Last week, I got off the train in the morning and there was a TV reporter that jumped in front of me with a few questions about fare increases. I immediately sensed that she was trying to wind me up, get me irate. But I felt like I was mild mannered and not falling for the bait.

ME: “I can accept the price increase because I know they’re buying new trains, which we really need badly. So as long as I can see the results I’m okay with it.”

TV LADY: “But what if they don’t add the trains? Are you seeing what you’re paying for?”

ME: “I’m not seeing what I’m paying for yet, but I know they’re in the works.”

TV LADY: Strange devilish smile. “What if they raise prices again? Would that make you stop taking the train?”

ME: “No. They basically have me over a barrel. I don’t want to pay for parking, I don’t want to pay for gas, I don’t want to deal with a car. Maybe I could ride my bike sometimes, but not in bad weather. So for me the train is still the best option.”

TV LADY: Looks at camera man with a huge grin. “Thank you.”

Now watch how it was presented on air.

That’s not the angle I was expecting.

Everyone at work was mocking me for being the angry American.

Not loving the new Delicious design. Way too much visual noise. What used to take a few key clicks (tagging new bookmarks) now takes a few additional clumsy key clicks and mouse clicks.

The night before the Webstock halfbaked challenge I got a hellish fever (it turned out to be tonsillitis). I was up all night with the chills. In my feverish delusional state I somehow had the hallucinatory inspiration to put together a presentation for my halfbaked team to show on my behalf, which for some strange reason they never did show.

You probably need to be fully baked (or feverishly delusional) to appreciate it. Click on the movie, then use the keyboard left and right arrow keys to go through the frames.

I’m pretty certain this could have swayed the vote in our favor.

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…

When you roll with Rod anything can happen. This time, on the drive up from the airport to Warkworth we took a quick little detour to do some skiing at Snowplanet. For those of you up north (northern hemisphere), February is a great time of year to go skiing. Down south, it’s the height of summer. Snowplanet is an indoor ski field.

It was absolutely awesome. I didn’t want to leave. When we came out into the hot, humid baking sunny day the utter surreal-ness was intense. Admittedly, the whole time I had a dirty nagging feeling that my carbon footprint was off the charts.

Which made it especially interesting to meet Ian Wright and see his presentation on saving the planet (while going obscenely fast) in his electric car, the Wrightspeed X1.

My takeaways: If you have a late model car that gets 35mpg then you really aren’t a significant part of the problem. In LA, those cars output cleaner air than they take in. It’s the gas guzzling SUV’s and light trucks that are the real killers. Turning those into hybrids can make a very significant difference. That’s Ian’s ultimate plan.

I always really enjoy when Tim Norton of PlanHQ gets talking. He and Dave ten Have from Ponoko ran a really good session on taking your kiwi company and product to the world. Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian also chimed in with some good insights.

My takeaways: Get your ass on a plane and spend time in your target market. Get in front of the key players and stay in front of them. Just remember that hype does not equal money in the bank.

Nat, the organiser of Kiwi Foo, ran a session on teaching kids to program. He shared his experiences with Scratch, I shared some of my experiences working with kids using Flash and various other people piped up with their experiences using other tools and methods. I came away glad that I’m not the only one who’s underwhelmed by Mindstorms.

My takeaways: Tech ed is wide open and yet to be cracked. I’m very interested in being one of the people to crack it.

There were a whole lot of sessions that I really regret missing, especially one on Meraki. It looks like people are starting to bring Meraki here to NZ. Wellington is ideally suited for it. That would certainly help fulfill my prediction that mesh networks catch on in 2008.

The place was crawling with iPhones, so thankfully John Ballinger whipped together this fantastically useful iPhone directory of all the Foo sessions.

As always, it was great fun with great people. Next year, I would prefer to see some upfront planning for the sessions, kinda like the way barcamp do or even better, like the SXSW panel picker.

If George can anoint himself “The Decider” then I can confidently take the title of “The Predictor”. I was just crowned (literally, I have the tiara to prove it) 2008 Visionary Of The Year by Unlimited Potential. Which is pretty impressive, considering it happened in the first month of 2008.

It was another fun event and my fellow predictors had plenty of prescient and witty insights. Hopefully UP will post all the predictions somewhere.

The following is my outlook on the year to come. It contains a fair dose of wishful thinking, but sometimes technology and events do sneak up on you quicker than you expect.

2007 Greatest hits and misses

DRM finally goes away
Hit. Woot!

Wellington weather will be shit
Miss. Woot!

