SaaS meets Old Skool

I was in a meeting recently between Google and the OU implementation group involved in the rollout of Google Apps. Google has flown in Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Product Manager and Sam Peters, Business Development Manager (Europe) and the OU had representatives from all the big areas of the organisation. I’ve had meetings like this several times in the past but I was struck by the chasm between the Google view of Enterprise change process management  for implementing SaaS (software as a Service) technology versus the ‘old school’ view of implementing services and systems with paid for 3rd party service suppliers.

For example the OU would like to spend a period working with a senior technical person from Google about how the Google suite gets implemented against existing technologies. Sitting around a table and whiteboarding scenarios and coming up with a implementation plan. With Google it’s a case of switching it on. They say they can provide eight weeks of technical support around the launch window ‘but we’re unlikely to need that’.  I visited the University of Westminster when they had just ’switched on’ the Google suite and I can testify that Google make the process painless. UoW’s head of ICT said that they spent ten days internally with Google mapping their authentication services and sorting our the passthrough of information to their Google Apps environment and that was it!

At the meeting on Friday I was struck by the different world views. The people from the OU (myself included although I may think of myself as a little more enlightened) were discussing about how you’d provide a stable environment for students and roll out tools. Google said they just add ‘feature sets’ and have a quarterly release cycle so it’s a case of benefitting from new things and providing them as you see fit. The OU has however a different demographic to other UK higher education institutions and we have a fair share of ’silver surfers’ and some technophobes to consider.

I think it’s a very different mindset coming from a more traditional 80’s or 90’s style view of systems and services where you have total control, holding you full architecture stack within your business in a single place (or multiple places within your control) and having a total internal structure and staffing mechanism to keep things going to moving to allowing things to be controlled by others and to have services that are provided for you (and that you don’t even pay for) but that your organisation benefits from.

This lack of control is obvious and moving to the cloud is undoubtedly a very positive step but when it finally starts to become reality you can almost smell the fear. Knowing that Google provides services to governments, pharmaceuticals and other organisations that have serious data control concerns doesn’t make it any easier. Our students ARE our business and even a 1% drop in students would make a huge impact so we need to make sure we do this right. 

Yes lets just switch it on…but after we’ve planned and made sure that our students will be switched on to it.

e-Books, content and openness

I’ve just been reading a book by Stephen King (Everything’s Eventual) – actually it’s a collection of short stories and that, says Stephen in his introduction, makes a big difference. He points out that short story writing almost died in its original format and then in early 2000 there was great interest in an Arthur C Clark short story which was published only in cyberspace. This prompted Stephen King to do the same, not for business reasons but to try another marketplace. The story “Bullet” sold hugely and for embarrassingly large sums even for the audio rights. He went to add that he didn’t know how many people actually read the book or simply tried the download because they liked the novelty of the ‘electronic package’. King believes it would likely be disappointingly low. We’re now in 2010 (no reference here to Arthur C Clark but prediction is wonderful in hindsight) and I think that e-Publishing is now settling down and becoming a very interesting way to get things out there and micropayments seem to becoming well established (as Apple will tell you with their iPhone store apps downloads) and lucrative.

I’m rambling here but to bring it back to local context, The VC of the OU extolled the virtues of iTunesU and the fact that the OU had passed 13m downloads through iTunesU and reached 10m visitors to OpenLearn (something of which I’m very proud having been responsible for the original specification…and by the way there’s still plenty of that spec left to complete!). These are both free services but through them there has been an increase in student numbers, an estimated 14,000 students began their learning experience through consuming this free content and going on to study. There’s an article from November 2009 about this when iTunesU downloads passed the 10 million mark. It’s an emerging marketplace for learning and for publishing high quality content.

So I do believe  that consumers care about quality in the electronic marketplace. I do believe that these are potentially extremely huge markets for those that care to explore them and I do believe they open up a world previously the preserve of the ‘officiandos’ to a wider audience.

I haven’t mentioned iPad yet and I don’t want to until I get to try it but my wife* remarked (*she’s the person who keeps me grounded) “If I were to try one of those eBook reader things then it probably would be the iPad”. (N.B. I’ve tried to get her interested in the Sony eBook reader, iliad pad and Bebook without success). I realise there’s more to iPad than eBook reader but that’s for another blog.

