Island Tech 2009

I had a great time today at Island Tech 2009.

The day started out with the keynote speech by Will Harbin who informed us that there is still success happening in Technology, even in today's marketplace.  He specifically highlighted the growth areas of lead generation and virtual goods (think Mafia Wars on Facebook).

Over in the exhibit hall, there were approximately 50 businesses and organizations represented, highlighting the best of the tech sector in Victoria.  I spent a fair chunk of time hanging out with a number of ex Mercurial folk and catching up with old friends after making the rounds a couple of times to see what was new and exciting.  Highlights of the exhibits included: the Flock and Clover Point Cartographics booths (manned by old colleagues), Starfish Medical, who displayed a number of medical devices designed and built locally, and Knowledge Computers who are taking used networking equipment from Cisco, Sun, and others and re-selling it locally and overseas.

The morning got a bit noisy when the usually quiet tech crowd was overwhelmed by a large number of school children who came to visit the show and take in the "Things that go boom in the lab" talk.  They were a boisterous bunch but were polite and well behaved (until someone thought it would be a good idea to hand out giant foam hands in the middle of the lab show - causing a bit of a stampede).

I didn't take in all of the talks, but I certainly enjoyed the ones I went to:

Kurt Cagel had a fascinating take on trends with us now which will be effecting us for the next 10 years or so.  From generational issues, to changes to the energy economy, to changes in the way we communicate, Kurt covered a lot of ground.  I'm looking forward to seeing the full set of slides (he ran out of time and had to truncate his talk a bit).  In the mean time, check out his blog posts on the Metaphorical Web.

Kris Krug gave a sprited talk about open everything.  He stressed the possibility and the reality of companies (and himself) making money off of open source (he publishes all of his own work under the Creative Commons license).  The one phrase that really stuck with me, though, was about a software company we love to hate and their "drug dealing business model."

Joshua McKenty gave a really interesting talk about high performance teams - what they are and how to nurture them.  Given that Josh is one of the highest energy, high performance people that I know, he has a good perspective on this subject.  What I took away from this is that a high performance team should not have people parachuted in - the team knows what they need and knows who will (and most importantly who will not) add to the mission.  This is a lesson well learned from the Netscape 8.0 days.  The most shocking part of the talk was what Josh used to get our attention in the first place: "A single bad hire will easily cost a company $100,000.  A single good hire is worth $400,000."

Clayton Stark (of Flock) surprised me with an empassioned talk drawing parallels between our evolving social networking modes of communication and how people with autism spectrum disorders communicate.  The gist of the talk is that we have accepted asynchronous communication as the norm when interacting with people on the web.  We need to take our evolving communication strategies and be able to accept autistic communication as being inherently asynchronous, rather than bad or wrong.  This one hit close to home as my nephew has Asperger syndrome.

The final presention of the day was truly "Out of the Box".  Dave Olson challenged us to embrace the "translucency" of the web and express ourselves to the best of our ability.  It's not the sort of talk I would have attended based on the synopsis, but Clayton was raving about this guy.  I'm glad I went.  Dave was, by far, the most entertaining and engaging speaker of the day.  I learned a little history and took on a new appreciation for some of the artists of the past and the present.  Most importantly, I feel challenged to not let my creative side slip away under the pressures of work and family.  Thanks, Dave.