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Belgian Tech Scene - Kris Buytaert Explains

Kris Buytaert has been a prolific contributor to GMT for the last six months, bringing news of the goings-on from the heart of Europe, beside writing for his own blog, Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem. He is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant doing Linux and Open Source projects in Belgium, Europe and the rest of the universe. He is currently working for Inuits, and starting up some new projects still in stealth mode.
Kris is the co-Author of Virtualization with Xen, used to be the maintainer of the openMosix HOWTO and is the author of different technical publications. He is a frequent speaker at different international conferences. He spends most of his time working on Linux Clustering (both HA and HPC), Virtualisation and Large Infrastructure Management projects, hence trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th floor test.
Kris was the obvious choice to ask for an overview of the tech scene in Belgium. He's done us proud.

Let's get started with discussing Belgium, if that even exists as a community... don't get me wrong ... I love Belgium, but the fact is that we are a multilingual country, and it's mostly these languages defining the communities. Luckily there are some exceptions. But still localisation is one of the borders. Where the Flemish speakers will mostly only work either for a local audience in their own language or for an international audience in English, the French speakers often stick with French as they have a big enough audience with that language.

Is the tech scene in Belgium buzzing? Does Belgium have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically? What is the scene like with regards geeks getting together?

Geeks get together ... we have our GeekDinners, monthly events where people from different areas meet, have some fine food and chat about technology. The GeekDinners initiated by Serge van Ginderachter tend to attract an interesting mix of entrepreneurs and kernel hackers. The GeekDinners travel around - we started in Gent, went to Brussels, Antwerp, Leuven and now back to Gent. The GeekGirlDinners are  more hyped (even made it to local TV and national radio) but given the fact that I'm male I can't really comment on them as I’m not one of those wannabees that try to get a date with one of the geekgirls. We're up to the 5th Barcamp, we had 4 editions in Brussels organised by Peter Forret and now Thomas Bouve is organising an edition in Gent. Last but not least we have Robin Wauters organizing frequent OpenCoffeeClub, down in the center of Brussels.

Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure? Is there a cross-pollination between people in different areas of technology?

Usergroups tend to be really local and small, usually due to the language issues, they tend to start  … not gain a critical audience … then fall apart.
We had different LUG's over the years, but even the bigger ones are now struggling to get an audience.
Our MySQL group is really small, the PHP group is just starting, the Ruby Group seems to be growing steadily...

What events are specific to your part of the world? And what are the benefits of live events? How do they affect the attendee's creativity and output? What major conferences take place in Belgium? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

Fosdem definitely ... who doesn't know Fosdem? Already in it's 8th edition this year. Fosdem attracts geeks and FOSS developers from all over the planet. With figures up to 5000 visitors (no real figures as there is no registration required), Fosdem is starting to become the victim of its own success. Different development rooms are too small, the BeerEvent location is too small and there definitely isn't enough time to meet everybody who is around.
And of course Javapolis, the Mecca for the Java Developer, one of the bigger events in Europe. I went to the early editions but I haven't visited recently however.
Lots of new groups/organisations are started at Fosdem, most notably this year Fosdem was the founding point of the Postgres Europe organisation. Last year an Open Source Government workgroup was started.

Does the culture support start-ups? Are the government helpful in this regard? Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up?

I never really did much research on this topic so I’m pretty sure I’ll be missing some stuff here.
The governement support depends on which side of the language border you are - things differ a lot.
On the Flemish side, we have the IWT and the IBBT. I've seen a lot of people trying to get funding from the IWT and few succeeding. The IBBT is doing a good job at getting people together.
On the French side, we have Agence Wallonne des Télécommunications (AWT): their people are also pretty active talking to new businesses, helping them getting started.
The fact is that we don't have a good track record in trying, compared to other countries where you can become a serial re-starter: we have more of a try once, win or disappear mentality. Also we have what we call the "under the church tower" problem. Local businesses often think local, say local and don't even dare to go away from their local church. Luckily also that mentality is changing.

Are other techies supportive? Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Belgian geeks? Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

Ideas come from everywhere, sometimes it's dreamers that have absolutely no clue on how to get started, sometimes it's techies who launch before the market is ready. I don't think there is a rule that defines our way of working. Lots of start-ups combine consultancy tracks to get the money rolling with internal development of the product they really want to build, the advantage is that they can invest their own money and still have bread on the table, the disadvantage is their time to market.

What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

I'm not sure if there is a site we all read ... the tech communities have planet.geekdinner.be and planet.grep.be. There's gentblogt.be but there is much more going on. We have a couple of bloggers that are really talking about the bloggerscene (blogologie.be), others are reporting local startups and business ideas (web.2point0.be)
I'm personally blogging a lot but my audience is not the local start-up scene, I'm sure there are couple of them reading my blog since I'm advising them technically but the first Barcamp we had was more of a blogger meeting than a real techno start-up event where people came to meet and discuss fresh ideas. Lots of start-up folks are blogging, other are more focussing on their code. It's a mixture. Robin Wauters is organizing Plugg which I'm really looking forward to.

Lots of interesting stuff is going to happen in the next couple of months, I've been talking to a lot of people with good ideas ... and some of them are planning to launch soon I'll keep you folks posted :)

Erlang – The CEO’s View

Gordon Guthrie is CEO/CTO of hypernumbers.com, an early stage semi-stealth start-up.

He has previously had a range of senior technical and business positions including Chief Technical Architect at if.com and more recently as Solutions Architect at BT/City of Edinburgh Council.

I bumped into Gordon at FOWA in London a few months ago, and asked him to write an article about Erlang, which he was extolling at the O'Reilly stand, and he came back with this piece about why Erlang should (and shouldn't) be used in the workplace.

Erlang – The CEO’s View by Gordon Guthrie

Disclaimer

This is a CEO opinion on Erlang –it is not a technical article but it does require technical knowledge about programming and programming languages. The poet Robert Lovell once said: “there is no money in poetry, and no poetry in money”. Readers seeking The Joy Of Erlang (and joy there is) will go away from this screed unsatisfied.

Introduction

CEO’s don’t have opinions on programming languages. Or they shouldn’t. Programming languages are merely an epiphenomenon of the business requirements – if a programming language can do ‘it’, whatsoever ‘it’ might be, then it’s in.

So why might a CEO, like myself, venture such an opinion? - and such an opinion attached to the new sexy language de jour. Oops. Old hands will immediately know where to pin the blame, a techie ‘playing up’ – for ‘up’ read ‘out of their league’.

Indeed, what opinion could a CEO offer on a programming language. It would seem to me it would have to be one of two stark options either you should use it – or you shouldn’t.

So before I tell you that you should use Erlang, as tell you I will, it is probably worth making the case against first.

(Still) No Silver Bullet

The traditional response to this sort of article is to pull out a battered copy of Fred Brooks’ article No Silver Bullet – Essence And Accidents Of Software Engineering [1] – and with good reason. No Silver Bullet asserts:

There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself, promises even one order of magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

In business speak this translates into a firm injunction to the CEO that there is not make or break commercial decisions on programming language alone for it to be within their core remit. Certainly there are critical decisions about technology that will impact the performance of the company, but the job of the CEO is to get the best technologist in, build the best corporate culture and enable the troops to get on with it with the tools they think are best fit for the job. Decisions on technology are best left to the CTO and their team. In my other job as CTO I have written [2] about Erlang from a technical perspective.

Brooks separates two different aspects of software – the essential and the accidental. The essential aspects are those that pertain to the business problem that the software is addressing, and the accidental aspects are those that are constraints placed on the outcomes by actually using real software on real machines with real limitations.

Brooks’ argument is that step-changes in software productivity can only come by addressing the essential aspects – there aren’t enough accidental constraints left that their being addressed can deliver the goods.

There are two ways to promote Erlang in these circumstances. The first is as one of the group of functional programming languages (a ‘family’ that includes Lisp, Haskell and F# amongst others) which focuses on addressing the central question of state. Functional languages allow the decomposition of programmes into functions with side-effects (ie that depend on state) and those (the majority) that don’t. Side effect-free code is deterministic – the same inputs give the same outputs every time.

This addresses the core essential complexity of software programming. To quote NSB:

From the complexity comes the difficulty of enumerating, much less understanding, all the possible states of the program, and from that comes the unreliability. From complexity of function comes the difficulty of invoking function, which makes programs hard to use. From complexity of structure comes the difficulty of extending programs to new functions without creating side effects. From complexity of structure come the unvisualized states that constitute security trapdoors.

This line of argument focuses on using the differing semantics of different individual programming languages (and families thereof) to partition the possible state space of the programme and thus reduce complexity dramatically. Functional languages are designed around side-effect-free functions that are their essential (in the Brooks sense) nature. Functionality with side-effects (like writing to disk for instance [3]) are accidental in nature. The FP argument goes that if you don’t design a language such that side-effects are considered constraints on your language then you are mixing accidental and essential problems willy-nilly in all code written in that language – you should develop your systems in a functional language. As a techie I agree with this argument, you should have a bias to FP – but as a CEO I don’t think it is important enough to warrant my time.

The second line of argument is a sort of super-set of the first one which focuses on the Erlang concurrency model. Erlang uses ‘processes’ as basic units of concurrency – processes which are analogous to operating system processes. In Erlang even functional components that have side-effects have no shared state (at the conceptual programming language level). This can be made a convincing argument at a technical level.

But Brooks is right. There is no silver bullet and the Erlang programming language isn’t it, which would appear to leave this article somewhat holed below the waterline. Maybe it is time to make the positive case for Erlang.

Erlang - The Long View

NSB lists four Promising Attacks On The Conceptual Essence:

·   buy not build

·   requirements refining and rapid prototyping

·   incremental development, grow, not build, software

·   great designers

On this side of the house, Erlang appears to be a clear loser. There is no evidence that Erlang is superior to other languages in terms of rapid prototyping or incremental development. By definition great software designers are not tied to languages except in terms of the availability of experienced ones – and ‘small’ languages like Erlang naturally lose to ‘large’ ones like almost all others on that line anyway.

‘Buy not build’ really should be ‘procure not build’ with the rise of open source and free software. In language choice this is normally expressed in terms of library support – and on these grounds Erlang also loses. There are certainly ‘missing libraries’ in Erlang – particularly with respect to string management – and these are partly a consequence of limited uptake. The cussedness of Erlang and its obdurate refusal to ‘play nicely’ with other languages doesn’t help – no handy piggybacking.

But it is on this unpromising territory that I will stand my ground. The essence of this argument is that with Erlang and you buy something more primitive than software libraries which you would otherwise have to build – and the cost-saving is so great that there is a compelling financial case for using Erlang almost without exception in certain classes of businesses.

In order to understand what ‘this primitive’ is, it is helpful to go back to the beginning of our trade, yes all the way back to the beginning, the “hello Mr Babbage, how’s it going with auld Ada Lovelace, nudge, nudge, wink, wink?” beginning.

In the beginning the computer was a hardware object sufficient to the task. Babbage conceives of a calculating machine in 1822 and Turing builds the first big computer farm during the Second World War to decode enigma traffic.

These early computers are monolithic, physical implementations of the solution to the problem domain - a single physical design shown schematically to the right:

It is worth recapitulating this timescale. Babbage conceptualises, but does not build, the first computer. 120 years later the first proper one is built and the ‘burning platform’ for this implementation is the Nazi hordes at the gate – one might reasonably come to the conclusion that building monolithic computers is not really that cost effective.

The critical point about Babbage computational machines was that a change to the business requirements meant a change to the physical design of the Bombe. The introduction of a 4-rotor machine in 1941 meant that a new version of the Bombe had to be designed and build.

