Twitter

Everyone's dog says/blogs/twits that Twitter is a synonymous to fail. They've had more than their share of downtime and keep cutting on features to be able to cope with the load.

Although it's annoying at times, I reckon they're being really, really smart about their options. You see, no matter how bad Twitter performs, no one's leaving. In the meantime, they're tuning their software and systems to make it scale like mad. When it's finished, problems will be a thing of the past, they'll be able to start adding new features and, more importantly, they'll be prepared to cross the dreadful chasm Moore wrote about nearly two decades ago. At that point, it'll be sold to the public as SMS for the Web and, taking a look into where the mobile industry is possibly heading, I can see them making it really big (a big clash of interests will surely follow).

iPhone prices

I keep reading about iPhone 3G prices everyday. I don't mean the price you pay when you get the phone but the sum of everything when the contract finishes. The latest (sorry, portuguese link, scroll to the bottom and ignore the rest) tells the iPhone costs about 1000 Euros after two years.

Man, these people really need to learn a thing or two. The correct way of figuring out how much the iPhone costs is to subtract the value of any contract plan with subsidy from the value of the same plan without subsidy. Example: for the iPhone Best 100 (which is the cheapest), you'll need 299.9 Euros to bring it out of the store. The phone is subsidized and the contract costs 29,9 Euros per month, which isn't a lot if you think about it: 100 minutes of voice on prepaid costs about 25 Euros. If the phone weren't subsidized, the same plan would be 14,9 Eur per month. So to calculate how much the phone will cost you, you subtract 14,9 from 29,9, which gives you 15 Euros and then multiply by the contract duration, which is 24 months, so the result is 360 Euros. Now add it to the price you paid to take it home with you and you'll get 659,9 Euros. This is the real iPhone price, not 1100 Euros, which includes the costs of communications (voice, SMS, data).

iPhone apps

Speaking of the iPhone, a topic came up the other day over lunch with the rest of the 7syntax crew. Someone, who shall remain anonymous :-), was saying that 3rd-party consumer apps will give a big boost to the iPhone popularity. I don't think so, but I can see how people might believe in this given the amount of hype surrounding both the iPhone and it's apps. With that in mind, if I were a betting man, I'd bet against companies who focus their development efforts of iPhone apps for the consumer market. A small note: I'll gladly accept being proven wrong as the game is just getting started. Another note: I'm talking regular apps, not games.

The major barrier to 3rd-party iPhone apps is the language you need to write them on: Objective-C is not the same as C. Where a C++ developer picks up Symbian in no time or a Java developer creates something for J2ME really quick, unless you have some Objective-C under your belt it'll take some time wrap your head around Objective-C and Cocoa. Also, there aren't as many experienced developers available as there are for other platforms. And then there's also the fact that one needs specific hardware (ie. a Mac) to be able to develop the software.

Finally, there's history. After Symbian got popular (ie. when Nokia started churning Symbian phones like mad), some companies focused themselves on developing consumer apps for Symbian. To be honest, I can't name any as still being alive and kicking. The way I see it, the only platform that stood the test of time is J2ME and games contribute a lot to this. What happens is that the general consumer market isn't looking to replace their computer with their mobile phone, so 3rd-party apps that aren't gateways to something bigger are pretty much doomed by default. It may happen, but it'll take lots of time.

Update: both Celso and Pedro made good points on Twitter with regards to the iTunes App Store, which I missed. Still, how is App Store any different form a carrier's own application portal which is also easily accessible on mobile phones? Is it so different and so engaging that it'll prove as important as the iTunes Music Store was for the iPod?

I'm not a tea fanatic. Sure, if the kettle's on I'll have a go but my favorite work beverage is, by far, coffee. Even so, a few days ago a batch of Adagio teas arrived through mail. I placed the order mostly out of curiosity, due to them having so many weird flavored teas available and the samplers costing only $2 USD.

In spite of a minor confusion that caused some shipping delays, the ordering process was simple enough and getting a package from the States delivered in less than a week is a sure way of getting a repeat customer.

