Today I had the pleasure of introducing the idea of using the Internet, open data and actual people to build a trustworthy rating infrastructure for the future, I asked all the geeks at HackFwd to join in the effort to actually create this system and early next week I will post the URL to a site with additional information and a page where you can sign up to participate.
So stay tuned, return on Tuesday and sign up to support We Rate
WOW! I´ve jst checked into the hotel at this year´s "How to Web" event in Bukarest Romania and I am impressed. First of all a big thank you to Bogdan Iordache who invited me to give a talk tomorrow. He asked me to shake up the event a little by getting out of the normal development talk and so I will try my best. But what I actually wanted to tell you about was my first impression coming here. Ok, I had a tough week so far with about 4 hours of sleep overal. When I came here and the "How to Web" crowd welcomed us very warmly. This feels almost like a mental spa for geeks. We were picked up at the airport, got a personal welcome at the hotel and even had a coockie (there goes the sweet tooth). Up in the room there is a nice bottle of wine and the internet is actually FAST. I have been speaking at many events and I have rarely ever had such a great welcome and a well organized reception for speakers. If the rest of the conference gets even close to that standard I promise to return next year right away. Also Eric Wahlforss – Co-Founder and CTO of SoundCloud – arrived at the same time and I had a chance to talk to him during our ride into the ciry. SoundCloud is actually one of these Apps that I use on a regular basis and never bothered to lok at the company, just because the App does exactly what I need it for and I am just a happy customer.
I am very much looking forward to seeing all the cool people at "How to Web" tomorrow.
I have written about HackFwd before and I am an adoring fan of the concept. I think the whole IT industry should acknowledge what Lars Hinrichs has done by starting this movement. Obviously many have seen the enormous potential and HackFwd is now being copied more or less exactly all over the world.
Well I am writing now, because I have just attended the 6th Build event (at least that was when I wrote the post, but I wanted to wait for all the videos) –the HackFwd conference for all HackBoxes (Investments) and the HackFwd network. With 50+ attendees this was the biggest build event so far and in my opinion also the best one.
You may follow some of the content of the conference on Twitter when looking for the hashtag #build06. Still I want to give my summery here to make it more concise and because I think HackFwd should get much more publicity (and that is after Germany´s most known management newspaper just wrote an article about it)
I would like to share my take on two of the HackBoxes in a future post – that does not mean I think any of the others have less potential, I just picked out two stories I like and if I get around to writing more posts on HackBoxes I will cover the other ones, because they are all great. I also want to recommend some of the speakers at the event. If you ever get the chance to see them at an event, stop caring about entrance fees, just go, it will be worth your while.
Let´s start with my favourite four presenters and their presentationhere. I will list them in alphabetical order so don´t read any preference into this.
First I would like to recommend Mike Butcher – not that he needs any more recommending…, but…. This was the most entertaining and well-presented talk I ever heard about PR and dealing with the press. Ok, Mike is a well-trained presenter and all, but his presentations are very obviously coming from “within”. I also had the chance to talk to Mike, and even though I would have much preferred to talk about automation instead of past merits and eccentric holidays I can now – from personal experience – say that Mike is – despite his tremendous reach in the industry – a polite guy, someone who actually listens to what people have to say and someone who understates his knowledge of the industry up to a degree where modesty seems too weak a word. Yes he comes across as an ego, but that is part of the job or would any of us read his articles otherwise? I was seriously positively surprised, because I was actually expecting a super arrogant know-it-all as I have experienced before with other journalists with less insight into the industry. Don´t get me wrong, this is not brown nosing; as you know TechCrunch does not cover our customers or industry focus but is just a source of up to date information and opinion read by a lot of people in our company – so there is nothing to gain for us from praising TechCrunch or its senior staff. This is my opinion and as I believe positive surprises are worth mentioning I do.
How To Deal With TechCrunch – And Maybe Other Media – Mike Butcher from HackFwd on Vimeo.