Turing being the genius he was, was able to address the change management problems of computers. His Universal Turing Machine proved that any problem that was calculable could be decomposed into a hardware and a software element. There had previously been ‘software’ for ‘calculation-like’ machines (punch card driven looms and pianos, for instance) but Turing’s insight was that ‘everything’ was calculable, not just ‘somethings’. Turing postulated the ‘first great bifurcation’ – that between hardware and software, (figure to the left):

In a Turing machine multiple pieces of software can run on a single hardware platform and we see the birth of programming. Turing doesn’t stop there though, he also postulates the second great bifurcation – that between programme and data, shown to the right:

Now the hardest thing about the past is trying to ‘unknow’ things you take for granted –but once this was hard stuff. Again it is worth recapitulating the development cost of systems after the second bifurcation. Each ‘application’ was custom built in software – albeit running on a common hardware platform. In the epilogue to the 20^th Anniversary Edition of The Mythical Man-Month Fred Brooks talks about the start to his programming career that is both comfortingly familiar and deeply alien:

The first computer I worked on, fresh out of Harvard, was the IBM 7030 stretch computer, Stretch reigned as the world’s fastest computer from 1961 to 1964; nine copies were delivered.

Yes, that is 9. Fancy running an application? Well let’s start by working out how we intend to layout the files on the DASD, clearly you can’t begin coding until you know how you intend to write your IO subsystem, can you? Gradually coding teams built up libraries of software that they used on application after application. The developers slowly split into programmers and sysprogs – the sysprogs taking care of non-functional aspects of the application.

From this gradual build-up of libraries emerges the operating system in the next great bifurcation, (right):

Voila! operating systems. Again the boundary between the two seems immutable and clear, an obvious natural boundary; as clear as maths. The operating system was always out there just waiting to be discovered. Except of course it isn’t. A gentle reading of the Posix standards [4] will soon disabuse you of any notion of clarity. The boundaries of the operating system are as definitive as a statement about the length of the coastline of Norway. Take the entry on vi. To comply with the Posix standard an operating system must provide a version of the vi editor, to wit:

The vi (visual) utility is a screen-oriented text editor. Only the open and visual modes of the editor are described in IEEE Std 1003.1-2001

It is pretty clear that you could exclude one of the modes of vi quite cheerfully without ‘breaking’ the operating system – it is more import that the boundaries of an operating system are drawn clearly than they are drawn at a particular point. The operating system is just another convention; but the reason the convention thrives is because it is bloody useful.

They say that man is a pattern-matching animal, and by now a number of you will be thinking – “he’s about to make the case that Erlang is The Fourth Bifurcation [5]”. Nearly right. I will now make the case that Erlang/OTP is the first implementation of an Application System – which is the product of the 4^th bifurcation, (right):

So what are the characteristics of an application system? Well lets turn to the maestro, the father of Erlang, Joe Armstrong. His Doctoral Thesis is called Making Reliable Distributed Systems In The Presence Of Software Errors. The salient point of the introduction is [6]:

When we make a fault-tolerant system we need at least two physically separated computers.

An application system runs on more than one computer. Network up a Windows machines, a Linux machine, a Solaris machine and a FreeBSD one. Start an Erlang shell on each machine with a common shared cookie, a bit of the old-ping-pang-pong in the shell and shazam! an operating multi-machine cluster - and not a line of code written – you have started up an Application System. Its unwritten lines of code sit suitably lightly on the balance sheet.

Application systems address the essential complexity of the software environment by providing a set of ‘bought not built’ mechanisms for addressing the –ilities:

·   scalability

·   reliability

·   manageability

·   changeability

·   securability

·   performability

From a CEO’s perspective using commodity software to deal with the –ilities leaves the paid-for technical team concentrate on the –ality, the functionality. Given that under current circumstances only 10% of the cost of software is the development, with the rest being the post-live servicing, commodifying the bulk of the cost makes obvious sense.

This commodification needs to be seen in the context of the three previous bifurcations. Each bifurcation constitutes an episode of commodification. Each commodification causes a change in the underlying cost-structure of the software industry and each change in that cost base makes incumbents vulnerable and opens up opportunities for new companies.

The critical aspect of the Erlang/OTP that makes is a suitable candidate to be an Application System turns out to be exactly the same as the key aspect of Operating Systems:

·   concurrency is provided by processes

Processes are independent units of concurrency that don’t share state and which communicate by passing messages. In operating systems (which run on one computer) a process is only addressable local to the machine. In an application system (which runs on many computers) a processes is addressable across many machines. It follows from this naturally that A/S processes can’t be O/S processes.

Historically the unit of concurrency in an operating system is the ‘user’ – a given process should think it is the only user on the computer. An O/S process should have access to full range of functionality of the physical machine. The O/S process doesn’t actually talk to the hardware – it talks to the O/S which handles the hardware on its behalf.

In an A/S the application system itself runs as an O/S process. If an A/S process wants access to the full range of O/S resources is asks the A/S to access them on its behalf.

Given that O/S’s have a user (or an anthropomorphic batch user) as their basic unit of concurrency it comes as no surprise to find that the upper limits on O/S concurrency tend to mirror the upper limit of concurrent sign-ons for timesharing machines – 4,000 to 8,000 concurrent objects.

In order to get around this limitation many applications use an alternative mechanism of concurrency – the dreaded thread. Unlike processes, threads share state and software errors propagate between them. The threaded model in applications has its analogue in operating system design. There was a very popular operating system that didn’t impose memory page writing constraints between applications – they all shared state. MS-Dos was enormously successful, for a while, but it had, a-hem, stability issues.

By comparison with O/S process, Erlang processes are a lot more lightweight with an upper limit of tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent processes – if they want heavy lifting they just ask the Erlang Virtual Machine. Critically the Erlang Virtual Machine doesn’t rely on the operating system scheduler to time share between its processes. The VM is just another anthropomorphic batch user receiving one time slice at a time from the Operating System. Its own time-slicer/scheduler parcels that clock-tick amongst its own internal A/S processes. And the VM underlying the Application System has to replicate a whole host of constructs familiar from Operating System design like spawning processes and loading code. This can be of great benefit, as when, for instance, the Erlang code loader is used to hot load changes – running processes are invited to swap themselves out for newer versions whilst executing.

It may seem like this diversion into concurrency models shows a little too much interest in the technical side for a CEO, but it is critical to understanding how A/S programming and O/S programming should interact. It is worth showing this schematically, (right):

You can’t just yoke generic libraries written in an Operating System [7] language directly into an Application  System language, or more precisely you shouldn’t. It is entirely possible to do so. But mixing programming between abstractions is never going to be a sensible idea. There used to be a popular class of operating system that didn’t prevent the application from writing directly to the hardware. The Win3x class of operating system kernel lasted all the way up to Windows 95 and its ‘flexibility’ brought with it the thrice-blessèd BSOD [8]. You could recompile the Linux kernel to allow your apps to write direct to hardware, and you could recompile Erlang to use your single- or multi-threaded libraries in some other language - but you really don’t want to.

For good reasons there is a clear distinction between user-land Linux developers and kernel developers (or sysprogs as they used to be known). Typically these two sets of coders don’t share libraries. Unless your (typically) C library is specifically intended to be implemented in the VM you really shouldn’t link it in – ie don’t mess with the VM unless you are an asprog – a contraction I fear that will either never catch on, or already means something beastly on the far shores of the internet.

In Erlang the Application System is provided by a series of discrete VM’s running on a number of machines (typically more than one VM per physical machine). These VM’s expose a common cluster and communications semantics to each other. The ‘universal driver’ approach for encapsulating libraries and other non-Erlang add-ons is to wrap the hardware board or Java class or whatever in a set of libraries that expose those common semantics. In Luke Gorrie’s Distel a popular IDE (some techie doo-dah called Extendible Macros something or other) is so enabled: giving you a clustered development environment and multi-tier debugger.

Naturally the emergence of Application Systems will not avoid meeting some resistance. But, again, ‘twas always so. The world once pullulated with shoals of ‘knit your own operating system’ men but they have gone the way of all flesh.

One may well ask why if Erlang/OTP is so good as an Application System it is not better known outside the telecoms industry. It has a long pedigree and a code base of 1.25 million lines of code. The answer I’m afraid is to be found in the capital requirements of telecoms and web start-ups. In capital intensive industries like telecoms the techies don’t become rich. And rich is the only way geeky stuff gets sexy.

That’s enough of this romp around the history of computing. All the experience of the history of computing tells us that at the point of a bifurcation the cost base of the industry is transformed by an order of magnitude or more. The arrival of commodity Google scalability will change the cost base of the industry and when cost bases change, commercial opportunities arrive.

In Conclusion

Do I, as a CEO, recommend that you use Erlang? No, but I recommend that you use an application  system. This particular Kool Aid currently only comes in one flavour, Erlang, but I’m sure new ones will be along soon...

---

[1] Henceforth NSB http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/pm/docs/no_silver_bullet.html. There’s a good reason it is well worn and that’s because it is simply excellent. On re-reading it for this article one particular paragraph leapt out at me and made me laugh out loud. On trolling around various start-up offices in and furth of London I have observed the inexorable rise of the super large Apple monitor, 4, 5 or 6 times the screen acreage of a normal laptop screen. Back in 1986 Brooks wrote apropos of graphical programming:

...the screens of today are too small, in pixels, to show both the scope and resolution of any software diagram ... the hardware technology will have to advance quite significantly before the scope of our scopes is sufficient to the software design task...

[2] http://hypernumbers.com/news/Hypernumbers-White-Paper

[3] <autoblogger>Jeezo, he’s an idiot, in what way can IO be anything other than essential to a computer language – muppet.</autoblogger>
<wiseoldhand> In the olden days we had ‘core’ as in ‘core dump’ and it wasn’t volatile – when you switched the machine off and then on again it came back with the memory state restored. This old volatile memory malarkey is a new thing, and it won’t be around forever. Back in the day the Cray-XMP at London University was the only machine in the UK with 1Mb of Ram; so Ram is much, much more available. Mebbies soon we will have so much non-volatile core that you’ll no need to ship stuff in and out... Io can go back to being a lovely wee moon of Jupiter again.</wiseoldhand>

[4] http://www.unix.org/single_unix_specification/

[5] Sounds like a fillum to me...

[6] Chapter 3 Section 3.1

[7] an O/S language may be defined as one in which you know at write time which physical machine the concurrent units of the code will execute on at run time. Think C, C++, Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python, Lisp, Fortran etc, etc for each of which the code can only run on ‘this’ machine. You might call a library on ‘this’ machine that will talk to ‘that’ machine.

[8] In the olden days when I wrote the first undergraduate thesis at Bristol University to be ‘word processed’ the word processor I used was a printer. You wrote the text with embedded printer commands in and the ‘programme’ wrote natively to the peripheral hardware.

Innovation, Technology and Enterpreneurship in Italy

Antonio Bonanno is a resident of Milan, Italy. He is one half, along with Giorgio Montersino, of Digital Natives, a start-up created to help Italian companies put together a Social Networking business strategy. I met him through Franceso D'Orazio after the first Social Media Lab at IULM, when, after he and Giorgio had driven us around the city, he kindly agreed to write a piece summing up the Milanese and Italian tech scenes.

Hi there! First of all, I've got something to confess: this piece is the result of pizza.

Yes, I mean it. I met Craig Smith of O'ReillyGMT at the first of a series of events called Social Media Lab, and we had a great time together eating all sorts of pizza after the conference. Over pizza, it happened. He proposed I should write a piece about Italy and Milan, what's happening here in the Web 2.0/Live Web revolution, so here I am. My name is Antonio Bonanno and I'm one of the two partners of Digital Natives, a start-up based in Italy. What we do is try to help out companies and folks who want to create social networks.

