Archive for March 2011

MySQL Conference Early Bird ends 31/03/2011

If you’ve been busy and haven’t registered yet, remember that early-bird pricing ends on 31/03/2011. From April 1-10, you’ll have to pay USD$100 more. A discount code for use (I think you save 20-25%): mys11fsd.

We’re full up in terms of the schedule. People are still asking for an opportunity to speak, and there are still opportunities in the Products & Services track. Please contact Yvonne Romaine at yromaine@oreilly.com for more information on this.

Might I also suggest that if you want to speak and there’s no longer an opportunity, you submit a five-minute talk for the Ignite MySQL event. Even though submissions are now closed, contact Brian Aker — he’ll try and help make some magic happen for you.

Don’t forget you can also lead a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session. While it is not a talk, you can still gather like-minded folk and talk about things over pizza & beer (which has always been a popular combination in previous years).

If you’re looking for a new job, don’t forget the Career Zone. There are some great companies participating, so that’s another good reason to come.

Conferences are all about networking. While not enabled by default, I suggest you manually go and turn on access to the Attendee Directory, so you can write messages to people you want to meet, have chats with, and so on.

Conferences selling out forget about the rest of the world

2011 seems to be a good year for both Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC. Google I/O sold out in 59 minutes and Apple’s WWDC sold out in under 10 hours. They’re both held at the Moscone Center and I guess the caps for attendance is usually set at about 4,000-5,000 attendees.Flinders Street Station

My only beef with this is that the rest of the world is forgotten. It’s only good for the developer sitting in North America (or a similar timezone). In fact folk that need to get corporate approval are probably also forgotten. Launching at 9 or 10am PST is past midnight in China and Singapore for example. Its even later in Japan. What about developers sitting in Sydney & Melbourne?

Google takes an open approach to this. They will have live streaming available and are organising extended events (which again, think about the timezones — they work if you’re all together in San Francisco but you’d be hard pressed to find a venue that will let in twenty geeks at 2-6am). Apple will provide recorded video later to registered developers.

However developers in the rest of the world miss out on all the interactions, face-to-face sessions, hands-on labs, meeting other developers, and all the parties and late-nights in where partnerships get made, and new ideas get formed. The networking is why people go to these conferences, in addition to learning about the latest and greatest. I remember years back at WWDC that people will install the latest beta of OS X on their laptops at WWDC itself!

Sun Microsystems used to boast that JavaOne had over 15,000 attendees. Oracle OpenWorld claims over 41,000 attendees. Maybe its time to grow out of Moscone West and use the whole Moscone Center?

I urge Google and Apple to think about the rest of the world. Yes, we will take time out of our schedules to fly to San Francisco, put up at a hotel, all for the opportunity at being at one of these conferences. Not only for the content, but all the relationships we will make, with other attendees and of course, your engineers.

HTTPS for Twitter & Facebook – enable it!

Use Twitter? Want to use HTTPS where possible, to prevent accessing it over plain HTTP, and getting “tweetjacked” by FireSheep users? Twitter now allows you to use HTTPS wherever possible. A good start. Its accessible in your account settings.

Twitter  Settings

Use Facebook? Want to use HTTPS where possible? Account -> Account Settings and look at Account Security. Again, you can enable HTTPS. Very cool.My Account

I don’t know how I missed this, but I encourage everyone to enable HTTPS, especially since I see the most common website at cafes, restaurants and other public places that are being accessed tend to be Facebook. I was at the KL Facebook Developer Garage (KLFB) at the end of February 2011, and I saw two speakers get fake updates on their Twitter & Facebook profiles, so I’m guessing this is not very well publicized.

Go, spend a minute, and enable HTTPS.

Some keynote updates about The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011

A quick update on a few keynotes that the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011 managed to recently close:

O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011

  • The opening keynote, The State of the Dolphin, given by none other than Tomas Ulin, who is currently the VP of the MySQL Engineering team at Oracle. I am told that this is not just a “what’s new” and “what’s coming up”, as there will also be a Q&A session with an analyst, customer, and Tomas. You must not miss this on Tuesday morning at 9am, 12th April 2011.
  • On Thursday at 9.30am, we have The Next Decade in Data Management, a keynote given by Mike Olson, CEO of Cloudera. More and more I see people using Hadoop/Hbase alongside their MySQL installs, so I think this talk is a must-see.

Early bird registration ends March 15 2011. What are you waiting for? Procrastination will cost you!

Don’t forget to follow the conference via social media: Facebook, Twitter.

Messenger apps, disrupting text messaging (SMS)

Here are my thoughts on messenger applications, and if you read beyond, there’s an idea worth thinking about.

