Steve Jobs has 46 Chromosomes too…

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I’m in the anti-mac-fanboy-club, but you’ve got to feel for Steve Jobs. Rumors about his health hits the company’s stock price like a profit warning, and now Corporate Governance experts are openly questioning whether the reporting on one man’s health in a company of 32,000 staff was adequate for a public company.

Like Erick at Techcrunch, I wish the man a speedy recovery – while I generally despise the myopic nature of the disciples that make up the global Mac-Fan-Boy-Club, there’s no doubting that Jobs has contributed at least as much to technology as the top handful of humans, ever. I’m glad they’ve found whatever’s wrong, I’m doubly glad it isn’t cancer, and for his sake, hopefully eating meat won’t need to be part of the necessary therapy.

I wish I was a funny as this guy...

I wish I was a funny as XKCD...

Facebook's domination of Christmas Day

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Uncharacteristically short post this time: Dan Whitworth has an article at BBC’s Newsbeat site about Facebook being so popular it accounted for almost 5% of all page views on Christmas Day.

I’ve got three theories for why this might be:

  • The Facebook generation have enough of their families early in the day, and want to catch up with what their friends got up to on Christmas Eve more than if they weren’t hanging out with the folks
  • There just isn’t anything else going on on Christmas Day. News papers shut down. People trying to make news don’t say anything cause they think no-one is watching, or if they are, there’s no working journalists or outlets to report and publish it anyway
  • With the cost of SMS messages – the most recent way to wish your friends a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – coming in at around $1,000,000 per GB, Facebook just plain makes sense.

Either way, Facebook is a phenomenon. When my mum starts asking about it, and my mate’s mum asks to be my friend, its gone as mainstream as you can possibly imagine. And for an advertising based business, mainstream = $$$.

Using FoxyProxy and a spare US Web Server to unlock Pandora

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I first discovered Pandora as a houseguest of Mike Arrington’s back in early 2006, and was immediately hooked. Unfortunately a year or so later, back in Australia, Pandora started blocking access since I wasn’t coming from a US IP address – all over about music licencing territories and a dispute over internet radio royalties that played out until late 2008 in the US alone. While I can’t blame them for picking their battles and deciding the rest of the world could wait until they’d saved their business, I was pretty disappointed as an avid user and fan.

After reading Mike’s latest “Products I can’t live without” post, I thought I’d put 20 mins of work into getting access to Pandora back again. Getting first time access to Hulu and other sites that block international users is on the agenda too, but I’ve got Pandora back now, and I couldn’t be happier. Here’s how I did it.

Ingredients:

  1. Firefox web browser
  2. FoxyProxy plugin
  3. Someone else’s Proxy Server or an Apache Web Server on which you can configure mod_proxy

Method:

  1. I’ll assume you’ve got Firefox. If not, step 3 is probably going to seem a bit tough.
  2. Install FoxyProxy. You might see a warning about the plugin being unsigned. This is common for open-source plugins, and since Mozilla recommend this one, I reckon you’re fairly safe, so choose OK.
  3. When FoxyProxy first loads (following a restart) it will probably ask you whether you want to configure it to use TOR (The Onion Router). If you don’t know what that is, choose no.
  4. From the FoxyProxy options (which will be open by default on first run, but which can be re-opened by clicking on the “FoxyProxy” link in your status bar (the bit at the bottom of your browser), you need to configure a your rules so that attempts to go to Pandora go through your (or someone else’s) US based Proxy Server, as described below in “Configuring FoxyProxy”.

What is a Proxy

In the sense we use it here, a proxy is a computer that makes requests for web pages, images and other we content on your behalf to another server. So, you make a request of the proxy, and the proxy then makes the request to the destination server on your behalf, and when it gets a response from the destination server – in this case, Pandora.com – it receives it and then passes it back into your browser.

In default mode, Firefox (like most web browsers) can only run with one proxy server configured at a time; this is problematic because while I want to use my Proxy to access Pandora, I don’t want all my traffic crossing the Pacific (twice): it would slow things down a lot when I’m browsing Australian websites.

This is why you need FoxyProxy: it allows you to apply logic and rules to what traffic you send via the proxy, and which you let go through normally (usually directly). You can even define different multiple proxies, each of them having their own rules or patterns that bring them into play.