When we talk of social networks, we actually mean a whole lot of things. Social networks have different technological platforms: they can be web-based, on your mobile, in Second Life, in your company's intranet. Each of them is about starting a conversation: with your friends, with your collegues, with some appealing stranger with the same musical tastes. My business partner Giorgio Montersino and I have been active on the Internet for about 8 years, during which time we have seen many developments happen, and we started to play a part in the late 90's when we began building websites. Although we've been working together for about 6 years now, we only recently started our own company. During these years, we met a lot of interesting people, and with a mix of their experiences and ours, I will try to outline what's happening on the Italian scene in the Internet field. On a personal note, I would like to thank Craig for this opportunity. So, here we go!

CS - Are the tech scenes in Italy and Milan buzzing? Does Italy have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically? What is the scene like with regards geeks getting together?

There is a lot going on and the community is very active, but I wouldn't say that Italy has a history of encouraging technology, in general. We've had our great times (Olivetti in the 70s), but we recently lost a lot of that competitiveness in the field. I asked Mafe De Baggis, from Daimon, about this at LeWeb3: in her opinion, Italians don't like to take risks: they prefer to work for an assured gain, rather than risk high capital. Also, in Italy we have an "innovation caste", that makes it very difficult for people with good ideas to emerge from the underground. Mafe also played a part in the formation of the community of internet innovators in Milan: she told me about the very beginning, when people started to meet at a bar called Movida: at first they were seen as Martians by members of other business communities, but with time the community started to grow and regain the status of earthliness as the Internet itself grew. The variety of members of the community started to vary, too, from techie-only to a wide range of professionals, from journalist to the emerging jobs of the latest years, community managers, project managers and so on. The community is today still quite strong even off-line.

CS - Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure? Is there a cross-pollination between people in different areas of technology?

Working to organize a network of freelancers, I personally think intercommunication between different tech areas is vital both for the growth of new ideas and for the correct development of projects. Working without talking to each other doesn't lead anywhere: that's why, at Digital Natives, we don't forget that the person as a whole, and not only their specific abilities, are key to every project. Federico Fasce, community designer and blogger currently working with Daimon, has a different idea. He thinks that there are some interesting communities of people willing to help each other, some even with a solid knowledge base, and gives HTML as an example. It has active groups in HTML, PHP and general webapps and the forum managed by Giorgio Taverniti is a great source for SEO and web marketing information. These kinds of communities tend to form around technical topics. Cross-pollination is more of an issue: there is some within specific communities (web app developers talk to web app designers) but not among the communities themselves. One example is the web and the game industry in Italy: so far there haven't been contacts between the two that lead to a reciprocal cross-pollination of businesses.

CS - What events are specific to your part of the world? And what are the benefits of live events? How do they affect the attendee's creativity and output?

Especially lately, events have multiplied at all levels: governmental entities started organizing events with the aim of evangelizing people who are not familiar with the technology and the revolution that's happening; private organizations focused on getting people together to talk business; members of the tech communities self-organized to promote events with more specific targets, with a strong preference for the "barcamp" model. Nicola Mattina spoke and helped organize a lot of these events. He recently talked business at Web2Oltre in Milan: in his opinion, the event was way too expensive, although it was targeted at corporate executives. BarCamps instead have no cost for attendees, but unlike the ones that happen in other parts of Europe (UK) and where they were born (California), they tend to derail too much towards fun and put innovation and real exchange of ideas aside. It is really hard, Nicola says, to hear interesting things at BarCamps in Italy. Both creative and business output are not very well developed, although they are a good place to meet new friends and recruit people to work with on a variety of projects. Nicola suggests that for future events it would be best to adopt the OpenConference model, rather than continue with barcamps. On the same note, Federico Fasce thinks the most important activities at events is networking. Barcamps have so far been successful in that, because they have become "the place" for networking among bloggers and members of the different parts of the community. What Federico also sees is a great deal of attention coming from people who are not part of the community, trying to understand what is happening. Events like the recent one organized by Top-IX show an effort in this direction.

CS - What major conferences take place in Italy and Milan? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

From the perspective of Luca Conti, among the most popular bloggers in Italy with his blog Pandemia, most of the events that take place in Italy are nothing but an attempt to involve the big players that have something to do with the web but are not web-based businesses, thus come from the marketing/advertising side, to stimulate new opportunities and evangelize them. For this reason, the average content level of these events is quite low: it is often the case these events are little more than a showcase, where no real innovation takes place. The targets are traditional and new media and corporate managers who represent either big advertising agencies or companies that are interested in adopting web tools. The geek world is seldom participating in these events, because they have high entrance fees, and if they're free, they're very often simply showcases of products of these or that company. That is why Paolo Valdemarin and Beniamino Pagliaro organized a 2-day conference called "State of the Net" (February 8th-9th, in Udine), that has the aim to change this trend and speak of what innovation is really about: as Paolo told me, the event will be focused on the web and its impact on society from a professional and cultural point of view, with topics ranging from information management to the web's social impact. They recently launched the event, which is going to have a very interesting line-up that will be revealed day by day on the website of the event. The event is structured into 3-4 keynotes, 6-7 sessions in which a certain numbers of topics will be faced, in panels with a mixture of web professionals, both Italian and foreign. The event aims to gather both professionals and people who are just interested in those aspects of communication which involve the web.

CS - Does the culture support start-ups? Are the government helpful in this regard? Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up?

Speaking of start-ups in Italy at this time is a hard task. On one side, we see a lot of new stuff coming up, with very interesting products to be delivered to the market soon. On the other, it becomes more and more evident the need for a big change of culture towards enterpreneurs. Most of the investments and money are in the hands of the big players, who are just now starting to think of investing in smaller businesses (with some exceptions, of course). Alberto D'Ottavi, consultant and blogger, member of 1Generation and NewTwo, a network of entrepreneurs encouraging the intiatives of young entrepreneurs, thinks that despite the vast number of initiatives, mostly linked to incubators in universities, the level of innovation is quite low. However, the VC system in Italy is opening up to small initiatives. Today there are VCs in Italy - the real problem they have is that they don't find worthwhile initiatives: most of the initiatives that are now coming up are B2B, and they don't offer enough perspective growth. Italy had a great deal of innovative products in the past: Yoox, VolaGratis, Dada, Tiscali, Buongiorno.it, all Italian intiatives that had success both inside and outside Italy. The same enterpreneurs now are starting to welcome the new wave, which is actually already here. Luca Mascaro, owner of Sketchin, a company based in the Italian canton of Switzerland and operating a lot in Italy, has observed that a few Italian VCs started investing also in Ticino, to expand their range of action and possibilities. The start-up culture we have here in Italy (and Western Europe in general) is much different from the American or Northern European one: our entrepreneurs tend to risk much more, to reduce start-up costs. Our competitivity is mostly on risk, than on quality; as Eric Reiss noted in his recent keynote at the Italian Information Architecture Summit, in Italy we do more invention than actual innovation. Mafe De Baggis also notes that most of the initiatives of innovation that governmental entities launch are really hard to access: the deal of documentation that is needed to even access them is so high that creative and brilliant people are discouraged to even try. Lele Dainesi, one of the most popular bloggers and now working for Cisco Italy CEO Stefano Venturi, has been overviewing some really interesting initiatives Cisco is taking in Italy. From its position, Cisco is trying to replicate in Italy the Silicon Valley culture that made it the company it is. The Cisco facility in Monza is the biggest R&D center in Europe, with top level engineers, where a lot of the products Cisco does in the whole world are sent for testing and developement. In this facility, Cisco recently started a series of events trying to connect Italy and Silicon Valley, to encourage investments and innovation in our country. The most recent one is an event that took place with the presence of the US Ambassador in Italy, Mr. Spogli, and a panel of experts in venture capital and related subjects. As a follow-up, a group of Italian enterpreneurs and innovators recently went to Silicon Valley to present their products and look at opportunities there. Cisco itself is promoting a VC culture: one of the most recent acquisitions, WebEx, was done in that spirit. What Dainesi hopes is that Cisco will manage to replicate the same culture in Italy.

CS - Are other techies supportive? Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Italian geeks? Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

Alberto D'Ottavi, as member of 1Generation and NewTwo, has a very good perspective from which to look at these matters: he thinks that we are now learning to be supportive of each other, because the working culture in Italy for many years meant looking for a stable job rather than taking risks as entrepreneurs. What happened recently is that on top of the few big companies, there are now a lot of smaller initiatives, led by a professionals or small companies. In the first New Economy, around 2000, we saw the explosion and the creation of a lot of initiatives in the tech field, even of a considerable size, mostly concentrated in Milan, which is the advertising pole, and Rome, the telecommunications pole. Now the situation has changed, we have a huge number of small professionals, who work and cooperate on a national scale, communicating and exchanging experiences through the Net, and events like BarCamps and such. What we're still missing is a structured ecosystem. The business model that is most used in Italy is the one of development and integration of new technologies, particularly B2B. Paolo Valdemarin agrees on the present situation, where there are a lot of protagonists who work in more than one project of development. He also notes that the level of competitiveness is low, because of the lack of structure of the company ecosystem, which makes it really hard to establish which is the most used business model, in his view.

CS - What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

Since I was in Paris with many of the most prominent bloggers in Italy (according to stats), I took the occasion to ask them what their views about blogging are. Luca Conti writes on many blogs, the most important being "Pandemia". He has been a protagonist of the Italian blogosphere for a long time. The part played by bloggers, he thinks, if you compare it to the blogospheres in other European countries, is less prominent, even if the potential is high. The situation is slowly changing, even if the dimension of the blogosphere is small, and we almost all know each other. The fact that we have these connections, however, doesn't mean the blogosphere is fully cooperative inside. There is a good deal of competition, mostly based on views and visits more than content: in Luca's perspective, there should be more cooperation to help raising attention to some very important issues we all feel as fundamental (i.e. net neutrality, technology tools diffusion and so on). His five blogs: Stefano Quintarelli, Andrea Beggi, Giovy, Tommaso Tessarolo, Robin Good. I asked Nicola Mattina what he thinks of the Italian blogosphere. Some of the relations he had as a blogger then became work opportunies (like the one with Sole24Ore, the leading economic daily newspaper in Italy, which has a Thursday special on Technology called "Nova24"). Blogs, in his view, are used to start conversations: speaking through a blog is almost easier than speaking in the "traditional" way. One of the problems of the blogosphere in Italy, he thinks, is the fact that it's self-referenced: if you write in English, or speak of a project you made in any other language than Italian, only a few will pay attention. I asked Nicola (and all the others, too) to give me 5 addresses of blogs he usually reads; his list is: Zoro; Luca De Biase; Maestrini per Caso; Luca Conti; Gianni Cuperlo. Lele Dainesi thinks we're in a critical moment of the Italian blogosphere and of Web 2.0 in general, in Italy. The attention that is now given to bloggers is not based on content, but on what they do and say or who they know, in a sort of cult of presentialism. It's not healthy to keep the blogosphere closed as it is now: new entries are less and less, and this creates the akward effect of encouraging personalism. Lele thinks we should get back to content, and speak less of charts, self-exposition, or self-promotion.

The future of blogging, in Lele's view, is in social networks. He sees a lot of creativity coming from sites like FaceBook or Xing: bloggers will form microcommunities of specialists in certain matters. What is emerging now in the blogosphere is the need for identity management: people want to be different personas in different situations: being a "public persona" is radically changing. Mafe De Baggis, in a very interesting remark, said that the real crisis of blogging happens when bloggers sell their capacity for suggesting and criticism. One of the most important roles that bloggers should keep is the role of the "maven" (a quote from Tipping Point, Gladwell, 2001), people who are genuinely interested in providing you with the information to do the best choice. Five blogs for Mafe: Mamma per sbaglio, Zoro, Kurai, Squonk, Mantellini.