These are the teas that were delivered at my doorstep:

• Iced tea delight
• Earl Grey bravo
• Citron green
• White peach
• Rooibos vanilla

Except for the first one, I've already tasted all the others (actually, I'm sipping through a nice cup of rooibos vanilla as I write this) so a small review is in order.

The Earl Grey is a huge disappointment. From what I've learned the bergamot is an orange-y kind of fruit and that was what I expected. Instead I got a perfume flavored tea. Utter crap and put me on a bad mood as it was the first tea I tasted and started to second guess what the others would taste like. Score: 1, just because it's Earl Grey.

Fortunately the other day I woke up way earlier than usual and prepared a cup of the Citron green tea. Now, this is a very good and light tea. It has a very nice lime flavor, just strong enough to be something worth enjoying. I'm giving it a 3 out of 5.

By coincidence the same thing happened this morning. I got up at about 8:15AM and was looking for something light to fill an empty stomach. At such an early time of day I wasn't quite ready to step outside and go to the café so I prepared a cup of peach flavored white tea and I'm really glad I did so as it's really, really good. It's incredibly light and the strong peach after-taste is, I dare say, awesome. This is my favorite out of the four. Score: 4.

As I wrote before, I'm now enjoying the rooibos vanilla. I never had tasted a rooibos tea before, nor a vanilla flavored one. I'm a fan of vanilla ice cream so I had high expectations that were totally met. One of the reviewers mentioned the fact that rooibos tastes like medicine but I can't spot that taste, only the nice vanilla. I'm giving it a 3.5. It's not as good as the peach white but it's definitely better than the citron green.

And so I'm ending this small tea review, but not without mentioning the mint tea Ruben brought to the office some weeks ago, which kickstarted this small tea adventure. The mint tea is awesome to have on those hot summer days and you should have it really hot as it gets the best flavor out of the mint. But don't prepare lots of it as after about an hour it starts to taste really bad.

All in all, Adagio has a very nice thing going on and their expanding their business to Europe. Although I'll probably keep ordering stuff from the States due to the low dollar price, I really hope they can get some traction over this side of the pond and start having a bit more of variety on their European store. Go check them out.

We have a couple of openings over at 7syntax. We're looking for highly motivated individuals that want to take part on something as special as a startup. If any of the following is you, get in touch by dropping us a word via work@7syntax.com.

Python Developer

Key responsabilities:

• design and implement software back-end components
• program in Python and C
• analyse and improve the performance, scalability and stability of Handivi
• colaborate with the rest of the product team
• proactively look for ways to improve the service

Past experience/desired interests:

• having participated in at least one medium to long term project, Open Source or commercial
• solid skills in programming with Python and C on Linux
• experience with Java
• good knowledge of SQL databases, PostgreSQL earns you bonus points
• solid understanding of messaging systems, server architectures and distributed systems
• design patterns and unit testing
• good communication skills and strong command of the English language

Bonus:

• CS degree
• solid experience with the Django framework
• experience with one or more Amazon services: EC2, S3, SQS
• experience with distributed version control systems
• experience with agile methodologies
• able to travel abroad for training sessions and conferences

J2ME Developer

Key responsabilities:

• lead the development of mobile applications
• interact with the design/user-experience team
• provide technology insight for the definition of project architecture with the back-end team
• research other emerging mobile platforms, e.g. iPhone or Google Android
• proactively look for ways to improve Handivi

Past experience/desired interests:

• having participated in at least one medium to long term project, Open Source or commercial
• deep knowledge on Java Mobile Edition, it's advantages and weak spots, including MMAPI
• design patterns and unit testing
• having an interest in scripting languages, like Ruby
• general knowledge on how mobile networks work, particularly data transport
• excellent communication skills and command of the English language

Bonus:

• CS degree
• hands on experience with distributed version control systems
• Linux lover
• knowledge of agile methodologies
• able to travel abroad for training sessions and conferences

The Operator Perspective panel at the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference was a pretty heated up debate. At a point some members of the audience were going ape which, although entertaining as it may be to the outside observer, wasn't doing any service to those who were looking forward to a rational debate.

