Singing the SharePoint Song at C4DI

We use SharePoint at work. All the modules that we teach (and lots more besides) have SharePoint sites that contain notes, coursework and other useful stuff. It works for me.

It works for Simon and Steve too. Tonight at the C4DI Software Development Meetup they gave a presentation which started with a song. (something I've never dared do) and then went on to lay out, in well structured detail, just how much you can do with this platform.

Things that came out of the talk for me:

• SharePoint an "everything machine". You can use it to share data, you can use it to manage process, you can use it to present stuff. And lots of other things too. It will provide 90% of the features of highly expensive platforms for things like document management, version control, group working and lots of other business needs. And if it doesn't do what you want out of the box you can use it as a platform for customised apps that can run on a huge variety of devices.
• SharePoint is cheap to get started. Individuals can use the online version which is part of Office 365  for a few quids a month, and you can get developer access for not much more. And even an individual can get value out of using it to manage their data.
• SharePoint is becoming a cloud application. You can run your own servers, but the number of reasons for doing this is falling over time. 
• SharePoint is like a lot of things in life. You get out what you put in. A little planning at the start will pay off hugely when you start to use the system. 

I only use a tiny percentage of what our departmental SharePoint site offers. After this talk I left resolved to find out more.

Making the Web Work for you at C4DI

Another interesting evening at a C4DI meetup.  I don't actually make a website that sells anything (other than the brand of me I suppose) but the session was fascinating even so. Mike Jessop from Strawberry gave a talk on Digital Marketing. Used properly the technology can give web vendors invaluable insights into how their customers tick and what makes them actually go ahead and buy stuff.  Used badly it can give customers the feeling they are being stalked by an oven. 

The most important single point for me was that Google Analytics is where you need to go and live if you want to this kind of thing properly. I do have it switched on for my site, but I don't really use it as much as I probably should. But then again, I'm not really selling anything.

Analytics is free, and very powerful. I didn't know that you could use it to create dashboards that show real time activity on the site, summary reports of the way your site is being traversed by visitors and even perform a/b comparison of site designs to work out which is the most profitable. 

The other thing that came out was just how much tagging and profiling goes on. Mike recommends the Wasp profiler as a way of finding out how many tags each web page contains. A tag is a link embedded in web page that lets servers behind the scenes track what you are doing and pass the information around so that what you see on the next page reflects where you have been.  This is how my oven managed to follow me from site to site.

Apparently the Holy Grail of web marketeers is a system that can track the way that you move between mobile, tablet and desktop as you move from following a link in an advert through finding out more about the product from your Facebook friends to search for the product on Bing and then buying it. We are not quite there yet apparently, but we are heading that way.

Personally, I'm not sure if this is scary or not. I remember years ago that when you answered an advert in the paper and you put "Department G176" on the top of the address you knew that this was how they were tracking the success of their promotions.  However, nowadays it all takes place in the background. I reckon it is all about making sure that folks are aware that this kind of thing is going on.

Mike was very keen to make it clear that if you get too heavy handed with the technology and start gaming it to swing results your way this will end in tears as the users and the service providers change the way they behave, and his talk provided a really good overview of how to make the best use of what is out there. The best sessions leave you wanting to find out more, and this one did that for me.

C4DI Hardware Hacking

Last night we had our monthly Arduino hardware hacking session at C4DI. Lots of the regulars were there and one person even brought her long-bow along. Which was a highly impressive piece of wood. 

The theme of the evening was Sci-Fi movie effects, using programs to make whooshes beeps and all kinds of space age noises. You can find out what we got up to (and even have a go yourself) by grabbing the lab sheet from here).  Great fun was had.

I brought along my latest purchase, an Arduino powered pen pushing robot that you can pick up from RoboSavvy for the amazing sum of 18 pounds. Peter and I had enormous fun building it, particularly when we (or more accurate I) wired the motors the wrong way round and had the robot printing perfectly - but from right to left). However, with a bit of adjustment we got it out of "arabic mode" and managed to get it printing properly.

