kiwi startups

Mytours – apps for walks and museum tours – 4 people

Workshop enterprises – 1+ person

What is startup?

  • high growth
  • not cash-flow positive
  • less defined business model
  • aggressive targets
  • pre-ipo
  • high-risk profile
  • some industries ( airlines ) startup on completely different scale and timeline

How Auckland different

  • in SanFran networking for webapps with diggs etc easier
  • in NZ easier to meet retailers and customers
  • different reports on how easy to get matching funds from development
  • easy to start, hard to scale
  • maybe launch globally rather than NZ first and then expand
  • lot easier with beta customers you talk meet & talk to in person
  • CARE really good source for contacts
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Bcak4 – saas & apis for workflow

Second session at barcamp Auckland. Trying to do less and automate stuff . Avoid cut and paste

Examples

  • Xero has bank rules which automate creation of invoices
  • mail chimp easy mailing lists, free for small groups, pay pretty good too
  • CapsuleCRM – list of tasks for customers
  • use the capsule API he adds new customers when signed to their own system
  • capistrano for automated deploy
  • textmate bundles
  • gmail labs pre-canned resposes
  • hoptoad – monitors logs
  • xero – re-occuring in voices
  • accounting system checks prod system and looks for unbilled accounts or locks people who don’t pay
  • single password systems
  • firefox sync, dropbox
  • greasemonkey
  • insta-paper
  • google calendar, trippit
  • quicklaunches
  • lighthouse, activecolab, atlaysan
  • run lint or jslint at commit time
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Bcak4 – nzpost redev

First talk at barcamp auckland 4 is Ben from NZ Post

Existing site hard to find stuff, often things listed by product name rather than what people wanted to do.

Around 3000 pages. Huge job to rewrite many of them, many docs written by insiders for insiders.

Key customer profiles for each product , narrowed to 8 customer types. Products matched to some of these types.

New platform is Drupal. Was going to broad RFP but decided to narrow things first. Down to 4 systems Drupal, Plone, Silverstripe, and ruby-on-rails. Lots of alternate vendors for that platform.

Site being built by catalyst. Platform is Ubuntu .

Some product rationalization and presentation changes.

Planned launch in a couple of months

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