interviews

I first met Tim Hamilton, the CEO of Astonish Designs at one of the GeekAustin lunches earlier this year. Tim told me about a tool his company made for the city of Houston, called the E-catalog. The tool provided a public website that anyone could use to access the spending activity of the City of Houston. Due to the growing interest there has been in creating greater government transparency, especially in areas of government finance, this project piqued my interest.

Following the discussions at the In Code We Trust panel at this year's SXSWi, I made arrangements to meet Tim for an interview, to get the whole story.

I transcribed this as the conversation started, so the conversation picks up early -- we had been discussing Drupal (I had just had lunch with Lynn, who spent most of SXSWi in Drupal-related meetings) and this is how we began discussing the E-catalog project...

Nova Spivack is a name many people associate with the Semantic Web through his prolific blogging and speaking promoting the use of semantic technologies. He is also the founder of Radar Networks, the creators of Twine. Here, he shares his thoughts on the current state of the Semantic Web and what may be its future.

Jana Thompson: I want to begin with a very general question: how do you view the current state of semantic search? Do you think it has become usable enough for the average person, and if and when it does, do you think the impact will be enough to make semantic search the norm that Google is currently?

Flash has long since held a near-total domination of graphics-based online apps – however, with the advent of the iPhone and now with the anticipated release of the iPad, a major sector of mobile and possibly tablet market share cannot make use of the widespread Flash and Flash-based applications. Canvas is an HTML5 element allows for the dynamic painting of web-pages, and thus a way for developers to create visual elements for web-pages and apps independent of Flash. Is Canvas a viable alternative or even a threat to Flash's ubiquitous hold on the market? This is the question I wanted to discuss with Gregory Veen (@gregveen), of San Francisco's Small Batch Inc, who organized the Is Canvas the End of Flash? panel at SXSWi 2010.

Jana Thompson: Why did you want to do this panel at SXSWi?

Most people do not associate Africa with tech – but in the last ten years, Rwanda has struggled with developing a nascent IT industry and the advent of the mobile phone has begun to have a profound impact on day-to-day life in rural African villages. (see article in Business Week) After a discussion with a friend in San Francisco who works on txteagle, a project that allows for Kenyans to make money or cell-phone credit for work on their cell phones, I saw the Africa 3.0 panel on the table for SXSW and was interested, not only due to the conversation with my friend, but also from first-hand experience of life in Sierra Leone when I traveled there in 2008. LinearB and I contacted TMS Ruge, who agreed to be interviewed just in time for SXSWi this year. - Jana

Jana Thompson: This is drawn from your panel questions, but for the readers here at GeekAustin, what is Africa 3.0? How do you define it?

Mona Kasra is a media artist / educator / PhD student in Arts & Technology / New Media enthusiast concerned with issues around Gender & Identity. You can follow her on:
* twitter: @monaism
* 12seconds.tv: monaism
* Flickr: _monaism
* vimeo: monaism

Jana Thompson: On your website, you mention complexities and paradoxes when cultures meet -- what is an example of one of those in your own life?

Mona Kasra: I grew up in Iran and my childhood was intertwined with an Islamic revolution and a war. I relocated to the United State when I was in my early 20s and immediately encountered a culture shock. My art is about this encounter: an Iranian women living in the United States able to express her femininity and sexuality but inspired by questioning cultural and traditional assumptions that she grew up with.

Alison Lewis is all about tech meets fashion meets real life. Her blog, I heart switch, covers lighted high-heals, sequined dresses with solar cells that double as cell phone chargers, twitter dresses, and skyping roombas. For the full walking-talking Alison experience, check her out on Verizon FiOS’s television show MyHome2.0

Jana: In the New York times article on your work, it mentioned you learned to sew at age 4, and made a pair of pants that you wore in the sixth grade, so you have a long background in DIY. Your 'Closer' project when you graduated from Parsons seems like a natural continuation of that, but how did you first become inspired to combine technology with crafting and fashion?

When I found out that Nina Hartley (@ninaland) (bio) (wikipedia) was speaking at SXSW, I wanted to interview her. Linear made the introductions, and Marjorie Kase set it up. - Jana

Jana: Twitter and Facebook both have the potential for changing a private life into a public life. Although you are well-known, now many fans can follow you on twitter. How do you feel about that change from before, where your fans were probably more anonymous than anything else, to now having people read about your thoughts on life from day to day?

Although I've known Silona for (mumble) years, I have never gotten around to doing a proper interview with her for GeekAustin. A few months back, I heard her interview with Phil Windley on Technometria. Days later, I heard her interview with Jon Udell on Interviews with Innovators, and I thought: " I gotta get in on this action." So I grabbed my field recorder (courtesy of the folks at SmartBear), called Silona, and said: "Let's meet at Medici."

After seeing her work for a while, I finally got to meet Lauren Roth at the Drinks and Drupal party I hosted in May. I took the opportunity to ask her how one becomes a Drupal design ninja. Lauren was gracious enough to share the knowledge.