Before configuring FoxyProxy, you’ll need to have a proxy server to use. Here, you’ve got two options: you can try using a public open proxy, or if you’ve got a web hosting account that gives you access to Apache’s configuration files, you can make one yourself.

Using a Public Proxy Server

Using a Public Proxy Server is pretty easy, although there’s no promises as to the reliability of the servers you want to connect through: remember, Pandora is streaming radio, which means if the Proxy your using is being used by a lot of other people, you might not have enough bandwidth to suck the music stream down through.

I did a quick Google search, and the xroxy.com list ranked pretty well. I can’t vouch for it or any of the Proxies it lists, but it looked OK. If you don’t have access to your own Apache server in the US, this is what you’ll need to use.

Making Apache a Proxy Server

If you’ve got access to an Apache server, you can make your own Proxy in a few quick minutes. I’ll take you through the steps now.

  • Open httpd.conf, or a file that httpd.conf includes, often found in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf or somewhere similar, in your favourite editor.
  • Scroll down the file, and look for a LoadModule directives that mention “proxy”. There are two we need to make this work: mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http. If they’re there, then you’ve got the prerequisites you need.
    • NB: If the line that mentioned them has a # at the start of this, that means they’re currently disabled: remove the # at the start of the line to enable them the proxy functionality in Apache.
    • If you can’t find these directives, it might be that your hosting company doesn’t let you edit your core httpd configuration file. This isn’t uncommon, particularly in shared environments. If you’ve got the ability to edit at least some configuration files, you might get lucky and find that mod_proxy is enabled already, so keep perservering cross your fingers.
  • Now we’ve established that you have proxy (or we’re hoping you do), its time to configure the proxy. My configuration (with the IP address for Allow from changed) is below:
ProxyRequests On
ProxyVia Off
<Proxy http://*.pandora.com/*>
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
</Proxy>
  • The block of code allows people from the IP address listed in the Allow from line to access http://www.pandora.com, streaming.pandora.com or any other prefix of pandora.com, as well as allowing those people to access files and subdirectories of *.pandora.com. MAKE SURE YOU PUT YOUR OWN IP ADDRESS IN THE ALLOW FROM DIRECTIVE. You can find your IP address from the aptly named WhatIsMyIP.com site.
  • When you’re done, do an apachectl configtest and if Apache is happy, do an apachectl graceful to reload the configuration files.

Once this is done, it’s time to configure FoxyProxy so that your browser actually makes requests to your new proxy when you’re trying to go to Pandora.

Configuring FoxyProxy

Configuring FoxyProxy wasn’t too hard, but if you’re not familar with the terminology, its easy to feel confused. Here’s a step by step.

  1. Inside the FoxyProxy options box (you can get to it using the instructions described above), you want to click on “Add New Proxy” on the right hand side.
  2. On the next screen, under the “General” tab, give your Proxy a name. If you’re using a public proxy, use the name from the listing website; if you’re using your own, give it a name like “MyProxy”.
  3. From the “Proxy Details” tab, enter the address of the proxy. If you set up your own proxy, this will be your server’s hostname or IP address. You also need to choose a port: if you set up your own server using the Apache instructions above, it will likely be 80; if you used a public proxy, look for the number after the : in the address if they don’t specify an explicit port number. Also, if you created your own Proxy using Apache, leave the SOCKS box unticked.
  4. The “URL Patterns” tab is where you tell your browser to use this proxy whenever you’re going to Pandora.com.
    1. Click on “Add New Pattern”
    2. Type a name for the pattern that makes sense to you, eg, Pandora
    3. Type the following into the URL pattern box: http://*pandora*/*
    4. Leave the default radio buttons (whitelist and wildcard)
    5. Click on OK to save the Pattern, and then OK to save the FoxyProxy settings, and then close.
  5. Now, you need to enable FoxyProxy. Simply right-click on “FoxyProxy” text in the status bar, and choose “Use proxies based on their pre-defined patterns and priorities”.
  6. Try going to http://www.pandora.com – this is the real test of your Proxy server, and whether it will let you pass traffic through to Pandora. The following results might give you an idea of what where a problem lies:
    1. 403 Forbidden Error: the Proxy isn’t letting you get through to Pandora.
      1. If you’re using a pubic proxy, then they don’t like you, or don’t like Pandora. Either way, choose another proxy.
      2. If you’ve set up your own Proxy using Apache, you’re either coming through from a different IP address than you thought (check for typos on the “Allow from” line), or you’ve typed in your “<Proxy>” directive incorrectly; check there for typos too.
    2. If you get the “restricted” page from Pandora telling you your IP address is outside of the US, then one of the following has occured:
      1. If it shows you your IP address, then you either haven’t turned FoxyProxy on (make sure you do Step 5 above), or you’ve made a mistake when setting up your URL Pattern: go in and have another look.
      2. If it shows you another IP address, like that of your Proxy, then Pandora doesn’t think the Proxy is in the US. Use another Proxy.