Second I would like to recommend Stephanie Kaiser. She is product lead at Wooga and responsible for three of their games – two of them being under construction and one of the being “Monster World“, their biggest hit. And in my books it is no wonder that her projects work out. She is KPI driven, yet passionate about every detail (let me just mention orange monsters for those who were at the event). Stephanie made me think that we should start looking at enterprise applications as games and she made me look at the topic of user tests and user relations in a completely new way. If you want to see someone who is PASSIONATE about her job, talk to her or let her talk to your audience (if you can persuade her to take time off from grooming monsters that is).
How Wooga Cares About Monsters – Stephanie Kaiser from HackFwd on Vimeo.
Third I would like to recommend Josep M. Pujol, who is now working at 3scale.com. Very few people want to talk to me about algorithms but with Josep I was in the details within 5 minutes. In some areas he has a very strong opinion coming out of commercial research, which I prefere much to the pure intellectual discussion of theory. I would love to regularly talk to Josep, just to check up on my thoughts on parallel programming, AI and distributive development. Well, one thing that we definitely agree upon is that it is the API you need to standardize, not the program itself. He is one of the smartest guys I have met lately and he is so modest about it that you only find out when you listen closely. If you ever need advice on APIs, distributed systems or AI data structures he certainly is a good starting point.
More Than The Sum Of Its Parts, The API’s Whole – Josep Pujol from HackFwd on Vimeo.
Last but not least I would like to recommend Charles Wiles. His distinguished career as a product manager at Google in Europe should tell us a great deal about his abilities. The talk he gave at the event – 7 good tips for startups – was not just applicable to startups. I felt like telegraphing most of the points home to my guys at arago right away. Absolutely great! And he definitely knew what he was talking about. And then at lunch he showed me the iPhone App he was programming at night over that last 6 months (Huntzz), which is not only educational, but also a lot of fun. So if you are looking for someone who knows where startups can go wrong and need to avoid exactly that, Charles is a great contact. Other than that, just download Huntzz and you can judge yourself, what kind of a guy would program an app like that at night besides his day job.
7 Product Tips for Startups – Charles Wiles from HackFwd on Vimeo.
On 24th August 2011 using twitter gave me more than just news and interesting articles for the first time. On August 24th I was witness to the battle of the giants when I watched a discussion between Sam Johnston (@samj) and Simon Wardly (@swardly) on APIs, the possibility to patent APIs and much deeper on weather standards and thus APIs needed to be open or proprietary de factor standards were all right.
To give you an impression on who I was listening to – besides that I personally think they both are two of the most important guys to follow on twitter on the topic of cloud computing – I give a brief overview. Simon used to be Cloud Computing strategist at Canonical (the guys who do Ubuntu) after being Chief Economic Office at Fotango and is now researcher at the Leading Edge Forum of CSC. Simon also gives one of the most compelling and best presentations on the topic of “what is Cloud Computing”, which you can find <HERE>. Sam Johnston – successful tech entrepreneur – was technical program manager at Google Switzerland and is now director for Cloud Computing at Equinix. Sam was part of the Open Cloud Initiative and is now pushing OpenStack.
I do not know how their discussion started, but I have made a screenshot of the discussion and put it in this post (which like any twitter discussion you will have to read bottom to top) but it turned out that two worlds collided on the topic of standards and how they should be created and maintained.
Simon made the argument that as long as the API is public anything that is practical and seems to be used by many people (the de facto approach) can legitimately be called a standard and that in case the company who´s proprietary implementation was used to implement the standard could always be circumvented by reengineering the functionality behind the API.
Sam on the other hand argued that standards, the API AND their implementation needed to be open and agreed upon between as many parties as possible to make the base for using and developing them as free as possible and especially to prevent any company who might have originally created the implementation behind an API to do anything “evil” in the future.
I find myself naturally siding with Simon on this argument because it has been a long crusade for me to convince people that the actual implementation is not worth talking about as long as you knew the API and could out whatever you like behind the API (or reengineer the original functionality). Also I believe that corporate interests are not necessarily evil and that the market is actually a fairly good regulator (especially the mrket that is created by engineers having their ideas and concepts compete against each other).
