Day: 18 May 2007

Xtech 2007 finished for this year

Xtech crowd

So its Friday and Xtech finished half a day ago. Overall, Xtech 2007 was excellent and I enjoyed every minute of it.

The conference was quite diverse in nature this year. A quick scan of a room revealed people from enterprise, academia, public sector and of smaller startups. The theme for the conference was ubiquity and most presentations were actually loosely connected. And what a range of topics this time around. Everything from debates about XHTML 2.0 and HTML 5 to the abstract nature of ubiquitous technology and products.

Once again choosing the sessions was always going to be very difficult with 4 tracks running side by side. Edd added Personal schedule just before the conference last week which helped a lot but I ended up adding more that one per slot into my personal schedule. In the end I went to these sessions.

 

I missed a few slots because of the late night drinking and talking with Molly, Gavin and others more that once. Most of the sessions I went to, I did video but its taking forever to upload all 2+ gigs of videos up to Blip.tv via FTP. I got a feeling the hotel might actually be crippling all ports except 80 and 443 because skype sounds like crap and my VPN to the house feels slower that it should be.

Flickr

The hotel is a pretty nice hotel, a little pricey but its right on the river and just within walking distance from the Eiffel Tower. The conference felt a lot more tighter that the previous one I had been at (2005). Rooms all had plenty of power but wireless was a problem. It wasn't free which seems to be a theme for most conferences now, For the presenters a special code was given out.so they could get online without too much problem

Great work Edd and the other people who  were involved. I look forward to Xtech  next yeaar. I'm already thinking about a couple of new proposals.

My Pictures | Group pictures
My Videos

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Microsoft announce Popfly, the mashup pipeline application

So only 2 days after my presentation at Xtech 2007 about user generated pipelines and how Microsoft have got something in store in this area. Microsoft release details of Popfly,

Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.

There is a screencast which shows pretty much everything you can do at a basic level with Popfly. There's also some more focused videos here.

The service is split into two, one a application the other a service.

  1. Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups.
  2. Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

It looks good and works well. Almost anyone power user will get the hang of it within minutes but there is almost enough to keep more advanced users going for a while. However it falls down in the same places as Yahoo Pipes. No access to the local file system again. Theres even bigger problems when you compare it to my core principles of user generated pipelines.

  • Definable
  • Graphical
  • Standard
  • Shareable
  • Open
  • Non-proprietary

Popfly only manages to get Graphical and Sharable right. This is worrying but its still in Alpha, so who knows what might happen in the next version. Till then, there is a blog for the team and a few screenshots even.

meta-technorati-tags=popfly, pipelines, pipeline, usergeneratedpipelines, flow, xtech, xtech2007, xtech07

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