Thanks to a few truly dedicated people (I’m looking at you Mike and Tash) Wellington just played host to a geek orgy of supreme quality. First rate speakers, venue, schwag, branding, web site, and perhaps most importantly coffee…mmm…people’s coffee.

A couple of Yahoos

I was particularly looking forward to sessions by Cal Henderson (slides galore), Tom Coates (notes and old slides) and Michael Lopp (notes and more notes). Each delivered a superb presentation. I was hoping for a few radical new ideas to completely rock my world, but it was predominantly a refresher course on “the web as platform”. Which was still excellent and inspiring.

Tom Coates’ sneak peek of Fire Eagle was pretty interesting (tho what’s up with the lame name?). Fire Eagle aggregates and broadcasts geo-data, so other apps can retrieve or publish your geolocation at any given moment. The implications of this concept were nicely amplified by Nigel Parker’s 8×5 session on privacy and pervasive online tracking – some kids (his…doh, mine too) have been online since they were in the womb, while other people are implanting RFID tags under their skin, and a few people currently broadcast their geolocation via GPS.

Local boys

The fireside chat with Sam and Rowan was fun. Rowan roasted Sam with a hilarious video from the nascent days of TradeMe, when Sam was just a young pup. They waxed nostalgic, but also dissected the TradeMe deal starting with how Sam struggled to get investment funding and then buggered off on his OE just when it started to break even. Upon his return the business started taking off. He got serious buyout offers from Yahoo and Telecom, but upped the ante and ultimately landed the Fairfax deal.

Usability for evil (aka profit)

My world did get unexpectedly rocked by Amy Hoy. Her session was about coercing people through design and language (excellent notes from her session here). For somebody in advertising, this might have been a basic refresher. However, Amy made it especially relevant and compelling by presenting great offline and online comparisons. For instance, I’ve always wondered why Amazon presents people with an overwhelming and chaotic array of information and options on every page. Where’s the usability and good design in that, right? It’s intentionally that way. For the same reason that malls (and casinos, for that matter) are designed with burrowed interiors: to get you wandering around, somewhat lost. It’s there to keep you busy and distracted, because it’s well known that the more time you spend in a store, the more money you spend.

A few gripes

On the downside, many of the sessions were tediously academic. Too many bullets points. Too much bleating and pontificating on theory. There was a frustrating absence of demos and real world case studies from the trenches. It should be an absolute requirement to show demos, which must include a breakdown of the design/dev/business decisions that lead up to the finished work.

Simon Willison was the only person I saw who did a real world demo with live code, showing Django in action. It was interesting and impressive, but not where my head is at these days. His session on OpenID was excellent and it definitely caught my interest, but it still didn’t leave me with huge confidence in the OpenID standard, as it currently stands.

Another serious downer was the Wifi situation. It was utterly disgraceful and humiliating to watch so many prominent visitors from across the globe unable to get a working internet connection. At a web conference. It’s like having a world conference on electricity and we don’t have enough power to keep the lights on. How bad does it need to get in this city and in this country before internet connectivity becomes an angry-mob-inducing crisis? (as I’m writing this my TelstraClear connection has been down for hours – now’s good, huh?)

That’s how Apple rolls

As always, there were sessions I was frustrated I couldn’t attend. I heard from many people that Mike Lopp’s session on design management was fascinating. Sadly, it’s also one of the few that will not be made available online. Damnit! Apparently, he described how Apple creates 10 different pixel perfect prototypes for each new piece of functionality in their software! I can’t say I buy into that approach. I know how much time it takes to finesse every little gradient, drop shadow and icon. I appreciate how important those details are in the final product, but when you’re exploring new ideas you tend to lose the plot when you focus on fine tuned pixel pushing. Worst of all, you get way too precious with your design, since you’ve invested so much time and energy.

Rocking out

Nothing could have capped things off more perfectly than the happy coincidence of Phoenix Foundation playing in Frank Kitts park. It was a beautiful night, the buzz of the crowd was blissful and the band rocked hard. It was purely intoxicating.

To finish things off here’s a short, but brilliant clip from the show…

…things-with-stories sell faster than things-without-stories. How much faster depends on the story.

…

The value of an item – in the mind of a consumer – is simply the difference between the anticipated price and the price on the tag. When the anticipated price is higher than the price tag, it’s a “good value.” When the anticipated price is lower than the price tag, it’s a bad value. Good stories raise the anticipated price.

I would also add that good stories get repeated.

Speaking of good stories, below are some from my reading list, via Good Reads (I’ve tried most of the competitors and this was my fave). I need a new book, so I would love to get your recommendations.

Google have released interactive driving routes (found via Human Factors).

I’m certain this is either heavily influenced or entirely based on the Eyebeam NYC Subway map project. It’s using the same Flash overlay technique.

There are more video demos on personalising maps. This lets you add in photos, videos, even ads (see details here).

When I tried mapping across the two islands of New Zealand it also took into account the ferry crossing. Customising it is amazing. Drag and drop simplicity. Right-click context menu. Scroll wheel zooming, with crosshair centering. It’s another piece of mind blowing design from Google.

Grant and I both worked on driving routes for newzealand.com back in the Web 1.0 days. We know how complex maps and routes can get, even in the simplest implementation. That was later updated to include some Flash interactivity first developed by Andy Biggs and more recently given a major overhaul by Barry Hannah which includes extensive geo-coding. They even integrated it with Google Earth.

When I worked on newzealand.com the biggest user request was always more maps, maps, maps. Wisely, Tourism NZ invested a lot of money into building better maps. They could have never predicted (and certainly never relied on) Google developing technology like this. Now it seems like they should be integrating Google maps into newzealand.com, with photos, videos, and driving routes, rather than continuing to use their proprietary system. Of course, they can still take advantage of the database and technology they’ve built, while leveraging Google’s incredible technology and global reach.

Of course, I can only imagine how useful this is on the iPhone. Could some lucky iPhone owner tell me how it really is (cough Wayne cough)? When we were coming up with blue-sky ideas for newzealand.com mobile and mapping were always the big dream. It’s getting much closer to becoming reality, yet it’s still frustratingly out of reach. Especially considering the price of mobile data.

My friend Jonathan says: “to succeed in a market with no real switching costs (e.g. the consumer internet), when users invest in you, you must use that investment to make it better for them to stay, not to make it harder for them to leave.” Facebook just provided a way for every consumer internet developer on the planet to make money from their site, *and* make Facebook more valuable. There’s risk involved, but I think there’s far more upside.

Internet advertising works best when anyone can produce a simple ad. This was first shown with Doubleclick ceding ad prominence to Google and now it will be shown in internet video with blip.tv’s new DIY ad program.

It doesn’t appear to be as advanced as what I proposed – bidding for ad placement, different ads served to different users, with green screened product placement ala in-game ads. However, that will emerge. Count on it.