Thinking along these lines I found myself longing for that raised finger that Sam put up “what if someone abuses the power they get through owning an implementation of an API” because there obviously is a lot of power behind this and the most absurd example is the completely useless battle of egos between Adobe and Apple about Flash on the iPad. An open standard for what browsers had to support and how plugins have to work in order to make users want to use them would keep us all from having to stand in the middle of this stupid war.
My personal actions in coding and in designing architectures strongly reflect what Simon is saying. I do not believe in reinventing the wheel just because I like or do not like the original inventor, as long as I feel I could do so if that inventor and his terms turned nasty on my. But in many arguments I have sided with Sam´s open standard arguments.
And as I don´t much like it –especially in myself – when I seem to say one thing and behave differently I tried to look behind the scene, made some interesting observations and came to an important conclusion.
One of the more interesting observations was that Simon and Sam, two guys whom I have seen interact in person and on twitter for a long time, who are normally on a friendly basis and agree in most of their conclusions get religious and almost personal on this topic. This is a strong hint to me that this topic is loaded with emotion and there is always a question weather this helps or is a deterrent.
The second interesting observation was that fact that Sam and Simon were sometimes talking about different things. Where Simon was talking about the API, Sam was talking about an implementation or when Sam was talking about the ownership of an API Simon was talking about the legal strength of this ownership. Many interesting discussions can be spawned from this about software patents and the value of knowledge and intellectual property in general.
My conclusion is that there is no “right” way to go, because if there was only Simons argument it would be very simple for the owners and developers of de facto standards to abuse their position and even make strategies o explicitly do so. If there was only Sam´s world we would try to make an exact plan of the future and have a democratic decision on every variable name in the universe (sorry, I am just exaggerating to make a point) and that would slow us down immensely. Thus my conclusion is that we need this battle between open standards and proprietary de facto standards because they act as a catalyst for innovation and as an evolutionary safe guard against going down one direction too far. This is also why we need people who are very convinced of their position and less distant to make these points, because someone who does not come across as authentic (and you know what I mean when talking about authentic when you have seen Sam market Open Stack and condemn everyone creating proprietary software to the lowest realm of hell) would have no audience and all the safeguard and innovation power for long term development would be lost. On the other hand it is easy to argue why Simon´s part of the argument is emotional, simply because it is about profit. And arguing profit is always an emotional topic.
For me and my software development this means that we will go on supporting the open source community where we can – financially and with code contributions – but that we will not be religious about using none open standards. On the other hand my respect for guys like Sam Johnston has increased by actually thinking about this argument, because these guys (and there is one of them behind every open idea on the net) put themselves into the firing line of very powerful opponents, to keep the rest of us safe for the future, weather we completely buy into the open argument or not.
I attended CFP and Founders Forum 2011 and finally get around to doing a short write-up. For those of you who do not know CFP (Corporate Financial Partners), it is about the most not banking like investment bank and private equity funds company possible. Andreas Thümmler who gives the whole network around CFP its unique way of doing things founded CFP. This special way is more uncomplicated, more creative and more innovative than the investment banking 1.0 you see across the board. Thus it is not too surprising that CFP is specialized on technology deals. Besides the pure M&A business CFP has created their own PE fund, because they saw that most of the entrepreneurs for whom CFP works would reinvest part of their money into other technology companies. This makes their fund (CFP and Founders Fund) an unique opportunity for innovative approaches in technology, because they do not just have the money but also an amazing network of successful technology people who hold a stake in the investment the fund takes on.
