The flagship branch of Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London is a fantastic shop with a magnificent computing section. It is arguably the biggest section in the UK, maybe in all of Europe, possibly in the World, W & G Foyle Ltd
113-119 Charing Cross Road
London
WC2H 0EB
Fax: 020 7434 1580
Email: orders@foyles.co.uk
Mapwith the equivalent of 70+ full-size bays, plus additional promotions, spinners etc – and that doesn’t include digital audio, digital photography, digital filmmaking etc, which are housed in the neighbouring Technical section. With good coffee in the connecting coffee shop, (past the lifts and around the corner), Foyles Computing Section is well worth a visit if you’re in the centre of London.
A section that size needs a committed and knowledgeable crew to keep it in check, and Foyles have had a succession of dedicated staff who have incrementally improved the section over the years.
Ten years ago, when I started to call there, the section was an overloaded, over-stocked mess with no inventory to speak of. The shop never did returns, and like a hoarder who won’t chuck their unwanted trinkets, the floor was a ghastly hell-hole wherein all the good stuff was buried beneath the bad.
image: Wikimedia - Tarquin Binary - License
And now we have Ian Veldhuizen and Stephen Forde running the section on a daily basis, stepping up like giants to grapple with the siesmic changes in the computing industry, while at the same time showing an attention to detail that would make a Swiss watchmaker jealous as they pick through the minutiae of computer book publishing. Stephen recently appeared on Makezine modelling the store’s bewilderingly good Make collection. And aiding them, Floor Manager Eoin O’Reilly (no relation) is like a flood barrier handling the tidal sweeps of bookshop politics.
Covering a third of the first floor the department’s stock ranges from books for the novice tackling their first laptop, through to graphic design students, computer scientists, programmers and IT professionals. Recent reallocation of floor space within Foyles has meant that the department now has a dedicated Microsoft Room that covers all the Microsoft applications, platforms and common languages, with sections for basic and advanced certiffication. But there’s plenty of Open Source in there, too.
Ian and Stephen answered a few questions about running the Section:
Why are bookshops still important in these days of online bookselling?
The popularity of online bookstores has effected the profitability of the highstreet bookshop, but people still enjoy being in a bookshop, and want to physically browse and compare books on a subject. The more technical the subject, the more customers want to compare and contrast not just the subject covered but how it is covered, something best done with book in hand.The Computing section has a turnover of topics that say the History section will never have. Does it make it hard to keep up?
Picking up upon new trends has always been exciting. Usually customers ask for something on a subject you have never heard about and it’s always exciting to track down more information on these subjects.How did Foyles computing sections blossom while other sections are falling away?
We have always tried to stay updated with the latest in the computing world. We try to stock as wide a range of titles as possible so that when customers come to us there is a very good chance that we will have at least one book on the subject they are looking for and if we don’t, we’ll try and find something and offer to get it in for them.
We also have quite a few regular customers and have attended a few events and exhibitions to get the word out to the computing community that we are the one-stop shop for all their books.O’ReillyGMT adds: Foyles were lucky, in some ways. They started to revitalise their
section at the exact point that other shops were feeling the effects of the dotcom crash. While elsewhere sales were falling away, triggering budget cuts and shop real estate shrinkage, at Foyles a formerly under-performing department began to realise its potential, prompting further investment from the shop management. Their reward was to pick up market share as customers who couldn’t find their books elsewhere took their custom to Foyles.Future plans for section?
Early next year there are plans to move the Computing department in with the Technical department. Hopefully this will give a better crossover between sections such as photography, engineering and so on. In the past we have also considered stocking software: this is still something we might look into.
|
Here’s an interview I did at Erlang Factory with Mark Imbriaco of 37Signals about Campfire. Among the high end topics we discussed – how did Campfire come about, how was it written, how do the rest of 37Signals regard it, what Mark is learning this year and, most importantly of all, who would win in a fight between Erlang and Rails!
At the last Erlang Factory in London, I interviewed Senior Erlang Consultant Michal Slaski and Creator of the Nitrogen Framework Rusty Klophaus about how Erlang Web Framework and Nitrogen can work together.
And this seems an apt time to remind you about Erlang User Conference 2009 in Sweden, Stockholm from the 12 Nov 2009 to 12 Nov 2009.
