Conferences
Impersonal Democracy
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/23/2008 - 15:28Today is the first day of Personal Democracy Forum, #pdf2008, and I am trying to make sense of my feelings about not being there. I don’t think it is sour grapes. I couldn’t justify paying the price of attending, and I just didn’t feel like scrambling to get in as a panelist, volunteer, scholarship, member of the press or so other sort of comp.
No, it feels to me like PDF has lost the personal touch. I spoke a little bit about that last year, and it feels even more so this year. It all feels so predictable, the usual speakers saying the usual things, various attendees complaining about panels led by four white men, and others being too crowded to get into.
Yes, I would have loved to hear Zephyr Teachout speak. I got a sense of what she was saying through Andy Carvin’s Tweets. It sounds like she still gets the personal aspect of it. I suspect that a discussion with her about her ideas in a coffee shop in Burlington would be great, but I suspect the hall at Lincoln Center was a less personal venue.
Yet from other tidbits I’ve picked up on Twitter, I wonder if the growing community of PDF is the growing community of those working, one way or another, in Internet Enabled Electioneering.
Micah Sifry started things off with a comment about how small donor networking has taken big-money politics down a notch. Has it? Sure, there are a lot of smaller donors fattening the campaigns’ coffers, but these coffers are larger than ever. On the spending side, politics is bigger money than ever. It would be interesting to know how much of this is going to media companies, both new and old.
So, what do we see at PDF this year? Wonderful maps of the influence of Internet based media. Presidential Watch 08 gives a map of the political blogosphere. All of the big name media companies are there. The campaigns are there. The DCCC and DNC are there, but what is missing is the long tail.
There was a brief discussion about MoveOn being on the fringe and Tracy Russo noted that this is one of the problems of web-only metrics. I suspect that if you look at the long tail of blogs by unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, you might see a very different picture.
The problem is that it is very hard to quantify the impact of these unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, and if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t really matter, right? After all, what matters most is the quantified results of voting scheduled to take place in November, right?
Well, I think this reflects the myopic perspective of those who focus on electioneering to the exclusion of governance. How do you quantify Learned Hand’s criticism Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion of Schenck v United States and the effect that it the criticism had on subsequent First Amendment jurisprudence? How do you quantify the value of some unknown medical professionals who voluntarily provided an operation on James Lowe’s cleft pallet and its effect on the debate in health care in America?
All of this makes me think of this scene when a Cardinal was coming to Assisi in the moving about St. Francis entitled “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”. One of Francesco’s friends urges a mutual friend who has taken up with Francesco to come and speak to the Cardinal. The friend says that he doesn’t have anything to say to the Cardinal, but Francesco says, there are many that you could say, much of it centered around helping the poor. (Note, this is my vague recollection of the movie from many years ago and I may not have the details exact, I couldn’t easily verify them online, but it captures the idea.)
Perhaps this captures my ambivalence about going to PDF. On the one hand, I don’t feel like I have a lot to say to Arianna Huffington or Ana Marie Cox. I doubt they would listen anyway. On the other hand, perhaps Francesco is right. Perhaps we need to remind those focused on Internet Enabled Electioneering on the bigger picture.
Lets work on making our democracy, all aspects of it, a little more personal.
High points and Low points of the Technology Management Conference, Day 2
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 10:38One of the bigger disappointments of the Technology Management Conference was Don Tapscott’s keynote speech Wednesday morning. Tapscott is co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I really looked forward to hearing some profound reflections on how Wikinomics relates to the financial services industry. Unfortunately, the session was scheduled to start at 8 AM, and because of a collection of transportation issues, I just could not make it into New York from New Haven in time to hear what Mr. Tapscott had to say. I hope he did say something profound and enlightening and that others will write about it.
The most exciting high point of the show was talking with Michael Warner, CEO and Founder of Quantum 4D. Quantum 4D provides a data visualization tool using 3D models, that shift as a time series is played through it, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. It is still in an early stage and there were lots of things that I wish it had. For example, you load data into Quantum 4D in batches, instead of Quantum 4D connecting up to real time data feeds. Their presentation layer looks good, and they talk about the ability of users to collaborate in the three dimensional space that the data creates. We talked about taking the presentation object and incorporating it into other systems. Being the Second Life fan that I am, I suggested finding ways of presenting their model in Second Life so people could collaborate in a virtual world to work with the data. There was some resistance to this idea due to some of the bad press that Second Life has received.
We talked about using QWAQ as a collaboration tools and about looking at integration with other collaboration tools. We talked about pricing models and about different companies creating their own data spaces that they could share on a free or subscription basis. This was definitely the hottest software I saw there. My sense is that it is something that only innovators and visionaries are likely to get right now, and the challenge will be to see how it develops, scales, gets documented, builds its community, and on and on, before it becomes the tool of choice by early adopters and the early majority.
After seeing such an interesting and compelling presentation, I was wondering what the Open Source Update panel had to say. The panel was made up of luminaries, Roger Burkhardt, CEO and President of Ingres, Randy Hergett, director of engineering for Open Source at Hewlett-Packard, Roger Levy, SVP and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell, Marcus Rex, CTO of The Linux Foundation, and Michael Tiemann, VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. Unfortunately, it was too much like so many other panels, where the moderator asked lots of questions and didn’t really provide an opportunity to let these people shine. I left the panel without having heard anything new or interesting.