At this year’s Founders Forum there was a crowd of more than 200 investors, founders and experienced technology and banking people who discussed the current market situation, opportunities and the merits of entrepreneurial endeavors especially in a time where the general financial market seems to be unpredictable at best. After the substantial decline in stock and bond markets preceding the event it was not surprising that the star of the event was James Turk from GoldMoney.com. GoldMoney.com basically makes gold available as an every day currency and is of course profiting from the uncertainties in the market and the general movement towards commodities since the 2008 financial crises. Personally I can see the logic behind the approach and I quite like the idea of an independent gold based currency, but I do not agree with the notion, that this is the only way to survive any doom and gloom scenario. Personally I believe that equity in companies producing actual assets and consumer services in an element just as important as putting money behind the firewall of a gold currency. This is why I also liked the talk given by Oliver N. Hagedorn from avesco Financial Services AG – a financial service provider specialized in delivering services to entrepreneurs who have made one or more exits He was not only speaking his mind that financial consulting can never be done for free – which is obviously something most people still expect – because independence in consultancy can only be guaranteed if you pay for the advice you get. Mr. Hagedorn was also strongly emphasizing that cash behind the firewall is not a single strategy approach (like just investing everything into gold) but should be more like a fort with different protections for the wealth to be preserved, different levels and mechanisms of protection for different needs and different market situations. And I could not agree more.
One very important keynote speech – especially given the current situation in Africa – was given by Dr. Michael Hoppe who is running the very special aid organization Steps for Children. This organization is not only special because it focuses on giving children a good education and thus solving the under development problem and possible risk of extremism at the same time – in the long run that is – but also because they do not give away the assets donated to them simply to fund their program but they use the assets to build up small enterprises that will finance the program in the long run. And as I happen to believe that the best help you can get is help to learn to help yourself and be entrepreneurial this is an approach I not only personally support but would recommend to anyone who is considering sharing some of the wealth they have earned. At this point it is a good example to mention Matthias Hunecke, the founder and CEO of Brille24.de who has donated a share of his company to Steps for Children – a very brave, admirable and humbling example to all of us.
But now to the most important part of the 2011 CFP and Founders Forum – the founders who presented their companies and approaches. I will not write about each and everyone, because you can check that out yourself. I would like to write about three very interesting examples. These examples are three very different ones but three companies, executives and concepts that I personally find intriguing and would thus like to promote to you (and I have not included brille24 here because I already mentioned their great service in other places).
First let me start out with zuuka! a mobile development company specialized on building the coolest applications for kids for this new generation of devices. The founders of zuuka! – Susanne and Dirk Busshart – obviously did not just have a love for good educational material for children they also realized the potential of the post book and post TV area where entertainment does not have to be dull and education does not have to be nerdy anymore. I believe the market of educational and entertainment applications for children is huge and that these applications are a good thing for our society at the same time. Susanne and Dirk have realized this and started cooperations with many of the best known children’s book publishers and authors to put well known characters at the center of new concepts. They were also able to acquire the rights to some of the coolest child material through an acquisition in the US and I believe we can expect great applications and an excellent corporate development from them – and an improvement in our kids entertainment and learning patterns which will leave all of us in a multi-tier win situation.
Second I would like to mention Kognitio a company providing “big data” services as in house or cloud solutions to everyone who really wants to squeeze the value out of all the great data they own. Customers of Kognitio could be super markets who want to know what to sell to whom when and where based on all the trillions of sales made in all their stores over a long period of time. With a technology like Kognitio´s this kind of analysis becomes possible at a reasonable pricing. I believe that Roger Llewellyn – founder and CEO of Kognitio (yes I spelled the name correctly and even I with an Irish family connection cannot remember how to pronounce this Scottish name) – has been ahead of his time in developing this technology for the past years but he is in a great position to have a proven technology in a market where “big data” is all of a sudden a hype and where large players like SAP try to move into this market with new and fairly untested solutions like their in memory HANA package (which I like, but I think Kognitio just has more experience in the realm). In my book Kognitio is also worth mentioning here, because the CFP and Founders Fund only rarely invests into completely enterprise focused and solely technology driven approaches and I think they have done so with Kognitio for a very good reason.