 The Good Ship O’Reilly Stand |
 The ship-shape Francesco Cesarini |
 The Little Tugboat Who Could, Josette Garcia |
Craig Smith writes:
The O’Reilly stand at any tech event is like the crossroads of the world: if you hang out there long enough pretty soon everyone will come by. Yesterday afternoon, I spent a few hours with O’Reilly’s own Josette Garcia at QCon London 2010. In the time I was there, we met with Erlang co-creator and Programming Erlang author Joe Armstrong, Erlang Programming co-author and Erlang Solutions founder Francesco Cesarini, Skills Matter proprietor Wendy Devolder, Agile Coaching co-author Rachel Davies, Alois Reitbauer from Dynatrace and a host of others.
We also sold a fair few books – we were out of Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker and Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology before 5 O’Clock, which is both a shame with two more days to go and multiple requests coming across the counter for them, and a tribute to how strong those books are. The 97 Things Series continues to sell well from conferences, especially 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. We got through a fair few Microsoft Press books, a few copies of Beautiful Code, a couple of Open Govenments and some Android and iPhone books. There was a lot of interest in our interface and usability books, such as Designing Social Interfaces and Designing Web Interfaces.
If you’re at QCon today or tomorrow (Thursday or Friday), pop by the stand and say hello.
And watch out on here for an interview with the aforementioned Rachel Davies, which took place in the exotic corridors of the QEII Conference Centre.
(A quick word of thanks to the staff at First Colour, Tothill St, Westminster, who went far beyond the call of duty for an order of 42p’s worth of photocopying).
Folksy is an online marketplace for Makers and Crafters to buy and sell their wares, its mission “to support craft and design talent through showcasing work and also providing a cost effective platform to sell ‘stuff'”. Based in the UK, Folksy is the brainchild of James Boardwell, who works in partnership with Director and Software Engineer, Rob Lee (whose wife Deb Bassett we featured on GMT last year), and the quietly magnificent marketing skills of Russell Davies. James was kind enough to tell me where Folksy came from and where it’s heading:
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m James Boardwell and I’m someone who is interested in how people behave and why they interact and that has driven my interest in social media and social business. 
This interest started at the BBC where I was a researcher / journalist in current affairs before being seconded into producing interactive content and websites. Following people like Tom Coates and Matt Locke, I became hugely interested in how you really ‘do’ a joined up semantic web experience. Nowadays I run Rattle Research with Rob Lee and we do research and social applications for the web.
What is Folksy, who is involved in it and how did it come about?
Folksy is a service for designers and crafters to share their knowledge and sell their work and for brands and people to find interesting items and talented designers. I kicked it off in 2006 having had the idea to do it whilst researching programmes for the BBC way back in 2000. I saw how the internet was enabling crafters and designers who had a ‘punk’ attitude to come together and support each other in a way they never could have before the internet, except in ‘artistic’ silos and neighbourhoods in major cities. To make it happen I scratched around and found a great software engineer in Rob, who had a huge interest in making social apps and in ‘craft’, albeit crafts around electronics and arduino’s rather than fabrics and natural materials. We had a beer, sketched out the service and I then sold my house and pumped some money into the venture and that’s that… well, it was another four months before we had a working prototype in June 2007 and then we mothballed the whole thing while we got Rattle going so we could generate a bit of elbow room to launch the service properly. That was meant to be 3 months and it ended up being 12months. We launched in July this year as a beta.
What issues have you faced since launch? Have you had to re-think the business at all?
The service was predicated on the cream rising to the top, on an ‘open’ platform where we create different ways to slice the data / the products and allow the long tail of stuff to find its long tail buyer. This model has been tested. We’ve had some great quality work but we’ve also had some items that have been of questionable quality. We did consider a panel / approval system. We looked at sites like Etsy and Not on the High Street and compared models and on balance we prefer to stick to our ethos and try and build around an open service.
We’ve also realised that we need to play to our strengths. We’re not event organisers as a few attempts at making that work for Folksy have proved. There’s a skill in doing events well. We’re good at making and running a trading platform and managing a community on the web so we’re sticking to that.
Where is Folksy heading?