Amazon at C4DI

Tonight at the C4DI June Developer Meetup we welcomed Ian Massingham from Amazon Web Services, who gave a great talk about cloud based deployment of computing resource. Put that way it doesn't sound that interesting, but whey you go on to think that it allows computing infrastructure to change performance and scope with just a flick of a virtual switch you start to see just how compelling this model is.

Consider a situation where you have an idea for a product or service which, if it works, would be useful to millions of people. More than that, you might have an idea which only works properly if you have millions of users. How do you get started? Well, the answer is to put your system in the cloud. You don't have to buy anything at the start and you just pay for the computing power that you use. If things go well you use your revenue to pay for more processing. If things go badly you walk away and have another idea.

Ian talked about the way that the Amazon service is provisioned around the globe so that your data doesn't need to to leave your part of the world, and how clever management of the addressing of addresses means that your users will always be connected to the fastest servers in their neck of the woods. 

It's very clever stuff, and it lets you do things and play with things in a way that was just not possible in the past. Want to test out a new service for a while, need a high performance cluster for twenty minutes,  reduce the power of your end user platforms and do all your rendering off site? Cloud services can do this kind of thing and their power is going up and their prices going down all the time. 

When I met Ian I made some fairly silly comments about Python, a computer language that I've been playing with during the "Wrestling with Python" sessions we are doing for teachers. I made the point that for some applications, where security is right at the front of the things you are worrying about, I don't think that Python is the best choice (I'm going to have to write a complete blog post to get my feelings on this one properly set out).

However, for cloud type stuff Python is pretty much perfect. It provides the fastest way to get from idea to running code that I've found. A skilled Python coder can wrangle hugely complex systems together really quickly. I still prefer C# personally, but when you hear what developers can put together in Python in record time you can't help but be impressed.

Python is a perfect language for the "Move fast and break things" culture where companies survive by innovating faster than the other guy. If your new services are a bit fragile that's a price worth paying, and you can always iterate until you get solid systems.

All in all, a very thought provoking presentation, which ended with some hugely tempting AWS offers from Ian to members of C4DI and anyone thinking about their startup programme starting soon. 

Knife Throwing at the C4DI Developer Meetup

OK, so we didn't actually throw any knives. Because if we had I think that people would have died. Those knives were sharp, really, really, sharp. Jon was running his finger over the blades and saying how sharp they felt. I reckoned I'd make that judgement just by watching him....

Some people regard cooking is an art form (as opposed to something you do when you feel a bit peckish). The company CuttingEdgeKnives sell knives to such people. If you want the best tools for the job, these are the business. They are hand crafted in Japan and really look and feel the part. 

You might be wondering what they have to do with software development.  Well, tonight at C4DI James Young, Creative Director from Offroadcode was explaining how diversifying into luxury knives had paid dividends for the website development business. It's all very well making Content Management System (CMS) based sites for companies that sell stuff, it's quite another thing to be putting stuff in boxes and selling it via a CMS powered site of your own.

James made some very valid points as he described the trajectory from an initial investment in a box full of knives to successful niche business. Some points from his talk that I think make a lot of sense if you're selling things:

• If you want to use Google and Facebook to promote your products this is really, really tricky to get right. Get in some appropriate expertise if you are going to do this. 
• Competitions and paid advertising don't work as well as you might expect, but giving samples to influencers and reviewers does. 
• Writing good editorial copy (and regularly updating it) will help sell your product.
• If your customers need to think a while about a purchase give them time to do this by ensuring your shopping carts take a very long time to expire.
• Address customer concerns about a purchase directly and at the point where they are making the transaction. 
• Ask your customers "Did we nearly lose your business?" to find out what might be stopping others from parting with their cash.

The talk left me thinking that setting up a niche business like this is not a bad idea, and it gives you a lot of credibility. If someone is about to hire you to build them a site that helps sell stuff, it is useful to be able to show that you have built a site that works for you. 

All in all a great talk, followed by Pete Duncanson, Founder and MD of Offroadcode, who talked about the fun you can have when using Content Management Systems (CMS) to build web sites for clients.  A CMS system provides a friendly interface that lets a company edit their product range, prices, special offers etc and generates a web site that their customers can interact with.  All the product details are held in a database and the CMS is customised for the business needs of the particular client company. Offroadcode use Umbraco, which is a system I've heard good things about and seems to work very well. 

