Maybe it’s just me, but running keynotes every single day of a conference seems really silly, and waters down the value of the concept of a keynote. But I digress. Either way, this morning features Tim O’Reilly (again), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems), Fake Steve Jobs (aka Daniel Lyons), Matt Cutts (Google), and Matt Mullinweg (WordPress).
- Another day, another video. This is the sort of stuff that should be delivered to clients, not to people who understand.
- Co-chairs return the stage. Much clapping.
- Housekeeping items.
Tim O’Reilly + Jonathan Schwartz
Looks back at the past and how things have gone.
Introduces Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystems
Schwartz sees blogs being one day achronistic
Sees one part of his job as communicating, which the internet serves well - It’s harder to do it inside the company; so answer both at once
Most terrifying day when the General Counsel descided to write a blog (turned out to be really good)
Doesn’t think he’s terrified anyone but the securities group (SEC compliance, apparently)
Discussion about MySQL — what’s the strategy? - Deal is closed and integration is going well
Sun acquired a financial asset that is growing like a week
MySQL was actually working towards going public
Sun sees this as a way of expanding the market as a result of all the downloads
Open source strategy connecting with the cloud strategy - The goal is about delivering value, not how that value is delivered
You have to reach out to the market with an asset, which will draw them into the network (cloud)
Sun distributes 50MM Java runtimes a month
Cloud distribution of databases, not so much to worry about the database and more about making sure you can get the data
Moore’s Law supporting social networking — the cost to have thousands of cores is trivial - Scientific computing, which was traditionally the largest benefitter, is “collapsing” as they don’t get the same benefit
Working to everything being virtualised
Efficiency doesn’t lead to less purchase — it usually leads to much more
Green computing - We’ve already hit problems
Costs more to run your server in Japan than the cost of the server itself
Not many of the CIOs are responsible for their own power bills
Sun wants to green their infrastructure to stay competitive
A fifth of all energy is just to move air around; very inefficient for cooling
Sun now builds data centres in shipping containers for fast deployment anywhere
- 1/3 more efficient than an equivalent data centre
ZFS to be GPL’d
Fake Steve Jobs (Daniel Lyons)
“It’s great to be here at the peak of the second dotcom bubble”
This guy is pretty funny in person
Long intro, but totally worth the time to hear it
Paranoid about being Twittered like Zuckerberg + Lacy
Why? - It was mostly a stupid prank, but was really boredom
Can’t believe he’s doing speeches about it now
Was also a part of fear — saw his business being distrupted by the web, so he decided to learn how to do it (hard partly been crucified by an articled “Attack of the Blogs”)
What if a transparent CEO went “nuts” and was insane on this blog?
Why Steve Jobs? - Seemed perfect — takes himself too seriously, no sense of humour
“Dude, it’s a fucking cell phone! Get a grip!”
Started as a sort of comic strip, then started adding news
Had 90,000 readers in six months; sparked the manhunt
The person who offered the reward to find FSJ was the publisher of Forbes (Lyons’ boss)
Why does it work? - It works because the audience feeds him ideas
Has a Fake Noam Chomsky and Fake Vladimir Putin sending him ideas
It’s almost a social platform onto its own
The big discovery is not taking content from another channel and putting it online, it’s about feeding back into the online media and watching it evolve
Thinks it’s not long before the big media companies figure out how to exploit this
Rob Curry, Dash
- Connected GPS for cars
- Crowdsourced traffic — other drivers provide info back into the system to provide real-time traffic updates
- Can do Yahoo searches based on location
- Can provide (anonymous) data about where people conduct searches (e.g. knowing where to build a new Starbucks based on requests)
- Can subscribe to data sets for search
- Has an interesting long tail
Matt Cutts, Google
- “What Google knows about Spam”
- People spam mostly for money, but also for recognition (e.g. church trying to get more people)
- Build trust and reputation into your system
- Make spams frustated, and they’ll usually stop
- We know most of this stuff, nothing new
- Can register the site on google.com/webmasters/ to be alerted to hacks or issues
Matt Mullinway, WordPress / Automattic
- “AH-kiz-mit”
- This guy doesn’t really seem comfortable on the stage
- 1/4 of traffic comes from the US
- 99.999% of blogs get under 10,000 pageviews a day
- WordPress.com gets 10+ million pageviews to permalink pages
- New feature: (Possibly) Related Posts - Introduces a form of personalisation
- A Wikipedia and a half of new content is being generated each month on WordPress.com
- http://ma.tt
- Monotone (theme) will adjust the colour based on the picture in it.
