Ecademy is a service I don’t really understand.  I went to a few good Ecademy networking events in Bath once but as for the website it appears to be a poor man’s LinkedIn. Although some people seem to really like it to me it seems dated and confusing. It does not even have an entry on Wikipedia.

On a side note I always find it funny that it is run by Thomas and Penny Power. This reminds me of the Simpsons Episode where Homer changes his name to “Max Power”  increasing his networking ability no end. Coincidence? Anyway apart from the old email inviting me to a seminar to learn about the power of social networking it rarely bothers me and I don’t really use it.

Ecademy Spam

However when I woke up this morning I had several Ecademy emails inviting me to join Ecademy. I got one in each of my different email addresses including some I had forgotten about. The invite appeared to come from myself but with the email address <connecting.business@ecademy.com>.  I also had several emails from people who had accepted my invitation.

I investigated further and apparently Ecademy had decided to send this invite email to all 800+ email addresses in my Gmail address book . It was sent at 23:10 when I was in bed and completely without my permission.  I haven’t even looked at Ecademy for weeks, months even. I am really annoyed but I know there is no real point in complaining and can only apologise to all the people who got this invite. I will be closing my Ecademy account so there is no risk of this happening again. As far as I am concerned this spamming tactic is really nasty.

== UPDATE ==

I exchanged a few emails with Ecademy to work out what happened. In the end I got the following response from Glenn Watkins CEO of Ecademy:

Hi Daniel

After further investigation, an issue was found where the system had run a process which you should not have been included in, this is upsetting and not something we would ever do intentionally and I again apologise profusely. This hurts on many levels to see one of our members – and their connections – understandably upset because of this issue.

I confirm the issue has been fixed and that we are also now reviewing our policies, we will be implementing more notifications before we do anything with anyones details and data as it is rightly a sensitive area and one that we also value and respect enormously.

We have removed all email addresses and ensured your reminder setting is set to off, I am very sorry and want to thank you for your help, patience, understanding and professional communications.

I am pleased he admitted the problem and is doing something about it. There are many companies that would not even do that.

Yesterday, I finally received a production copy of my new book, Ext GWT 2.0: The Beginner’s Guide in the post, almost exactly a year after Packt approached me to write the book. It has been a massive amount of work, consuming most of my free time for nearly nine months. As a first time author I may have underestimated the time commitment involved but I have learnt a lot along the way and am pleased with the finished product. The team at Packt have been great. I was surprised how many people actually worked on the book; the reviewers, the editors, project managers, proof readers added up to a team consisting of eighteen people.

The book is available to buy on the Packt website and other online and high street bookshop. If you are interested in Ext GWT you should find it very useful.

As a former proud resident of Bath I have always had mixed feelings about traffic on Pulteney Bridge. Since I first lived in Bath in 2004 normal cars have not been able to cross the bridge. Buses, taxis, bikes are allowed, deliveries I think are ok too. However normal private cars are banned 24 hours a day.

In more recent years the council have put cameras on the bridge with ANPR cameras that recognize the number plates of cars that cross the bridge and automatically issue £30 fines.  However, I have recently noticed a stream of letters to the local news paper from angry foreign tourist and visitors who have been caught out and fined for crossing the bridge. An example letter can be found here and there is another story on the BBC website.  They generally complain that they did not see any signs. I checked on Google street view and saw the following picture:

What is people’s problem I thought? The signs are pretty small but they are standard “no motor vehicles” signs on the left and on the right. This is how I remember them. These people should either pay more attention or learn their highway code.

However today I was in Bath and I thought I would have a look for myself. Here is what you see as you approach in real life. Where are the signs?

A bit closer and you do catch a glimpse of a sign, on the left hiding behind a hanging basket.

In fact it is not until you you about to cross the bridge and get a fine that the sign appears from behind the hanging baskets.

There are no longer a standard “no motor vehicles” signs. Now there is just an more unusual, blue bus lane sign on the left hidden by the hanging baskets. I pity the foreign visitor who has to work out what it means. That is if they even see it.

Even I am a bit confused to what the sign means. The “no motor vehicles” is fine. I can look it up here. It is I am told a regulatory sign giving and order. The blue sign however seems to be an information sign for giving advanced notification of a bus lane. It does not appear to tell drivers not to do something.

I think think the complainers may have a point.

