Billibala

6 recommendations to Macworld Mobile

My last post on Macworld Mobile sounds like trolling. To rescue my image, here’s my suggestion for better conference experience.

Disclaimer: I am one of the production team members of the previous 2 TEDx Taipei events and the BQ Conference (pre-TEDx Taipei event). My suggestions should mean something.

Break in every session

people need time to mingle. They may have questions for the speakers which they may not raise in front of all audience.

Make people flow during the break. That’s when interactions happen.

Don’t fly in all speakers

It’s simply not cheap to fly people from the States to Hong Kong. It’s half the globe, man. Flight, accommodations and other expenses… Just fly, maybe, 1 or 2 star speakers. If you can get Craig Hockenberry, Wil Shipley, Cabel Sasser, Marco Arment, or, I mean, just a few respected indies. You can secure 50% of tickets sales!

Paul Kent was in the event. (what a waste I didn’t connect with him!) He, himself, is a legend. Why doesn’t he have a session on his story curating the first Macworld without Apple? It’s probably the worst thing on the planet that Steve Jobs pointed you saying he doesn’t need you. (Flash, Macworld, floppy, netbook, e-reader)

I wanna hear his story way more than anyone of the speakers. How did he and his team get through all the negative press and doom predictions and turned that into an enjoyable Macworld experience?

Local and regional heroes

If we are not filling seats with only overseas speakers, what can we do?

Find local and regional heroes! There are many interesting and successful stories. Talk to the hosts of developer communities in Asia. I am sure they can recommend some good stories.

Satellite events

I enjoy going Macworld and WWDC cause there are loads of independent satellite events. CocoaHeads WWDC special, Delicious Generation party, MacSB meetup, etc. Many companies host their own party too – Plasq, Omnigroup, Smile Software… So, what are the Mac/iOS developer events organized by independent developers? Well… you’ve got one – CocoaHeads Hong Kong Nov Meetup.

Regional Communities

Hong Kong is at the heart of Asia. You can reach, I guess, over 20 major metropolitan cities in Asia if you draw a circle of places covered by 5-hour flight path. There are developer community within this range… Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, etc. Make them come to Hong Kong for Macworld Mobile!

Position yourself, target the geeks

There is no need for technical conference other than WWDC. I don’t need anyone to repeat the documentation for me. You may argue the conference is for starter. But I can say for sure that no starter is willing to pay money for conference. You can tell from the attendance this time.

It’s only fans paying to go to concert of their favorite touring band. I paid $1000 in total for GreenDay last concert in Hong Kong. Same applies to conference. It’s always passionated geeks who dominate the demographic.

Do you think those who’s been coding iOS stuff day and night would wanna listen to introductory topic? Give me the meat!

Conclusion

Hope you won’t find this post written solely for trolling. I really appreciate having overseas speakers coming over to spend time with us. That’s why I do the CocoaHeads meetup in November specifically after Macworld Mobile and invite the speakers to come.

Given all these great speakers, the contents that are presented do appear below my expectation. I see that happens to many events in Hong Kong where people organize but not curate.

Conference is being democratized in the internet age just like media, music, games, etc. Conference models are marginalizing to their own niches – mega scale event (Comdex, E3, ComicConf, etc), Company event (Google I/O, WWDC), TED + TEDx and independent/bootstrap (SXSW, ROFLCon, SecondConf, NSConference, etc). Each one of them has its own niche.

Just like newspaper, those in mid levels of the ecosystem (like San Francisco Chronicle and South China Morning Post) will face huge challenge and, possibly, extinction if they continue failing to find their own niche.

Macworld Mobile – FAIL

Went to the Macworld Mobile conference at Mobile Asia Congress  today. It’s bit crappy honestly.

A bunch of unenthusiastic crowd, unpassionated crew, weird session schedule, poorly arranged refreshment bar… No breakfast, no lunch, no after party (you pay extra USD $195 for after party). There’s refreshment in the tea break. But there’s only 1 break in the whole freaking afternoon. You can’t take the coffee or snack into the conference hall either. WTF?!

You don’t get a break in between sessions either. There’s 1 lunch break and 1 tea break. People literally sit the whole morning and afternoon. You can imagine how much speaker/audience interactions happen in this arrangement.

So, this conference experience part is just one word – fail.

Let’s ignore all these. Just focus on the content…

Bottom line is… if the talks are not inspiring, they’d better be funny. If not, at least, be useful. I think I wasted one whole day suffering from poor organization and unthoughtful curation of the organizer.

I do like the design and Japanese social media talks. The speakers highlighted their unique personal perspective. The technical talks? I would classify them as elementary technical talk. It’s like collage lecture.

Is it the organizer requesting speakers doing elementary level stuff? I don’t know. Most talks are about stuff that already exists in documentation. In another words, it doesn’t make any different if you are not coming today. You can read everything from the fucking manual.

Who’s gonna pay for a conference where the contents have no depth?

Well, I did. But I won’t pay again. If I could, I wanna get my time back. No need to refund.

Who needs to pay to listen to introductory materials?

Those who first learn the technologies presented today are probably bogus developers who go to the conference to escape from company’s work. Even if they genuinely come to learn, is there any difference if they just read the fucking manual?

Expo organizer is not developer. They are event organizer focusing on event logistic. They are little from ignorant to iOS technologies and indie culture. It seems to me that they just organize the event to the job done. I don’t feel a single bit that this conference is related to iPhone developer culture. I feel a huge disconnect between audience expectation and what the organizers offer.

No wonder Steve Jobs is out of this Macworld Expo thing. This expo model doesn’t work.

I enjoy conference trip. I have been to WWDC 4 times. Every now and then, I had a WWDC moment. Why?

WWDC is mainly a technical conference similar to the Macworld Mobile too. But there are 2 main differences.

