Government 2.0 Camp Berlin
August 29, 2009
The last two years have brought Amazee to Bar Camps, Blog Camps, Startup Camps and most lately the Government 2.0 Camp in Berlin. It took place yesterday at the Hertie School of Governance and featured an interesting mix of government employees, researchers, web pros, journalists, you name it. The bottom line: The biggest challenge for e-government – ranging from administration to participation – is not technology but the cultural resistance of the public sector. The fact, however, that about 40% of the participants were civil servants proved that Germany is taking quite some interest in the latest developments in the US. Way to go!
Toni Schneider part 2 and thoughts on virtual companies
August 28, 2009
Luckily I also heard the second part of Toni’s speech, which was amazing as well! Here two interesting and remarkable statements:
Every employee has full access to all live systems and the source code. So everybody in the company can change a feature and immediately release it. It takes 30 seconds to change all 1200 servers and another 30 seconds to fix a bug that has just been released! And by the way: there is ONE system engineer administrating all 1200 servers. ONE, let’s call him superman.
Automattic is a fully virtual company. Until a while ago they had no office, now they officially have an office in Pier 38 San Francisco, but the employees do not work there. There are some in San Francisco, but most the people are spread all over the world and therefore even the guys in San Francisco don’t work in an office to not break with the rules of being a fully virtual company. They never have any meetings, which saves lots of time. The only time they meet each other physically is at their bi-yearly event somewhere on the planet. They collaborate over IRC or the P2 theme for WordPress.
The virtual company thing made me think. I wondered whether a virtual company could also be an option for Amazee. The answer is clearly no. One of Amazee’s core strengths is the dedication of our team, the positive culture, strong identification with Amazee and the great working environment. I can tell from myself and also often hear from the team members, how happy they are to come to work, exchange ideas, joke around and be together. At the moment we have six people living in Zurich and three people commuting from other Swiss cities to Technopark Zurich everyday (by public transportation of course!) . They all have the option to work from home, but they don’t. I guess working at home is not as rewarding and does not provide the same identity as working together in the office.
It needs a very special corporate culture to have a successful virtual company and I really admire Toni for running such a great company. Anyhow, as long as there is Amazee I don’t want to work for any other company and I would never aim to change our little cozy Amazee gem office for the virtual world.
Maybe my team members have a different opinion – feel free to comment ;)
Doodle CEO Mike Naef and Automattic CEO Toni Schneider
The interested crowd
Automattic CEO Toni Schneider @ Doodle (Part 1)
August 28, 2009
Don’t know what WordPress is? Well, right now you’re looking at an installation of this really great blog software. Personally I enjoy using WordPress since I guess 2003 when I started my first blog. And when Amazee decided to switch from Drupal (as a blogging software) to another solution, it was very clear to me that we’ll go for WordPress. As I haven’t had a look at a WordPress admin screen for quite a while – the last time was maybe in 2005 – I was really overwhelmed by all the tweaking they did in the meantime, while still keeping the core clean, fast and simple.
That’s also one important thing Toni Schneider – Swiss rooted very congenial CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com – emphasized in his speech yesterday: Keeping the core of the software slender and provide additional functionalities as plugins. However, if some features really prove to be used by a majority of users, they can also be included in the main package after a while.
But it was not only about the geeky tech stuff. Toni also told us a lot about life in the Silicon Valley 20 years back from now, about his experiences with either very small or totally bloated companies and about how open source business models work – of course he used WordPress as an example.
So what’s important to know: WordPress is not only a very popular open source blogging software that everyone can install and use for free (WordPress.org) but also a world’s top 20 website hosting more than eight million (!) blogs (WordPress.com). While their basic service is free, users can pay for a variety of upgrades starting with an ad free blog, an own domain and going on with highly customized solutions for big customers who generate high traffic loads as for example CNN. Though not everyone liked their business model at first – some people couldn’t understand how you can give away the software you’re earning your money with for free – it proved top be a great success over the years. Open source as its best!
Unfortunately I had to leave because my duty was to hunt down an evil spammer who misused our platform, so I missed the second part of Toni’s speech about being a VC. More about this part of the speech as well as some pics in a soon to come blog post by Dania – stay tuned! And thanks to doodle, ch/open and Technopark Zurich for organizing and enabling this event!
Can you spare a giraffe?
August 25, 2009
Although the headline might suggest it, I have not gone mad, no. But I would like to draw your attention towards the utterly extravagant project of Ola Helland or Stavanger, Norway. He and his friend Jørgen have a little bet going on: Jørgen insists that Ola will fail at collecting 1,000,000 hand-made giraffes. And Ola, naturally, wants to prove his pal wrong. The deal is this: Anyone can submit giraffes in any form, given they are hand-made (i.e. hand-drawn, hand-molded). You can not submit photographs of real life giraffes or any computer-assisted giraffe incarnation. Because the important part of the excercise is this: “The whole point of this project is to give the digital world a break and let humans be humans for just a little while.” So, get out your crafty weapon of choice and get giraffing (you’ll find all the info on how to submit on the website)!