Still, there were some highlights that deserve a post-event debate, starting with Anastassia Lauterbach of T-Mobile who shed some light with regards to mobile bandwidth consumption:

• Youtube represents about 17% of all the traffic
• peer-to-peer generates 34% of all traffic (I'm not really sure of this number as I failed to jot it down, please feel free to correct me)

She asked if the audience could figure out these numbers in a pure rhetorical exercise, as an excuse for the tight control and lack of data plan innovation on behalf of mobile operators.

While I can understand her point, in my opinion this is something mobile operators brought upon themselves when they came up with the idea of the USB 3G dongle for the masses.

People aren't using P2P on their mobiles, starting with the fact that it'd kill their battery in no time, and Youtube isn't compatible enough with a large enough range of devices that would cause such high data consumption values.

What's generating all that traffic is people with laptops watching Youtube funny videos while they commute or others that plug the dongle onto a computer and want it to be a complete replacement for fixed broadband, which is a completely legitimate assumption as it is what is being marketed by mobile operators.

At the end of the day, data traffic generated by dongles cannot be used as an excuse for the lack of data plan pricing innovation, which is something that was already going on way before such devices became popular.

Another hot topic was that of tight operator control over what gets into the phone (and what it is allowed to do). This is more of a problem in the US than in Europe, as European MNO's are getting increasingly more open although we're not quite there yet. Still, the old excuse of "we are the ones who get support calls" is getting worn out as a recent market survey rates Nokia as the most popular mobile operator and I doubt Nokia gets a flood of support calls, or considers it a problem large enough to become pretty vocal on it, over 3rd-party applications installed on their devices.

Mind you, I don't doubt MNO's call centers get support calls for 3rd-party applications but I also don't believe that by exercising a tight control over what gets installed will reduce them to zero.

A question that was left unanswered was about whether or not the iPhone, and the high data consumptions done by their users, will become MNOs worst nightmare as they have zero control over what gets installed and must "compete" on flat-rate data pricing amongst themselves.

Conclusion

Both these issues, coupled together, prove Max Niederhofer, of Atlas Ventures, right when he says that operators wanting to get a piece of everything makes him, and other VCs, extremely wary of any serious investment in the mobile industry.

When comparing the mobile services/applications ecosystem with what happens on the Web, one has to admit innovation is, in fact, stifled. And this is the reason any open debate between mobile operators and 3rd-party developers will continue to be heated up for the foreseeable future.

So you're planning on ordering a batch of Moo cards and are wondering about what images to use? Are you a photographer, casual or professional, who has a batch of really nice photos on Flickr and likes to see your work being shown to the world? Then, this Flickr group can be of use to you.

It started with Armando's idea of asking people to send him photos to include on his next batch of Moo minicards and this is the natural evolution of it. If you're a artist looking to spread your work, it just doesn't get any better than this. Join the group, share your stuff, we'll take care of the rest. Just a final note though, your work must be licensed under a Creative Commons that allows us to use it. That's it, see you there.

At Mario's I wrote that I too was eager to get my hands on an iPhone 3G, the $199 USD version which is about 125 Euros (of course it won't go out at this price but let's daydream for a while). But I think I pulled the trigger a bit soon because I paid a visit to the online Apple Store only to spot the following, roughly translated, small print:

The iPhone includes up to two years of free technical support, for the duration of the contract with your mobile operator

WHAT?! A two year contract? Unless it's a competitive monthly fee, e.g. 35 Euros, unlimited data (but of the actually unlimited kind), I won't really consider it. At least until someone finds a way of breaking the operator lock so that I can use it with my pay-as-you-go voice call service plus 100MB of mobile data (you know, the small and compact kind) that currently costs me roughly 20 Euros per month[1].

[1] Expect a full explanation of these costs sometime later tonight.

