webponce rants

I’ve started curating a weekly collection of links for Hyper London each Monday morning. I’ll post them here too.
My reading is usually a little more broad, but this weekly extract will be more communications/geeky focused:

Foursquare hits 2 million users – http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/foursquare-crosses-2-million-users/
Kindle and iPad readers are slow - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ipad-kindle-reading.html
Texting during World Cup visualised by O2 – http://www.mobilebehavior.com/2010/06/29/shared-experience-o2-visualizes-texting-during-world-cup/
Last.fm for TV? – http://gomiso.com/
Last.fm for everything else? – http://getglue.com/
Flash goes 3D – stick that up your iPud – http://mashable.com/2010/07/09/adobe-flash-is-going-3d/
Job Boards dying – Social Media is the new recruitment channel - http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2010/07/most-companies-use-social-medi.php
Continuing the long history of networked coffee – http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/06/15/iphone-makes-coffee-for-real/
Integrate skype into your app/hardware/toaster – http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/skype-skypekit-sdk/
Making football augmented – http://www.mobilebehavior.com/2010/06/23/augmented-reality-superimposed-game-stats-in-the-soccer-stadium/
Removing all sense of coincidence – http://face2face.ws/
Facebook’s plan for world domination – http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/07/07/facebook-emerging-markets/
Making Android easy – http://mashable.com/2010/07/12/google-app-inventor/
Share your parking space – http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/11/google-open-spot-alerts-android-users-to-freed-parking-spaces/
Making us the infrastructure – http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2010/07/026355.htm
Facebook’s OpenGraph three months on – http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_opengraph_three_months_later.php
Finger skating IRL – http://designyoutrust.com/2010/07/10/irl-finger-skate/

Looking to hire someone

Matthew Knight — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:30:03 +0000

Position: Full-time Lead Developer
Location: London
Salary: Negotiable + Equity (Based upon Experience)

We’re a start-up in the health space, developing a groundbreaking multi-platform application to be launched in 2011. The team is a council of excellence across commercial, creative, clinical and technical strategy. We have already formed key retail and clinical partnerships. Now we need the final piece of the jigsaw: the team member who will develop the application software.

You’ll be working closely with our Technical Director and Managing Director to understand and define how the application will function, and play a key role in shaping the underlying technology, but will be given the space to determine how this should work in practice. We’re looking for someone with experience in developing web-based applications which can also work in mobile contexts, someone who understands how to architect a solution, not just build to a spec, someone who wants to take responsiblity for the code and own the project, rather than just churn out controllers, models and views.

You’ll be paid a salary, but also equity in the company and genuinely be a critical partner in this small team developing a new business. Your experience may be digital agency, self-employed developer, or just a general code ninja. You’re probably a PHP, Rails or Django hacker, and know your way around jQuery and CSS, REST APIs and JSON. You see yourself as a middle-weight or senior developer who is maybe fed up with working to a brief, and wants to create something with longevity as part of a small energetic team.

Email matthew@webponce.com for more details and secret squirrel information.

Looking for.. Web Dev interested in mental healthcare and wellbeing

Matthew Knight — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:13:43 +0000

I’m looking for a web developer who is interested in helping us out on a project for the NHS.

We’re building a physical device which will use embedded software to send data to a platform in the cloud you’d be developing.

You’d be required to build the APIs for the device to connect to, some integration with an SMS platform (dead simple), and the dashboard and tools on the platform itself.

There isn’t a huge budget, as it is an early stage trial, but should it go ahead, you’ll be helping people with mental and emotional difficulties use digital tools to improve their wellbeing.

You’ll also get the change to work alongside a great little team of social innovators, and of course, me (don’t let that put you off).

You’ll need skills in:
- Front-end development (HTML, CSS, JS etc)
- Server-side development (ie. PHP, Rails, Django, etc)
- Ideally some experience in frameworks rather than building everything from scratch
- Some experience in building RESTful APIs
- Some experience using Google Charts would be cool.
- Some experience using Facebook and Twitter APIs (including OAuth, Facebook Connect, etc) would be very handy

Drop me a line via twitter or email or just leave a comment if you’re interested in finding out more.

10 principles

Matthew Knight — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:45:53 +0000

Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of good design:

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Damn straight. Get yourself down to the Design Museum for the last week of the Dieter Rams exhibition.

Procrastination

Matthew Knight — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:08:50 +0000

I’m an expert at putting things off – in fact, even writing this blog post is being done in place of something else more productive. You see, I’m working from home these days. I’m continuing on the path of being a full time freelance technical creative director, working with a number of different teams to provide my experience and insight, and that means few people around to pester me in to getting things done. So here’s a video which pretty much sums it up.

That being said, I do have some amazing projects on at the moment, and I will write more about them soon, when I’m putting off doing those amazing projects.

Disposable Memory Project at ‘Free’

Matthew Knight — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 12:07:34 +0000

A presentation to the IPA ‘Game Changers’ event a few months ago. Rather rambling upon watching it back, as it was the first time i’d been asked to talk about the project, and I could talk for hours on the subject. I’d love to talk again to a crowd about this, but maybe a shorter period of time so I’m more focussed.

Matt Knight, The Disposable Memory Project, “Game Changers: Free” from The IPA on Vimeo.

An abridged extract from Wind in the Willows

Matthew Knight — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:43:03 +0000

Read to honour my father at his funeral this week.

He suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, ‘Up we go! Up we go!’ till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than whitewashing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on the further side.

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting– everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens.

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before–this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver–glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

If you love it, set it free…

Matthew Knight — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:20:56 +0000

My biggest problem is sticking with something – I love the ideas creation process, and the excitement of creating something new, but 90% of projects when ‘completed’ have only really just begun. For instance, The Visual Dictionary, a typography photography site I started some years ago, was great fun to develop, and build up, but it has subsequently been over-shadowed by other projects since I launched the site. That being said, there are still daily submissions, and still receives decent traffic. I really want to do something with it, to refresh the design, its functionality, and generally invigorate it a little bit, but I don’t have the time currently.

I think the same is likely to happen with The Disposable Memory Project, which is already taking a fair amount of my personal time to curate. There is no doubt that this project is a long-term one, I expect it to run for a minimum of five years, by which time I may well be on other projects which need my time.

So, how to ensure that the DMP continues to exist and grow over the next five years with the possibility of me not being at the helm? Well, its all about the community!

When I originally threw together the blog suggesting the idea, I had planned on releasing cameras around London personally, making it a relatively small and managable idea – but when it grew from being London based to having a presence in almost 45 countries, with a handful of emails coming through every day – the management shifted into a more involved job. We have some wonderful people who are already helping out by acting as local representatives in countries who accept the cameras mailed to them to save on postage. The next step will be finding people who are happy to help out maintaining the site and project itself, performing updates on the blog and camera tracker so I don’t become a bottle neck.

The tools don’t currently exist to make it particularly easy to update the site (its all run off a database, but it doesn’t have an interface to update the cameras very easily, other than the excellent phpMyAdmin), so I’m very much focusing on creating those tools to allow others to help out in managing the site. I don’t ever want the site to become ‘automated’, allowing users to create their own codes and updates via the website as I think the personal touch is important in responding to people – but we can still automate much of the grunt work like uploading images, geotagging the updates, etc.

In any project, working out the shift of ownership from creator to community is a pretty important consideration once you start to get an amount of growth. Whilst you shouldn’t start out with this in mind, you might need to think about it earlier than when you’re at breaking point. Equally, don’t be afraid to relinquish control to members of your community who are advocates or offering help, as they’re just as eager to see the project succeed as you are. I know my efforts are usually better in helping create and drive projects, and direct the vision, rather than day to day detail. I don’t want to see the project stall because of my potential lack of time, so if that means “giving up” the project in some way, I’d rather that than neglecting it.

It is something often forgotten in commercial projects, that a project launching isn’t the end, but the start (unless you’re creating something broadcasty, rather than conversationy).

I don’t actually see it as ‘giving up’ the project at all, more of a graduation from a personal project to a community based one – which is the best thing in the world. Creating an engaged community is the hardest thing to achieve, but if you do manage it – you need to reward them for their support however you can, and I reckon ownership is a major part of that reward.

Disposable Memory Project at the IPA

Matthew Knight — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:04:14 +0000

I was asked to talk last night about the Disposable Memory Project at an event held by the IPA in London. The videos of the talk should be online within the next week, but in the meantime, the slides are available here and on slideshare.

Update: Chris from Vizeum wrote about the event here for an overview of what was spoken about.

An apple a day

Matthew Knight — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:34:51 +0000

I was asked to speak at last night’s “An apple a day” talk, held by the D&AD at the Hoxton Pony. The speakers were asked to consider ‘what piece of technology has truly changed the way you work’. You can see my response in slideshow form over at Slideshare, and preceeding my ramblings were Alex from de-construct, Ranzie from Tonic, Flo from Dare, Clare from The Partners, and a handful of other people with really interesting perspectives on the question.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone pretty much had the same thing to say – remember the human element, interaction and connection within everything you do.

The Visual Dictionary article

Matthew Knight — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:08:15 +0000

Someone sent me this newspaper clipping about The Visual Dictionary. We still get regular submissions and the database is just growing and growing. I’m going to try and pull together a team of people to do something with the content this year. It’s funny how old it feels now – especially as the images are quite small (it wouldn’t do print), and its all hosted on a server, rather than in a cloud, and it doesn’t use flickr APIs or any form of interconnection with any other services, but the content is still great, and concept is clearly still liked.

if you haven’t seen it before – check out www.thevisualdictionary.net

ps. i have no idea why people think its an american website.. it’s not! i’m english, and the site is internetional (sic)

We Have Band

Matthew Knight — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:33:01 +0000

W+K creative team Ida and Fabian have just completed a music video for music group ‘we have band’, using stop motion. Awesome video, but most interestingly, they’ve uploaded all the the stills from the stop motion to flickr. Will be interesting to see if people take these and create their own versions of the video.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jun/20/bandoftheday.culture

Being able to grasp scale

Matthew Knight — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:13:17 +0000

I think so often when dealing with world issues like famine, poverty, illiteracy – the problems is not being able to comprehend the scale of the situation. What does 1.2 billion people without clean drinking water actually mean? And the more intangible the issue, the less one feels able to do something about it. These infographics all use the idea of ‘If the world was a village of 100 people..’ to scale down the numbers and make the problems tangible. Great use of design to explain a problem. Next step: Simple tangible steps towards removing the problem.