Pete gave a very good exploration of the psychology of dealing with clients who take your lovely web design and then subvert it to the point where you aren't proud of having made it any more. He explained how and why this happens and offered a lot of human and technical tips to make sure that the integrity of your design is preserved as long as possible. Some points he made include:

• Plan for expansion. If the client swears that there will never be more than three of something, plan for an infinite number. If they promise that the number of items on a page will always be small, add paging anyway. This is not because clients tell fibs, or are silly, it is just that business needs change over the lifetime of the site, and the operators of the system might not be the people that gave you these design assurances.
• Add pickers. Letting the operator enter an item directly is nice enough, but if they can pick one from a list, and then go back and fetch that item again, then they will thank you when they have to add the "Christmas Special Offer" again next year.
• Constrain as much as possible, but in a constructive way. You don't want huge images on sites that the client creates, but just refusing to upload them will cause offence and lead to support calls. Much better to resize and then cache the image so that you can send out appropriately sized pictures when your system serves out the web pages. 
• Use sensible names and be consistent about them. If you have a field called "Page Header" which is the header for one of your pages, use the same name throughout. 

This is all good, solid advice which is not a million miles away from what we tell our students on the Software Development modules. And it was all presented in a very entertaining way. Great stuff and a most enjoyable evening.

If you are not coming along to C4DI events, you are missing out. All the events are free and open to anyone, including Hull students who really, really should come along. 

The next C4DI event is the June hardware meetup. You can sign up here. 

The next C4DI develoepr meetup is also in June. Sign up here. 

C4DI and Bald Secret Agents. And wedding lights.

We had our third hardware group meetup at C4DI this week. A bunch of plucky souls turned up to develop some software to help secret agents who have no hair. No, really. You can find the notes here if you want to have a go yourself. 

I took along a few of my wedding lights to show folk how they work. You can see them under construction above. The next meetup will be in a month or so.  I'm presently writing up a document that covers exactly how they work, which you might find useful if you ever want to create remote controlled stuff.

C4DI Accelerator Program Launched

I got this slide from Jon's deck today. I hope he won't mind...

Today Robert and I went down to C4DI in Hull to see the start of something big, the launch of the C4DI accelerator program. An accelerator program is a way of making ideas real. Take a good idea, a bunch of folks that want to run with it, add in some mentoring and a ton of hard work and you should end up with a strong pitch that will get you on the road to great things. 

C4DI have partnered with PwC who will be supporting the enterprise, along with Handlesbanken, Campaign Monitor, FreeAgent and Ebuyer. 

The principle is that you get funding, a place to work and support and mentoring in exchange for a chunk of your action, on the basis that any percentage of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Selection starts in October this year, with the first teams in place by February 2015. Then, later in the year they will hold the final pitches and demo day. There's space for 8 teams, each of which will get up to 16K of  seed investment and 16K of match funding to keep them going over the 90 day incubation period. (I stole all these facts from Jon's presentation - go there if you want more details and a picture of a dog dressed as a horse). 

This is such wonderful stuff. I would so love it if some of our graduating students took that amazing idea they don't know what to do with, and ran it through the C4DI accelerator.

C4DI Hardware Meetup - With Nerf Guns

Lots of Industry

Tonight was our second hardware meetup at C4DI. I knew that things were going to go well when I arrived to find everyone had already set up and was building stuff and making it do things without us needing to do anything. Peter was in charge of the exercise tonight (you can find his lab here) and he had made really good use of the flex sensor in the SparkFun Redboard Kit to create a shooting game that you can play with Nerf guns. Which he had thoughtfully provided too....

Everyone had great fun building up the circuit, getting the software working and playing with the result. The lab was great because it shows how you can create a fully formed solution (a shooting game where you have a few seconds to hit the target three times) based on this technology. 

No Cows were harmed in the making of this game

Peter had even provided a bunch of 3D printed parts that support the flex sensor target, and some cows (taken from milk cartons) to use as targets. 

March C4DI You Really Should Be

David Gilson and Jon Moss, and a Media Centre

I really like the "Your Really Should Be" events at C4DI. And so do lots of other people it seems. The place was packed.

