December Tech Meetup - web analytics, casual games and online spreadsheets

The December meetup started earlier at 6:30pm like last time. The turn-around was smaller (40) this time, possibly because its December and many people are on holiday and students/professors are preparing for exams. For people working in retail-related industries, Christmas season is the busiest time of the year, while others are preparing for the holidays.

Even then this tech meetup was one of the best we have had since we started. We had two great demos, an interesting talk, and lots of pizza and beer for everyone...



We started early like last time (6:30pm) and the initial chat and pizza took us an hour. We started with the presentations by 7:45pm. We had initially planned on each demo/talk taking 15 mins including questions, but it took much longer and in the end, all talks finished only by 9:30pm.

But the quality of the discussion was really good, be it Andrew explaining policies of Google and use of analytics, or Thanasis defending Java and the design decisions behind his game, or Gordon explaining their plans to take over the world of Spreadsheets.

So let us get to the talks...

Web Analytics

Andrew Hood who founded Lynchpin Analytics gave a quick rundown on Analytics, what it is and why to use it. He explained how advanced analytics can help websites track the sources of traffic and the flow within the website. Analytics can also track how successful various marketing campaigns (like AdWords/AdSense) and referral strategies have been. In today's world of cut-throat competition for attention on the web, successful marketing campaigns are critical to a websites' fortunes. But failure or success can only be understood and replicated if hard statistics are available for the decisions being made. Online Analytics is a way to achieve this understanding.

Here's a video of Andrew's talk...


Lynchpin from Sam Collins on Vimeo.


Crazy Space

Casual Gaming is a pretty big industry ($2.25 billion in 2008) and is growing fast. The industry consisting of small and easy to play games like Solitaire (Microsoft), Tetris (Tetris Holding) and Bejeweled (PopCap Games) is aimed at "non-gamers". These games are intended to be for relaxation and quick entertainment, and are mostly aimed at women (comprising 75% of the sales). The reason we don't hear a lot about these games is that these gamers don't tend to talk a lot about their gaming habits and they usually don't identify themselves as gamers...

Thanasis Theocharidis who has been working on casual games for many years, gave a demo of his game "Crazy Space". Crazy Space is a "Othello" inspired game which has been engineered ground-up. Thanasis wrote his own libraries for online AI calculations and fast hardware acceleration in Java. The game can also run on Google's new Android mobile platform.



Even though I'm not part of the intended audience, I found the game pretty addictive after playing a while :-)... You can download/play the game online.




Hypernumbers

The charm of starting a start-up is to dream big and think different. But alas, even in the startup world, very rarely do we see ideas that are truly original and ambitious. And this is what excites me most about Hypernumbers.

The whole idea of Hypernumbers is a little hard to grasp in beginning, and it looks like another online version of Microsoft Excel. But its purpose is to build a platform using which any non-developer/non-programmer can easily build their own websites. You say: Hold on... what?

In Hypernumbers, every cell in a spreadsheet has a unique URL and hence can be used as a variable to be programmed with. This means that any element on a webpage can map to a cell in a spreadsheet. For eg, each textbox, dropdown or checkbox on a webpage would map to a cell in a spreadsheet in the backend. So, if you can program an excel sheet you could potentially create your own website!

The point is that this allows a huge number of non-technical people who know how to use and write macros in Excel, to easily create websites.

Gordon Guthrie, Dale Harvey and Hasan Veldstra have created a highly scalable architecture in Erlang from scratch. They have written their own parsers for Excel documents (along with 100k compatibility tests) and Gordon tells me their system has recently crossed 90% compatibility.

Hypernumbers were funded by SeedCamp in 2007 and are looking to launch their first beta product this year in March. So stay tuned at http://hypernumbers.com/.

See slides of Gordon's previous talk on Erlang.


Photos

I was in-charge of the photos this time and didn't do a very good job :-(. But I did take a lot of pictures and by the "law of large numbers", some of them did turn out to be good... They are here.

The Website

Colin has been working hard on the Tech Meetup website, and it should be functional and up pretty soon... Do send us any feedback as it is supposed to be used by you guys...


The next meetup is on 14th Jan. Hopefully everyone will be back from holidays and we will have a great Tech Meetup again...

Previous meetups: First (September) Tech Meetup, the October Tech Meetup, and the November Tech Meetup

November Tech Meetup - Virtualization and time travel!