We want to re-claim craft and design from both the elite art establishment and from the church tea-room. There are very skilled ‘makers’ out there and through Folksy we’re giving them a means to share ideas, make money and do something they love. Whilst independent design and crafting is quite big at the moment and there are a raft of services that designers and crafters can choose from, we believe we have the ability to be successful. Folksy is simply architected, it’s a good user experience, we’ve found a solution to managing poorer quality work and we are trialling working with High Street brands to run competitions to drive wider, mainstream interest. Later in the year we’ll be launching with Universities to enable students and departments to create spaces for their work which they can manage and from which they can derive an income; it’s a great way to trial ideas in the market at very little cost.
As the world economy starts to wobble we’re also keen to promote the idea of a ‘creative surplus’ akin to Clay Shirky‘s notion of a cognitive surplus. We believe that with a little bit of effort most people could create things themselves. Our Make section which launches this month (which is similar to the Instructables) aims to show people how to make things so they don’t have to buy. We’re not talking the Large Hadron Collider here, more screen printing a new t-shirt or producing a lampshade.
Can you tell us about the Maker scene in the UK and Europe?
There is less of a ‘scene’ in the UK and Europe than say, the US. There’s a less identifiable core and so it seems smaller and it’s fair to say that the UK crafters were not as quick to see the possibilities of the web, both to share, talk and sell as was the case in the US. But that’s changing and it’s no longer seen as a male dominated, dorky thing to do. The technology has become almost invisible through simple blog CMS. There is a very talented Maker population with over 4000 design graduates coming out of UK Universities every year and thousands of artists studios. One of the things I really want to do is to encourage some of these top artists to create more mainstream pieces, to have more ‘fun’ with their work and to marry up with say, electronics makers and do collaborative works. To this end we hope to be running a Craftcamp early next year.
The main issue is still one of elitism. An ‘artist’ won’t mix with a ‘hobbyist’. We try to encourage more of a mix but I think the US are more open and less elitist in this respect.
How does Folksy compare with established Craft online marketplaces like Etsy?
We have similarities in that we’re a business that supports independent ‘makers’ and we’re open but we also differ in that we’re not necessarily as ‘social’ because we believe there are already places for the making community to talk and discuss things on the web. We’re also more focused on being an intermediary between commercial interests and independent makers, so we’re committed to partnering with brands to run ‘live briefs’. These briefs are key for Folksy to educate the wider public about ‘cool’ craft and design as well as reaching a more mainstream audience. The current competition with howies is our first example of these briefs and you can see the shortlisted winners now in the Carnaby Street store. What else? We’re going to be doing specific work with the educational institutions to promote the work of undergraduates and graduates and run ‘shows’ of their work. We think there’s an awful lot of talent that goes to waste every year as students struggle to gain work in their field of interest. Folksy will be one venue for them to facilitate this and make it easier for them to create a career from their talent. And that’s it really. We’re similar but different.
Why is the Maker community and market important?
Firstly, they’re passionate about what they do. Secondly, there are lots of them and many of them are very talented. Thirdly, they offer a means to get off-the-grid, to find alternatives to the very conspicuous, label driven sort of consumption we have in the West. Folksy isn’t a political project but we like to think of it being a means for the small guy / girl to compete with the bigger brands.
Going forward I’d love to see us providing a Mechanical Turk for craft, a means to commission work simply to this distributed talent base. That would be neat – the efficient, auction economy imbued with social democratic virtues; a cottage industry for the 21st C.
Dux Raymond Sy is the author of SharePoint for Project Management. Here he is to tell us a little bit about it:
What is your background, technologically speaking?
I have a degree in Telecommunications Engineering and my first foray into IT was actually programming Motorola chips in Assembly programming language. I later evolved and have worked with higher-level programming languages such as Basic, Pascal, C++. In the mid-90’s, as the world wide web started to gain commercial adoption, I got heavily involved with developing web applications with tools ranging from open source solutions to microsoft-based technologies.
In the late 90’s, I focused on the collaborative aspect of the web by building community-driven websites. I came across SharePoint right around 2001 when I was investigating viable platforms for collaboration.
Where do you work now? What do you do?
I am the managing partner of Innovative-e. Innovative-e is a business technology consulting and services company that helps clients gain competitive advantage by transforming high-performance strategies in to reality. Services include consulting, project management, application development, training and systems integration with specialized expertise in Project Management Information System (PMIS) capabilities using Microsoft SharePoint technologies. Clients range from startups to the Global 50, including Siemens (E&A), Blue Cross Blue Shield, The Gold Center, BlueLinx, Learning Tree, NASA and Morgan Franklin. Innovative-e is headquartered in Atlanta with offices in D.C. and Central Florida and technology delivery centers in Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
My role is primarily focused on business development and evangelizing how to leverage the benefits of SharePoint in organizations.
