Simon Lyall's Blog

Making infographics that don’t suck – Mike Mike Dickison

• www.numberpix.com
• Didn’t have a chance to take notes cause it was so full I couldn’t sit down

Gather on mass – featuring Rowan Simpson, Karl von Randow and Penny Hagen

Rowan Simpsons

• Developers + designers + dictators
• Poster Boy Dictator = Steve Jobs
• change made by people: who care, have authority, take responsibility
• Careful about words they use – Don’t use “they” , careful how you describe colleges, other teams, “the business”
• Domestics – members of cycling team supporting head rider
• Focus – we all know it is good but it is uncommon.
• Opposite of focus – Don’t get bored, don’t flail
• You don’t have to invent you just have to leverage these and execute
• Innovation just one action, execution requires you to keep going though many steps
• MVP – whatever you can sell
• Sales – How will overcome your obscurity?
• Be a polymath – what else are you good at? where is the intersection?

Karl van Randow

• Focus on design – how it looks and how it works
• “NASCAR fans” – generic term for customers
• Team in NZ, USA and Europe. ichat and skype
• Camera+
• Changed from “shoot and share” to “post-processing app”
• Lots of mockups, iterative design
• Initial startup page had animated viewfinder, launched with but removed after 6 months
• Custom typeface, skewed thumbnails, etc makes app feel unique
• Release to correspond with WWDC keynote, competition to give away $10k of camera gear. Lots of public charts of sales ( with nice infographics) to attract attention

Penny Hagen

• Design in the Wild.
• Iterative, largely private within company/studio at the start
• Few users at the start in house, but only a few testers.
• Beat blurs private/public
• Crowd sourcing – get ideas from public – cars, nightclubs, ACC ideas
• Open Design – Normal process but all phases open to public and takes input from public – eg Drupal website redesign ( 1600 people participated )
• Emergent Design – Initial design and then evolve final design from there. Patchwork prototyping ( start with existing software product and patch )
• DIY Design – Ponoko – Build a platform and let end users design
• Constant Design – ongoing conversations
• Potential / Challenges = mass distributed participation – transparency – everyone becomes a design
• Questions – who, how, why? – who owns ideas/IP? – who decides what is good/right – what tools? – what is designers roles? – why aren’t more people doing it?

Automating things – Mal Curtis

babushka – http://babushka.me

• nested dependencies.
• useful to define what software you need on a system as well as configuration
• similar to puppet and chef
• each dependency has a url to grab it from and a .app which list install defaults, configs, dependencies,
• server config just has a bunch of dependencies listed

Vagrant – vagrantup.com

• Automate process of creating virtual machines
• Runs program like babushka once machine is live

Capistrano

• Code deployment

Jenkins

• Continuous integration
• hard to setup – look at “go ci” instead perhaps

Powering a Mt Eden Cafe – Nate Dunn

• Tuihana Cafe in Mt Eden Rd
• Runs 3bits design setup

Chellenges

• Highly competative industry
• Tight margins
• Advertising doesn’t work very well

Get the basics right

• Clean, bright warn environment
• extraordinary staff and passionate staff
• Great coffee and food with plenty of choices ( but not too many options )
• Look after your regular customers

Clever Technology

• eftpos over broadband, with nfc
• naked DSL and VOIP – phone lines expensive, no need to dialup always on, have to have broadband for Free Wifi anyway, VOIP really cheap and works whereever you are
• coffee ordering via sms, email, twitter. Twitter DM -> Custom Windows App, 2N cellular gateway on vodafone prepay -> nice printout + reply with confirmation of email/sms/twitter. SMS is most popular method. Inspired by subway’s system. Commercial SMS gateways too expensive at their scale just $10/month for prepay acct.
• Learnt – word numbers not important, customers don’t read messages, some will register & never use, novelty for most, must-have for core group
• NFC – visa paywave + mastercard paypass – quickest way to pay. Few people have cards or know how to use
• Snapper not supported since they are with eftposnz and didn’t work with paymark eftpos provider
• Free Wifi – expected by most customers, just works having codes too complicated, rate/protocol/time limited . Extremely rate limited on all ports except 80/443 , time limit to 1h. Seperate SSds for customers and staff. Powered by mikrotik
• Google Alerts – looks for reviews anywhere, all sites. Put all reviews on our feedback page. Have a unique name so easy to find.
• foursquare – not heavily used, has 2 offers but rarely redeemed
• Only 150 followers, broadcast platform. DM ordering only used by a few
• Facebook – most customers on it, best bang for a buck advertising, good analytics. Take the good and the bad facebook posts. More people will see facebook post and come in than will like.
• custom facebook app checks twitter feed every 10 minutes and posts ( grabs photos off yfrog if linked ). People see posts of food and come in to buy
• Blog – facebook don’t like pulling RSS feed so have custom app to pull facebook notes and post to blog

Official Information Act requests – fyi.org.nz

• Need to be specific
• Ombudsman office a bit slow. Some problems with lack of “case law” from them
• Charges usually not a problem
• Over 3000 government bodies listed, around 2000 of them schools
• Bulk questions are discouraged, limits, has been abused overseas
• Even the GCSB respond to OIA requests
• Police and some govt departments require requests directly
• Information include Police interrogation manuals!