2007 Report card

User generated video advertising
Good progress: LiveRail, BrightRoll, YuMe, Adap.tv, VideoEgg, Adotube, Google/YouTube

Enterprise SaaS
Good progress: Netsuite IPO, Force.com

Web OS
Good progress: Macbook Air, gOS, CloudBook

Mobile Media Centers
Not so much: iPhone + Apple TV

2008 Better mobile experiences

3G iPhone with GPS, still won’t be available in NZ

Mesh networks start catching on thanks to Wireless USB (WUSB)

Somebody will provide a standard wifi billing platform (think OpenID + Paypal)

Presence detection gets real, gets fun:
get pinged when social network in proximity,
“scan” a party, cafe, club, biz conference to see profiles,
mixing and mingling privately while standing in a crowded room

2008 Hyperlocal on the homefront

Oil nears $200 a barrel, travel increasingly becomes a luxury,
people start thinking and acting a lot more local

Biofuels start becoming more efficient, demand surges
Aqua Flow becomes a leading provider

Working and learning from home becomes more and more of a necessity, collaborative web applications thrive in response

Lending networks thrive, microloans help ease economic turbulence

Home bio scanners start to hit the market – letting people scan food, detect viruses and germs, capture and analyse medical data, send data to a remote expert for further analysis

2008 Geeks Robots rule the earth

Portions of Google Earth and Streetside become available as realtime video

Mashed on top of this “open surveilance” framework will be
massively multiplayer game experiences

Hardware widgets and software widgets will converge producing very hackable, very personalised, interoperable device components (Buglabs, ThingM, Chumby)

New software driven materials interactively, physically reshape on command

2008 will go down in history as the year the robot uprising started taking shape

2008 Politics

Obama wins by a landslide

Helen wins (barely)

Kerry resigns in disgrace over conflicts-of-interest scandal

Tom Beard becomes the new mayor!

Finally, in my acceptance speech I predicted that next year the panel will include a woman!

After Xmas I spent a week doing some long overdue gardening (weeding, to be more accurate). Which is where I came across this beauty!

Then the family hopped on the Interislander to spend two awesome weeks off-the-grid at the top of the South Island. We camped for a week and then we shared a holiday house on the Marlborough Sounds the week after.

To top it off, Emory and I conducted our own personal Amazing Race to see the Police in Auckland. We started with a ferry crossing, rushing to the airport, buying tickets, jumping on a plane, booking a hotel, rushing by taxi to the concert, then we spent most of the concert in an ambulance.

Expect a big update to my Flickr site this week.

What’s UP 2008?

Last year I participated in the ‘What’s UP’ predictions event. They’re having a follow up 2008 event and I’ve been invited back to face my predictions and make some new ones.

Last year was great fun, so I definitely recommend it.

Price: FREE (price includes pizza and beer)
When: Wednesday 30 January, 2008, 5:30 for a 6:00 start.
Where: Wellington Chamber of Commerce, Level 28, The Majestic Centre, 100 Willis Street, Wellington.

He’s not the first to take up the cause and even Apple has relented to the patent, paying Amazon royalties for using the concept in iTunes.

Now it now looks like he’s won the case.

Hopefully this sets in motion a trend similar to the end of DRM – which has been greatly accelerated, somewhat ironically, thanks to Amazon.

Ponoko

On-demand, social manufacturing – design, share, and buy laser-cut products from a variety of materials

Dave launched Ponoko at the TechCrunch 40 event with big buzz and fantastic reviews like this from Michael Arrington “Ponoko is a cool way for designers to create new physical products and sell them. Users collaborate on design and prototyping all the way through to production.” It was also hilarious that Dave emailed me afterwards and said that the first person who approached him was a VC who started off asking “Do you happen to know an American interaction designer…Philip Fierlinger?”

I was really lucky to have the opportunity to work with Dave for a short while. When we were just forming Xero, Dave consulted for us and worked along side us in the 404 apartment. I got to hear Dave’s early concepts for what would become Ponoko. From the outset I loved it and I was quite impressed that he was so unphased to take on, what seemed to me, such a daunting project. It’s definitely not your usual web startup. And that’s one important reason why it’s such a great idea.

PlanHQ

A collaborative planning tool to help start a business and keep it on track

Tim is a born entrepreneur who has a never ending reserve of passion and ideas. He presented his product PlanHQ at DEMO, which also got an excellent review from Msr. Arrington.

Tim is really active in the NZ web and business community. A little while ago he did a fantastic presentation on getting your startup funded:

The entire set of videos is well worth watching. It’s refreshingly frank and well informed, with great insights and tips, based on priceless experience.

Go New Zealand! Go Wellington. Let’s just not mention the rugby.

After seeing my talk somebody pointed me to this video: “The Science and Art of User Experience at Google”. It’s a presentation by Jen Fitzpatrick, manager of the user experience team at Google, talking about their interaction design process. She shares some really interesting examples of how they collect user feedback, particularly how they track usage patterns and monitor support queries.

A usability note on the actual video file: it contains a caption overlay, which is really useful, but it would be much more useful if that text was available to read/search/copy!