Yesterday I attended the very first edition of Portugal's webtrip in Aveiro. If you know me, you'll know I live next to Lisbon so going there meant covering nearly 270 km to get there and another 270 km coming back. Let me tell you it was well worth the effort but, unfortunately, this is how it all ended for me:

Clearly I haven't been having much luck with motorcycles of late. I'm jinxed or something, but I'll get to that later.

Webtripping

The purpose of webtrip, straight off the horse's mouth, is to have a monthly meet up with web people across the country. The expression "don't come to us, we'll go to you" applies perfectly because we all know about small groups getting together now and then to chat about tech in general, web in particular, over a cup of coffee. When something somewhat interesting happens it'll probably take place in or near Lisbon[1] and often times people don't attend because, although it's a small country, it's not easy to get around (nor cheap). So, every month, at a location voted by the people (or scripts, whichever is quickest to post the most votes) a lunch and after-lunch meet up, filled with interesting conversations containing lots of good and free advices, will take place.

I really liked the concept and, with that in mind, me and my script-foo went on to vote on Aveiro. No, the voting wasn't rigged, Aveiro was clearly set to win, I just gave it a nice boost.

Oh, one small piece of advice, if you attend the next one do yourself a favour and make sure to take a notebook (as in pen and paper) with you, you'll most definitely need it.

If you're now ready to read about what happened exactly, I'm sorry to disappoint you but I won't write about it, you'll need to show up next time around to actually know what goes on.

Motorcycles are fun

I really enjoy motorcycles. I mean, not in an obsessive way, if you ask me about parts and stuff you'll get a blank stare but I enjoy every bit out of the sense of freedom you get from riding one (and don't get me started on how I use it for reflection and introspection): it's just you and the road. With that in mind, when I went to get my driver's permit I just got the one that allowed me to officially drive a motorcycle, postponing a 4-wheeled vehicle one for later. Boy, did I regret that yesterday.

Going to Aveiro I started to get the feeling of her loosing some grip on the rear wheel. It's OK I thought to myself, thinking it was just road dirt. But then it happened more than a couple of times so I pulled over at a service station and noticed that the rear wheel was a bit loose. If you shook it, it moved a few millimeters which isn't much for slow driving but it's quite a lot if you're hurrying to get somewhere. Still, instead of getting back to base I proceeded to my destination.

On the drive back home, I started hearing this really weird "plonk" sound, similar to the one you get when you drive over a sewer man-hole cover. And I wasn't passing over any so it started to get on my nerves. Still I insisted on driving back but when I got on the highway at a certain point, which you can look up in the photo's location, it got really dangerous and I had no choice to call it quits, pull over the highway shoulder and ask for the insurance company's roadside assistance to pick me up and the bike. Now this would be all good, where it not the case of the tow truck showing up quickly, picking up the motorcycle and driving off, leaving me standing there in the dusk, waiting for the taxi to bring me home, on a highway shoulder, at the middle of nowhere with no roadside lights whatsoever. I blame it on the football match. Fortunately the taxi showed up about 15 minutes later and was able to spot me and I was set for a nearly 3 hour trip back home.

Oh yeah, why did I regret not taking the car driving license as well? Because the insurance company guy asked me if I would mind being driven to Oporto instead of Lisbon, pick up a replacement vehicle there and taking it back on Monday at some shop in Lisbon. "Of course not", I told him, "the only issue is that I can't drive a car so it'll have to be a motorcycle". No deal there, apparently there are no motorcycle rentals around these parts of Europe so I had to settle for a lift home. As for she, she'll be deliver at my mechanic's doorstep on Wednesday.

[1] let me save face by tell you that I don't mean that interesting stuff only happens in or near Lisbon, quite the contrary

As I mentioned elsewhere, yesterday I got my Nokia 770 back along with a nice bluetooth GPS so, having a couple of free hours to fiddle with it again, I went to grab the Maemo SDK (oh yeah, the 770 is flashed with OS2008). Just by looking at the instructions at the INSTALL.txt file it recalled it wouldn't be a smooth ride, and indeed it wasn't. What I make of this is that my patience levels certainly aren't as high as a few years ago.

