Steve Flinter

The Lero CSET is holding an industry day on December 9 in the Kilmurry Lodge Hotel, Castletroy, Co. Limerick.

Admission to the event is free, and interested parties should contact Jack Downey to register, or check out the conference programme

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science foundation ireland, sfi, lero, conference

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While at the Business of Software conference, this happened.

I’ve only been to California a few times, and I find myself eating dinner 9 miles from the epicentre of a 5.6 quake. Typical!

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Following on from my last post on the topic, here’s a brief run down of day 2 of the Business of Software conference.

• First up was Dan Nunan of Red Gate software, who spoke about marketing made simple – a recurring theme of the conference. Like a number of previous speakers, Dan was originally a techie, but moved into the marketing side of things. Dan’s basic message was that software marketing was not done particularly well, and he provided a list of 10 ideas on how it could/should be improved. One simple idea that I really liked here is that Red Gate have put their software downloads directly on the homepage, and do not force people to jump through registration hoops to get the software.

• Matt Mason, author of the up-coming The Pirates Dilemma was up next. The theme of Matt’s talk was basically how good things can come from piracy (of various forms). Matt’s background is in pirate radio, but his reference to piracy spans all media, including software. This talk took a while to get going, but when it did, there were a few interesting ideas in there. I’ll have to watch out for the book when it’s available.

• Rick Chapman, editor and publisher of Softletter, spoke principally about Software as a Service: SaaS. His basic message was that Saas is coming down the pipe, and you better get ready for it. The talk was primarily aimed at vendors of enterprise software, and that much or all of these systems are going to have to switch to a SaaS model over the next few years, or get eaten alive by vendors who do.

• The fourth talk of the day was by Jennifer Aaker of UC Berkeley. Aaker’s talk covered the intersection between branding and consumer psychology, and she described a number of experiments that she and he colleagues had conducted to understand what emotions people use when attributing qualities to brands, and how brands that fall into different categories are thought of by people. This brief description doesn’t do credit to what was a very interesting and information packed presentation (the best of the day).

• Next up was Hugh MacLeod, the cartoons on the back of business cards guy. MacLeod’s talk was a little bit all-over-the-place, but the basic premise was that it’s important for the geeks to be geeking out over your product. Geeks, in this sense, is anybody with a greater than usual level of knowledge/interest in a topic – not just computer guys. That is, there are wine geeks and clothes geeks, and so on. MacLeod talked about a number of businesses that he has worked with – a Savile Row taylor and a South African winery – whose products he promoted through blogging and guerrilla marketing.

• The final talk was from Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer of the Stanford Business School. Pfeffer’s talk was on how software companies don’t do what they know to be right, and he elaborated to explain why that’s so, and what can be done about it. One of his key messages was the importance of measuring your business, and measuring the right things, and managing the business based on that. I felt that this was a pretty generic talk, and could have referred to any business sector at any time. Nevertheless, it was pretty interesting, if not earth shattering.

Thoughts overall: a very interesting conference, with an interesting mix of speakers and attendees. I felt that the speakers and presentations on the first day were generally better and more interesting than those of the second (Jennifer Aaker notwithstanding).

The one criticism is that most of the software guys that presented ran or worked for companies that sell software aimed at other developers. This is a whole different ball-game from developing and selling software aimed at the general public. Obviously, it follows on that marketing to non-techies is different also, and perhaps the people who espoused geek marketing of various hues might not be as successful with this type of customer.

Anyway, a minor point on an otherwise excellent event.

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Today, SFI officially announced the launch of a number of new CSETs (Centres for Science Engineering and Technology) and SRCs (Strategic Research Clusters).

Professor Frank Gannon, Director General SFI, added; “Today’s research award recipients and the teams that they have assembled are of world-class calibre. I believe that the initiatives to be undertaken by SFI over the coming seven years will provide a cornerstone for Ireland’s future economic development, with CSETs and SRCs playing a key role”.

CSETs are SFI’s largest award type, and are typically in the €10 – €20million range over five years. These awards tend to fund teams of up to 50 researches, including Principal Investigators (PIs), post-docs and graduate students. The CSET programme has been running for about 5 years now, and the latest CSET to be funded is one that I have had responsibility for – namely Centre for Next Generation Localisation, being run out of DCU (with TCD, UCD and UL / LRC as academic partners), and headed up by Professor Josef van Genabith, also of DCU.