How did you get into Sharepoint? What’s so good about it? Who should use it? Under what circumstances is it the right solution?
It was late 2001, I was working on a Web development project with a geographically dispersed project team. Just like most project teams back then (even today for that matter), e-mail was the primary tool we used to collaborate and share project information. As we all know, this is not the most efficient nor effective way. While researching, I came across SharePoint Team Services (STS). It was a a free add-on to Office 2000 called SharePoint Team Services (STS) that provided Web-based team collaboration features. It wasn’t the silver bullet that I was looking for but it was easy to use, specially for the less technical individuals in my project team. It provided the central repository that we needed to store project files.
Three years later, one of my government clients found out that I was using SharePoint on a regular basis (at this point I was using Windows SharePoint Services 2.0), so they engaged me to develop a customized hands-on, in-house training program on implementing, maintaining and using SharePoint Portal Server 2003. This opportunity further piqued my interest in SharePoint and, more importantly, I saw the potential in how this tool can address various business challenges.
The key benefit of SharePoint is that it empowers users to build collaborative solutions themselves with minimal assistance from IT. For example, in a project environment, traditionally, a project manager would need to ask the IT department to build a website for project collaboration. Now, depending on how busy IT is, or how important the project is, the request my take awhile. Whereas with SharePoint, as long as IT has established the basic configuration, a project manager can create and maintain the project website themselves.
Now, the intent of SharePoint is to be used for enhanced team collaboration and effective document management. If you have no intent of using it for these purposes, then SharePoint is not the solution.
Is Sharepoint for Project Management your first book? How did you find the experience?
Yes. SharePoint for Project Management is my first published book. I was too idealistic when I first signed up thinking that I can finish writing the book in no time since the topic is near and dear to me. I was wrong, so much for being a project manager. Throughout the process of writing, I made sure that that the content is practical and applicable to folks involved in managing projects who would want to utilize SharePoint to support them.
How often do you get over to this side of the Atlantic? Do you speak/teach in Europe/UK, and how would people find out about your engagements?
I frequent UK at least twice a year because I conduct training for Learning Tree International which has presence in London as well (http://www.learningtree.co.uk). In a training environment, I find that Europeans are less prone to ask questions and relatively reserved compared to their American counterparts. I don’t know why this is …
Craig Smith writes:
A fine day was had by all at PHP UK Conference 2010 at the Business Centre in Islington, London.
I was aiding the irrepressible Josette Garcia on the O’Reilly stand. We were in good company – Drupal, PHPWomen, Facebook Developer Garage London and PHPNW were on one side, TEKSystems, Logical Elements and Paypal on the other, with iBuildings, Pakt Publishing, data.gov.uk and main sponsors WebsiteSpark scattered at the other end of the hall from us.
The table at the start
There was a real buzz about the place, and we had a lot of interest around the stand. Popular titles included our two Android titles (Hello Android! and Android Application Development); JQuery Cookbook; all three 97 Things published so far (97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know); the Beautiful series, particularly Beautiful Code; and the Pomodoro Technique Illustrated book from Pragmatic Programmers. I was pleased when a couple of copies of Open Government sold – it’s not even out yet!
The table toward the end
There were also lots of enquiries about the O’Reilly User Group Programme, which is heartening. Among the many conversations we had, Lorna Mitchell told us about the 4th Dutch PHP Conference from June 10th to the 12th and Jeremy Coates let us know about the 3rd PHP North West lined up for Autumn.
More photos from PHP UK Conference 2010 can be found on the O’ReillyGMT Flickr page.
Madlab is Manchester Digital Laboratories:
… a 1000 sq. ft. former shop in the Northern Quarter – open Thursday-Sunday from 10am-late (plus other evenings when there’s an event happening).
It’s a space you can get together with like-minded individuals and work on your urban gardening, crochet, hacking, programming, media arts, filmmaking, animating project without worrying that you’re in a library, coffee shop, pub or other unsuitable venue. We know hackers and craftspeople need work space and may need to get down and dirty – we also know sometimes you need a quiet area to present and show works to your peers. We support both activities. And we hope there will be a rich mix of individuals who’ll get out of the usual zones, the knitter talking to the software architect, the cupcake maker scheming with the laser etching builder. We know some good will come of this.