To crack the eBook reader market fully I think the following needs to be done :-

1. To find a way of displaying stuff so that it looks good outdoors in bright sunshine from any position, indoors in poorish lighting and generally in any environment where people read. The same issues apply to laptops too and still aren’t solved ’to my satisfaction!’ (matt screens and improvements in eInk?)

2. To avoid any flickering or adverce wear and tear to the eyes from the ‘electronic experience’ over a book.

3. To find methods for tapping into the ambient environment for power and networking to avoid any cables or recharging. No-one wants a flat battery half way through a book. (…sitting on a beach with an iPad getting it solar fix is all fine but I live in England and it ain’t sunny a lot of the time).

4. Easy to use micropayment transactions for content without lock in (Apple take note!) – i.e. keep the content open and unbounded in order to give exposure to the maximum audience and keep the marketplace open for the benefit of all.

5. Add value over books including referencing to web sites for additional content (text and media), auto-updating and added value tools. You name it, you got it.

Anyhow time to stop and read my book for a while.

Transformative Technology (T.V. via games console)

T.V. was a bit rubbish the other night despite the many channels we now get through Sky and Virgin cable (lots of channels does not always mean lots better content) so I downloaded BBC’s iPlayer onto the Wii (which is network connected via a USB Ethernet connector to the broadband at home) and we watched some episodes of Silent Witness that I’d missed the previous week.

I was blown away by the simplicity of the installation and use (I know a lot of work has gone into that simplicity) and I was also pleasantly surprised by both the smoothness of the streaming (it only rebuffered once in the whole two hours and very little jerkiness) and the quality of the picture. As a geek and a YouTube advocate of course I’m familiar with this type of interface now as are many people these days.

..so…we have what I believe is something a bit special. A ubiquitous and relatively cheap technology for gaming that already exists in most living rooms which is being used to provide on demand TV content delivery. The XBox 360 has similar simplicity and ease of use for Sky content and my colleague used that last week for TV content, so we now have a number of devices on which on demand TV content can be delivered. The next step of course is to make the experience more fully interactive, knitting together the content and websites and providing content based on feedback and user interaction, also mixing and blending together sophiticated games and TV content seamlesslessly, then of course there is the 3D experience which is due to be big this year.

Coming back to the here and now the main big thing for me is that the BBC is now really mining the area of rich mixed media environments through providing its iPlayer on so many different platforms and devices and through blending different media types and delivery mechanisms to explore new ways to tailor delivery to suit the individual. I think this is putting the BBC in a very strong position and I admire the work they’ve begun to explore this blending of online and broadcast content and tailored delivery.

It shouldn’t all be about consumption though and the idea of people, for example, sharing ratings on programmes, giving recommendations, having back channel chats and peer group discussion around a programme seems like a concept that could be tapped into to provide a more interactive experience for those that want it. I look forward to seeing how this develops.

Gagging Order, Google et al

I’ve been under what feels like a gagging order for the past twelve months as I’ve been part of a small team at the Open University evaluating Google Apps for Education versus Microsoft Live at Edu as the replacement to OpenText FirstClass system for email and also to provide other services to enhance the OU student experience (eProtfolios being one in particular that the OU would like to examine to see if Google can provide a suitable replacement to the current in-house solution called MyStuff).

This has been a very interesting project for me and I visited Google HQ in London earlier in the year and also went around to various places, including the University of Westminster to check out their use of Google tools. I also visited places that have taken the Microsoft tools route and I visited Microsoft HQ last year too, in both cases the overwhelming majority of the institutions are pleased with the results they have received by moving to a cloud provider and adopting more of a CLE rather than VLE (despite the odd niggling issue). I have to say though that, and this I hope is no disrespect to other UK Universities, they are coming from a place much lower on the curve then the OU when exploring “Virtual Campus” solutions. Most of them have Web CT, Blackboard or in a number of cases POP mail accounts as their VLE equivalent. These places gain a lot in a short time by moving to Google or Microsoft.

The OU is in a different position and so it was a big responsibility to make the decision we thought was the correct one to move the OU forward, I felt especially responsible since when I worked in the Technology faculty in the 1990’s we (the EMERG team) introduced FirstClass to the OU and through T171 with John Naughton, Martin Weller and Gary Alexander made it a core component  in online courses. It was a rich environment compared to the equivalent at the time (and remember this was Windows 3.1 era whereVAX mail and CoSy were around as competitors so it really was giving a whole new set of services to the student with it’s rich conferencing experience).