These are a few instructions that worked for me: they’re not going to work for everyone, and they don’t take into account the myriad of different ways you can set up Apache servers in particular.

Hope you’ve found them useful – if you’ve got questions, please post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them.

It feels like there's a community forming…

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Just a few late night reflections on the (Sydney-centred) Australian Startup Community, and more particuarly, SiliconBeachAustralia.org at the centre of it.

While I’ve personally been playing the startup game on and off for a while now (first with Internetrix, which is now pretty established, then Omnidrive that taught a lot of lessons on how not to do things, and now Hiive Systems, which we soft launched over the Christmas break), including time in Australia as well as Silicon Valley, I’ve never really felt like I’ve been part of a community. Whether the community I associate with SiliconBeach existed or not in the past is something for others to say, but from my perspective, feeling like being part of the startup community is a fairly new thing.

Almost by definition, being an entrepreneur is a lonely existence.

It isn’t that we’re loners, antisocial or isolationists – there’s good reasons for feeling alone a lot of time.

Firstly, we’re kinda busy a lot of the time – more so than most of our friends or family seem to be – trying to create our dreams, but it really just comes across as being workaholics. Sure, we’re having fun in a perverse way with the stuff that really drives us crazy as we learn the things that don’t work, but it does make for a certain amount of loneliness.

Secondly, the things that we care about – investment, scaling, staff, company structures, marketing and so many more topics – isn’t really pub conversation, so while we’re quite happy to talk about whether Hayden should be dropped from the next Test or not, it probably isn’t the thing at the top of our mind.

I’m sure there’s plenty of other things that lead to being a bit lonely in our endeavours, but its late, and I’ll leave it at that…

The thing I’ve been most impressed about professionally over the 6 months or so is that I’ve seen a community start to form and take shape. Again, it probably existed long before I noticed anything or was included, but this is my blog, so I’ll take a naive 1st person reference point or we could be here all night.

So, why do I think a community is forming?

Firstly, entrepreneurs are building relationships. Real relationships. I’ve actually made real friends, people I’ve enjoyed beers with, had lunches and dinners with, and more than anything, have gotten to know and respect. I like these people, and really enjoy their company, and they seem to tolerate mine. Why are we forming real friendships and relationships? It surely isn’t just the work: I think its about a shared lifestyle, a shared passion, and a shared outlook. I might never work with any of them, and I don’t really care – while entrepreneurship (and thus by proxy business) might be the common thread, its the people at the ends of this thread that are worth knowing. This isn’t some virtual social network substituting for real friends and human relationships.

Secondly, people are having real conversations. Talk is cheap? Sure it is, but it takes time and effort, and you know a community is forming when there’s care and passion in the talking. There’s been a few little dust-ups and differences of opinion, but that’s a good thing in moderation: people care enough to contribute, and as long as they listen to the other guy/girl’s point of view, it’s all good. On the lower friction side of the equation, and following on from the relationships thing above, I’ve just come off a 40 minute Skype chat with @Nickhac, someone I wouldn’t have gotten to know – and massively appreciate and value taking the time to talk to – if it wasn’t for the SiliconBeach community.