There were four speakers, starting with David Gilson who took as his stating point "You really should be looking at XBMC" (or Xbox Media Centre) to use its full title. XBMC is a media client that runs on most anything, from Raspberry Pi upwards and lets you spread media around your house. You can even start watching a movie downstairs, move upstairs and continue from exactly where you left off. You can integrate it with other media tools such as BBC iPlayer and replace shelves full of DVDs with a single mass storage server tucked behind the TV.  David took us through configuration and usage scenarios and had even brought along a Ouya video game console which he also uses as a media centre device. 

Chris Gooding - Telling us all to train our replacements

Next up was Chris Gooding.  He is definitely a man after my own heart. I've always thought of programmers as "Creatively Lazy" people. We will work surprisingly hard to find solutions that we convince ourselves will save time and effort in the long run. Chris argued for taking this to the next level. Rather than programming computers to do things for us, why not program people? He reckoned you really should be training your replacement. If you spend your time showing other folks how to do your job they can pitch in and do your work for you. And if your boss does the same thing (and they should) then this will result in expertise trickling down the workforce and making it easier to keep all the skills inside the company. Nice idea.

Jason Taylor. The text on the screen says "Take Risks, Throw Darts, Make Rubbish, Surprise Yourself". Amen.

Jason Taylor was next. He reckons that we should play more. Jason comes from an arts and product design background and gave a great talk about the benefits of just playing with stuff. I agree. Recently I've had a lot of fun playing with things just to see if I could make them do stuff. Hitting a specification and making the correct deliverable is all very well, but sometimes there is nothing nicer than just fiddling around with bits and bobs. I reckon this is particularly true of game development. Some of my best gameplay ideas have come from just starting with a few things on the screen, getting them moving and seeing what happens next. 

Mike Clarke on the automation trail.

Finally Mike Clarke gave us another slant on the "creatively lazy" aspect of developers. But he took the perspective that rather than training people we should be making every use of the tools that are available to us.

Rather than perform actions we should create scripts that do them automatically. This has two happy outcomes. One is that you can do the task a second time very easily. The other is that you now have a documentation of that task. If you start out with this approach when you begin to do a job it will really pay off further down the tracks. I heartily agree with this way of working. It is very often the case that you find yourself repeating something that you thought you'd only have to do once. If you've built that into an automated action you can repeat it very easily. 

Then, right at the end of the session we had our first ever C4DI rap. Alan O'Donohoe gave a pitch perfect (if you can do that in rap) rendition of why you should be engaging with technology in general and Rasperry Pi in particular. 

All in all a great evening, and as usual I left with a whole bunch of ideas.

John Connelly Talks Hull City Plan

Today we had a Rather Useful Seminar from John Connelly of C4DI. He came along and told us about the exciting developments centered around the Hull City Plan. I wish more students had been around to hear all about it. As it is, there are lots of interesting things coming along soon, including a "Three Thing Thing" application development hackathon that we are going to run based on data that the City Plan is making available. 

I reckon everyone who is interested in getting and using data from the area should sign up and get involved. There are lots of problems that are well worthy of an attack based on big data and novel solutions. You can sign up to be kept informed of the plans here. 

Arduino Fun and Games at C4DI

We had some great fun at C4DI tonight. We were all playing with Arduinos and trying to get lights flashing, make strange buzzing noises (with a little sounder that is part of the kit) and then reading buttons and reacting to input.

C4DI turns out to be a great environment to do this kind of thing. I'm really grateful to them for letting us have access to such a well set up area. It is a great place to do little sessions like this.

I think the mood of the night was best summed up by one chap who had come along to take part. We'd given him one of the loan kits to work with and at the end of the session he handed it back in again because on the strength of the evening he was going to get a device of his own.  

The next session will be on Thursday 3rd of April at the same time, same place. I'll bring along a Mars Bar for the best thing that anyone has made. The fun will start at 6:00 with setup/show and tell, and then we'll begin the practical stuff at 6:30. 

Keep an eye on the Hull Digital Meetup calendar to register for the event. If you want to have a go at the labs you can find all the notes here. 