SRCs are a new type of programme within SFI. They are clusters (as the name suggests) between two or more investigators, who typically want to study a problem or set of problems that is greater than any one of them alone could work on. The SRCs are in the region of €4 – €8million over five years, and are designed to bridge the gap between single investigator grants, and the much large CSETs. One SRC that I handled, being led by Prof. Stewart Fotheringham of the National Centre for Geocomputation at NUI Maynooth was funded in the area of advanced geotechnologies.

We can expect really interesting things from these centres/clusters over the next number of years.

As usual, the ever-reliable Silicon Republic picks up the story.

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Professor Mark Keane, the former ICT Director and Director General at SFI returned to UCD in February of this year.

He was recently appointed to the role of Vice President of Innovation. Silicon Republic has an interview with Mark.

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The Irish Independent reports on the recently published Top 200 world universities, published by the Times Higher Education Suppplement.

TCD retains its spot as top Irish university, but sees its raking rise to 12th in Europe and 53rd in the world. UCD breaks into top 200 for the first time, at 177.

UCD has also improved its ranking from 219 last year to 177 this year, while UCC leaped 100 places to 286th and DCU jumped from 441 to 300th place.

There were smaller rises for the University of Limerick and DIT, but the National University of Ireland Maynooth and the University of Ulster failed to make the cut of the top 500 in the world.

Overall, a very encouraging performance by Irish academic institutions, and one which reflects the investment being made by SFI and other agencies.

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One of the best non-fiction writers around, Malcolm Gladwell, has resumed blogging with a bang.

Welcome back, you have been missed.

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Last week, I had the pleasure and good fortune of attending the Business of Software conference in San Jose, California.

The lineup of speakers was truly impressive – many well-known figures from the software and blogging worlds.

Here’s a quick run-down of the speakers, and my impression of their talks. For a more detailed set of notes, check out the Business of Software blog

• First up was Guy Kawasaki Guy is a very well-known software guy and blogger, having formerly worked at Apple. His most recent venture is the start-up Truemors. His talk was called The Art of Innovation, and was excellent. However, I had previously seen a video of Guy giving this talk at another conference, and his presentation at the Business of Software was pretty much identical. In many ways, it was more like a performance than a presentation. Nevertheless, well worth seeing live, so to speak.

• Next was Tim Lister, he of Peopleware fame. Tim’s talk was about a set of project management patterns that he has observed from many years of practice. An interesting, but not earth shattering talk.

• Bill Buxton was next on the agenda. The theme of his talk was how the software development process is broken (what’s new there), and that what’s missing is a preproduction stage, along the lines of that in the movie industry. Buxton’s idea is that all stakeholders should be represented in the design stage of a project, where ideas are sketched out before a line of code is written. I wasn’t aware of Buxton before the conference, but was very impressed with the talk, and the ideas behind it. I bought Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences before I left, and am working my way through it now.

• The fourth speaker was Erik Sink. Sink runs a small software company that develops source code management software. The theme of his talk was Marketing for Geeks, and how geeks (or software professionals) can manage the process of software marketing as well as any marketing professionals. The one downside of this talk was that Sink develops software for other software people – not for normal people. This, I have no doubt, makes it much easier to market his wares, as he’s often preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, an interesting talk with plenty of good ideas.

• After lunch was a Software Idol slot, where four speakers gave short (15 minute) talks, and the audience had to vote for a winner. The winner (I suspect by a wide margin) was Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing. Excellent talk by an excellent speaker.

• At the 3pm coffee break, the conference organisers had arranged a breakout session. This involved a number of industry luminaries moderating topics of relevance to the conference. Usually these things are pretty lame affairs, and this one was no different, I’m afraid. I can’t say that I got very much out of this session. Thankfully, it didn’t go on too long.

• The next presenter was Alberto Savoia of Agitar Software. Alberto’s talk was about software quality metrics, and how there is no generally accepted metric for quality in the software industry. He then presented his proposed metric called Change Risk Analysis and Predictions, aka CRAP. As you can tell from the name, the talk and the material were very light-hearted, albeit with a serious intent. Savoia was not somebody I was aware of before the conference, but I found the topic and the presentation wonderful – probably the best of the conference.

• The last talk of day one was by Joel Spolsky, author of the very well known blog Joel on Software. Joel’s talk was about the process that he uses to hire and retain people in his company Fog Creek Software. While the talk was interesting, and well delivered, it was largely a re-presentation of much of the material he has already blogged about. Nevertheless, well worth seeing such a well known figure in action. As an aside, Spolsky is in Dublin this week. I recommend going along to one of the events, if you can make it.

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