The upshot is that the Open University has picked Google as the provider of choice. Everyone and his dog is blogging about it but some interesting ones are Niall Sclater (who managed the evaluation process) and Tony Hirst who is starting to think about how these tools may be used.

I’m extremely pleased for three reasons, none are to do with Google being “better” then Microsoft by the way as I think it was really a close thing. They are:-

1. I can finally talk about the things I’ve been doing for the past year and not have NDA’s or confidentiality agreements to worry about, so the future is bright and I can discuss the potentials of the ‘next wave’ of technologies without having a gagging order placed on me.

2. We can start planning on how internal v external works for the organisation; we can explore and exploit the benefits of distributed, cloud and share services solutions.

3. I feel like I can start blogging again properly about techy stuff as I’m a nerd. I had considered setting up an anonymous blog or an internal blog (i.e. a blog to self) to keep track of all my doings  but neither of these seems satisfactory. I like to link to others posts and debate with colleagues online (and offline) so those things seem like anti-blogging to me.

…Never mind Happy New Year, it’s happy new era.

Convergence v Specialism

I’m very interested in the trend with devices such as XBox 360 towards a convergence of media types and delivery with it’s support of Sky TV through the XBox and broadband via Sky Player – Stephen Nuttall from Sky was quoted as saying: ‘Our partnership with Xbox is a further example of our commitment to put choice and control in the hands of customers.’

I’m particularly interested in the ‘blurring’ or perhaps integration is a better word between the different media types so the idea of interactivity around watching a football match whilst downloading stats and also interacting with other fans is cool, also concepts around adding value to experiences through ‘back channel’ activities is something becoming more prevalent, as is the concept of ‘on demand’ services.

I think the really interesting stuff will be when the boundaries between an interactive TV experience, a gaming experience or an internet experience all disappear to the extent that they become platform neutral and coherent rather than bolt on things. The announcement of the Boxee box earlier this month is a step in the right direction, this really is opening up the rich resources and putting power int he hands of the users. It also means that you no longer need to get content ‘produced’ on a TV channel in order to get your content to a large audience, consumers become producers.

I’m very interested in using gaming technology and interactive TV in more powerful ways to develop engagement and learning, supported with internet they become extremely powerful tools.

Catching the Wave (Oh I know it’s not original!)

I’ve been exploring using Google wave as a tool to help scaffold our work around Digital Scholarship Hackfests. My idea is simple –  i.e. to use wave a tool to capture the ideas forming that takes place before, during and after the hackfest - To help define the context of the work, to help support the discussions and provide a back channel during the development. The next hackfest is planned for the 24th so I’ll keep you posted of how we get on - key things are to get the group on wave, to get the discussion flowing freely and to keep the wave a reasonable size and shape.

I have only been trying wave for a short time but I’m enjoying it. It very simple conceptually but it does seem to have it’s own position. I was suggesting that it will form part of peoples online experience as time evolves.

At the moment it feels a little sterile as most of the conversations are about wave itself, or are people testing the water. It also feels a little chaotic and experimental. All of these things are fine in an emerging technology and I remembering feeling the same way when first experiencing email and conferencing many years ago when they were unrefined and raw. I think that ideas forming may be a crucial part of wave, as will it’s ability to mange complex relationships that used for be part of multiple email threads/discussions. It will also come of age when more people are on board and when etiquette is sorted out around privacy versus openness, and around whether you’re invited or can self join waves (I’d like a model like mail lists where some are open and some require you to be joined by the list moderators). I think the embedding is also fascinating and the ability to embed content from a range of sources will also help this mature into an extremely useful tool, it seems like it may have design applications, also CRM applications, it may replace wiki’s as a media for group and community led creations and it may also extend and complement email and twitter as a tool to manage complex organisational interactions. Finally it may be a tool that will help scaffold discourse and discussion, a bit like cloudworks.

I hope however it finds a home and does something new and that I haven’t thought of yet, something I didn’t know I needed until I used it in anger. Like twitter it enhances my life in small but very pleasant ways.

Clowning Around?

I’ve hardly blogged at all recently (been on twitter lots) - There’s a debate raging about whether twitter kills blogging. We’ve been having the debate using cloudworks which is our very nice home grown system and I intend to give my opinions of that in another post, but suffice to say I love it.