Last I would like to mention a company that is so far out o my field of knowledge that I might be opening up a lot of doors to criticism here, but it is my personal feeling that they are doing a great thing and thus you read about Agrarius here. This publically traded company is focused on agricultural production on a corporate scale in Romania. They have a good point about the slow down in innovation in the food industry while at the same time the global population is increasing steadily. I believe a new wave value will be induced into food production and thus I think that proper management and corporate organization to this field will give investors a wonderful long term pay off. Also Ottmar Lotz – founder and CEO of Agrarius – gave me some insights into the modern agricultural industry and the idea of city farming (vertical farms) that are fascinating me and give me hope that we will be able to deal with the mega cities building up all over the globe.
Unfortunately I could not attend the evening party at the CFP and Founders Forum – and that is seriously bad, because I missed out on great networking and also parties in which Andy Thümmler is involved have the nimbus of being legendary by definition – but I heard from attendees that I really missed out on a wonderful evening event.
Well I am already looking forward to another year following CFP’s activities and I am sure I will write about next year’s Founders Forum with even more great examples for entrepreneurial engagement and innovative approaches that will rock the world.
Many solutions on the IT automation market are script bound – and why not? Scripts are the way we have been doing automation in IT operations for the past 30 odd years and they have served us well. But if we are just to continue things like we were doing them already, why is there such hype about automation now? Well, simply because the cost of operating IT is too high – despite the scripting we have already done – and because the talent parked in IT operations is missing in the innovation part of IT – which is what IT should all be about.
Naturally many reactions to the need for better automations are to refine things as they are and come up with better ways to write, manage and maintain scripts. Alternatively a disruptive leap in technology can achieve a completely new way of doing automation (the latter is what we are doing with the arago Autopilot for IT operation).
In either case you have to understand the shortcomings of scripts in order to make any improvement and this post is a brief and blunt summary of these shortcomings. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying all scripting is crap and all the people who have written or are writing scripts are idiots – far from it. As I said scripts have served us well and will play an important role as they are the foundation of today’s IT operations, but we have to understand the limitations of scripts in order to push forward.
In my books there are three limitations to scripts and I will outline them here:
To me the part 3 is the worst, because this is the simple reason why everyone understands that the “never change a running system” rule is not only followed but the status quo of a system is defended like it was the last bastion of humanity or admin appreciation. And if you cannot change your environment you cannot accommodate business requirements – or accommodating is always a big fight for everyone involved – and you can absolutely not entertain innovation as a constant companion in IT – which according to all the IT literature I have read is what IT should be all about and which is what makes IT people love IT.
All three points together make maintaining an IT operational environment an expensive and time consuming task and changing an IT operations environment an almost impossible mission.
Many people have seen these limitations or constraints of scripts and there are many products out there to help us overcome one or more of the restrictions mentioned above. Many of these approaches have fancy names like run-book automation or data-centre automation, but they are simply better ways of managing scripts, managing reusability in scripts or managing tasks to be scripted. I believe that this is not enough, because IT changes too fast to make a script that needs lifecycle management and everything attached with it an effective way to handle things. The result of elaborate operational lifecycle management normally is a very standardized environment that is slow to react to new requirements. Such an environment is great for commodity products and services like desktop provisioning or server provisioning, but it is not good for application maintenance, user feedback management and the like.
This is why a different approach is a good idea. Our approach is called autopilot and all the autopilot does is to have a big pool of knowledge (like you do) and write a script on the fly every time a task comes up (like you do when you handle something manually). The effects of this are simple. You do the interesting new stuff and the autopilot does the boring work, even in a changing and ever more complex environment – without the need to standardize everything.
Now let me talk about the HackBoxes – the term for HackFwd companies. .