So, after running the maemo scratchbox (yes, there is a specific maemo scratchbox script, god forbid merging the scratchbox installer with the SDK installer) I noticed that, somewhere along the many packages to be installed, probably hundreds but I didn't bother to count, one of them failed so the entire installation was borked. Ok, back to the starting line: rm -rf /scratchbox. Woooooooppppssss, there goes my console. Oh, and the desktop env stopped responding too. Apparently, there were some wicked links to /dev and by rm'ing /scratchbox those links went the way of the dodo too. Pushed power button, all back to normal (ie. dev recreated) and time for a rant.

What do you get when you put a bunch of geeks who consider themselves Christ's second coming in a room?

A huge pile of shit!

Maemo people, please, pleeease take a page off the Android guys book and learn how to make an SDK generally available to the public. You've been at this for what, 3 years now?

As for the simple app I wanted to create, yet another dumbass Twitter client I can use without being in front of a computer, I'll go with Android. At least the tools don't get in my way and the last time I did something with Android, it took me less than a couple of hours to go from installing the SDK and browsing the docs to having something pretty to show in the emulator.

Yesterday I managed to attend BarCamp at FCT in Lisbon (ok ok, not quite Lisbon but close enough). I say managed because I only attended after a (crazy enough) friend lent me his motorcycle. Quite nice, being able to drive a Triumph Sprint ST instead of my trusty old Honda CB 750. If you want to learn more about the beast, check this link. I had already had a nice taste of another Sprint when a good friend bought one last year and I had to drive it back to Lisbon, but this one was special because I always wanted to take it for a ride but always refused offers to do so. These Sport Touring motorcycles are bloody impressive because they pack a huge punch and yet are extremely comfortable. On my way to FCT and without noticing it (ie. with no effort whatsoever of the engine) I was driving at about 160km/h (100mph). Really great bike, although it was missing most of the plastics, because they're being re-molded, and that got me into trouble going in (security guy didn't like my overall looks, can't really blame him) and coming out of FCT as I'll later explain.

Anyway, back to the Barcamp. I missed the opening salvo by Carlos Rodrigues, which was a shame as I admit to be geeky enough to have a passing interest in FireHOL, iptables and whatnot, although I am not a sysadmin. Met with Alexandre Solleiro on my way in and we stayed outside chatting about his project and exchanging ideas on it while an incredibly lengthy presentation was on. Before walking back to the auditorium I spent some time with João Moreno who was organising the event. Really smart kid and a Python lover too. João, if you're reading this, I'd be glad to have a talk with you after you get back from your MSc :-)

Then VD went on stage to talk about platforms, services and products. Ok, I have to admit I was really slow yesterday as a result of serious sleep deprivation, barely getting some quality shuteye this past week, but I found the entire discussion, which was the only part I caught, mostly irrelevant and confusing. You cannot really compare the frustration between having a problem on a physical product, say a laptop, and a service, say like Flickr or Twitter. If my computer breaks down I'll get extremely pissed off because I paid crap loads of money out of it with the expectancy of having it functioning 100% of the time for at least a couple of years. If Flickr loses some of my photos or Twitter goes down, yes I'll bitch about it but life will go on as usual. On social network services, the experience they provide is completely determined by who's in that social network. Twitter trounces Pownce because of the difference, in many orders of magnitude, between the amount of action that goes on Twitter and not on Pownce. Twitter keeps going down, Pownce is still irrelevant (sorry Leah, Pownce is not awesome). And users don't just flock to other services exactly because of that. On the other hand, if you're creating a developer platform you'd better go out of your way to have a pristine uptime record because your users really do care about whether your service is up and running or not. So I pitched in by trying to explain that there is a world of difference among the three types of users/consumers, what each of them expects and how much, in reality, they value your product/service/platform.

