Month: October 2010

“The currency of this era is connection.”

“The Apple iPad is a piece of jewelry that happens to do something.”

“37 Signals Basecamp product is successful because it connects people. Their asset is not their code base, its the community of people who would miss them if they were gone.”

“The purpose of the product is to create the conversation.”

“Krispy Kreme’s competitive advantage was scarcity. When they decided you could buy them grocery stores, they destroyed that.”

“Your watch is a holdover from the Industrial Revolution.”

“A resume is proof that we are good a compliance. Its even full of brand names.”

“Be a corporate insurgent.”

“Anxiety is nothing more than experiencing failure in advance.”

“Did you notice nobody ever gets ‘talker’s block'”?

“When the resistance says: ‘Don’t do that,’ then that is what you should be doing. Its the lizard brain telling you ‘no.’

“Leading is saying: ‘I’m going this way, come along!'”

“If your ideas spread, you win.”

“You have an opportunity to go back to being human and connecting with people, instead of just being a cog in a wheel.”

“CocoaCamp” is half-day conference focused on the design and technical needs of Mac and iOS developers.  To help attendees navigate the conference, an iPhone app was created and made available on iTunes one week before the event.  Besides being a great example of developers “eating  their own dog food,”  it was incredibly useful and incorporated some really great ideas.  For only a few hours…

The app began its life on GitHub in mid-July, and took a team of seven developers about two months to build.  The app’s primary feature is a schedule of sessions by hour, with the ability to drill-down into the details of any session and view contact information about the presenter:

The app also let you post photos of the event to a Flickr wall, and follow the event’s Twitter stream.  These were two great social media hooks;  the developers then took it one step farther by integrating the Bump mobile data sharing API into the app. With this integration, you could bump your iPhone with another conference attendee and swap contact information effortlessly:

When you attend a conference, the people you meet are often more important than the conference sessions.  Integrating Bump showed an awareness of this, and made the  typically cumbersome process of swapping contact information effortless.

I’d like to see more conferences offer apps (both Android and iPhone) that do similar things. It would increase the value of the conference for attendees, and likely not cost much to build.  And since apps can use REST and SOAP, conference information can be updated during the event. 

Is there a business opportunity for building “disposable” apps whose usable lifespan is measured in hours? I bet there is.