Geoffrey Moore, the author of “Crossing the Chasm” (the “unofficial bible of silicon valley”) will be giving a talk entitled “What Kind of Software Company are You Trying to Build” in Santa Clara next Tuesday. The event is hosted by the software SIG of TIE Silicon Valley.
I’ve written about Moore’s model and it’s implications for usability before. As the owner of a tiny little software company myself, I expect to learn a lot from this event about how to position our software in the marketplace. Notes on a talk he gave a few weeks ago should give a sense of what to expect.
Author: jonathanboutelle
Trip report from Recent Innovations in Search BayCHI event
The BayCHI panel on Search innovation was a huge success. I’ve never seen the main auditorium at PARC so full…the aisles were full of people sitting on the floor (don’t tell the fire marshal) and 30 or so people had to watch remotely from a television in the lobby.
I’ll start by summarizing the key themes that came out in the panel discussion / questions and answer session. I’ll follow up with a blow-by-blow that captures some of the specifics of the show-and-tell that each company was allowed to do.
Whitepaper on RIA technologies
A nice little white paper comparing the different RIA technologies has just been published. It’s a good 30,000 ft overview of the different technologies available (including java and xaml and other non-swf, non-AJAX solutions). Among other things, it’s a great collection of links to articles and documentation on Flash, Laszlo/Flex, AJAX, etc.
Games, flow and RIA design
I have never been much of a game player. Apart from the occasional game of Solitaire during college (and a seriously disturbing brush with Grand Theft Auto last year), I managed not to get addicted even while hanging out with game obsessed geeks, and building Tetris for a computer science course. I would look at people addicted to computer games, and congratulate myself on knowing better.
Laszlo Unchained
The newest release of the Laszlo Presentation server (version 3.0b2) allows developers to use Laszlo technology (LZX) to develop swf-based applications, without requiring IT department to run the resulting applications using the Laszlo presentation server.
Recent Innovations in search / information finding
An upcoming BayCHI event promises to be just awesome.
This month, a star-studded panel will look at recent developments in search and information finding. Panelists include:
Jakob Nielsen: Usability rock star
Peter Norvig: Director of Search Quality, Google
Ken Norton: Director of Product Management, Yahoo! search
Udi Manber: CEO of A9
Rahul Lahiri: VP of Search Product Management at Ask Jeeves
Moderated by Uzanto‘s own Rashmi Sinha.
Anyone who’s interested in search in general, or the intersection of search and user experience in particular, should attend. April 12th, at PARC in Palo Alto.
What I learned at the RIA/AJAX BOF @ ETECH
So the RIA BOF at etech was really great. About 45 people showed up, far more than I was expecting, given the short notice. There was a lot of excitement about AJAX at ETech. The term kept on being mentioned by different presenters, and I think that contributed to the number of people who chose to attend the BOF.
The discussion was very free-ranging, with a lot of smart web developers from various companies sharing their tips and tricks. Below are some of the insights that really stuck with me.
Home Lan Caddy
In the spirit of MAKE, I thought I’d share a little project I did over the weekend: making a box for wrangling the connections in my home LAN.
Rocket Science and Plumbing
The AJAX meme continues to percolate on the internet, with a nice summary article from QuirksBlog that links to some of the more interesting analysis. Geeks everywhere seem fascinated by the fact the XMLHttpRequest can be used to fetch data behind the scenes and serve it up when the user asks for it.
XMLHttpRequest is a handy and mildly interesting bit of plumbing. The fact that it’s a fairly simple API that you can read about and comment on makes it handy blog fodder. But the real differentiator in all of the new google applications is NOT in that they use XMLHttpRequest (they could easily use an iframes hack instead, as an earlier commenter on my site pointed out). They could even have used Flash!
The client-side predictive engine that google has built into their new applications is what really makes them powerful.
Rich Internet Applications BOF at ETECH
I’m organizing a BOF (Birds of a Feather) on Rich Internet Applications at the ETECH conference in San Diego next week. We’re meeting at 7:30 PM next Tuesday at Ball Room C of the Westin Horton Plaza in San Diego. It should be a lot of fun. RIA has been a big theme at previous etechs, so it should be a good bunch of people.
O’Reilly says that evening entrance is unmonitored. Feel free to join in whether you’re a conference attendee or not!
jonathanboutelle.com 