Lunch was served and it was kickass. Really. In no other conference (woops, sorry for throwing an unconference into the conference mix) was food as good as this one. After lunch, half backed dot-com went on but, although I agree with it having to be about nonsensical stuff I don't like it when a particular person becomes the target of public mockery. So instead of ganging up on someone I barely know, I took my interest elsewhere and I'm glad I did because in the coffee break room, which I maintain should have been used for Ignite sessions, the usual suspects were brainstorming around interesting stuff. I seriously tried to keep up with the discussion, but failed due to struggling between an extremely reduced attention span and background noise. From then on I entered zombie mode, hanging around just because of the interesting side discussions that unfortunately never took place inside the main room. Also met with Andre Oliveira, from Sem Papel, with whom I let out some frustrations about how currently job sites are little more than glorified newspaper classified ads and do very little to explore a possibly good opportunity to differenciate themselves.

As the event got closer to the end, ignite sessions started to take place. I was prepared to go deliver two 5 minute pitches with no safety net, read no powerpoints just my trusty moleskine and the blackboard, so I let everyone who needed a computer go first. By the time I was ready to go on stage the other guy from the BarcampFCT team let Ignite go astray by having people from the audience step in. Now don't get me wrong, I found the motivational speech somewhat interesting, although I havet to wholeheartedly disagree with recommending startups to mainly seek government sponsorship or see it as their best option. What I got really frustrated with was the sense of having someone just jump in right into the front of the queue, without even bothering to ask for permission. The guy I mentioned in the beginning of the post, who also owns a SprintST, had just arrived so, with frustration adding up to fatigue, I decided it was time to walk out, but not before extending my compliments to João who did a really good job.

I was getting ready to actually get out of the campus when the SprintST simply refused to turn on. You see, this is the kind of problems I wrote about. It's way, wayyyy different to have a electronic malfunction on a motorcycle than to experience a Twitter failure (which was down at the time btw). You see, it rained during the day and because the bike didn't have it's plastic bodywork some of the water went into the electric circuitry. By that time all the water had already dried out so we got the bikes side by side, Private set us up with battery cables which we plugged in and hoped for the best. Fortunately, the bike started to work, although timidly but enough for me to take it for a spin and have it warm up a bit before leaving, noticing that the speedometer failed to function. All's well when it ends well I guess.

To the people who made it happen a big thank you, you did a good job and it was indeed unfortunate only half of the people who said were attending actually made it to the event.

As you may be aware next Saturday a Barcamp will take place at FCT. As a way to promote the event we, at 7syntax, have arranged, together with BarcampFCT's organization, to throw a little get together on friday, the 23rd, at the British Pub in Lisbon. Drinking starts at 19:00 and the first round of beers is on us, so be sure to come on over, introduce yourself and get loosened up for Barcamp FCT!

and it seems only I have figured out the reason:

twitter is down because the Debian developers are bitchslapping each other due to the recent openssl bug

In related news, del.icio.us appears to be down as well. Most certainly because they're regenerating their SSH keys.

I'm getting fed up with reading XMPP would save Twitter. For the sake of having a good discussion that extends 140 characters, if you believe in that as well drop a commenton the reasons that lead you to believe that. What Jabber server would you use? How would you enable offline messaging?

Yesterday I received an invitation for GAE and spent some time today poking it around. As a result, I've created a service for the mobile community that tries to make everyone's life more simple when it comes to applying for mobile content whitelisting.

Content providers just have to drop their domains on the box, mobile network operators (all of them?) can download the OPML and add those domains to their whitelists. Fetching the OPML with If-Modified-Since is also supported, so no one will have to download the same domains time and time again. Hopefully this makes it easier on everyone until a better solution is reached.

Oh right, the service is available at http://mcw.appspot.com.

My "Wakapooca"[1] shell stats:

history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

252 cd
197 bzr
124 vi
115 ll
103 ls
37 ./manage.py
27 python
16 grep
14 ssh
13 rm

Some patterns stand out:

1. commit often, branch and merge as if there's no tomorrow, as bzr is the top application
2. editor execution proves the previous point, I open the editor less often than I commit code
3. I don't execute the code probably as often as I could/should ("sharp shooter" coding? :-) )

[1] This is a joke on a mispronunciation by VD. See Wakoopa

As we approach the end of NextWeb, it's time to write a round up of todays presentations.