Thirdly, people are interacting, not just occassionally, but through both casual and signifcant events that cost much more than money – they cost time. It’s now 4 months since StartupCamp was held in Sydney, and StartupCamp II is coming in a couple of weeks. This is on top of the regular Friday Drinks, a range of other events including BBall, and finally the conference circuit which those of us too busy can follow thanks to the likes of @kcarruthers. 2009 is looking like a bumper year for quality interaction in the entrepreneurial scene. I’m really looking forward to StartupCamp II in Sydney, and I really hope Geekdom can handle us, since there’s something like 90 people already signed up to come. I’m mildly concerned about what we’ll do without Bart there to guide us, but hopefully we learned enough last time around on the maiden voyage to have a stab at it.

A big thankyou… to you

So, in summary, I’d like to thank Elias for kicking off SiliconBeachAustralia.org, and I’d also like to thank all the other people who’ve contributed to the 1400+ messages over the last 5 and a bit months. Lets keep this community growing, and don’t be afraid to say hi – introduce yourself on the list, come along to StartupCamp or follow the action on UStream or startup-australia.org or technation.com.au if you’re too far away to make it in person.

But, most of all, if you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t need to be lonely…

Telstra's Letter to Shareholders – a lot of talk, no real explaination

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Last week, Telstra got booted from the National Broadband Network process, where the Australian Federal Government will be spending about half the amount of money they (wasted) on the bogan bonus to fund/subsidise an improvement in Australia’s broadband capacity down to the last mile.

Telstra, the largest telco in the country, apparently didn’t like the concept that some Govt money in the process might mean the new network actually involves competition between the network, wholesale and retail divisions of the value chain: one network with cost recovery, then a number of wholesalers, and then lots of retailers. You know, competition on a utility.

Anyway, they submitted an incomplete report, and the Govt kicked them out of the process for non-compliance. Their share price then copped a hiding, double digit losses even in a rising market, since it is pretty clear this new network is going to be “where its at” for the next generation of Australian fixed-line internet access. The government will need to legislate to ensure the successful builder gets access to the copper and other Telstra infrastructure, and it would have been much better for them to have been in the game. But they had a dummy spit, and now the pressure has been on for them to explain their incompetence to their shareholders, including yours truly.

Here’s the letter. A lot of talk, but no explaination. What a disappointment.

Continue reading →

The Perils of Credit (cards)

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On a recent trip that included China, half a dozen stops in Europe, and some time in New York and San Francisco, someone skimmed my corporate credit card. My bank, Bankwest, has a pretty impressive fraud detection system, and when someone (I think based in China) made a $1 transaction (so as to test whether the number was valid, before either selling the details on or coming back to try and clean me out), the bank’s team caught it and gave me a call.

Unfortunately, I was in the US at the time, and for some reason they didn’t see fit to leave a message, so all of a sudden, my card stopped working, but it was at the tail end of the trip, and I decided I’d look into it when I got back, thinking it might have just been a normal effect of running out of credit limit or something.

After getting home and calling the bank, I was told all about the fraud, that the card had been deactivated, and that they’d send me a new one.

With a number of automatic transactions with suppliers now rejecting, there was only a little bit of hassle involved with telling them the new number. Everyone except TPG internet.

With the new number in hand, I dutifully logged into their web control panel and updated the details. The system accepted them, but a short time later sent me an email and told me that the card wasn’t valid. I logged in again, thinking I must have mistyped a number or two, but again, after a while, an email came through rejecting things.

Not I thought they might have had something wrong on their end, as I’d been buying fuel for the car and paying other vendors successfully with it, and I made a note to come back in a day or two to try again.

This went on for a little while, until I got a call from the bank after I’d made a number of large transactions internationally in a short period of time. While confirming the transactions were legitimate, I happened to ask the caller from the bank whether she could see if there was anything wrong with the card that would explain why TPG’s transactions were failing.

She looked back through the records, only to see that TPG was trying to process my card with an expiry date of 20/22, ie, a month much greater than 12 in the year 2022.

When I got my email reminder from TPG accounts the next day, I replied and explained in some detail what I’d discovered, and asked if someone could give me a call or reply via email with an update on what’s happening at their end.