Before my conclusions, I would like to give you a sneak view of a couple of really good initiatives that are originated in Italy or by Italian entepreneurs and developers I got in touch with in Paris, and before in London at the Virtual Worlds Forum. One is Dixero. It was launched January 15th, and it's a service that was developed by Sketchin (owned by Luca Mascaro, who told me about it) and Phiware, with a mixture of Italian and Swedish capital. What it does is it gives the possibility to aggregate and vocalize your favourite RSS feeds with your preferred voice, transforming any entry in a podcast. It works with any standard RSS, from your calendar to your e-mail. In Luca's vision, it will help people "prolong" their 24-hours day, with the possibility of putting things to listen in background while doing other things. The other one is Myrl. Myrl is a social network for the Metaverse, a cross-world platform aiming to bring together users from multiple virtual worlds. The initiative was started by Francesco D'Orazio, who now lives in London, with Italian funds. The first upcoming release of Myrl will have a specific focus on social virtual worlds, bringing together users from worlds like Second Life and There.com. Among the most interesting aims and uses of Myrl, which are many, there are these two: Myrl helps bridge the gap between virtual worlds and the web and to integrate web2.0 tools in the Metaverse user experience, while gathering users from multiple social virtual worlds in one place to build a cross-world community of users, in order to stimulate cross-world interaction (world-hopping, not world interoperability), to stimulate a cross-fertilization amongst different virtual world user bases and to promote an organic vision of the Metaverse, as opposed to a walled garden style constellation of worlds. We are waiting for a public beta release of Myrl, which should happen in the next days. Stay tuned! I think that's all. Speaking to all these people with different views was extremely interesting and I hope it gives a nice portrait of the situation in Italy. For any other quesion or information, you can leave a comment here or contact me by e-mail.

Thanks for your attention!

Scenes: Manchester and The North-West

I was at Manchester Polytechnic between 1986 and 1989, playing about with online chemistry abstracts and yet not quite realising the potential that lay at my fingers. Manchester is a great city to live in, with the facilities of a major conurbation but the feel of a small town, and it has a fantastic tech pedigree. The city is a vibrant metropolis at the heart of the North-West and though it's much gentrified since I was there, it has a busy grass roots that goes out of its way to make things happen.

Andrew Disley and Paul Robinson are two players on the Manchester geek scene who are making real efforts to bring people together. Andrew started the GeekUp franchise, which has spread virally to the mouth of the Mersey and over the Pennines to Leeds. Like Andrew, Paul has quickly evolved from being purely a developer into an event organiser of note, co-founding User Groups and Community Groups because nothing at the time provided the forum that he needed. Both are strong advocates for the city, the North-West and the North as a whole, championing the cause of and encouraging the participants in the multitude of activities that take place in the towns and cities either side of the M62. These are guys with a world outlook but a local base and they move seamlessly from picking through the minutiae of a block of code to taming the maelstrom of a Northern tech meet.

They were good enough to answer a few questions about Manchester and the North-West.

Who are you? What do you do? What are you aiming to achieve?

Paul Robinson (PR): I'm Paul Robinson, the owner/founder of Vagueware Ltd which is a software development company and soon-to-be online publisher dedicated to innovation in the software industry. I'm loosely attached to GeekUp but more involved in the Manchester BSD User Group and the NWDC. I worked on public sector stuff a few years back, and before that was working in the local ISP scene. I graduated from UMIST (now part of Manchester University) in Software Engineering and have lived in the city centre for the last decade.

I'm a kind of a developer with strong sys admin skills who wants to get more into writing. ;-)

In more broad terms, my main business is Vagueware Ltd. It started as a software company building Rails apps freelance and doing bespoke work, but I've evolved my business plan in public. I'm now a few days away from releasing the latest version of that plan, aka "the simplest thing that will work", which is best described here:
http://blog.vagueware.com/2007/8/5/almost-there

My driving force is that there isn't enough innovation in the open source space, and developers aren't plugged in to listening to their user base. For now, I want to get the 400+ ideas for software products on my desk/in my head out there for somebody to be able to play with. If in the process we build ad-hoc open source projects or even commercial businesses off them, great.

Some people ask how I intend to monetise this, to which I shrug my shoulders and say "I'll work it out eventually". Like I said in my last post: doing interesting things appeals more than doing something boring with a guaranteed return. Or maybe I'm just dumb.

Manchester seems a great place to be a techie at the moment. Has that always been the case? Does Manchester have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically?

Andrew Disley (AD):   Manchester is said to be the birthplace of modern computing, Alan Turing was based at Manchester University and his stored-program idea led to Tom Kilburn's "Baby" (Manchester Mark I) - the world's first stored-program electronic digital computer.

PR: Wow, where to start...
OK, first off Turing came here after the War and worked at Manchester University on "The Baby", the World's first stored program digital computer. The University is justifiably proud of this, and built a replica of that machine to mark the 50th anniversary:
http://www.computer50.org/

Between 1948 and until at least the mid/late 1950s the University was one of the few places you could buy a computer if you were a government type in need of one - it was really a pioneering centre of innovation in the early days. If you have access to the BBC Archive Trial there's an interesting docu in there called "The Brain in the Box" in which Profs Kilburn and Williams are interviewed.

As you probably know, Manchester went through a period of economic decline in the late 50's through to the 1990s with much of the North in decline. During that period there was a focus on industrialisation and Manchester kind of lost its way and ended up in a bit of trouble.

In the early 1990s there was some interest in digital media in the city, but it was mostly coming from the angle of "new media" - i.e. web design, interactive content, etc. There is an argument this is related to the rise of the Northern Quarter (where even now most web companies are based), which in turn was helped by the rise of the music scene in Manchester.

What helps this argument is that whilst most centres of digital innovation (Silicon Valley, Taiwan, China, Estonia, Israel, et al) are driven by the economics of the sector, Manchester is pretty unique in that it's driven by the creative possibilities. We need to make money, sure, but doing something interesting always seems to have appealed to the Manchester companies more than doing something outrageously profitable but boring.

After the '96 IRA bomb which required a major rebuilding of the city centre, there was a renewed sense of purpose in the region and the North West Development Agency (the NW's RDA) combined with ERDF giving the region Objective 2 status meant the council and several Universities were able to throw money at a purpose. This was described to me as "To make the North West of England the Silicon Valley of Europe." I was involved in one project at MMU to help businesses engage in digital media and to try and promote business development within the sector: help little web companies find their way to breaking big and dominating in their niche. That experiment broadly failed in immediate terms, but the knock-on effects have been considerable. A lot of companies in Manchester now know of each other and look out for each other as a direct consequence of that project.

In addition, the council set up MDDA which is still running. They're more interested in helping disadvantaged parts of the community gain access to technology but have a broad interest in business development as well.

If you add on top of that Manchester Digital - the city's own trade association for new media/tech companies - and the effort that goes into Big Chip Awards, you can see there's a lot of effort to try and make the sector really viable here.

Has the original goal been achieved? Are we Silicon Valley? No.

But then, I think the emphasis has changed: we're no longer interested as a community in being Silicon Valley - we're interested in being Manchester, and being the very best Manchester we can be. There's a lot of grass roots tech work going on here, with the largest University campus in Europe, with a massive R&D spend, and it's affordable and enjoyable living here, that's where the vive is headed...

What is the scene like with regards people getting together to talk geek?

PR: Strong. There are to my knowledge at least half a dozen regular geek get togethers every month covering everything from high-level topics of interest to business managers in the sector down to piss-ups with Unix sys admins.

Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure?

PR: There is a regular meeting of organisers of the various user groups (known as the North West Digital Communities, or NWDC for short) where we sit down face-to-face for a couple of hours, talk about what we're all doing and what we can do next.

I get the feeling we're all determined to make people talk to each other and make interesting things happen. We're supported in part by MDDA and Manchester Digital which gives us focus and means we get cross-pollination. Suddenly a guy who runs an event for VCs is talking to a Unix sys admin and trying to work out if those two groups can overlap somehow.

It's early days, but it's getting interesting...

Is there a cross-pollination between different tech areas, eg do the wireless guys party with the Unix crowd, do the developers and designers hang-out together?

AD:   As far as I can tell it's only been recently (the last 2 years) that techies in Manchester have started to cross-pollinate. At the end of 2005 I formed GeekUp, after I failed to find an exisiting User Group that would connect me with other designers and developers in the area. GeekUp, while predominately web related, isn't based on a specific technology so all techie's are encouraged to come along. GeekUp's take place each month and proven to be successful in Manchester there are now GeekUp's in Leeds and Liverpool. There is also a number of technology specific User Groups:
* BSD User Group
* Linux User Group
* .Net User Group
* North West Ruby User Group

In February of this year North West Digital Communities formed. NWDC brings together the leaders of local communities to improve the local digital community by sharing resources and pooling ideas.

PR:   Sometimes. The web guys tend to stay away from the Unix/Windows sys admin guys, but there is an overlap where developers mix between the two. VC events tend to draw SME developers looking to network and so it seems the Venn diagram puts development across the major groups.

I might be biased though: I'm a SME developer and I go to nearly all the events I can, and the only people who tend to show up to all of them with me are developers. We're like some kind of weird glue. :-)

What events are specific to your part of the world? And what is the benefit of live events to the attendee? How does it affect their output?

PR: GeekUp is exclusively Northern at the moment. To my knowledge me and Sam Smith run the only regular BSD User Group in the UK here. The OpenCoffee stuff was started down in London, but Manoj Ranaweera is doing a lot to promote them across the region.

There are plans for a much bigger event next year, but we're keeping that close to our chests for the time being. It should be quite interesting though if we pull it off. That will be very Mancunian in the modern/cosmopolitan/forward-looking sense of the word "Mancunian".

In terms of benefit, part of it is just knowing that there are other geeks around here. Knowing you don't need to move to London or CA to make something happen is something I think helps people. And then there is the conversation, the beer, oh the beer... :-)

What are employment opportunities like for a techie in Manchester?

PR: Variable. If you've got the skills, the work is here. A lot of kids end up going elsewhere in the UK but work hard to get back here if this is where they studied - it might have a reputation for rain, but there's something addictive about living in and around Manchester.

If you want to work for a small company (and take everything that involves) there is plenty of work around for somebody who knows their stuff. Bullshitters and coasters don't tend to last long in my experience: you either have the kung fu, or you need to go to London where you won't get noticed in the swarm of what I can only kindly refer to as "mediocrity". :-)

The BBC move is expected to produce a lot of jobs, but I'm cynical of how many will be recruited from local population...

In geek-related areas like biotech and engineering there's quite a lot of opportunity around here as well. Astra Zeneca invest in the region, and the University is trying to bring in a dozen or so Nobel laureates.

Where things really fly around here though is if you've got the balls to set up on your own...

Are there big companies that dominate?

PR: Not really. It's a SME city in many ways. That's expected to change to some extent with the BBC move to Salford, but big companies tend to move out to the suburbs or down South: a large web tech company in Manchester would be one having more than a dozen employees.

At the last count I saw in later 2005, there were reckoned to be around 4000 such companies in the North West, but that had a pretty broad definition of "digital" attached to it.

Do they innovate?

PR: Not as much as they should. I'm trying to do something about that. :-)

Most innovative company I think that geeks should know about, based a 10-minute train journey away from the city centre:
Starchaser

Yes, the rockets are real and they work. :-)

The Big Chip Awards is the place where a lot of local firms show off their digital media stuff, but I think in the next few years there is going to be a lot more in general tech locally.

As you probably know, innovation tends to come from smaller, risk-taking companies than it does much bigger firms. We're primed, we're just not moving as hard as we could yet, IMHO.

AD:   GeekUp runs it's own Job Board. The up and coming Media City UK will no doubt open up massive employment in the area, with the BBC set to move 1500 London based jobs up North.

Is the work on offer interesting or routine?

PR: It tends to be bespoke development work for larger organisations. High street names often bring their digital portfolio to be developed here. What's just starting to break out now is the start-up with their own technology funded out of VC or other investment channels.