Let me start out with a company I put into the dead pool only 9 months ago. DeltaStrike a company producing a universe as a platform for many games and writing their own game in this universe. Well 9 months ago I saw the first prototype and asked the 4 founders – in no uncertain terms – why they thought that someone should play their homemade stuff when other gaming companies invest 100 people into the same kind of game and you could see that. Since then they have completely turned around. I have rarely met a team that can handle criticism so well and actually take the content and base a decision on feedback and their own vision of what they want to do. The team has grown, mainly with passionate partners and other contributors and their game is one of the show off applications for the new Adobe 3D 
environment. I am not a hardcore gamer, but I think their new idea has potential and the way they dealt with really HARSH feedback gives me every confidence in this team.
Also DeltaStrike is an impressive example how being on the edge of technical development can push a business ahead of the competition and of how the combination of creativity/art and technical skills allow for a flexibility single talented teams cannot show easily and an enterprise IT could never achieve.
Then I want to talk about Fantasy Shopper (quoted on twitter as the next facebook by someone from the British government). Well everyone at HckFwd loves the idea of shopping in shops you know with stock they actually have without having to spend the money but still with getting all the feedback and chatter involved with great shopping.
Originally this game – actually it should be called platform – was intended for teenage girls, but the first test showed that all of us seem to be a potential market for this kind of application. But I am getting ahead of myself. Fantasy Shopper is an virtual shopping environment that models its virtual shopping arcades after real location – i.e. if you go fantasy shopping in Exeter, UK (where the team is located) – you will find shops that actually exist in the real world Exeter with stock they actually have in the real world shop replicated in the fantasy universe. You can shop with fantasy money (the virtual currency) and stock your wardrobe and combine your acquisitions into outfits. You can then share your newest trends and fashion ideas with your friends and get into a lot of conversation, feedback loops, trend setting experiences and so on while doing so. To make the shopping experience more goal oriented Fantasy Shopper has created contests, where you have to e.g. create an outfit for a special event with a price limit. Obviously this sounds like great fun for every shopoholic, everyone interested in fashion and everyone who wants to get the feedback from their friends and peer group before actually spending the money. There are so many possible business models for Fantasy Shopper that an amazing case – always on the assumption that they can achieve a sustainable user base – can be built. The potential in popularity and the business interest from stores, fashion magazines and the ad industry is obvious and a first beta shows that the user interaction is even better than expected. Now the only question is when this brave new world will be online and live for the public. This is what everyone at HackFwd has been urging the team to do: PUT IT ONLINE. And I think we have succeeded in convincing the founding team that there is no point in making something 200% before giving it to the market. I hope we will soon all be fantasy shopping.
To me Fanatsy Shopper is also a great entrepreneurial story. The CEO actually posted an ad in the newspaper to find his CTO and together they applied (and were obviously accepted by) HackFwd. But that is not all. The entrepreneurs behind fantasy shopper also live on the bare minimum in order to use the budget available to them exclusively for developing the company. This is the spirit we are looking for and this is the spirit the big successes are made of. Connected to the passion is the ego and stubbornness to create a perfect solution and we all had a hard time to convince the team to get it out into the open, but as I said Fantasy Shopper will be available soon.
Well some of you have noticed that I was gone for a while. And actually this time I did not take an eccentric trip on a submarine or ride through the desert. This time lime disease hit me hard. What started out as an ear infection while I was at PULSE 2011 (this is why you do not find any articles on PULSE 2011 on the blog yet, the conference was great and I will do a write up yet). After I returned from Las Vegas I had taken some antibiotics and felt better. But a week after I returned all of a sudden my hands, feet and other body parts started to hurt, feel inflamed and I had a hard time moving.
So I finally went to a local doctor and was diagnosed with gout, arthritis and rheumatouse arthritis (ok, I do feel very old sometimes, but I’ve never felt that old before). All the pills I got only ever helped for a day or two and then things started getting worse again. In the worst state I was actually in bed, completely unable to move and drugged up to the hilts.
Finally my normal, every day doctor remembered that I had horses and that having horses out in the forest also means you can easily be bitten by ticks. This is when I was tested for Lyme disease and the tests were positive. I was immediately treated with the proper antibiotics and as the infection was obviously a while ago and wildly spread through my body (I can tell you it is amazing to find out which parts of your body can hurt when you try to move) I also got a cortisone therapy. Now this was a little more than 6 weeks after I had started to feel sick and it took another 6 weeks until I was modestly better.