Developer Meetup at C4DI

Last night we had a Developer Meetup at C4DI. I really like these, they give you a chance to find out what other folks do with their computers. 

First up was Jon Polling, speaking on behalf of the Ruby programming language. I didn't know much about Ruby, but I know quite a bit more now. It looks like a great way to build applications, particularly the way that you can reuse code by importing Ruby "gems" that have been written by other folk. It looks like it would be perfect for writing server based stuff, although there are also toolkits for Android and ios. The syntax of the language looks interesting too, the way that you can integrate frameworks was very impressive. For me personally it looks like a solution to a problem I don't have at the moment, but if I ever have to write a hosted solution I'll be taking a closer look. 

Next up was Steve Bowman talking about Continuous Integration. This was another very interesting talk. To understand what it was about you have to first think about how people write software.

If there are several people working together they will have central code repository which holds the latest version of all the code being written. If Ethel wants to work on the menu system she will check out the code for that module, make some changes, test them, and then check her code back in again.

Every now and then a complete new version of the system is built from the code and tested. Sometimes this build process or one of the tests will fail and "break the build". Breaking the build by checking in dodgy code is seen as a bad thing, and usually involves the guilty person having to buy everyone donuts for the next week.

The problem with this model is that there can be quite a delay between the breaking changes being checked in and the fault being detected. If you only build a new version every day or so it can take a while to notice that something is broken and if there have been a large number of changes in that time it can take a while to figure out the cause of the problem. 

Continuous integration involves you having a build server which is constantly scanning your code base for changes, rebuilding your solution and testing each time new content arrives. Faulty code is detected very quickly, the person checking in the faulty code (along with the rest of the team) will get an error report within minutes.

Steve gave a demonstration of the system in action, and explained that the build server doesn't have to be one of your own computers, you can actually do all your building in the cloud by renting some space and spinning your own build server there. This also allows the build process to scale if you have a very large system and lots of developers.

Apparently people like Google, Amazon and Facebook do this kind of thing a lot. It is common practice to create and even deploy their latest code with bits of the user interface "switched off". Then, when all your tests in the field turn out OK you can switch on the new features. 

You can get started with Continuous Integration for free. Steve recommended the TeamCity platform which is free for up to 20 projects. He also made the point that the approach works very well even for an individual developer. It looks very interesting, I think I'll have a go with this. 

The third talk of the evening was by John Connolly. This was all about the awesome work that is going on between C4DI and Hull City Council. For me this was a follow on from a Meetup in 2012 when Adam Jennison and Benjamin Welby talked about plans to make available the huge amounts of data held by the council. It seems that things have moved on a bit since them. C4DI and the Council are now working together on the "City Engine" which will provide a central point of access to all this lovely data. We are so going to have to run some hackathons with this stuff, stay tuned for a proper Three Thing Thing event built around making the most of open data.

Finally Mike said a quick word about our Hardware Meetup next week. We are going to be firing up some Arduinos and seeing what we can do with them. Stay tuned for more details.

To me this all looks like the "Perfect Storm of Fun". We've got C4DI and Platform Expo providing a great environment for startups from games to data mining. We've got Hull City of Culture in 2017 to aim at, with the potential for all kinds of interesting things, and we've got the council making available tons of data to that can be combined to make ground breaking applications and services. Truly a very interesting time to be in Hull. 

Tech@Hull Launch Event

Andre Hitchman is one of our second year students. With some big ideas. One of them is Tech@Hull. He launched it this evening at C4DI. Tech@Hull aims to bring students and business together to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Which are things that I'm quite keen on too.

The launch event was great, plenty of people, food, drink and discussion. Jon Moss of C4DI urged us all to get out of our comfort zone and go and talk to other folks, something I've always been spectacularly bad at, but I did my best.

If you are a student in Hull you'd be bonkers to miss out on this opportunity. Tech@Hull will be running lots of events where local developers and students can meet up, learn from each other and make plans together. You must, must, must be involved in this. 

Andre has set up a web site for the group. It's under construction at the moment but you can sign up for news of when it goes live here. 