I expect in the next few years Manchester will become more of a mixture of companies that develop for themselves as part of their own business as well as handling bespoke development as part of a media campaign.

Does the work focus on any particular technology or admin/programming skills? Are there Open Source opportunites?

PR: I'd say it's dominated by web and ISP work (we have the largest concentration of telecoms and data centre work outside of London) but there are some interesting light engineering firms doing interesting stuff with embedded systems. They're not prominent though, and don't talk themselves up.

What about the big national/international tech companies - do they have big set-ups that co-ordinate with the grass roots developers? Any developments in the pipeline to look forward to?

PR: Sun Microsystems is working hard to reach us, and they're just starting to succeed. They're based down the road, and doing much better at engaging than the regional IBM office (which is mostly sales). Google has a Manchester office but it's sales only.

If they took notice of us, we'd take notice of them. As it is, we're quite happy co-existing if they're not interested in what's under their noses.

Does the culture support start-ups?

PR: Yes. The Northern Quarter is very bohemian, and the city itself is full of relatively cheap office space. The cost of living is comparatively low for a cosmopolitan city, and VCs are starting to take interest. The Universities run R&D outfits and incubators and because the city itself is so small everybody kind of has a way of knowing everybody else - useful when you need ideas and contacts.

Are the government helpful in this regard?

PR: The Objective 2 funding has ended, but the NWDA still are trying to help in ways they can. The council are keen to help where they can through MDDA, but it's becoming more "self-hosting" through Manchester Digital and GeekUp and NWDC. We're trying to break the culture of saying "why isn't somebody doing something about this?" and actually doing something about it ourselves. It'll take a while, but if the enthusiasm is there, it'll work.

Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up?

PR: I know of one VC firm on the look out for local companies, and there are rumours of more expecting knocks on the door. To my knowledge, it's only these guys who go to the effort of trying to knock on geeks first:
http://www.enterprise-ventures.co.uk/

Are other techies supportive?

PR: Very. Sometimes the mailing lists for local techs can be a bit aggressive, but that's what happens when you get a bunch of intelligent, opinionated people who know what they're talking about together. In general though, great bunch of people.

Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Manchester geeks?

PR: All over the place. The geeks tend to be the waterwheel of the local industry, but they're not always the people who decided there needs to be a waterwheel in the first place. :-)

Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

PR: It's mostly bespoke development, so you pay, we play, you get a working set of code to make you rich.

There's a mild increase in VC and investment funding, and they're keen to follow open models where possible. A mixture of build-to-flip and build-to-dominate in my experience.

There is a lot of hobbyist work around here though - lots of passion out there for doing interesting things. "Hacking" is starting to mean something pure around here these days, which is nice given that for  years the only geek group that met were 2600.

What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

AD:  GeekUp has an active mailing which keeps everyone up to date with whats going on.

PR: The GeekUp afeeda is closely tracked and has several blogs on it from local geeks doing different things, there are plenty of mailing lists knocking about, etc.

What major conferences go on in your neck of the woods? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

AD:   Up to now the only major grass roots conference I can think of that Manchester has hosted was the first international OpenStreetMap conference. Next year Manchester will be home to a four-day long Futurology: 2008 Manchester UK conference. On a smaller level GeekUp hosted a one day mini conference on Ruby and Rails, and because of its success, Dave Verwer formed the NWRUG.

PR:  Have laptop, will travel: it's not unusual for whole groups of us to suddenly appear in Brighton, Berlin, London or Paris for a conference. Tends to be focused on EU and UK confs, but sometimes people wander off to the US.

I wouldn't say they're a major driving force, but make for interesting conversation. Like I say before, there are plans for us to do something here in Manchester in the next year which I hope will be notable, and then we'll see where we take that as a city.

Profile - Deb Bassett

Deb Bassett is a freelance Rails developer based in Otley in West Yorkshire. She is a mainstay of the Leeds tech scene and the organiser of the Leeds GeekUp. I interviewed her the day after the inaugural Geek-Up in Leeds, and a couple of weeks before her marriage to Rob Lee, who is also an Otley-based developer.

CS: What’s your background?

DB: I’m originally from Stone in Staffordshire. I did a University degree at Manchester in Computer Science – I had applied to study Physics but I changed my mind at the last minute after realising my forte was computers! After finishing my degree, I moved to Leeds for my first job, as a software engineer for PA New Media, which became Ananova (remember - “the world's first virtual newscaster”?) and was eventually bought by Orange. I was with them for three years, mainly developing in Perl, with some Java and PHP in between. I then went to work for Energis, which is now Cable & Wireless, as a full-time Perl and Java developer. After 4 years there, I left and went travelling for 10 months with Rob, and we have both freelanced thereafter.

Things moved on while I was travelling, and I picked up Ruby/ Ruby on Rails when I got back – this time I had the choice of where to take my career and Rails seemed to have everything I wanted in a framework.

The Rails community has grown substantially since I first started, and are such an enthusiastic bunch of people. The amount of Rails applications in production has increased substantially too since I started and is steadily creeping into the mainstream.

CS: How do you find working from home, when there’s two of you doing it, and your personal life is there as well?

DB: It’s really good, I enjoy it! Sometimes it can be difficult to separate home and working life when there’s no clear boundaries for when you should start and stop working. You sometimes find yourself working the whole day and into the evening until quite late, and sometimes your cycles move round so, for example, you might work from 12 noon until 4 in the morning: it doesn’t really matter when you’re working from home what times you work. But there’s two of us, and it’s actually very nice to have the support – I don’t think I’d like it if I was on my own.

Otley’s a great place to work from - it's a small town in the countryside just north of Leeds and we’re lucky enough to have some good friends there. There's quite a tech community which mainly stems from my ex-employers Energis (Cable & Wireless) and Orange – most of us have worked at one or the other at some point and we are techie to varying degrees.

I occasionally head over to York to see Edd who I work with on his exciting start-up, Expectnation.

CS: How long has GeekUp being going on in Manchester?

DB: I believe it started about a year and a half, maybe two years ago. It is the brain child of Andrew Disley, a web developer from Orrell, near Wigan. I first found out about it at Reboot in May last year where I met Andrew, and it had already been going a good while then.

CS: And at what point did you think you could do one of those in Leeds?

It’s an hour and a half from Otley to Manchester and we’ve done the journey quite a few times now. It seemed a natural progression for Leeds to have a GeekUp, a bit closer to home – we had talked about it a few months before with Andrew and others but we were a bit tied up because Rob and I were getting married (they got married in July - ed) so we said we'd leave it until after then. We had underestimated how vibrant the Leeds tech scene was, and by May lots of people were asking about Leeds GeekUp, so Andrew asked us if we could start it a bit earlier, so we kicked things off in June.

CS: Andrew seems to be an Agent Provocateur …

DB: I like to call him the father of GeekUp, although I'm not sure he'd like me saying that! He’s a nice guy I don’t think it would have the GeekUp edge without him.

CS: While I think it’s great there are User Groups for Linux, Perl etc, I think it’s important that GeekUp is not just about one technology. If someone is setting up a Start-Up, they need to be able to program, to need to be able to sell themselves, so there’s marketing skills involved, they need to be able to set up a website so there’s web design, there’s the money side of things …

DB: GeekUp is great because you get to meet a mix of people from the industry who you wouldn't necessarily normally meet. For example, I get to meet programmers fairly often, but, say, designers - I’m not really a designer so getting the opportunity to meet others from that community is invaluable. Also, if you are a freelancer, working from home, GeekUp provides that important connection to the community that you might otherwise get from a work environment. I end up picking up lots of sound-bites of information, and reading about them in depth later... it's an efficient, effective way of catching up with the community.

CS: So last night was just conversation?

DB: Pure conversation.

We’re hoping to have talks next time, we haven’t quite decided on the format, maybe 20:20 Lightning Talks. The Manchester GeekUp last month did 5 quick sessions, and people could talk about anything techie. It’s nice to have that mixture of socialising and formal talks.

CS: I think it’s important to leave spaces at these events so people can have a gab.

DB: Yes, It's a well known fact that the best conversations happen in the hallways at conferences, we think that GeekUp can learn from this.

CS: It’s a way of people getting excited about what’s going on. There’s a real buzz these days.

DB: There’s a complete buzz at the moment - it’s fascinating. Although it worries me a bit, I'm hoping it doesn't match in behaviour to the original dot-com boom.

CS: So how many people turned up last night?

DB: More than 40! Initially we were expecting around 10 people as we didn't realise the Leeds tech community was so big so we were really pleased!

CS: And beside the Rails guys you were with, who else came along last night?

DB: There were lots of web developers and designers plus a few from PR and marketing and some bloggers and entrepreneurs.

CS: How many people knew each other?

DB: I knew quite a few people, as I’d got in touch with them and invited them along, but there were lots who I didn't know - groups of people from certain companies that came together and then there were individuals who just turned up and mingled, so it was a complete mix. It was great to see lots of people from the Round Foundry Media Centre too - I’d never met any of them before.

CS: Did everyone volunteer to come again?

DB: We had lots of positive feedback, there was even talk of a barbecue next time.

CS: There seemed to be lots of people writing on Upcoming how they were pleased this was happening in Leeds. Has there been anything happening in Leeds like this up until now?

DB: WYLUG has been around for some time now and there's been quite a few flickr and blogger meetups. More recently OpenCoffee has started in Leeds - the first one was last week. It’s during the day so hard for me to get to, but they had a really positive turnout with 30+ people turning up in Starbucks (I think next month they are changing the venue). There’s going to be a BarCamp Leeds very soon, they haven’t set a date yet, but it could be late September or October, it's a really positive step for Leeds. Just last month there was a Barcamp Sheffield. It's really great to see so much happening up north.

There's also going to be an Open Street Map mapping party in Leeds on 15^th & 16^th September. The organiser, a guy called Tim Waters was at GeekUp last night. Leeds isn’t very well mapped, although it's getting better: I went to the Sheffield Mapping Party and I’m really pleased we're having one in Leeds as it'd be great to see more of Leeds on the map.

CS: They were a courier company at first, weren’t they, using GPS to keep track of where their couriers were?

DB: They used a courier company to get lots of the initial GPS traces. It’s really fascinating: have you seen the animations of the OSM coverage growing in London and the UK? It really excites me, over the last year I’ve been following it, I've watched the maps grow rapidly in coverage, the mapping completed by regular, open source-minded people.

CS: How far a-field did people come from last night?

DB: Some people came from over 30 miles away including some of the Manchester GeekUp lot. Andrew didn’t make it – he really wanted to but he’ll be there next time. I'd love to see Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester have a combined GeekUp gathering one time, it would be great to get everyone together.

CS: So when’s the next GeekUp Leeds?

DB: GeekUp Leeds is every third Wednesday of the month. Manchester is the second Tuesday of the month and Liverpool in on the last Thursday!

CS: That’s quite an algorithm to work out!

DB: There’s method there somewhere. One thing I noticed was that there seemed to be less Mac users than I expected. Every time I go to a conference there’s whole mass of Mac users. There seemed to be a mix of Windows, Linux and Mac users.

CS: Are you a Mac User?

DB: Linux. Ubuntu.

CS: And is it going to be a geeky marriage, if you don’t mind me asking?

DB: Quite! We are using moo cards for the place names, Rob’s generated everyone’s name using images of the letters from flickr using the same principle as flickr spelling. I wrote a guest management system for the wedding in Rails, too. We also are planning on having a wii room at the evening do.

CS: Weddings are well served by the internet.

DB: There's certainly lots of wedding-related content out there, it's a vast market! People used to put disposable cameras on the tables, but now there’s no need, you can tell everyone to upload their photos to Flickr and tag them with a specified tag. That way, everyone gets to see everyone else’s photos. Our gift list is online, too - we are using kaboodle (didn't get chance to write our own!) – so that we could list gifts from different places and not be tied to a specific store.