Later that day, upon getting to my home office, I tried to log on, only to find I’d been disconnected. I called through to their phone number on the bottom of their accounts email, and selected accounts, only to find I’d called 10 mins after they’d closed for the day. Of course, they then hung up on me. So I rang again pressed 2 for tech support, thinking I’d play dumb about my connection not working, and hope they’d take my credit card over the phone and reactivate or unblock the account. Instead of being placed in the support queue, however, I was just told they couldn’t help me right now (presumably too many people in the queue, but the system didn’t say that) and promptly hung up on me. Customer service: FAIL.

Giving up, I called the next morning, and after 15 mins on hold for accounts, I told my story to an outsourced phone support person. I tried to explain my situation with some difficulty because of language issues, and she tried to take the CC payment over the phone. Again, it failed. She put me on hold, and then 10 minutes later, hung up on me. Repeating the process, and now getting having been at it for almost an hour by this time, I am finally asked some details about the card, like the bank it is with. “Oh, we’re sorry, we’re having problems with some Bankwest cards”.

So, while on one hand I’m frustrated by the scammers who nicked my details and made this all necessary, I’m actually more frustrated with TPG. Their system had a problem, and they then disconnected me and made me jump through hoops to try and diagnose and solve it, and even with the accurate information, it still took an hour to have someone recognise it.

They’ve now demanded I give them a different credit card, or access to draw money out of my bank account, but I’ve told them to get stuffed – they should fix their system, and email me when they’ve done it. No one else I’m working with is having any problems, and given the quality of their website – design last touched in 1997 or something I think – and their poor quality customer service, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were massively cutting corners on their payment processing gateway: there’s some things you just shouldn’t scrimp on.

If they do this again, I’m off to Internode, who I heard nothing but great stories about while at OSDC last week.

Trademark Applications in AU and US

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I recently got a letter from a law firm in the US, alleging that my new business, Hiive Systems, has infringed their trademark. Unfortunately for them, the best they could do in claiming a trade mark was allege our logo was similar to theirs (we don’t think it is), and even though our businesses are in different industries, they demanded we stop using our name, logo and relinquish our registered domains, or they’ll sue us under some loose Common Law precedent formed in 1870 or so when the US government sued a counterfeiter.

Anyway, this is all going to play out over the next few months, so I won’t name names or go into details here lest I prejudice things or give these guys cause to make the issue (more) personal, but the upshot was that I did one of those important and non urgent things, and registered my trademark for Hiive Systems, initially in the US and Australia, and soon via the Madrid protocol.

For the benefit of those that haven’t gone through the process, but have been thinking about it, here are a couple of notes/observations. The key point is that it isn’t that expensive, and it isn’t that hard – if you’ve got a brand you care about, you really should be protecting your rights through a trade mark.

Australian Trade Marks (via ipaustralia.gov.au)

The process of applying for the trademark was fairly straight forward. The online application form was quite user friendly, and they made it easy to upload files and search for categories you want your trade mark applied to, from within the application process/form.

What surprised me the most was the vast array of detailed classifications for trademark categories: while I had previously thought the applications were for around 45 “high level” classes of registration (such as Class 9 which includes computer software), there are hundreds of sub-classes, and each one you select using a checkbox costs you more ($120 a pop). For example, “software” as a search phrase returned more than 80 sub-classes of Class 9 alone.

Starting small, we’ve spent $240AUD on an application for two categories, payable by credit card, and now we wait for the examination process to unfold. So far, pretty easy, and if/when they get accepted, we’ll be up for $250/class to actually register the marks, and then $300/class/year to maintain them: a total startup cost of $370/class.

IPAustralia is currently estimating less than a 3 month assessment period, which is nice – if I’m lucky I’ll know the result by Valentines Day.

United States Trade Marks (via www.uspto.gov)

The US Trade Mark system was decidedly less user-friendly, however, with patience and reading the fine-print, it worked out well.

Much like the Australian example, there are hundreds of sub-classes that you can apply against with your Trade Mark application, and each of these has a cost attached: US$275 per sub class, using the online TEAS-Plus system, which is a little more demanding of what you give it (and which presumably saves the examiners time). The good news is that these fees also appear to cover the actual registration if the mark is accepted, which is a good thing, since they’re a fair amount higher than the Australian application fees.