If you’re organising a workshop, meetup, unconference, user group, or knitting circle and want to use the space then drop us a line!
Madlab are hosting Robot Hack Day on the 24th of October, 2009 as part of the Manchester Science Festival. It’s a chance to break apart that disappointing electronic gadget you got last Christmas and create something new and inspiring out of it, to get crazy with solder and a glue gun and bring a bunch of resistors, capacitors and motors to life, and have a laugh while you’re doing it. And there will be Robot Football! I mean, if that isn’t a fun day, what is!
Here’s Madlab’s Dave Mee to tell you more:
A few days before he spoke at XTech in Paris, I asked Xavier Cazin of O’Reilly Editions to talk us through the Parisian Tech scene:
Paris seems a great place to be a techie at the moment, with XTech just around the corner. Is that the case? Has that always been the case? Does Paris and France have a history of encouraging technology in general and computing specifically?
Paris is becoming a very comfortable place for a techie to live. Thanks to the explosion of high bandwith triple-play ADSL boxes, anyone can now enjoy at home a minimum of 600Ko/s incoming bandwith and 100Ko/s outgoing, as well as free telephony and hundreds of international tv channels for just 30€ per month. This network of boxes even allows Wi-Fi telephony; the most innovative player on the ADSL front, Free (www.free.fr) recently enabled this feature for its 2 million subscribers: you now can benefit from the free telephony feature of your own box whenever you walk near other so-called Freeboxes, or from any accessible WiFi network in the world for that matter. The future of networking in Paris also looks bright; free wifi access and fiber optics everywhere before 2010, dedicated servers in brand new datacenters for around 30€ per month: Parisians will be able to broadcast their own TV very soon, and companies won’t need to host and maintain their own servers.
Technology has always been encouraged in France, but, until very recently, it was made “à la française”, that is mostly via big universities and big corporates or directly via government initiatives. French innovators tend to come from these established structures, where they learned enough about French communication infrastructure to start a niche. For example, the founder of the above mentioned Free started as a Minitel service provider, where he understood the specificity of the France Telecom homogeneous network and key people. Quite a few French innovators today come from the early days of the French Internet (even people behind http://www.nabaztag.com/!)
What is the scene like with regards people getting together to talk geek? Do you have a vibrant User Group infrastructure? Is there a cross-pollination between different tech tribes, eg do the wireless guys party with the Unix crowd, do the developers and designers hang-out together? What events are specific to your part of the world? And what is the benefit of live events to the attendee? How does it affect their output?
Technical user groups have usually been quite small and informal here. Often they meet during their studies and start a project there, but don’t try to grow. There may be tons of them that I didn’t even hear about! There have been visible ones around Linux, TeX, XML, PHP, IPv6 or Wi-Fi, and also music or games, but there doesn’t seem go beyond a few dozens of people at the same time. The two biggest events for techies to gather and exchange are Solutions Linux and RMLL. On the proprietary side, Microsoft and Apple both organize regular events, but visitors seem to mostly come there in order to keep up with new products more than exchanging and building new opportunities or get exposed to new challenges.
Now that you make me think of it, it seems that almost no one still knows how to set up conferences in France that would gather key technical people and allow them to mix together and with attendees :-)
What are employment opportunities like for a techie in Paris and in France? Are there big companies that dominate? Do they innovate? Is the work on offer interesting or routine? Do they focus on any particular technology or admin/programming skills? Are there Open Source opportunities? What about the big US tech companies – do they have big set-ups that co-ordinate with the grass roots developers? Any developments in the pipeline to look forward to?
Someone who masters web technologies has no problem finding a job right now. But this is not because companies innovate, rather because they keep up with the natural movement of things toward Internet OS. Investments are usually made where money already is, not were innovation happens. Big US companies (IBM, Microsoft) have always understood that in France money was in publicly funded institutions :-) Apple always had a lot of faithful fans, and Google doesn’t seem to have a specific French policy, although they probably were made bored by French publishers’ attitude against Google Book Search. International companies usually do what French companies do when they want to hire: they go fishing directly in Universities and Engineering schools. They don’t seem to see a need for setting up specific gatherings yet. This may change as interesting individuals will soon be able to expose their work easily thanks to telecommunication boom I was talking about earlier.