Hardware at C4DI

Robin talks radio

Tonight we had our first "proper" Hardware meetup at the C4DI. There were talks from Robin and Mike about radio hardware and one from Robert about robots. With added robot. And I stood up and waved some flashing lights around and talked about our upcoming Arduino sessions. Very, very interesting.

The first two talks, about radio communications, were amazing. It was all about the challenge of using tiny amounts of power to send signals huge distances and of designing and refining analogue circuits.

Analogue electronics has always seemed like a kind of magic to me. I'm very happy with digital signals, where things are either on or off. But analogue signals are all about signals that can take any value. The good news is that the signals obey a bunch of laws, and we can use this to build circuits that process analogue inputs in particular ways. I'm used to writing instructions for programs that tell them what to do with data that comes in. Analogue circuit design is programming with hardware. You use your maths and physics knowledge to come up with component configurations and values that should work. Then you spend ages tweaking the imperfect physical realization of your design until it does what you want.

Robin and Mike described the challenges, but also the deep satisfaction that you can get from contacting people in distant countries using hardware that you designed and made yourself. And this technology also lets you communicate when you can't get any signal bars on your shiny smartphone. 

Robert then took another hardware tack. He'd brought along a robot which contained around 34 lines of program code. Not a lot perhaps, but enough to make it navigate round the room avoiding obstacles. It even backed up slowly (with appropriate warning beeper) if things got too close for comfort. Robert did a great job of explaining how what appeared to be complex behavior was actually very simple from a programming point of view. 

Finally I got up and talked about our plans for future developments. We thought it might be fun to do some Arduino sessions getting to grips with programming the device, and I suggested that the Sparkfun RedBoard Starter kit would be a good basis for our work. Then something amazing happened, Ross Hamilton, C4DI regular and all round good egg, offered to sponsor our sessions to the tune of 10 RedBoard kits. This means that although it would be useful for you to have your own hardware, at a reasonable cost of 36 pounds each (less than the price of a video game) now you don't need to. I've set up a special part of this site  where you can sign up for more information, and I'll post any materials that we produce up there as well. 

Hardware Group at C4DI

Tonight we had our first meeting of the new C4DI hardware group. There seem to be lots of peple who are keen on getting to grips with hardware and embedded systems, with interest in Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Gadgeteer to name a few. I took along some toys, as had other folks. Above you can see the insides of my Tagomatic device, along with some pinball machine related shenanigans which includes using an Arduino to capture messages inside the pinball table circuitry and some coils of electro-luminescent wire. That lights up and looks really cool. 

Stay tuned for details of future events, this looks like it is going to be great fun, and it's not too late to sign up over at the meetup page for C4DI.

Retro Fun at C4DI

Tonight it was time for some Retro Fun at C4DI. Nothing on the agenda as such, just bring along your retro gear and be prepared to tell its story. We had some great stuff turn up, including a laser disk system and a Theramin.

Peter had brought the Apple II (by the way, the missing key is the | key) and a Palm Pilot. Ian brought the Sinclair Scientific calculator and I brought the hand cranked calculator. (did you know that people that used these were actually called computers?).

You can play "How many of these did you own?" here. I had two, and I really, really wanted an Apple Newton....

It was very interesting to see just what people had brought. There were Sinclair Spectrums, Walkmen (Walkmans?), Amstrad Portable Computers and all kinds of tech. It is sobering to reflect that these were all state of the art in their time, and that the iPhone that you adore so much is destined to become just as retro as these gadgets in a few years time. 

Thanks to Jon for setting it up. The next meeting of the Hull Digital is Thursday 16th January, when they are having the first Hardware Meetup, which should be very interesting. 

C4DI Retro Hardware Meetup

C4DI are having their first meetup of the new year next week. The subject of the meeting is "retro technology". We have been invited to take along something old that is involved with technology. Time for a trip up into the loft methinks. 

Fiddling with Hardware at C4DI

Jon Moss gets things started.

We had a great evening at the C4DI tonight. It was another of the “You Really Should Be” events and just to make it even more interesting I was giving one of the presentations. But first we had Jon Moss, making the point that “You Really Should Be speaking at events”. He made a great case for talking in public, not least because it is fun once you get going. He also made the very good point that the aim of a presentation is to get your audience to do something and what this is should be set out and reinforced at the beginning and the end of your presentation, when the audience is most engaged.