…anyhow back to my point. By far the most traffic to my blog was generated from my post about Why Clowns are Dangerous. This has in fact also spawned a lot of quite vitriolic and IMHO (!) self opinionated comments, these tend to be light on research and factual evidence but heavily packed with personal insults.

From this I summise:-

1. Michael Wesch is spot on in his analysis about behaviours around anonymity and rage. Particularly people  think they know me from what is a very incomplete set of criteria by which to judge….and for the record my sister runs a circus troupe and regularly dresses in a clown costume. There is a recognised condition around clowns and their fear. Stephen Kings “IT” is directly playing on that association.

2. Clowns are not something to make fun of. Clowns take themselves very seriously.

3. My sister runs a circus troupe (performing arts and trapeze and the works) so there is a clown in my family

4. The more bizarre the blog post the more traffic it generates. My second most popular post is on silent vacuum cleaners. Therefore ridding the world of scary clowns and noisy vacuum cleaners is likely to make someone very popular.

5. Most people don’t get irony. Or humour. Going back to 1, this is probably to do with the other 55% non verbal communication. Or it could be that people only expect blogs to be ‘either’ comical or serious and not a mixture.

6. People make assumptions. All the time. We forget past things that don’t fit those assumptions and concentrate on the latest things that do. Derren Brown would have a field day. Or am I making assumptions?

Bio Feedback Technology

We’ve just purchased a set of Bio feedback technology that has been used by other research to look specifically at emotional responses to gaming. The product is ProComp Biograph Infniti and we’ve bought it with a number of different sensors to pick up things such as  Surface Electromyography, Skin Conductivity and EKG heart rate monitoring.

This rich data can be provided alongside other types of data and we’re therefore going to use it with our purpose built Research Labs along with eye tracking technology and other video data that we capture during our testing work. This should allow us to get a much more detailed picture of the level of engagement and immersion within game play and indeed other forms of online interaction such as within virtual worlds and other online web environments. I’m really looking forward to trying it out. We’ve got plans to also extend this work beyond the labs themselves so we can look at monitoring people in their own social contexts and seeing if this makes a difference.

We are also considering developing a joint research bid with the Speckled Computing people again extending the work we do in the labs out into the real world and looking at how to use the ‘intant feedback’ that this technology provides to assist people in both how they work and in their personal and social lives. I’m very excited about the possibilities that these technologies provide.  

Some quick example or two to explain what I mean.

1. We can use Bio feedback to assist people in dealing with stressful situations and conflict. We can use VR or video simulations to mock up events and work through issues with individuals in a ‘controlled’ way, for example training social workers.

2. We can use Bio feedback and speckled computing at assist with rehabilitation, and with improving balance in people who have mobility issues, for example those who have had hip replacement surgery to learn to walk correctly again and improve freedom of movement.

3. We can assist with pandemic outbreaks by sending ’specks’ to affected people to gauge whether or not they have the illness and to monitor their recovery. This avoids having to involve expensive health care practitioners and it also allows us to accurately measure the spread of a pandemic.

There are many more, Sports Science, Gaming etc.. the possibilities are many and varied and the opportunity for using this technology to benefit our society is very much within our grasp.

Truely Immersive Gaming

We recently purchased Nvidia GeForce 3D Vision Stereoscopic Glasses to try them out for gaming to see if they offer a more truly immersive experience. They do, they are mind blowingly good!

I had almost given up hope because I’ve tried out the 3D glasses from two other providers (mentioning no names but I was expecting a lot and was hugely disappointed) and a set of gaming vests and found these to be annoying and actually get in the way of the gaming experience rather than promoting a more immersive experience.

Back to the Nvidia glasses. I can’t say enough about them. Here they are below (look quite cool and they are not not heavy or awkward to wear).

We used them with the 120Hz Samsung display and I tried out two games, the latest versions of Call of Duty and Burnout. Both were staggeringly good. The moment I went into CoD I felt like I was walking through the grass, seeing my team move past me and seeing people running at or away from me. I felt like I was moving in team formation. I was ducking to avoid obstacles and wincing as the bullets ripped past me. I’m not a first person shoot-em-up gamer but I thought that this experience could turn me into one it was completely mesmerizing and I had to wrench myself out.