Say hello to Salomé!
August 24, 2009
Today is Salomé Meier’s first day with Amazee and we’d like to extend a warm welcome from all of the team to her. She will be working with us over the next months and we are looking forward to having her boost the Amazee site. After working with Cyon Webhosting in Basel as Head of Operations & Finance she looked out for new challenges and we didn’t hesitate to get her on board. Glad to have you, Salomé!
The third replicator is not us
August 24, 2009
First genes, then memes, now what? There’s a new type of evolution going on and it might not be to our liking, says Susan Blackmore in the New Scientist, 1 August 2009. Let me give you a summary of her interesting train of thought.
The first replicator (= information that is copied, varied and selected) we let loose on our planet was the gene – the basis of biological evolution. Genes are copied, mutated and selected all over and over again.
The second replicator to evolve was the memes – the basis of cultural evolution. The idea of memes as a cultural analogue off genes has been much maligned, and most biologists still reject it.
Yes memetics has much to offer in explaining human nature, Susan Blackmore wrights. Once memes were proliferating, individuals benefited from copying the latest and most successful ones, and then passed on any genes that helped them do so. This “memetic drive” forced their brains to get bigger and bigger, and to become adept at copying the most successful memes, eventually leading to language, art, music, ritual and religion – the successful design of human culture. In other words memes are a new kind of information – behaviors rather than DNA – copied by a new kind of machinery – our brains rather than chemical inside cells.
Now what? There is a relatively new kind of information: Electronically processed binary information rather than memes. There also is a new kind of copying machinery: Computers and servers rather than brains. But are all three critical stages – copying, varying and selection – carried out by that machinery? We’re close says Susan Blackmore. We might even be right on the cusp. Programs that store information about your shopping preferences and suggest books or programs that write original poetry might still be limited in scope, dependent on human input and send their output to human brains, but they already copy, select and recombine the information they handle.
The temptation is to think that since we designed search engines and other technologies for our own use that it must remain subservient to us. But if a new replicator is involved we must think again. We humans were vehicles for the first replicator and copying machinery for the second. What will be for the third? For now we seem to have handed over most of the storage and copying duties to our new machines, but we still do much of the selection, which is why the web is so full of sex, drugs, food, music and entertainment. But the balance is shifting Susan Blackmore claims.
Billions of years ago, free-living bacteria are thought to have become incorporated into living cells as energy providing mitochondria. Both sides benefited from the deal. Perhaps the same is happening to us now. Gadgets like phones and PCs are already using 15% of household power and raising (New Scientist, 23 May, page 17); the web is using over 5% off the world’s entire power and is rising. The growing web of machineries we have let loose needs us to run the power stations and repair things when they go wrong. In return we get entertainment, facts at the click of a mouse and as much communications we can ask for.
So, it’s possible that we have kick-started a machine driven evolutionary process that is greedy, selfish and utterly blind to the consequences of its own expansion, just as we are. With the only difference that in this version we are going to be bacteria to be integrated as “energy-providing” mitochondria. Just like in Matrix.
blogosphere’s happiness has increased by 4%
August 22, 2009
According to the two mathematicians Doods and Danforth the blogosphere’s happiness has increased by about 4% since 2005. When they examined day-to-day fluctuations, they found that certain days stood out: Christmas and Valentine’s Day were annual elation peaks, whereas the 11 September anniversaries were gloomy valleys. The happiest day since 2005 was 4 November 2008, the U.S. presidential election.
When the researchers turned to song lyrics, they discovered a darker trend: Popular music has become less happy since 1960 – a 10% drop. Most of the decreases happened between 1961 and 1980. Fewer singers are crooning about “love” now and more are shouting about “hate” and “pain,” the scientists report. When they analyzed musical genres, the researchers found that genres haven’t changed much over time, but new, less happy genres, such as punk and heavy metal, have become popular and brought lyric scores down.
Don’t miss to read the full article in ScienceNOW – super interesting!
Amazee Pet Boys
August 20, 2009
Besides our well known web solution we also spend some of our research resources on hydro-mobility-devices. The latest brainstorm created this highly successful river-floating-belt: Components: 8 x 1.5 liter pet bottles (Body floaters), 2 x 0.5 liter pet bottles (Leg floaters) and lots of Duct Tape. Together with our air-matress-equipped friends from Supertext we did the proof of concept – about 10 km from Hardbrücke down to Dietikon (Glanzenberg)! Highly recommended – you probably can’t get closer to the feeling of floating in the Dead Sea.