Dramatis Personnae:

  • Beluga: Free, Private group messaging on your mobile (with Facebook integration). Works on iOS and Android. Created by ex-Googler’s. Recently acquired by Facebook.
  • Foound: A fun and easy way to organise hangouts with friends and follow their activities. Works on iOS only. Funded, round probably led by Neoteny Labs (a Joi Ito firm). Based in Singapore.
  • WhatsApp Messenger: Cross-platform mobile messaging app, works on iOS, BlackBerry, Android, Nokia. Group chat included. Costs money on some platforms (USD$0.99 on iOS, free trial for a year on BlackBerry/Android, etc.). Started by a couple of ex-Yahoo! chaps.
  • Kik Messenger: Text. Photos. Groups. Its like BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). I’ve not used it extensively, but its brought to you by some ex-RIM chaps, folk that worked on BBM. Just took USD$8 million in Series A funding, including from interesting firms like Union Square Ventures (and Fred Wilson joins the board).
  • PingChat! – Similar to WhatsApp and Kik, it works on iOS, BlackBerry and Android. Has support for video and voice notes, but I have not played with it much.
  • TalkBox – text is boring, why not use voice. Its basically push-to-talk in software. iOS only.

Today I use BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) a lot. I carry an Android and BlackBerry device in my pocket most of the time. If friends have a BlackBerry, we’re usually chatting on it via BBM, and we’ve given up the idea of sending a SMS. BBM also supports group chats, which means you can coordinate things amongst groups of people quite easily. The only “downside” to BBM is that I have to pay for the BIS service on a monthly basis (it enables push email for 10+1 email accounts, plus gives me BBM). BBM allows me to message friends all around the world, with zero cost. I tend not to use BBM when I’m roaming because data charges are ridiculous.

Which now brings me to discuss messenger apps like WhatsApp and Kik. I’ve been using WhatsApp for quite some time now, on my BlackBerry and my Android device. I also happen to have it running on test Symbian devices as well as know heaps of people running it on iOS devices. Its got traction. It uses my unlimited data plan which I pay for monthly, but when I’m roaming, again I do not use WhatsApp. Kik is the new kid on the block, received funding, and is backed by a serious team of ex-RIM folk. In my phonebook, I don’t see it gaining much traction, as WhatsApp seems to still be prime. Kik is free, so I wonder what their plans are to make money. Maybe Kik has solid management, which is what the VCs looked for. Kik is however not on the BlackBerry platform, and RIM is suing the company.

Foound and Beluga. Foound has been around for about a year, and I think it was myopic of the team to just focus on iOS. Yes, the iOS is popular in Singapore, but to gain traction you have to grow beyond just that market. Not focusing on Android and BlackBerry were probably huge mistakes; maybe its time for the company to pivot? Beluga is kind of like Foound, works on more than just iOS, and it seems its more integrated, with its Facebook logins. Of course, Facebook acquired them (team of three folk); their team is much smaller/leaner than the Foound team.

An idea worth implementing

Here is a suggestion for differentiation. What annoys me the most with BBM is that I use it to chat with friends and groups of friends while I’m on the move. When I’m chained to my desk, I would rather not use my BlackBerry to respond to messages. Its all data anyway, so why not offer a desktop client?

Google does this kind of well with Google Chat. It runs on my mobile with data enabled, and when I’m on my desktop, I just fire up Adium or Pidgin and I can still chat with folk. It does not handle group chat though.

WhatsApp is tied to my mobile number, for example. It works over IP. Why not allow me to login with my username (phone number, unique identifier) and password on my laptop, so I can write/reply to messages via my keyboard? It would improve my productivity tremendously, and it is a service I would be willing to pay for.

Finishing thoughts

Where does PingChat! and TalkBox fit in? They all do group chat. TalkBox focuses on the voice aspects of it. Are messenger apps the new group buying sites? This is becoming a crowded space, and WhatsApp looks like it is the most-cross platform at the moment.

The future is with messenger apps, but I doubt it’s going to bust any SMS profit cartel. It will make a huge dent, but frequent travellers will generally not be using data when travelling. And without data, all these apps are dead (unless you want to support the data profit cartel). When will we see unlimited data (and roaming data) become cheaper?

Best wishes to Team Beluga, Foound, WhatsApp, Kik, PingChat! and Talkbox. I see an exciting 24 months ahead in this space.

Going to Lisbon, Portugal

I’m headed to Lisbon, Portugal for the week of March 7-15. Were have a MariaDB Developer Meeting there, hosted by Monty Program. We’re still getting people stating that they are coming (which is good), so if you’re local to the area, and dig MySQL/MariaDB/databases/opensource, drop by and say hi (March 11-13 is when the meeting happens at the Holiday Inn Lisbon).

I’m stoked since I’ve never been to Lisbon, so I’m going a few days earlier to check the place out. If you’ve been before, I’d appreciate tips on what to see, what to do, what I must not miss, etc. I think I’ll actually bring my camera this time around too!


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