I went a bit further down the road and hung around for five minute. I counted four standard cars that came though and presumably would find themselves with a ticket in a few weeks like this lady:

If that is representative that is 48 cars per hour. That is a lot of money in fines per day many from people who are visiting the city. I much rather people go away with great memories of Bath, a city I love rather than thinking of it as a tourist trap.

More Victims

• Bath Bus Lane Tragedy
• Bus lane is just a trap for city’s visitors
• When is a bus lane not a bus lane?
• Official watchdog raises concerns over controversial bus gate signs

I just finished reading Rework by 37signals and have written a short review over at SGEntrepreneurs.

After looking at how Google Web Toolkit could be used to produce mobile phone applications I have written up an article here: http://www.bristol-gtug.org/?p=76

I attended the OpenMIC BarCamp event in Bath last week and was interested to learn about mobile widgets. Mobile widgets are basically mobile apps build with web technologies. They come in different flavours but all are a collection of JavaScript, CSS and image files together with an HTML file. These files are then packaged in a zip file with an XML descriptor (a bit like a war) and can be deployed to a mobile phone. I just deployed my by sending the file via Bluetooth. The application then can be started like a normal app although it is effectively a local web site running the browser full screen. Obviously the big wins here are that the JavaScript code is cross platform and the deployment does not require an app store.

As GWT generates JavaScript code I thought it would be suitable for packaging up as a mobile widget so as I have a Nokia phone I took the Nokia WRT kit and gave it a go. The results were very promising and my test GWT app worked very well on my phone, a Nokia E72.

The problem is of course that you cannot use RPC calls as you don’t have a server. However you can use JSONP to talk to a remote server which is perfectly adequate and this works well so far too. Using GWT to produce mobile widgets seems to have a lot of potential for creating mobile apps very quickly and with little pain. It would be great to hear from anyone else who is using this approach for mobile apps and any problems they encountered that I haven’t yet.

On Wednesday I went along to hear Ron Holland talk at Ecademy Bath. He was talking on the subject of creatively solving business problems. Ron is a very charismatic speaker giving lots of entertaining examples from his long and eventful business career and I enjoyed his talk a lot. In fact I enjoyed it enough to buy his book. Like many  motivational “business gurus” in the American style there seems to be a lot of NLP and other things I am not sure about in his approach. For that reason I will reserve judgement on how useful it is until I have read the book properly but after hearing Ron speak I believe reading it will certainly be enjoyable.

Last evening I went along to a BarCamp in Bath. It is really interesting that this sort of event has found its way to Bath in the last year or so. It was a little different to Singapore as it is a lot newer and less mature here but the speakers were good and the format worked well. The big difference was the demographic which was a lot more (almost exclusively) male and older than in Singapore. Also it was pretty much exclusively developers and did not have the VCs etc that you have at other events I have been to.

I am starting to think the growth of this type of UnConference throughout the world is marking the beginning of a shift in the IT industry. Developers in particualar seem to be attending events as individuals who are interested in their personal development rather than being sent to events as part of their day job. I see this as another sign of a shift towards independence of individuals in the industry and decreasing reliance on the organisation as discussed in Charles Handy’s book The Elephant and the Flea.

This is a fun video I cam across with some really interesting statistics about technology trends, enjoy.

UnConference in Singapore on Saturday was a really good event. I took several things away from it and saw some interesting start-ups. The most important thing I got out of it though was an “oh yeah” moment when Scott Rafer the keynote speaker made a very important point about cloud computing.

Recently I have been looking at cloud computing in the form of Google App Engine and see a lot of potential in it. The advantages I am attracted to being ease of deployment, scalability, not having to manage the server and low hosting costs. At the same time my main worry is being at the mercy of the platform provider, in this case Google who could potentially suspend an account and so any revenue stream for any product running on it at whim.

The additional point Scott Rafer made in favour of cloud computer though was that cloud computing changes the business model for web start-ups in terms of their need for VC funding. What he said was that in the past if your start-up is building a web application you need to have a decent set of servers in case your app gets very popular very quickly and you need capacity to cope. This type of infrastructure is a considerable capital expenditure and one for which you would often need VC investment in order to fund.

However, cloud computing such as App Engine changes this situation because if you app gets very popular very quickly the capacity is there instantly. Most importantly you don’t need to pay for the capacity until you need to use it. You only pay for the capacity you use and if your business model is correct you should have the extra revenue to pay for the extra capacity. This could remove the need for VC funding which is obviously very attractive to a start-up in so many ways.