One snag I got stuck on while registering was the need to declare the reason for the registration for each class – it was important to select one box at a time, and in my case, choose 1a) since we’re already trading, and then upload some proof that we were already using the mark, in our case, a screenshot from our application. This form and button processes was very poor on user friendliness, and I had to delete and re-add records after accidentally setting them to be 1b) (not in use yet) and start over.

The email from the USPTO states that it is likely to be about 5 months until the application even gets examined, however, when it comes to challenges on validity of the trademark, they’ll use the application date as their reference point. If I’m lucky, I’ll know the result before the start of next year’s ski season.

If YouTube's struggling, what hope's anyone else got?

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Was just reading a post from Mark Cuban, Blog Maverick, about what he percieves as desperation on the part of Google when it comes to monetising all that User Generated Content on their site.

Frankly, I don’t have the time to be a big YouTube watcher, so I’ll take Mark’s comments about changes and user experience at face value. Regardless though, I’ve long been a skeptic of the “we’ll build a loss making business with lots of eyeballs, and work out how to make a buck from it later” approach used by so many Web 2.0 consumer web plays.

And if Google can’t seem to make this work, you’ve got to ask yourself: “what hope does anyone else have”?

As remarked by Mike Cannon-Brooks in a SiliconBeachAustralia podcast, the sheer volume of eyeballs required to generate a sustainable business, assuming generous CPM’s, is amazing. If you want to have a $10m revenue business, you need to make close to $1m/month. If you manage to get $10 CPM, then you need 100 million page views per month – this is pretty massive scale, all for a business that could afford to employ, at most 50 staff, and that’s assuming you’re generating all of your own content (no licencing costs), and that your server and bandwidth costs aren’t too high.

Of course, this doesn’t mean is isn’t possible (divide all numbers by 10 if you and a few mates want to make it as a small crew), but unless you’re able to drive up your CPM by having content close to a transaction, in the current economy, its going to be an uphill battle.

1800 and 1300 Numbers in Australia

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I’ve been doing a bit of research lately on phone setup for my new startup, Hiive Systems. Part of the establishment work is around phone numbers, and I’ve learned a few things I thought might be worth sharing.

Firstly, I’ve learned that – in Australia anyway – VoIP services haven’t yet come of age. Even after iPrimus came and gave a presentation at the Australian Telecommunication Users Group about their new VoIP services (and how their roll-out for Rebel Sport saved a lot of money and made them much more efficient), the presenter admitted that it is really about point to point type services where you’ve got multiple offices.

Secondly, I’ve learned a bit more about the 1300 and 1800 phone number system. We’ve had a 1800 number with Internetrix for a while, and we got it as part of a long distance plan through AAPT some time ago. In setting things up with Hiive, I wanted to have another look at how it all works.

Turns out, there are lots of companies out there that specialise in these sorts of services. Generally, you pay a monthly fee, usually with no committment, and then you pay a price per minute to receive calls. The prices of two companies, AllTel and Telcoworx are included in the attached spreadsheet, which you can see by clicking here.

These companies will route your call to any landline – or, for a higher cost, mobile – number you like, which makes sense. What surprised me the most, however, is that the difference between 1300 (cheaper, because the caller pays something) and 1800 (free to the caller) is bugger all. So, given 1800 numbers look a bit better/more professional/generous, we’ll be getting one of those.

The other thing that was new info is how the numbers are allocated. Since this is a national namespace, it works a bit like domain names, and some numbers – which can spell your company name on the handset – cost more than others. There’s a Federal body responsible for auctioning off numbers that are more in-demand, usually because they use a lot of repetition – called SmartNumbers which appear to be a part of the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

What surprised me was how they price these numbers. By going to the search form on the SmartNumbers website, you can do a search for the phone number you want, and they’ll tell you if it is a premium number, which they’ve determined will have a reserve price at an auction; the more repeating numbers, the higher the reserve it would appear.

As a result, changing the leading digit at the beginning of the number I’m looking for – I’ll keep it a secret for the moment until I’ve won the auction – changes the price from being a reserve of $500 to, in one case, a reserve of $12,500 – that’s a 25x increase in reserve!

