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[jemimakiss-blog]

Tim O'Reilly's nostalgic opening interview

Fireside chat: Tim O'Reilly interviewed by Jason Calacanis 2pm, Friday 11 March 3 / 5

For a future-facing festival, SXSW Interactive's opening interview of Tim O'Reilly by Jason Calacanis was surprisingly retrospective, including the observations that led O'Reilly to coin the term Web 2.0 and the acquisition of GNN - the web's first commercial portal site that he founded in 1993. A review of O'Reilly's achievements was a good way of introducing the most respected figures in tech publishing to a new audience, but that inevitably meant it lacked any fresh bite.

• O'Reilly set a high bar for 'most unlikely SXSW quote' prize: "Reagan is the father of Foursquare," he announced, then adding that the while president, Ronald Reagan hadn't had to open the navy and air force GPS systems to civilians, but he had. 

• O'Reilly has a particular expertise in identifying and describing emerging tech trends. What makes  big idea into a brand? Big ideas are like trains - people have to what to go that way. The big promise is that it belongs to everybody who wants it." 

• Hardware used to be where the value was, and Microsoft was seen as a maverick for investing in software as the future. Then the value was in the open principles of the internet, and companies that thrived in the post-crash era were large consumer-populated databases: eBay, Amazon, Google, Craigslist. They collected value from their users - harnessing collective intelligence. As for Google and Facebook: "They are great companies because what you get when you talk to Sergey or Larry, or to Mark, is that you know there is somebody wrestling with deep problems they really care about, not just optimising something to make money. Google lost that for a bit, he said, but Larry Page is a big thinker. "He's in his element creating real enthusiasm, like Microsoft when Bill Gates really got the internet and said Microsoft is going to be a contender."

• What's Web 3.0? O'Reilly is putting his money on sensors gathering information, rather than people entering information on a keyboard. (Think mobiles, with sensors including GPS, and sites like Facebook adding facial recognition.)

• Here's something you may not know; Tim O'Reilly sold GNN to AOL, though he unwisely sold his AOL stock off too early. In fact as soon as he released it "didn't have a clue". He admitted that Cisco later offered to buy O'Reilly Publishing and when he questioned why they would what to buy a publisher, they told him: "You've been first more times than anyone else but have failed to exploit it."

• Calacanis asked why the interest in government and said he's always disappointed when seemingly intelligent people express an interest in politics. O'Reilly said it's important to differentiate between the two, and said the problem is the perception of 'vending machine government', where people put in money and expect service back. Instead, the approach should be more of a platform, a technological analogy: "Citizen participation is not just a way to reshape the vending machine," he said, though he wouldn't commit to support either Republican or Democrat strategies on revising US state health care service Medicare, for example. "We need the smart people from both sides." 

[jemimakiss-blog]

The unfulfilled promise of hacking work

HackingWork: Why good work means breaking the rules 3.30pm, Friday 11 March 2 / 5

Josh Klein and Bill Jensen's exploratory book on benevolent business hackers deserved a better platform than this. Jensen was scuppered by a failed presentation (the piece embedded below) that would have provided some much needed visual focus to his overview.

• Management have the most technical support and the most delegation, yet the main workforce in any business in typically more burdened with inefficient process and obstructive tools. Employees are increasingly breaching company policies, particularly the firewall, to take advantage of more efficient and collaborative tools - like Google Docs over PowerPoint. It is immensely stupid, Jensen said.  "All the stupid processes are not protecting me, but making me take longer to do my job and serve customers." Hacking Work would like to see itself as a tiny spark that ignites change - like the Arab spring - all in the name of doing great work. 

• For government, the leap to open technology will be the most difficult, particularly in the post-Wikileaks environment. "The government wanted to promote the Twitter philosophy going on Iran, but the aids in the Pentagon had to run out to the parking lot to load Twitter because it wasn't allowed by the firewall. That's an unbelievable amount of stupidity. We've got to re-educate everyone."

• Linking the work-hacking philosophy to journalism would have made a juicy session in itself. What have been the most successful off-piste projects and stories gained by routing round the obstacles of company process? What were we able to do with live-blogging, for example, by using new and external technologies? Tim O'Reilly's earlier session referred to a conversation with an entrepreneur who was metaphorically struggling to lay down the tracks, buy the trains, find the staff to run his new service. O'Reilly's response: "Why don't you just buy an Amtrak ticket?"