The final highpoint was the marketing effort of FTEN. They describe themselves as “an independent non-broker dealer application service provider (ASP) that offers these sophisticated solutions to Clearing Firms, Broker Dealers, Prime Brokers, Hedge Funds and Proprietary Traders.” They boast about their access, speed and control. Their swag was little stuffed pig toys with wings. They had women dressed as pigs with wings at their booth and they even gave away helium balloons to members of the press to try and get reporters to their booth. I didn’t find anything particularly exciting or innovative about their platform, but I do have to compliment them as having what seemed to be the most sought after and talked about swag.
Today is the final day of the Technology Management Conference. I’m working up in Connecticut today and won’t make it in. However, I was glad about what I did get to see, as well as the chance to connect with many old friends at the show and look forward to next year’s SIFMA Technology and Management Conference and Exhibition.
Unstructured Data
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/10/2008 - 19:40Just about every year, I find a key theme from the Technology Management Conference (TMC), and this year’s theme seems to be unstructured data. Other years, compliance seems to be an issue, such as the year after Sarbanes Oxley took effect. Another year seemed to be about phone turrets, but that might have been because I was in the market for phone turrets that year.
So, I’m not sure if it is because I am attending TMC this year, in part as a blogger, or if it is just that much more prominent, but unstructured data turned out to be a key part of my discussions.
When I picked up my press credentials, there was a press release from Firstrain announcing the FirstRain Blog Monitor. The press release talked about the proprietary FirstRain MarketScore Algorithm “to conintually analyze and identify the most impactful blogs from the hundreds of thousands across the broad web”.
Penny Herscher, president and CEO of FirstRain was quoted as saying, “Blogs are where many of the most intriguing questions, trends and ideas first come to light”. The press release ended with a pointer to Penny’s blog.
NewsEdge was also on the first floor of the show. They are a news searching tool that has been around for several years. They do not current crawl blogs as part of their real time news, but they do have the ability search blogs and they hope to add blog crawling by the end of the year.
At the other end of the spectrum was NewsWare. They do not track blogs because “blogs don’t factcheck” a spokesperson for the company said.
Not far away from NewsEdge and NewsWare was Dow Jones Newsfeeds. They were touting their Solutions for Algorithmic and Quantitative Trading. In essence Dow Jones is taking key reports and providing elementized newsfeeds that are especially interesting to algorithm traders. I keep hearing good stuff about their feeds and it was my first chance to get details. They do not include information from blogs in their elementized news feeds, however they make extensive use of it in other products, such as Factiva.
In addition, the Dow Jones representative spoke about “Generate”, a Boston based firm that Dow Jones recently acquired which dynamically tracks information on around 4.7 million executives, ties it together with other news data to provide a solution something like what you would expect from a businessman’s mashup of Google and LinkedIn.
All of this led to a particularly interesting company, JackBe. JackBe provides an ‘Enterprise Mashup Platform’, that gathers information from many platforms on the web and within the enterprise so that it can be presented as a widget that a company can use internally or externally. They have done work in other businesses and are starting to explore providing their technology to the financial services sector. They were the most interesting tool I found on the first day of TMC for structuring unstructured data. It will be interesting to see what day two brings.
Technology Management Conference
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/09/2008 - 15:08As many of my friend microblog from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m preparing to head to the SIFMA Technology Management Conference 2008. SIFMA is the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association. It was formed by the merger of the Security Industry Association and the Bond Market Association. I’ve gone to the Technology Management Conference for many years as part of my work with Wall Street firms.
However, this year, I’m wearing a slightly different hat. I’m going as a member of the press, a credentialed blogger. I’ll be looking for things similar to those that I looked for when I went as a Wall Street technology executive, what is the interesting hot new technology. Other years, I’ve simply explored the exhibit hall, which is typically more than a full days work in and of itself. This year, I’ll try to attend some of talks as well.
At first glance, the talks don’t sound especially interesting. Perhaps the most interesting will be discussions about computing capacity or open source software. Yet there are bound to be surprises, and by being on the press list, I’m getting little hints here and there. So far, the most interesting press release has come from Tick Data which is announcing the availability of “trade and quote data for equities traded on Japan’s six major stock exchanges back to January 2003”. I was always fascinated by this sort of data and have been trying to gather it for the stock exchanges in Second Life. Tick Data’s press release says that “the firm expects to expand its coverage further into this region in the near future.” This sort of data illustrates just one of the reason why Wall Street technologists are always looking for more compute power.
Will there be other interesting innovations reported out of the Technology Management Conference? We’ll have to wait and see. It probably won’t bring as much excitement as talk about the next version of the iPhone, but it will be interesting to watch and see what comes out.
Crossing the Chasm without Jumping the Shark
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/24/2008 - 08:06The recent issues around Twitter have led me to ponder how companies can cross the chasm as their product appeal grows from the innovators and early adopters to bring in the early majority without jumping the shark.
There are many different issues to explore here, but given that it is Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend, and I should really be getting on the road for a camping trip, I’ll try to have a brief exploration of the issues here, and then, perhaps, explore them in more detail later on.
To me, the interesting topic to explore is how the growth affects the dynamics of the company, both with the management of the company, and the larger group of stakeholders.