My Audience. Thanks for the applause.

Then it was my turn. My topic was “You Really Should be Fiddling with Hardware”, and I’d brought along some hardware that I’d fiddled with, including coloured lights that can be controlled over Bluetooth from my Windows Phone. Everything worked, eventually, and folks clapped at the end, which is always nice. You can find the slides from the presentation here.

Next up was John Polling who reckoned “You really should be working on a side project”. By side project John means something which takes you into new areas and helps you develop your skills. I like the sound of this. I’ve always found that the technical things that I’m not really supposed to be doing are the ones that I find the most interesting at any given time. By formalising this and giving an outlet for folks who want to make something different you can get happier developers and some surprisingly useful outcomes.

Finally we had Steve Fewster. who rounded things off with “You really should be - developing apps for the ‘Global Cloud Accounting’ community”. I’m not that familiar with accounting, but I do know about the cloud and how lots of business process is now moving into it. Steve, who is in the business of providing tools and services that add value for cloud users, took the line that “There’s gold in them thar hills”. In other words, the market is just getting going for people who want to bolt their ideas onto cloud based accounting systems. The system makers are keen to encourage an app infrastructure and so they make it easy to create apps and there is lots of scope for neat ideas to become the next big thing.

All in all, a very thought provoking and enjoyable evening. Thanks to C4DI for putting it together.

You Really Should Be Fiddling with Hardware

Find out what you can do with this, and how much it costs, at the session next week.

In an attempt to stop myself just buying components and start myself actually doing something with them, I’m doing a session at the next C4DI “You really should be..” event.

I’m going to be talking about the joys of making programs that talk to hardware, and just how easy and cheap it is to get started. Expect flashing lights.

The session starts at 6:00 pm on Thursday 12th of December. It’s at the C4DI in The Fruit Market. You can sign up here.

Data, Insight and Customer Weirdness at C4DI

Andy points out his achievements, including coming up with the slogan “8 out of 10 cats…”

We are all surrounded by data which is harvested, refined and bought and sold just like any other cash crop. In the C4DI meeting tonight two excellent talks showed how this “big data” can be used to deliver useful outcomes, but how you also need to be aware of the human context behind the numbers.

First up was Andy Parkinson who now works for Kingston Communications as their Head of Insight and Analytics. He used to work for Hull City Council and gave a great description of how the council has been using the data it collects to refine and target services to make them more efficient. He showed how we can all be clustered into groups and how this helps to target resources. It seems that everybody is unique, but we all mange to be unique in a fairly structured way. And when you can characterise and map this, you can work out where you need to target what you are doing with your resources.

Having told us of the power of all this analysis, he then went on to mention that people can also behave in untoward and unpredictable ways that don’t fit their profile, or just act on “auto-pilot”. This reminded me a lot of my favourite maxim of the moment “Plans are useless, Planning is crucial”. By all means analyse your data and take actions based on it. But be well aware that you will always have to deal with some weirdness around the edges and behaviours that arrive “built in” to people. Of course, if you can harness these you can get some really big wins. So don’t be afraid to try stuff that targets the “automatic self”.

Next we had a talk from Nick Thompson who is Managing Director of Hull City and was formerly Director of Consumer Services with Kingston Communications. Nick took what Andy said and added an even stronger human dimension. By breaking down the Hull City fanbase into sections and analysing their motivations and actions he provided a lovely example of how data can tell you some useful things, but that you need to understand what drives the people in your numbers and how they behave.

It turns out that the spending habits of the fans seem to follow the well established “80 – 20” law, which in Hull City terms means that that 80% of the income of the club comes from around 20% of the fans. And these are not necessarily the most fanatical ones, who see their passion for the club transcending things like replica shirts and other merchandise. Very interesting.

Nick make the point that you can make decisions based on the data, but this must always be done in the light of the emotional attachments and drivers of the people themselves. What made it all the more striking was that Nick has obviously been a huge fan of the club for a very long time, and presumably fits himself into one of his categories as well.

The talks fitted together really well and made for a terrific evening.