CS: Do you mind if I ask about women geeks? Someone was saying that Hack Day was predominantly male, and I wondered if you see things changing and what would make things change.

DB: I don’t see things changing that much, which is a shame as it's a really interesting and creative industry to work in. I do find it a difficult question to answer as it seemed a natural progression for me to head into computing and I have found the computing industry really welcoming as a whole.

Of course, you are aware that you are a minority, and there are both advantages and disadvantages to this. Jeni Tennison has written a fabulous article which is the first article I've read that really hits the nail on the head for me: Getting Women into Computing. Edd wrote a follow-up to Jeni's article - of particular interest to me is the point made about self-efficacy - as Edd says, a complete revelation, and something I've never quite been able to put into words.

CS: Are there any other interesting events in the North that you go to, and further a-field?

DB: Rob and I head down to Manchester as often as possible for North West Ruby User Group, run by Dave Verwer. There's also a group in York called We Are The Monkeys - they've been going for some time now and meet on a monthly-ish basis. In July, Manchester will host "The State of the Map" - the first Open Street Map international conference (http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/153405/). Unfortunately it's on the same day as our wedding otherwise I'd be there! Also in Manchester is rumour of a Barcamp – I'm looking forward to hearing more about that.

Further a-field, we headed down to Interesting 2007 in London where we manned a stall for folksy, the start-up that Rob has been working on with a guy called James Boardwell. Folksy is an online market place to enable crafters to sell their stuff but with a social, Instructables slant. I helped them with their stall where we showed off our hardware hacking and crafting skills, which went down really well. It was cool to see people making stuff in person at an event, it doesn’t normally happen. There seems to be a movement towards making and crafting at the moment, it's great to see people getting out their soldering irons and sewing machines and innovating again.

In May, we were lucky enough to head over to Paris for XTech, chaired by Edd Dumbill, the theme this year being “The Ubiquitous Web”.

In May, we also travelled to Copenhagen for Reboot, 'a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us', and last September we were at RailsConf Europe, in London.

CS: What are the major employment opportunities in Leeds for a techie? What kind of work is it? How do you find freelancing? Is it a good place to be a start-up?

DB: There are fairly good employment opportunities in Leeds covering a wide range of skills. Larger companies such as Cable and Wireless, Orange, William Hill, HSBC and the Halifax have a large IT presence here and there are also many web design and development agencies too.

In terms of freelance/contract opportunities, I've not seen many advertised Rails positions, however the more mainstream skills are well represented. I've normally found that freelance work comes via word-of-mouth and it matters less where it is based as you generally work from home.

In terms of being a good place to be a start-up - I don't think Leeds is any different to any other major UK city – nowadays I think it matters less where you are based, as long as you are close to major transport links, and have good connectivity!

CS: Are there major tech events in Leeds or and how do they impact on the daily techosphere?

I'm sorry to say I can't think of any major tech events in Leeds other than the impending BarCamp. Maybe that's something that GeekUp can help resolve!

CS: Who are the major bloggers and characters?

DB: The major characters and bloggers that I know of in the Leeds area are: Tim Waters, geo-specialist and developer, Edd Dumbill, writer, programmer, entrepreneur and free software advocate, Imran Ali, emerging technologies specialist and organiser of Leeds Open Coffee and not forgetting Rob Lee, fiancé, developer and entrepreneur!

Profile - The Pioneering Steve Bowbrick

UK-based Steve Bowbrick has been involved with the web since its early years, (as we know, Internet years are like dog years - you have to multiply them by seven to compare them to human years - which means Steve has been around the Internet since it was a small puppy!) He has broken new ground in a host of projects, notching up a World's First and at least one UK's First, and he shows no signs of stopping. He kindly agreed to expose himself to the full force of the harrowing GMT Scenius interview assault, and survived to tell the tale, (photo courtesy of Steve himself):

How did you start out on the road to being a techie? What language did you first learn to program in? What computer did you use? Did you code in isolation or was there a group of friends egging each other on? What resources did you have back then?

I have always been and will probably always remain a wannabe techie. I can't program, can't drive a command line and can't write valid XHTML! I developed a fascination with technology when I discovered a roomful of newly delivered Apple Macs at The Polytechnic of Central London in 1984. I went on to make my degree show using the computers and was very nearly failed for producing no photographs (this being a photography degree).

I belong to the wrong generation as far as computers are concerned. There were no computers at my school and the ZX81/BBC micro etc. hadn't been invented. So I'm a late developer.

I taught myself everything I know about computers by fiddling with my Mac and reading the quite amazing (and now defunct) Byte Magazine.

For me, computer technology represented a foreign language, exciting and exotic but utterly inaccessible to me. I'm an outsider looking in.

Where do you work now and what do you do there?

I'm spending a while with a really interesting UK manufacturer called King of Shaves which is a really cool (and slightly geeky) shave brand that I've been using for years. I'm interim Head of Digital for the firm, which means I've got a desk here but only for a few months probably. While I'm here I'll reset the company's digital strategy and revamp the http://shave.com ecommerce platform.

What I like about the firm is the focus on the product and on innovation: they're number 2 to Gillette in the UK and in other markets with almost no ad spend. They innovate three times as quickly as the big firms and they're really passionate about the product - they remind me of a web startup. This makes it exciting to interact with the people here and to invent new stuff.

Back in 1993, you worked as the editor of 3W. What was 3W and what was significant about it? How was it received at the time? How did you get the job? How did it all end?

3W (which was Ivan Pope's baby) was the first print magazine anywhere in the world about the web. In the mag's first issue there was a little box-out that said something like: "there are already hundreds of web sites". Holy shit. That was a fascinating time. Naturally enough, I met Ivan in a pub at some kind of net meetup.

3W was received with suspicion by the trade: distribution was difficult. Nobody knew where to put it! The readers loved it, though. I think what was most fascinating was the geographic spread of subscribers: we had readers in literally dozens of countries and the magazine was routinely censored by authoritarian regimes - they didn't want their people learning about this new, impossible-to-control information source.

The web killed 3W (maybe we were the web's first old media victim!). It just seemed crazy to be squeezing ink onto dried wood pulp with the web breathing down our necks. Also, issue 4 had a four-colour cover which I seem to remember practically bankrupted us!

Tell us about Webmedia: what work did you do there? Who did you work with? How different was web design back then?

Webmedia was the logical extension of 3W. The clue is in the name: In 93 and 94 we were going round telling people the web was a medium, not just a networking technology or an application (which was a pretty difficult point to make in those days - it was like saying your toaster is going to evolve into a new medium. People laughed).

I maintain that Webmedia's success (which was considerable in the early days, before we went bust!) was essentially down to our ignorance of business norms. I simply had no idea that two blokes in a basement weren't supposed to phone Lloyds Bank's Marketing Director or tell people we were going to transform their multi-billion pound businesses. So we just got on with it. It was a riot.

I was the sales guy - the communicator - and Ivan was the brooding presence. Then after a while Ivan kicked off a domain name registry called Netnames and the two businesses parted, which was all a bit painful and costly and led to Webmedia's collapse in 1998. There was a history of the period written a few years later and the author says: "Steve Bowbrick: such a pioneer he went bust before the boom".

At this time there were no systems, no norms, only a handful of standards: we built everything ad hoc right on top of the bare metal. Ivan and I both wrote HTML in the early days - which is sort of scary. We had a brilliant hacker called Steve Hebditch who wrote a web server for us - pre-Netscape, pre-Apache, pre-Java, pre- everything. When we started to build sites HTML supported pictures but not backgrounds. I remember the celebrations when a version of Mosaic came out that allowed a background gif: we went crazy.

I built the firm up to 65 staff, three offices, some very large and demanding corporate clients: consumer brands mostly. We built the first public sites for many major brands. Many of the people we hired went on to seed Web 2.0. I'm quite proud of all that. It was a shambles but it was the beginning.

After Webmedia, you set up Another.com: can you describe why it was special? It's just going through another revamp: what made it last, when other enterprises faded?

another.com was a glorious near-triumph. A creature of the boom built around the idea of personalisation. I still believe passionately that the premise was correct: identity is so important online but people don't want IDs handed out by faceless corporations: they want to create their own and they want control of their use. At another.com we registered tens of thousands of domain names and allowed users to create dozens of email addresses using them: addresses all mapped onto a single inbox and users had total control over addresses, filtering etc. etc. It was a very powerful idea.

The first problem for us was the crash. As NASDAQ bombed we were just getting to the end of our first round of capital ($10M from Eden Ventures and others). Raising new capital for a start-up like ours became impossible so we did the unthinkable and switched off the free service: dumping nearly two million users overnight. Blimey. It was the ultimate shock therapy, though, and the business survived and is now a profitable division of an ISP.

The second problem was down to me: my judgement was that the end of the free era was coming: that the giant, boom-era ad-funded dot.coms would soon be history, replaced by a leaner breed of paid-for services in a more economically rational environment. I was, of course, totally wrong! The final proof of my error came a couple of years later when Google launched GMail, a service offering an effectively unlimited service for nothing.

These things go in cycles but it seems pretty clear now that the economics of the next phase of the mainstream web are now in place: free services driven by ads and freemium deals.

You've toughed out some comparatively lean years since the dotcom boom: how hard was it to find work? Did you have to slum it and do less appealing work? Are things better now? What projects are you working on? Is there a division between your projects that are public and your projects that are personal? What project are you most proud of?

I don't remember doing anything unappealing! Things were hard on occasion, though - but that was mostly about having three kids in the thick of it, I think! Web 2.0 has changed everything of course. It's the fulfilment of our earliest dreams for the web. What I remember loving about Tim Berners-Lee's vision in the early nineties was that the www, for him, was a *read-write* medium. Remember, TBL's first browser (the one he developed for his colleagues at CERN) had an editor *built-in*.

It was taken for granted in the early days that we'd be authoring pages as well as just reading them. I think one of the most politically important decisions of the early web was Marc Andreesen's when he decided to take the editor out of Mosaic. A huge retrograde step that hardly anyone remembers.

Non-work projects now mostly centre on my blog http://bowblog.com, which I'm having rebuilt now by a clever American called Matt McInerney http://pixelspread.com, a couple of little twitter-based projects like http://twitter.com/lwb and I'm doing something radio-related with the esteemed Russell Davies http://www.russelldavies.co.uk.

Could you describe the work you do with Thinking Ethics? How is your choice of software informed by your politics? Is there any software you wouldn't use for political reasons? Are there particular licenses or software models that you favour?

Thinking Ethics is not such a big thing for me now - I'm a very occasional contributor to the blog. It's a great blog about business ethics that came out of an extraordinary event organised in Geneva by Beth Krasna. She put together the most ecumenical crowd I've ever met: from Generals and development workers to TV producers and priests - to discuss the future of ethics. The output was a book, which is absolutely fascinating. Beth went on to commission a comic book version of the book too, which is amazing.

Open Source, the GPL, CC and the whole flowering of open culture have inspired me for a long time. I was a fan of UNIX and hacking and Stallman and the all the rest before the web existed. I wrote about code in my undergraduate thesis in 1988 (for a photography degree!). I'm not religious about it, though. There's a lot of unhelpful, blind dogma out there. Geeks are a phenomenally bright and motivated group but they can be autistic about politics and history and society. They can miss the bigger picture (I guess Stallman's a pretty good example of that tendency!).

Think about the economic value that Microsoft has created over the decades. Think about the mark on history that the X86-PCM-DOS-Windows nexus will leave: the historical equivalent of being visible from space. Having said that, my desktop is *almost* MS-free: I still rely on Excel but I use the brilliant (and venerable) Nisus for WP, Keynote for pres and online services for diary, contacts, collaboration etc.

We're having a fascinating debate here at King of Shaves right now about the application of open source to manufacturing and consumer products: we're wondering if we could launch a shaving product with a beta period and an open source model. Fascinating.