Also like domain names, it would appear that once you’ve got one of these numbers, you become the “Rights of Use” holder; I think this is a bit like a lease on a domain name; you never own the domain, but you have the rights to it exclusively.

I remember a Fourth Estate Domain presentation some time ago with the (younger) Jack Singleton, who runs/ran Phone Names, and was trying to tap into this gold rush aspect. While it looks like the Feds have wised up with an auction system to stop companies “claiming” the rights to thousands of names, just to on-sell them like domain squatters, the more open nature of the process now should make people in business think about reserving a number that matches their business name.

OSDC Sydney 2008 – a wrap

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I was lucky enough to spend the better part of last week at the Open Source Developers Conference, or OSDC, held in Sydney between Wed 3rd and Fri 5th of December.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from my first OSDC conference – they’ve been running for five years, and we’ve had at least one rep from Internetrix, and now Hiive Systems, head along since the 2nd one.

Users, not contributors

From a business perspective, I’m a big fan of Open Source Software. As the provider of a range of hosted, software-as-a-service style offerings, however, I’ve been a little constrained in what I’ve been able to have our talented team of developers put back into the Open Source community; so far, it has just been participation and help in forums and such.

While it is a legitimate refrain from members of the Open Source community to ask businesses to Open Source their applications and make them freely available, the service/hosting nature of our business makes this impossible. For example, we’ve already had a Chinese based company knock off our entire website design, and if we shared our code verbatim, we’d likely have knock-offs appearing everywhere and destroying any chance we’ve got to recover our significant, sunken investment. For the clients that licence our software to run on their own servers, however, we provide them with access to the source code; partly its a peace of mind things given some of our clients are very large, and partly its about giving them control of their own destiny. They of course undertake not to redistribute it.

So, given we don’t open-source our apps, I wasn’t sure if I would be burnt at the stake or derided as a leech who takes and doesn’t give anything back when I arrived on Wednesday.

Open in more than code

As it turned out, while the community quite rightly has a level of religious zeal towards everything being free and available, there was a much stronger sense of support between participants in the community. The desire to provide mutual support to others that came through much more strongly than I’d ever seen at a conference, in both the presented sessions by day and social activities of an evening. In this sense, the emphasis was much more on the free and open exchange of ideas and suggestions, and there most sessions I participated had presenters asking for tips and suggestions on how to improve their own approaches to solving problems.

Making our contribution

One of the sessions that surprised me the most was a business session run by MySQL guru, Arjen Lentz from Open Query. Arjen’s previous two scheduled sessions were full of great advice and tips – at both a high and at a detailed level – on how we can build a better business with MySQL. Needless to say I had high expectations coming into his third presentation on the Friday afternoon, which continued the concept of architecting for success, just in case. Arjen said straight up that he didn’t expect to have three talks accepted to the proceedings, and that the session would be much more of a forum style chat about business things. Unfortunately, the content wasn’t very good, and it seemed to highlight somewhere we may be able contribute and give something back: in the business sphere of things. Hopefully, the siliconbeachaustralia.org initiative will help provide a welcoming, friendly environment for excellent technologists to deepen their entrepreneurial and business skills, and I’ll be looking for any ways to contribute there.

From a code contribution point of view, we have already picked at least two ways we can contribute; things that we think may be useful for the broader community. One of them is a real-time query format translator between MySQL formatted queries – which rely on built-in functions like CONCATENATE and different ways of using LIMIT – and MSSQL server. The other is a more ambitious project, to leverage our exposure to Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, and our own internal needs to integrate more closly with the whole Google Apps ecosystem, and contribute the Perl code we write to interface with GData sources back to CPAN. We’ve also now made personal connections with a number of the luminaries in the Australian Open Source community, and with people to talk to about contributing, who can give us access, we’re much more able to play a part.

Stand by for some updates in a month or three as some of these contributions take shape, and thanks again to the organisers who manage to run such a professional, well attended event for what is a seriously (comparatively) low ticket price.

Update: Stephen Edmonds, one of the nicest prolific photographers ever at these sorts of things, took the following photo; some of the Hiive crew with Larry Wall, Father of Perl. Worth the price of admission 😉

Larry Wall and Hiive

Larry Wall and Hiive