Does the culture support start-ups? Are the government helpful in this regard? Is there a ready supply of venture capitalists eager to invest in the talent of a promising set-up? Are other techies supportive? Do the best ideas come from the best techies or do they come from outside the pool of Parisian/French geeks? Is there a particular business model preferred round your way, eg do the start-ups build to sell, use advertising as a model, give the app away and hope that somehow money will follow, or do people develop purely for fun?
It is very difficult to find true risk takers here. Start-ups do exist, but they usually are financed on proper founds or because founders have established records or success. Venture capitalists seem to invest in me-too projects that may one day be bought by big corporates that fear to be left behind.
In France, more than the usual rants about too strict labour rules, I think there has been a idealistic view that great projects, like real art, don’t mix well with money, because having to make money from your product means making trade-offs and compromises and French people used to dislike compromises. As a result, a lot of great projects are just developed for fun and never compete: better nothing than a soiled thing :-) This is actually changing, but the change is just at its beginning. For instance, bloggers have nothing against soiling their blog with AdSense.
Often, the most ambitious projects seem fueled only by goodwill. For instance, videolan.org (home of VLC, the versatile multimedia reader) is a fantastic and crazy project that has roots in Ecole Centrale, a famous engineering school. They probably could have attracted a lot of money, but they preferred to continue to improve their tools continuously, as new students replace old ones. Another, smaller, project I like a lot, called Savonet/Liquidsoap (a scriptable radio coded in OCaml) would probably have a hard time finding investors while having the potential to be a marvelous multimedia tool.
What part do key bloggers play? Is there a feedback loop that helps everyone keep in touch with what others are doing? What sites do you all read?
It’s interesting to note that the most visited blogs are web and technology reports more than new thoughts on how and where technology goes. People read these blogs to stay informed on latest technology or latest (international) events, not to get their mind boggled like they would on Radar, for instance. True geek blogs, with practical sharing of new recipes and experiments, often very good, all have a Google Page Rank of 0 or at most 1! Fortunately, some of them are relayed by the oreilly.fr site, which give them a bit more exposure. Also, I think people are still reading newsgroups a lot, which give them their technical fix more surely than blogs.
What major conferences go on in your neck of the woods? How do they affect the day-to-day life of a techie? Are they a source of inspiration or something that goes on in the background for a while but doesn’t really touch the grass roots geek?
You know, Microsoft is doing a really good job at setting up small technical conferences around their new .NET products. Last year, I attended a presentation on SQL Server 2005 and LINQ that not only showed me that MS would soon become a true actor on the data and networking side of technology, but also triggered a lot of thoughts on what Web 2.0 actually was and where it is going. Inspired by Microsoft, do you believe that?
Other than that, the conference around Open Source and Free Software get their usual faithful attendees, but it’s hard to get a sense of their output, beyond spending a nice moment with 10000 family members.
Other “Technical conferences” are not places for geeks but rather for IS departments.
November’s iPhone and Smartphone Publisher and Developer Night was another triumph, an Augmented Reality Special. 24 was kitted out in its Christmas garb, and once again thanks to Yuza Mobile for loan of the space. An audience of about 100 people turned out to see two excellent presenters:
Ravi Damani is the co-Founder of acrossair. He talked about his most famous app, Nearest Tube, which uses geolocation to orient the user to the nearest underground station. The app uses the iPhone’s native ability to know where it is, to know which way it is facing and to understand how it is being tilted. It calls for data from the Nearest Tube servers for the nearest station and for directions for how to get there, and superimposes the data it retrieves on top of the image from the camera. The app can then guide the user to the station, following the directions on the screen.
Mark Cummins spoke about PlinkArt, his Art Indentification app. Take a shot of a painting, and the app searches the PlinkArt database for images that match. Three seconds later, it returns the name of the painting, along with information about the artist. 
Mark is a PHD student who specialised in image recognition, and the things he has learned are rolled into PlinkArt. The same algorithms would work on anything which has a hard surface – he said it wouldn’t work on something like a handbag, which is bendable. With PlinkArt, all the hard work is done on the server, not within the phone, which allows Mark and his team to develop the same application for platforms other than the iPhone: it has been ported to Android, and other platforms are in development.
Both Ravi and Mark made the point that the sticking point with all these applications is accessing the datasets. As Tim O’Reilly says, Data is the Intel Inside of the next generation of applications.
|
|