First, contents covered are usually about the next generation OS, new technologies or in-depth sharing. Second, the conference attracts great crowd. You can find the most well known indies and developers and talk to them.

Can you replace that with documentation or sample code?

There’s a reason why people spend money and time to conference. It’s the conference experience. If you are not crafting the best experience for developers, screw you. Just don’t organize it. Or, just say, “This conference feature mainly introductory materials and is not tide to developer culture at all”

My message to IDG or whoever running Macworld Mobile…

“Go attend SecondConf, NSConference, 360|iDev, iPhoneDevCon or any indie conference with good feedback! Ask yourself why people in those conferences enjoy being there so much! ”

Until then, this is my last Macworld Mobile event.

My advice to you as host of CocoaHeads Hong Kong – save the money for any of the indie conferences I mentioned above.

Living with less

NBC News has an interesting about living with less.

But I guess no one can beat the ultimate minimalist…

“This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.” Steve Jobs, 1982

Well, my place… ahem… I gave up a long time ago

Clip It! in Mac App Store?

Been busy with projects lately… didn’t get much time following indies thoughts on the Mac App Store.

There’s been a lot of discussion in various places – the MacSB list, many podcasts and some indie developers blog.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not. The 70/30 split between developer and Apple is pretty steep. In exchange to that, developers get exposed to millions of iTunes users and get Apple handles all distribution/credit card transaction stuff.

The response from those big name indies are pretty positive. Omnigroup and Real Mac Software had both publicly announced their support to Mac App Store. Smaller developers like Pixelmator and Kevin Hoctor and many others expressed positive outlook to the MAS too.

Well… I’ll join the party too. Just got Clip It! compilable and working under the latest XCode (3.2.5) for MAS submission. Now, eagerly waiting the door opens…

Business Insider interview with Zappos Tony Hsieh

Business Insider did an exclusive interview with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

Do you ever wanna remove a cookie?

Randomly browsing NYTimes and encountered this article – New Web Code Draws Concern Over Privacy Risks about privacy concern with HTML5.

The article mentioned about a new cookie type called evercookie. Don’t know visiting the site will trigger the forever cookie. But if you think that “Delete Cookie” really means deleting a cookie… you could be wrong.

Samy – the developer of evercookie described the way this cookie is implemented. Below is the screen capture of the evercookie page:

This guy is ingenious! Can you imagine using RGB value in PNGs created by canvas tag as cookie? Geez…

Basically, any features in browser which allow scripter to write some “clues” can be used as cookie identifier. The mechanism described in the list above are all legitimate features available in modern browser. Seems like we have no way to get away from tracking if a site owner determines to track us.

Does that mean we have no choice but to give up privacy?

Adam Curry on TWiST

Adam Curry is the guy behind “Big App Show” – bigappshow.com. He’s also a veteran of the internet and successful entrepreneur. Follow his interview with Jason and you will know the success of Big App Show is no luck nor coincidence.

My workstation is on steroid – new Dell U2211 assistive display

Been spending money to expand my workstation lately. Purchased a mid-2010 Mac Pro last month. This month I added a new 21.5″ Dell U2211 LCD display to my existing 3+ year old Dell 2407WFP.

The two displays work amazingly well. There’s little color mismatch even I haven’t calibrated the displays yet. Both displays are set to use “Apple RGB” color profile where I find it looks most natural to me. I am planning to get a Colormunki Create later this fall so that I can be more sure about color. Its support web site says it works with Mac OS X Snow Leopard with dual displays.

The new display (U2211) is of decent build quality. It comes with all necessary cables (DVI, VGA, power cord and USB).

Image quality is very good too. Well, I mean, it’s the quality you would expect from a IPS panel. Plus, you get good detail of color level control through the display’s own control menu.

One problem I notice is the physical size of its base. It’s disproportionally hugh.

The screen measures roughly 20″ x 14″. But the base itself takes up roughly 7 x 11 sq in of my desk space! Not sure if they just use the same base in the whole ultrasharp display series. If you have small desk, you should take this into consideration before you make the purchase.

I also find the aspect ratio a bit odd for productivity application. 16:9 is a little too narrow especially when you run word processor and spreadsheet applications. This is more a general issue towards all 16:9 widescreen displays. I prefer 16:10 aspect ratio.

Well, my ideal setup is still Apple display. However, the current LED Cinema Display doesn’t seem to be designed for me who need to work with source code and photoshop files for hours. I love the integrated iSight, 2.1 speaker, cables and the sleek design. I just hate one thing… and that one thing is significant enough to keep me from buying it. It is the glossy surface. Can’t really stand to see my face and stuff behind me overlapping tiny Objective-C source code on the screen.

At HKD$1650, this U2211 panel is definitely recommended as a main or secondary monitor. You may have to take screen aspect ratio into account. If you do plan to use the display for productivity app in its normal (horizontal) orientation, you should, generally, look for 16:10 display or a 27″ display which gives you more vertical pixels to work with.

Finger 2.0 for iOS4

Wrapping development work of Finger 2.0 this evening… (or morning). Finally submitted it to Apple for review.

It’s a long over due upgrade for existing user. Finger 2.0 provides support:

• Native iPad support
• iPhone 4 hi-res UI
• Copy and paste

We have updated the underlying network protocol in Finger to make it more robust for Mac user as well.

It’s late now… will make a official announcement in Finger’s site.

Eric Schmidt on Colbert Report

Eric Schmidt was in The Colbert Report earlier this week and mentioned about Hong Kong in the conversation

“Basically, there’s Hong Kong and mainland China. One country and two systems. We like the Hong Kong system better.”

Keep going Hong Kong people! Take advantage of our flavored system and do some good to people in China and in the world!