I was about to title this post as "November Tech Meetup - another success" but then thought that it was getting cliched... Nonetheless the November Meetup was pretty "successful" with about 60 people attending. We had enough pizza for everyone this time... :-)

Trial of Corners Idea

This time, on popular demand, we finally tried the corners idea. We labelled five corners in the room as "Games and virtual worlds", "Cool AI applications", "Databases and scaling", "Web design" and "Employers and job seekers". Though it seemed to be working in the beginning, and many people were asking what and where the corners were, towards the end most corners were empty. We think the reason was that even though people came to these corners, they saw no one there and went somewhere else. So it seems that it takes people dedicated to a corner to start a community around it. This may be something we can think about and try again in the future...

This time we had only one talk, but it was a good one...

Virtualization

Virtualization, or V12n (as there are 12 chars between 'V' and 'n', I didn't know that), is one of those buzzwords in the IT industry that you hear a lot, but very few people really understand what it means.

So it was great to hear Dan Shearer explain V12n, esp. since he is really passionate about it. Dan is a veteran of open source (he once told me, he first started developing software when I was 2 yrs old), and is a founder of the Samba foundation. But apart from all that, he is one of the smartest people you'll meet. So I was really looking forward to his talk...

Virtualization first began as a mechanism of testing software. As a software developer it has always been a pain to develop and test over all kinds of electronic devices out there. There are different chip sets, operating systems, motherboard and device configurations, and you can never be sure if what you have written works "fine" on all of them. So virtualization began with a purpose of simulating all kinds of hardware, with software. As for the software being tested, it doesn't matter if the underlying system is "real" or "virtual".

So Virtualization is essentially "Abstraction". You can simulate electronics and hardware, physical interfaces, people (how users interact with the system) and even time (speed up or slow down the computation to test for faster devices, and even change the direction of time)...

"All software is crap" (Dan says, not me... ;-) )

The point here is that even if software is perfectly written and tested on all current hardware/software configurations, we never know how it is going to perform in the future on unknown configurations like hardware that is 100 times faster or physical interactions that have not yet been imagined and created!

But these impossible configurations can be "virtually" created and the software can still be tested on these virtual configurations. So, Virtualization gives us a powerful method of preparing and testing for all kinds of strange future situations.

Time travel (oh yeah!)

If we take snapshots of a system every say 10 secs, we could restore these snapshots every second and make time run 10 times faster! Or we can restore these snapshots in reverse and even make time run backwards (virtually of course)...

This can be of tremendous help esp. while debugging. I have always feared programming in C++, as after you have removed all the obvious bugs, the scary part starts... If there are any memory leaks or hidden bugs in the system, the program crashes while running online (and taking down 10 other systems in the process). And there is rarely any way of recreating exactly what happened (unless you have heavy logging). But such backward time-travel could allow you to go back from a crash to see exactly when, where and how the problem started.

I can't wait to actually try out one of these debuggers...

Here are the slides for Dan's talk:

Virtualization - Dan Shearer

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: shearer tech)

Apart from many amazing new attendees we were very happy that Randy Haykin of Outlook Ventures, and who was the author of the original Yahoo strategy in the 90's, joined us.

I hope we continue to attract cool people to the Tech Meetup, and it evolves to be the hub of technologists and tech-preneurs in Edinburgh and Scotland.

</rant>

Previous meetups: First (September) Tech Meetup and the October Tech Meetup

December Tech Meetup - 10th Dec

The Tech Meetup for this December is scheduled for this Wednesday, i.e. 10th Dec. The venue and time are the same as last time...

Venue: 8th Floor, Appleton Tower, Edinburgh
Time: 6:30 PM

There is lots to look forward to as this time we'll have demo's from Hypernumbers and Dot-Red Games and a talk on "Web Analytics" by Andrew Hood of Lynchpin Analytics.

Can't wait...

update...

Sorry for not posting in a while... there were a lot of things happening...

My visa application (for UK Tier 1 visa) was rejected while the previous visa was about to expire. Apparently, the UK Border Agency doesn't recognise any income made through Paypal and Paypal statements are not considered valid. And hence, I did not have sufficient "valid" or "provable" income for the past one year to clear their minimum requirements (even though I have payed tax on it).

So it seems, my mistake was not taking a "regular" job after graduating and trying something different...

Anyway, am still in the process of sorting everything out. Fingers crossed...

Will get back to posting soon.