Who impresses you right now in technology? Is there anyone you'd particularly like to work with? What are the changes or developments you feel are going to have the most long term effect? What could the tech community learn from other areas?

I'm really enjoying everything from the current 20-something generation of hackers. I guess it's like any area of human activity: the vigourous, young crowd arrives with no history. Sometimes that's a bad thing, because they have to repeat the preceding generation's mistakes but it's also incredibly powerful. Attending a tech conference these days is like a crazy collision of a scout camp and a rock festival: epic enthusiasm and can-do attitude plus a kind of effortless confidence and impatience with the old ways.

AJAX is a great example: I think it was born out of an impatience with the set-in-their-ways, 'can't do that' thinking of the Web 1.0 crowd. The AJAX gang have just said: "We want a richer client side experience and we're just going to hack together all these older methods to achieve it". Likewise with Ruby. Ruby may fail but the youthful, impatient mindset that created it won't and successor languages will be faster and simpler still. Web 2.0 is about renewal and energy as well as about platforms and data and APIs.

Are there any questions I should have asked that you would have particularly liked to answer?

How about "Is Andrew Keen right when he says that the cult of the amateur is killing our culture?" My answer would be: no, he most emphatically is not. And his argument stinks because it represents the twitchings of a cultural and social elite and, whatever the risks to incumbent forms of opening up content creation, no elite should be allowed to determine the shape of human culture or society.

South Africa by Dirk Tolken

The changes in South Africa over the last few years have been possibly greater as those in any other country on the planet. We asked Cape Town-based Web Entrepreneur Dirk Tolken for his take on the Tech Scene in South Africa:

Who are you? What do you do? How big is your operation? What's your role?

My name is Dirk Tolken and I am the managing director of PERONii Solutions (www.peronii.co.za), a new media marketing solutions provider based in Cape Town, South Africa. We are a small, sub 10 staff agency that enables us to keep up to date with current online trends and change direction quickly (especially with the volatile nature of SEO / SEM). This allows us to deliver the latest innovative web development and marketing technologies to our clients. Our services include web development, internet marketing (search engine optimisation, search marketing like PPC, email marketing and more) and graphic design.

PERONii is part of a group of companies that specialise in various fields, including inbound tourism, mobile software technology and online gaming, all of which we provide various inhouse Internet related services to.

My role in the company is that of chief strategist, new business, online marketing and project manager. As small business owner one tends to wear different hats at all times.

What percentage of your business is local, national, continental, or global? Do you find that the demands of your customers dictate what software you use? How aware are your clients of developments in the web space? Do you find yourself explaining new technologies to explain their benefit?

Most of our business is South Africa based (with probably a 70/30 split of local and national), but we're busy breaking into the global market with strategic partnerships and our optimisation skills gaining us ground on the internationally competitive search terms. We're actively looking for agencies in Europe and the US to promote our skills as we're able to provide service at almost two thirds of the pricing in the UK and US which is of course an attractive selling point. As far as continental goes, we find that tourism & communication plays a major part in how technology enters Africa (when taking a perspective from the Internet industry). There is an ever growing sub-Saharan tourism industry and with South Africa being the most developed country we often have tourism start-ups that direct tours to these countries. In essence we find it to be more South African initiatives than clients that approach us from other African countries (other than the odd 419 scam now and then).

We usually dictate the technology to be used, but in certain cases clients come to us with existing solutions and we then build on that or suggest better solutions.

In South Africa, people are starting to wake up to the power of online marketing and we're working hard on educating existing and prospective clients. I tend to keep a library of FAQ's that I use to educate prospects. I have been published in a local magazine, writing about the 'Power of Internet Marketing' and have had positive response on that so I'll be looking at doing more of that.

Technology developments like for instance Web 2.0 and other lesser known developments tend to go under the radar to most of the buying market here, except in some cases where mainstream advertising picks up on certain trends. There was an ad on TV recently about margarine of all things that mentioned blogging and the online community here were quick to criticise the advertising company for not using it to their advantage and actually extending the campaign to the web. It could have been great education opportunity for the mainstream.

Our larger portals and service providers also do well in education, but there's always something new and more education to be done.

How did you get into technology? Was that typical of South Africa at the time? What equipment/software do you work with? How does Open Source help you in your work?

I have always been interested in science and technology. I guess I grew out of science and adopted technology as my main interest. In my early years we were playing with Atari's, Commodore 64's and later PC's, mostly through gaming. In the mid to late 90's networking and getting Microsoft Certification was all the craze, with many networking engineers leaving for London. I still have friends who have stayed on there.

We're PC based, using all the major software (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash and a string of others). Open source helps a lot. Our space venturing pioneer Mark Shuttleworth, who started Thawte Consulting (online security technology acquired by Verisign) is now doing great work through his Shuttleworth Foundation to promote math, science and open source to young learners here. We use open source daily, but only that which has good support systems behind it.

Can you explain about the computing scene in South Africa? Is there much User Group activity? How about Events? How conducive is the South African scene to Start-ups? What particular challenges do new tech businesses face in your country? What African/South African developments should the rest of the world be aware of?

The computing scene in South Africa is alive and well and growing very fast. As mentioned before, gaming is a good entry point for young people to get introduced and the Internet is accessible throughout most of South Africa. We are pretty much on par with the rest of the world technology wise, but infrastructure tends to be a problem with the monopoly of Telkom, our main telephonics and Internet infrastructure provider. Things are however slowly changing with increased wireless mobile technology and a second telephone operator entering the arena soon.

The larger user groups here are mainly from large portals, but there are many smaller niche groups just as anywhere else in the world. Computing events are still limited to gaming mostly, but there are some conferences on Internet Marketing starting to show around the major cities. These are of course good points of access for the industry trying to do some education.

South Africa is a land of opportunity at the moment and entrepreneurial spirit is rife. Our economy is growing well and technology is playing a big part. There are various start-ups here that are leaders in their field globally. Paypal for instance was started by a South African, but unfortunately due to certain financial laws (mainly from SARS, our revenue service) we're not able to use it here. The greatest challenge for new tech business is the education aspect. I was part of a company in 2000 that developed dynamic pricing technology that was way ahead of what anyone has seen before (in fact I have yet to see something like it again), but we had a rather reluctant market at the time so it went down as a dot bomb. I think with that being history now, the second wave of Internet technology that is available now is much better received due to the local market having been exposed to it for longer. It is like any new technology that arrives on the market anywhere around the world I guess.

Developments here that the world can be aware of? That's a big question, but I can say that the South African tech / IT community consists of hard workers and we're technologically well advanced. We're not an India or China as far as outsourcing is concerned (as in pure bulk), but I believe we have a place in the world as the gateway to Africa, and Africa will be (in my opinion) the next big thing the world industries will look at over the next 20 years as there is much development (economically and technologically) still to be done.

Mobile technology is big in South Africa and there are some great social networking services on the up, which I am sure will spill over to the business world (as with web 2 technologies) as it grows mature. Tourism is also a huge industry here, and there are still many opportunities surfacing around the 2010 World Cup Soccer. We're looking forward to have everyone visit Cape Town!

Profile - Dave Cross

Dave Cross is the Techie's Techie. He co-wrote Perl Template Toolkit for O'Reilly and Data Munging with Perl for Manning. His Perl Teach-In at the BBC sold out its 50 places in a day, with another 40 people joining the waiting list in just a few days more - there's untapped demand out there!

Dave kindly submitted to an interview with GMT. (Photo of Dave Cross courtesy of Paul Mison):

How did you start out on the road to being a techie? What language did you first learn to program in?

I came to computing relatively late. I didn't study any computing at school. Back then it wasn't an option. Even when I started studying Applied Physics at University there was no computing in the first year. I dropped out at the end of that year, but I believe that if I had stayed on I would have learned FORTRAN.

Having dropped out, I spent the best part of a year not doing very much. That was about the time that the first home computers were coming out. Friends and family started to own Spectrums, Commodore 64s and VIC-20s. I started writing programs in BASIC on some of these and discovered that I had the right kind of brain for it. Eventually I decided to go back to college and got a place on a Computer Studies at South Bank Polytechnic.

The course was aimed at people who were going to work in large companies' Data Processing departments (remember those?) We were taught COBOL, CODASYL databases and useful things like that. Cutting edge courses were about Prolog and Expert Systems. There was more useful stuff though. One course contained a brief introduction to SQL and in the final year we were taught C.

You've toughed out some comparatively lean years since the dotcom boom: how hard was it to find work? Did you have to slum it and do less appealing work?

I didn't really see much of the dotcom boom. I spent the second half of the 90s working for various banks in the City of London. But at the end of the 90s there was a bit of a recession in the City so I worked at couple of dotcoms just before the crash.

There were a couple of bad years though. I spent about five months out of work in 2002. In the end I took a permanent job as Technical Architect at a small web company. That didn't last long though as I was made redundant four and a half months later.

I don't think I ever really had to do less appealing work. But I certainly had to cut my rates.

Are things better now? What projects are you working on? Is there a division between your projects that are public and your projects that are personal? What project are you most proud of?

The City certainly seems to be waking up again. I've just spent a year working with a large bank. Currently I'm working with the BBC on an internal project.

I don't really have many ongoing personal projects at the moment. Last year I decided that I was juggling too many things and gave some of them up. For example, I stood down as the Perl Foundation's Perl Monger Group Co-ordinator. Of course, that just freed up more time to spend on other projects. Currently I'm writing the slides for a day's worth of free training that I'm presenting at the BBC on June 2nd. It's a public course, but unfortunately the places were all snapped up within a couple of days of the course being announced.

My plan for this year is to do some more writing. It might not lead to another book, but I have a couple of ideas for series of articles.

I suppose my biggest contributions to Perl (and the wider Open Source world) have always been more community-based than technical and undoubtedly the project that I'm proudest of is starting the London Perl Mongers.

How did you discover Perl? When was that? What other languages and apps do you use?

When I came out of college, my first job was writing C programs on Windows. It was only four years later that I discovered Unix. I got a job at Disney who spent two years training me up on Unix and Sybase. Unfortunately for them, that was exactly the skill-set that the City was crying out for at the time - which is how I started contracting there. At my second contract I was introduced to Tcl which was the first dynamic programming language that I had used. A bit later I discovered Perl. I think I had a particular task to do and a colleague suggested that Perl would be a good choice of language. I tried it, liked it, and have been using it for most of my work for over ten years now.

It's not the only tool in my box. I've been using SQL and Unix for longer than I've been using Perl. I use XML a lot and over the last couple of years I've been doing more and more work with Javascript. I run several web sites so I also have some experience as a sysadmin, DBA and webmaster.

Like almost everyone in my area of IT, I've looked at Ruby (and Rails) and I'll almost certainly be doing more with them over the coming months.

Why should someone use Perl over any other language? What are your hopes for Perl for the future?

I might get drummed out of the Perl community for saying this, but I don't take it personally if people don't use Perl. For the kinds of projects that I tend to work on, you have a choice between using a dynamic language (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP) or a static language like Java, C++ or C#. I believe that most programmers will be more productive with a dynamic language, but I know that many project managers prefer the safety net of using a static language. And once you've decided which of those two camps you are in, it really doesn't matter which language you choose. You should probably base your choice on the skills of the programmers on the project.

I do see two advantages that Perl has over other dynamic languages. The first is the CPAN. No other language has a repository of free code that comes close to the size of the CPAN. The second is the Perl community. I think it's great that we have such a cohesive international community who are so keen to help people make the most of the language.

As for the future. I hope that Perl doesn't go away. Perl 6 looks like it's going to be a great language and I hope that when it is released, it gets the publicity and interest that it deserves.

How is your choice of software informed by your politics? Is there any software you wouldn't use for political reasons? Are there particular licenses or software models that you favour?