I then tried out Burnout. Again fantastically realistic driving experience. In particular when going under low footbridges I (and others who tried it) couldn’t help ducking! – It’s great, the experience is enhanced for playing too because you get a more accurate measure of speed and distance of oncoming traffic through it which allows better reaction (at least we thought so). The downside for me if there was one was that after 45 minutes on it my brain felt a bit groggy and my eyes a bit tired, this may just be an acclimitization thing because I experienced much the same thing when I first played Super Mario Galaxy because I couldn’t get used to the ‘upside down’ worlds playing experience. I got over that after a couple of sessions though and I think it’s the same with this technology.

In conclusion this represents a huge leap forward in providing a more immersive and realistic experience for gamers. It’s relatively low cost now at £300 and likely to come down in price. I’ve have heard that Sony are going to put this technology (or similar) into the new Bravia’s and I’m just finally pleased to have tried a piece of gaming technology that lives up to the hype.

See you in VR land…

Hackfests – VTOL for websites

I’ve been the architect of two ‘hackfests’ this year and I wanted to share my experiences of these. The hackfest concept is probably well known but my interpretation of it is a short burst of creative programming and web service building from a relatively small group over a short period to achieve one or more goals. In the case of the two hackfests that I was responsible for orchestrating these were around “Building bespoke location based twitter feeds for Holographic screen display” (this was a one day hackday) and “Digital Scholarship”. Doug Clow has written an in depth review of the Digital Scholarship hackfest on his blog so I won’t go over that ground again, what I will do is say that I think hackfests present a way of quickly delivering relatively ’self contained’ services using a skunkworks project methodology.

So having done two of these I am now more convinced than ever that hackfests present a very powerful and substantial tool to allow academics and developers (or web services stakeholders and developers) to build sites within a short space of time and with a lot less pain and difficulty than more traditional methods. Hackfests also cut out a lot of the crap that you end up reverse engineering later because the short space of time means that everyone is totally focused on realising the most important aspects and ensuring that those get delivered.

The hackfests that I ran had a mix of people, in the second two day hackfest I booked a site off campus for the team to work, we had two academics (Doug Clow and Martin Weller)  two programmers (Nick Freear and Juliette Culver), myself (I guess I would probably be classed as a techy with some UI background for the purposes of this), a web designer (Anthony McAvoy) and an ICT manager with some programming experience (Kevin McLeod). This seemed like a good team to me and I picked the people rather than just throwing it together because I knew the group were both creative but also goal driven and self-managing.

What are the overall benefits?

1. Hackfests get services up and running relatively quickly.

2. Hackfests allow developers and stakeholders to work collaboratively and to brainstorm and feel part of the ‘inception’ and ideas forming process. This provides buy-in that is usually not in more traditional developments.

3. Hackfests develop bonding and foster team spirit.

4. Hackfests are cheap to run for the organisation (2 days x 7 people + cost of venue to develop + 14 days  x 1 person to launch service) compared to traditional bespoke web service delivery methods and offer good return on investment.

5. Hackfests get projects up and running fast (Vertical take-off and landing) – VTOL – produce quick wins.

6. You can have iterative hackfests over a period of time to accomplish a true release early and often model. You can do testing between hackfests to add a higher quality assurance process to the services.

What are the constraints?

1. You need to plan. Even though the work itself is relatively free you need to plan out the days for maximum advantage. I cut it into concept mapping and ideas forming (morning) then moving into planning and interface design (afternoon) and then moving to building (late afternoon and following day). You should also plan some technical aspects beforehand for example methods of coding and version control, network availability and host systems.

2. You need to have good people who are both engaged focused and not cynical! – You need to give people enough time to brainstorm but also manage to avoid getting bogged down in issues or details (for example authentication!)

3. You need to have a project that is not tightly integrated to other services or reliant on too many variables that can’t be delivered in a short hackfest.

4. You need to be willing to not fall back into the habit of thinking that it must be perfect first time.

5. You need to allow plenty of time after the hackfest for one of the developers to finish the final 20% to get it delivered. I underestimated this on both hackfests and so although you have the benefit of cheap delivery it still takes time to get the last 20% out the door.

Conclusion

We’re still experimenting with the concept but luckily I’ve got a good management team who are willing to explore this because they realise that I have very limited resources and therefore hackfests provide a way for them to grab some of the very limited resource. We are going to attempt a ‘hackfest’ competition – i.e. ask academics to come up with their most urgent service needs or research project prototype system requirements then we’ll judge these based on how much of a ‘big win they provide and how they fit with the units strategy, the winner gets the next programmer group for a hackfest in November. Watch this space.