So three months after lime disease hit me out of nowhere I was back up and started to catch up on my email, presentations and all other kind of stuff. It also took a while until my body was detoxed enough to be up for any sport. As you can imagine with the cortisone I added MANY pounds and a week ago I started running them off again.
So life is not only back to normal, but I have also caught up on most of my reading and this means I can finally get back to writing – which I am doing here and now.
Expect some very interesting posts on automation, clouds and the net in general to pop up, since I have done quite some thinking in bed and since all our guys were working away while I was gone, so there is a lot to share with you. Welcome back and stay tuned.
Having organized a very successful CloudCamp in Frankfurt, Germany with about 150 attendees in 2009, since then we were asked again and again if we want to start a successor to this great event, providing a plattform for discussion and exchange about Cloud Computing. While the 2009 event dealt with questions like
the discussion moved on during 2010 and the hype grew and grew. Today Cloud Computing feels more like an avalanche, because unlike other technologies, the business case is widely accepted. The questions of enterprise customers today are shifting more towards how and when Cloud Computing hits their vicinity.
Customers today want to look deeper into vendor offerings and find out
To address these questions the CloudOps Summit on the 17th of March 2011 will provide a platform to discuss various aspects of Cloud Computing setting the focus on Operations, an area where the ‘flesh is put on the bones’.
The event will be structured along three tracks covering Management, Operations and Architecure. In addition we will have a separate track, which will offer the opportunity for Cloud Computing startups to present themselves, their products or present their experiences utilizing cloud-based offerings.
Please visit the CloudOps event page at http://www.cloudops.de for more details.
I have recently spent a great weekend with the HackFwd crowd at the 3rd build event in Mallorca. This was one of the best technical events I have been to for a very long time – if not the best over all. Compared to all the big conferences – and you know I especially love IBM PULSE – the HackFwd events have a totally different goal and of course a totally different setting. I will not say that this kind of event is better than e.g. PULSE, they are simply not comparable making HackFwd not a movement one of a kind but also making the build event a category of its own.
So what made it so special? Well the setting was special, because it was an actual retreat and everyone attended everything. But that was not it. The special thing about this event was to totally open exchange of concepts and ideas, the openness of everyone to give and receive (even tough) feedback and the “one step ahead” mentality of everyone contributing.
I have never after university encountered such a high level of technical discussion and the amazing fact was that all the techies at the event were not the typical pizza eating cave men, but were very interested in all things business. It is my personal belief that this movement will bring forth some of the most interesting technical ideas, possible the next game changing company and most definitely engineers everybody will want to hire – and cannot hire because they become entrepreneurs.
There is just one thing I saw that I felt a little strange about: Some of the great guys there whom HackFwd names geeks try very hard to be tough businessmen and actually tried to put their great technical abilities in the background. This feeling was summarized in a comment made at one of the feedback talks where a participant said “maybe we are overemphasizing the geek term, maybe we should appear a little more normal?”. No, please No! Could you imagine a violin soloist trying to NOT be a musician and show to the world that he understands the music business better than anyone else? Well if that is the case he will become a music manager, but if he is the best violinist, he will find a partner who will do the management. So my message is: Geeks are cool and we need many many more of them, If you have the ability, the passion and the will to actually deliver rather than just talk about doing great things, you are a geek and that is a great thing! No need to hide. In the US no one would have the idea to hide this kind of ability or play it down by pretending not to belong to the outlier group of geeks, they embrace it. In Europe we are a little shy about it and there is no need to be.
So if you think you are a geek, watch the HackFwd video and if you think you have something to show to the world, maybe you want to get in touch with us. Any which way, if you have the technical ability to think up and create tomorrow’s technical concepts and applications, please don’t try to be something else, be passionate about it and embrace your potential.