The day began with Robert Scoble who ignited the audience with a brilliant presentation on participation and the importance of having friends (fake or not, doesn't matter) on various online. To paraphrase him: it's more important to follow people than to have followers at it contributes to an increase of your own knowledge about things.

We then moved to another 6 startup presentation round. There were some interesting companies there, Backbase springs to mind, and one personally didn't like, andUnite.com, which is about "search term sharing": the search terms you use on any one search engine can be shared with your friends. Fair enough, I didn't like the way they pitched it but someone else I met had an interest in it, specially for vertical markets.

After lunch and a brief meeting that put us in technical knock-out (of which VD appears to be slowly recovering :-) ) the man himself, Mr. Werner Vogels went on stage to talk about Amazon's Web Services. I'm guessing no one was surprised by hearing about this set of services, but Werner passed a very clear message about why it's important in a business sense, specially for startups, to choose Amazon as their infrastructure provider. A quote from memory:

No startup here can match Amazon in terms of service availability. While you may shoot for five 9's we're going after 100% uptime.

Someone from StumbleUpon followed but I failed to catch most of the talk. Judging by the twitter backchannel, the crowd wasn't enjoying his robotic monotone presentation.

6 more startups went on stage, one of them with a brilliant video starring David Hasselhoff: Soocial. Great pitch, very entertaining and it made up for all the others.

Jessica Mah then delivered an kick-ass presentation about how internet services should adjust themselves to the user, presenting the most relevant content first. She gave good examples like email services ordering messages by relevance of contact (I'm guessing something like finding relevance in the number of messages exchanged). Really good, all-around, speaker and she's only 17 years old. Certainly someone to watch in the future.

And that's pretty much it. Chris Saad is about to go on stage and probably talk a bit more about data portability. Then it's decompression, dinner and probably we'll go to Odeon for the NextWeb party. A bit of sleep and back to Lisbon.

Claramente não é um país moderno. Fomos ali ao café tomar o pequeno almoço e brincámos, durante a espera, com o facto de que, se a ASAE cá chegasse, não estariam abertos por muito mais tempo. Os jarros de compota, abertos com o conteúdo exposto ao ar. Os torrões de açúcar, em cima de um prato, também expostos ao ar e às lambidelas de quem quer todos mas só pode mesmo ficar com um ou dois. As colheres, de madeira, idem aspas. O padeiro colocava o pão quente no expositor, com as mãos. Não há uma luvinha nem nada? Cabos electricos expostos. Enfim, claramente um problema de saúde pública, como se podia constatar pelos presentes que demonstravam que, claramente, saúde é algo que falta a este país.

Nunca mais volto para enfiar um pastelinho de nata, feito numa fábrica, congelado e aquecido num forno local, no bucho, de volta ao mundo civilizado.

Reporting straight from Amsterdam, a few small notes on what went on this morning:

Portability, portability, portability

This was the main topic of the morning. From portable social data (photos, videos, comments) to portable search engine crawlers and open search rating algorithms, many aspects of portability were discussed. Unfortunately, the big question went somewhat unanswered: if your business depends on user lock-in (ie. makes money on keeping users engaged), how can you make money by allowing people to just take what they produced to you competitor's service?

Digg's suggested articles

Kevin Rose announced that in the near future Digg will start suggesting articles to voters who digg a link. The idea is that if you like something that other 3000 users liked, based on your digg-pattern the service should be able to say something along the lines of "If you digg'd this article, you should digg these too". Oh yeah, and it appears Digg has a monthly user base of 25 million people.

How to kick VCs in the butt

A very insightful presentation by Adeo Ressi, of TheFunded.com, on dealings with VCs. The key points, for me: 1) don't trust your own lawyers after you hire them, 2) give high level overviews of your business and financials to VCs and try to keep it that way, 3) do not take the first offer, ever.