I tend to use open source software whenever possible. That's largely for practical and economic reasons. I really believe that open source software is generally of better quality than proprietary software and it certainly works out cheaper for the users. But I can't deny that using it also fits in with my left of centre politics.

I try not to use Microsoft software because I find that I'm far more productive with a Linux desktop, but I don't get religious about it. When you're freelancing you generally just use what your clients use. And in most cases that's a Windows desktop with some kind of connection to a Unix server where I do most of my actual work.

I'm not religious about licensing either. All of my personal Perl projects are licensed under the same terms as Perl itself. That gives users a choice of either the GPL or Perl's own Artistic Licence. And when I'm writing articles, I like to use the Creative Commons non-commercial share-alike licence.

Who is impressing you right now, computing wise? Is there anyone you'd particularly like to work with? What are the changes or developments you feel are going to have the most long term effect?

It's a very exciting time in the web industry. I think that people are just starting to see what the web is capable of. Barely a week goes by without some new cool web-based application being released by Google or Yahoo! and there are hundreds of start-ups filling small niches. For me, the most exciting area is the number of web sites that are making their data available though web services - allowing other sites to incorporate their data. I don't think we've even begun to scratch the surface of what this can achieve. In the middle of June I'm hoping to go to the Hack Day that is organised by Yahoo! and BBC Backstage. That will be a great opportunity to meet up with lots of talented hackers and to create cool and interesting applications.

But, if you don't mind, I'll pass on the offer to predict what's going to have the biggest long-term effect. Predictions like that can only look very embarrassing in the surprisingly near future!

How does being a published author help your career? How do the books you wrote feed into the courses you run? Why should someone attend your courses? How do you see the future of technical manuals?

My books were published in 2001 and 2003. And for years, the industry was in such a recession that I saw no real benefit from writing them. But now that things have picked up a bit, I'm definitely seeing advantages from having them around. One of the nicest is that it's a couple of years since a client has asked me to take a technical interview. They just assume that I know what I'm talking about.

The books obviously feed into training courses. But, of course, training courses are far more flexible than books. It's much easier to keep a training course up to date. For example, in "Data Munging with Perl" I talked a lot about processing XML with Perl. But whilst all of the modules I talked about still work in the ways that I describe, I'd never use them in a training course these days as there are far more flexible and powerful modules available. So, I suppose that's one very good reason for coming to one of my courses - you get the most up to date view on some of the topics covered in my books.

And there you have the major problem with technical manuals. They always go out of date. Particularly in a fast-moving industry like this. I'm a big book-buyer, and I'll often find myself buying multiple editions of a single book just so that I have the most up-to-date information available. Obviously that doesn't scale well, so I'm going to have to look at more electronic versions of books in the future. But whilst I'm happy to look up an online manual to get the exact syntax of a function that I'm using, I can't really see myself reading books from cover to cover on a PDA or a laptop. There will be a lot of changes in the publishing industry over the next few years and in many ways I'm glad I'm not a publisher.

Are there any questions I should have asked that you would have particularly liked to answer?

I'd like to talk a bit about the Perl recruitment market in London. Amongst programmers, Perl seems to be going out of fashion. I hear people saying that Perl is too old or too hard. But on the other hand, over the last few months I have had a constant stream of recruitment agents contacting me about Perl jobs. At a current estimate, there are something like a dozen companies in London looking for Perl programmers. It seems that there are more jobs than programmers. If you're someone who has done a bit of Perl programming, but dropped it off your CV a few years ago because Java or C++ seemed more lucrative, then this might be a good time to revisit that decision.

And that's partly what is behind this Perl Teach-In day that we're running at the BBC. It's an attempt to increase the skill levels of intermediate Perl programmers so that they can apply for the more senior jobs that are being advertised. People say that Perl is dead, but the fact that places on the course were all booked in less than 48 hours would seem to disprove that. If this first session is successful, then hopefully we'll be able to do more similar things in the future.

Paris by Xavier Cazin

Introducing Scenius

Geeks and poets: both work in isolation, and yet both love to meet to talk shop. While it's a pre-requisite for techies to be able to work well on their own, it's abundantly clear that they thrive in a vibrant scene where busy user groups and stimulating events let them air their dreams in public. Give them a pint of beer and a few like-minds in a scruffy pub and ideas are triggered and innovative solutions to seemingly intransigent problems pop into their heads that might not have occurred when hacking away before a terminal. A thriving scene can help them lift their game to the next level as the fun and feedback catalyse their natural talent and their desire to create. Scenius is the word musician and producer Brian Eno coined to describe this collective intelligence working at scene level, the Greater-Than-The-Sum-Of-The-Parts phenomenon that kicks in when people gather with a joint M.O. and a willingness to pursue their own aims while helping their counterparts pursue theirs, the Get-Together equivalent of Web 2.0..

It's not just in technology that this happens - Paris in the 30's was the place to be a writer, the Brill Building in New York in the early '60's was the dream location for wannabe songwriters, the Grunge ethic and aesthetic crystalised in Seattle in the late '80's: suddenly, the infrastructure and the talent fall into place, a mixture of innovative ideas nurtured with intelligent tutelage, a touch of patronage and the appropriate marketing vehicles, and epochs are born.

All over the world, these scenes are blossoming, and each are as ripe for legend as any involving Hemingway or Joyce, Jobs or Torvalds, at least in the hearts of the participants. World notoriety might be a long way off, but there's a much greater chance of a project getting a wider audience or VC funding if there's an infrastructure and grapevine working to champion its cause and an existing user pool benefiting from it on a daily basis.

To look closely at the interconnecting parts of these burgeoning scenes is to see community in action. Each scene is different, each can learn something from the other, yet the common thread is the creative individual stretching themselves to make their mark, all the while having a fine old time in the company of their peers. Huge revolutionary leaps and small evolutionary increments are going on around the planet all the time, and the more we hear these tales, the more we feel we can do it, too, we can create something that makes a difference.

Craig Smith, May 2007

 

Paris: by Xavier Cazin

A few days before he spoke at XTech in Paris, I asked Xavier Cazin of O'Reilly Editions to talk us through the Parisian Tech scene:

Paris seems a great place to be a techie at the moment, with XTech just around the corner. Is that the case? Has that always been the case? Does Paris and France have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically?

Paris is becoming a very comfortable place for a techie to live. Thanks to the explosion of high bandwith triple-play ADSL boxes, anyone can now enjoy at home a minimum of 600Ko/s incoming bandwith and 100Ko/s outgoing, as well as free telephony and hundreds of international tv channels for just 30€ per month. This network of boxes even allows Wi-Fi telephony; the most innovative player on the ADSL front, Free (www.free.fr) recently enabled this feature for its 2 million subscribers: you now can benefit from the free telephony feature of your own box whenever you walk near other so-called Freeboxes, or from any accessible WiFi network in the world for that matter. The future of networking in Paris also looks bright; free wifi access and fiber optics everywhere before 2010, dedicated servers in brand new datacenters for around 30€ per month: Parisians will be able to broadcast their own TV very soon, and companies won't need to host and maintain their own servers.

Technology has always been encouraged in France, but, until very recently, it was made "à la française", that is mostly via big universities and big corporates or directly via government initiatives. French innovators tend to come from these established structures, where they learned enough about French communication infrastructure to start a niche. For example, the founder of the above mentioned Free started as a Minitel service provider, where he understood the specificity of the France Telecom homogeneous network and key people. Quite a few French innovators today come from the early days of the French Internet (even people behind http://www.nabaztag.com/!)

What is the scene like with regards people getting together to talk geek? Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure? Is there a cross-pollination between different tech tribes, eg do the wireless guys party with the Unix crowd, do the developers and designers hang-out together? What events are specific to your part of the world? And what is the benefit of live events to the attendee? How does it affect their output?

Technical user groups have usually been quite small and informal here. Often they meet during their studies and start a project there, but don't try to grow. There may be tons of them that I didn't even hear about! There have been visible ones around Linux, TeX,  XML, PHP, IPv6 or Wi-Fi, and also music or games, but there doesn't seem go beyond a few dozens of people at the same time. The two biggest events for techies to gather and exchange are Solutions Linux and RMLL. On the proprietary side, Microsoft and Apple both organize regular events, but visitors seem to mostly come there in order to keep up with new products more than exchanging and building new opportunities or get exposed to new challenges.

Now that you make me think of it, it seems that almost no one still knows how to set up conferences in France that would gather key technical people and allow them to mix together and with attendees :-)

What are employment opportunities like for a techie in Paris and in France? Are there big companies that dominate? Do they innovate? Is the work on offer interesting or routine? Do they focus on any particular technology or admin/programming skills? Are there Open Source opportunites? What about the big US tech companies - do they have big set-ups that co-ordinate with the grass roots developers? Any developments in the pipeline to look forward to?

Someone who masters web technologies has no problem finding a job right now. But this is not because companies innovate, rather because they keep up with the natural movement of things toward Internet OS. Investments are usually made where money already is, not were innovation happens. Big US companies (IBM, Microsoft) have always understood that in France money was in publicly funded institutions :-) Apple always had a lot of faithful fans, and Google doesn't seem to have a specific French policy, although they probably were made bored by French publishers' attitude against Google Book Search. International companies usually do what French companies do when they want to hire: they go fishing directly in Universities and Engineering schools. They don't seem to see a need for setting up specific gatherings yet. This may change as interesting individuals will soon be able to expose their work easily thanks to telecommunication boom I was talking about earlier.

Does the culture support start-ups? Are the government helpful in this regard? Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up? Are other techies supportive? Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Parisian/French geeks? Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?

It is very difficult to find true risk takers here. Startups do exist, but they usually are financed on proper founds or because founders have established records or success.  Venture capitalists seem to invest in me-too projects that may one day be bought by big corporates that fear to be left behind.

In France, more than the usual rants about too strict labour rules, I think there has been a idealistic view that great projects, like real art, don't mix well with money, because having to make money from your product means making trade-offs and compromises and French people used to dislike compromises. As a result, a lot of great projects are just developed for fun and never compete: better nothing than a soiled thing :-) This is actually changing, but the change is just at its beginning. For instance, bloggers have nothing against soiling their blog with AdSense.

Often, the most ambitious projects seem fueled only by goodwill. For instance, videolan.org (home of VLC, the versatile multimedia reader) is a fantastic and crazy project that has roots in Ecole Centrale, a famous engineering school. They probably could have attracted a lot of money, but they preferred to continue to improve their tools continuously, as new students replace old ones. Another, smaller, project I like a lot, called Savonet/Liquidsoap (a scriptable radio coded in OCaml) would probably have a hard time finding investors while having the potential to be a marvelous multimedia tool.

What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?

It's interesting to note that the most visited blogs are web and technology reports more than new thoughts on how and where technology goes. People read these blogs to stay informed on latest technology or latest (international) events, not to get their mind boggled like they would on Radar, for instance. True geek blogs, with practical sharing of new recipes and experiments, often very good, all have a Google Page Rank of 0 or at most 1! Fortunately, some of them are relayed by the oreilly.fr site, which give them a bit more exposure. Also, I think people are still reading newsgroups a lot, which give them their technical fix more surely than blogs.

What major conferences go on in your neck of the woods? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn't really touch the grass roots geek?

You know, Microsoft is doing a really good job at setting up small technical conferences around their new .NET products. Last year, I attended a presentation on SQL Server 2005 and LINQ that not only showed me that MS would soon become a true actor on the data and networking side of technology, but also triggered a lot of thoughts on what Web 2.0 actually was and where it is going. Inspired by Microsoft, do you believe that?

Other than that, the conference around Open Source and Free Software get their usual faithful attendees, but it's hard to get a sense of their output, beyond spending a nice moment with 10000 family members.

Other "Technical conferences" are not places for geeks but rather for IS departments.