Last summer I somehow managed to get myself into trouble by openly criticising the way OCL was being managed. In case you don't remember, here's the problem: it wasn't. My main issue was that OCL should happen frequently, e.g. on a weekly basis, whether one person or twenty showed up. The thing is that planning get-togethers with Portuguese people is an exercise of futility, comparable only to the venerable task of herding cats. So unless you stick to a regular schedule, nothing ever happens. I remember mentioning an example of a get-together that has been happening for more than a decade and MV chimed in, letting us know about Founder's Day in Lisbon, which unfortunately appears to have gone belly up but, one thing is true though, no one can point any fingers at them because they seriously tried to get it airborne.

One habit I picked up from the London days was getting together for a couple of pints after work to talk, not only but also, about mundane things. You see, when people talk they create bonds and none of us really wants to create a place where the only bond is the chain of command. So, when choosing a location for our modest office, I really pushed to get into a place where we could try and replicate this. Fortunately we were extremely lucky and found a good and incredibly cheap place, right where we wanted it. So when we moved there, one of the first rules became everyone leaving the office early on Fridays to go down to the pub and chat about random stuff.

So back to this OpenPub thingy, I wouldn't actually call it that, and certainly not pit it against OCL and definitely not define it as a recurring event (more about it later on). So far we've been lucky to have the team behind tarpipe.com showing up to join us but that doesn't mean it's a web startup get-together. This is mostly about us and for us, the guys at 7syntax. Whether anyone else drops by is nothing more than pure chance. Sure, it's been great to be in the company of Bruno and Vitor, and it would rock if more people stopped by, but that doesn't mean it's something official (unless you're working with us). That's why, if you're somehow interested in it, you should check the twitter updates on Friday. If something's on, you'll then be in the know. Drop by if you want to, when you want to and, as VD puts it, we'll even let you buy us a round.

PS: but not this Friday though, unless you happen to be in Amsterdam, as we're flying there for this year's NextWeb conference. If you're also attending, get in touch.

Anyone bothering to follow some of my weekend updates at twitter should have known it was coming:

In case you're staring at the pretty image and wondering: installing Leopard on such an old machine isn't supported. But that doesn't mean it can't be done. If you want to do it, here's a quick howto for the fastest way for giving your aging Mac a couple of go-faster stripes:

1. get yourself a spare IDE disk and plug it to the Mac. Trust me on this, tinkering with the install DVD image to make it fit a standard 4.7GB disc isn't worth the hassle
2. make a partition on that disk that can be used to dump the installation DVD (ie. create a partition with 10GB of space). In name of simplicity I'm assuming you'll name it Install and that it'll be accessible on /Volumes/Install
3. grab CCC, run it and clone the installation DVD onto said partition
4. download this package, put it on your Desktop, unzip it. Note: the linked file may disappear off the face of the interweb one of these days. Don't come knocking on my door for it, I don't have it.
5. when the cloning process is finished, open the Terminal and do this command: mv ~/Desktop/NewOSInstall.mpkg /Volumes/Install/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg
6. open the Startup Disk thingy, set the Install volume for startup, click the restart button and let it rip.
7. enjoy

Now, on to better things.

Update: in case you're wondering why, I did it because I want to tinker with the iPhone SDK which can only run on Leopard. So while this may look like time wasting to you, to me it means saving roughly a bit more than a thousand Euros.

I've realised that in my social circle's outer ring, hackers and geeks are a dime a dozen, mostly because they're fake. Fake in the sense that people call themselves hackers but don't like to code or do anything that relates with that activity (ie. compiling stuff). Fake in the sense that they call themselves tech geeks but keeping up with the bleeding edge of geekdom is way to much of a hassle for them.

My reasoning then is that, in the grand scheme of things, they could just as well be flipping burgers and be just as happy. Except the pay probably wouldn't be as good. And what's more interesting is that this only happens with younger people, the oldest actually love tech, enjoy fiddling with bits and bytes and manage to have time for their families.

Then again, I'm probably just having a bad hair day.