Lynn Bender: You first started with Drupal after seeing a presentation as SXSW, yes?

Lauren Roth: SXSW Interactive is a fantastic way to come upon new technologies and 2006’s was no exception. As someone with a writing background, I could understand having enthusiasm for a content management system, but the more I found out about Drupal the more I wanted to use it myself. It is now my primary development platform.

Lynn Bender: In the last year, I've noticed that many folks who've been designing sites in WordPress are starting to look at Drupal. I'm guessing that you've noticed this too.

Lauren Roth: WordPress is the grilled cheese sandwich to Drupal’s double-stacked club sandwich. Both have bread and cheese, but Drupal comes with lots of extra delicious parts. Both are written in PHP, use template files and CSS, and separate presentation from site logic.

Lynn Bender: Nevertheless, a common complaint I heard is that Drupal is extremely difficult to design for. What are the things that people tend to have problems with when beginning to design themes for Drupal?

I've had a fascination with all manner of data analysis since my days as a bookstore owner. So when I first heard news of a local web analytics group, I had more than a little interest. I asked Jennifer White, the chief instigator of Web Analytics Wednesdays Austin, to give me a little background on the group.

Lynn Bender:: Jennifer, tell me about the group.

Jennifer White: Web Analytics Wednesday is the world's only social networking event for web analytics professionals. Eric T. Peterson, an author and a global web analytics community leader, founded Web Analytics Wednesday as a global effort to put "faces with names" and to get local members of the web analytics community networking. I started the Austin group in 2 years ago in July.

The local group focuses mainly on web analytics, but we also talk about analytics for other media such as Twitter or search, but those tie back to web analytics. For example, how does Twitter influence bounce rate (which is when a visitor comes to only one of your web pages and leaves the site immediately)?

Lynn Bender:: What about non web data -- like email? Are e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information also part of web analytics?

<understatement>Four Kitchens is one of the premier Drupal consulting firms</understatement>. Fortunately, they call Austin home. In the last few months, I've had the opportunity to work with and get to know them. Aaron Stanush, one of Four Kitchen's co-founders, is also a member of the Drupal.org Redesign Team. I recently coerced him into meeting me for coffee and talking about Drupal.

Lynn Bender: Following your trip to Paris to work on the upgrade and redesign of the Drupal.org, you took the lead on the redesign effort. That's a massive site. How is the process going?

Aaron Stanush: One of the things that really helped focus the redesign effort was that we had an actual style guide to work off of. The Drupal Association hired Mark Boulton Design to rebrand the Drupal product as well as the drupal.org website. Even with a rich style guide, it's a massive site and it takes awhile for the community to decide the best way to re-engineer the content/layout or to remove elements all together.

If you go to any tech events around town, no doubt you've seen Eve Richter -- coordinator for the city's Emerging Technology Program. I recently met with Eve to get some background on the program, the city's other tech related initiatives, the state of biotech in Austin, resources for startups, and other topics.

Lynn Bender: Could you tell me about the City of Austin Emerging Technology Program? As part of the Economic Growth and Redevelopment Services Office, is the focus more on business development, implementation of new technologies, or...?

Eve Richter: The Emerging Technology program is tasked with increasing jobs and investment in the technology sectors. We do that by attracting new companies to the area (in our targeted sectors, including clean energy, digital media, wireless communications, and biotechnology, etc.), and helping existing companies to grow and flourish. Our focus is pretty much entirely on business development, except to the extent that the implementation of new technologies (or adoption of new technologies) helps our companies to thrive. So promoting the use of technologies created here is something we might do. We also focus on improving the environment for technology companies, by focusing on improving the workforce, regulatory environment, access to capital, and marketing the city as a hub for technology development.

I met Jim Hillhouse back in 2002, when he showed up at one of the GeekAustin lunches. Over the last year, I've watched him help put Austin's iPhone dev community on everyone's radar. Last weekend, I ask Jim to share a bit about iPhone development, the Cocoa Coders group, and the Austin tech scene.

Lynn Bender: It was Whurley who first told me that we had a large iPhone dev community in Austin. I got to see that first hand last year at BarCampAustin III. How long has there been a formal group iPhone dev group in Austin?

Tom Serres bootstrapped Piryx with his partners Naveed Lalani and Brian Upton -- launching the company with $1k made while waiting tables 3 years ago as a college sophomore.

Flash forward to today, and Piryx already been seed funded, and is currently in talks to close their first series A investment round. Although we'd been communicating online for a while, I finally meet Tom for coffee at Blu a few weeks ago. Tom told me the incredible story of Piryx, and agreed to be our co-host for the GeekAustin E-nauguration Party.

Lynn Bender: Tom, tell me about Piryx.

Tom Serres: First off, Piryx is a non-partisan suite of web tools, offered in a self serve environment. Think Google or Facebook, but designed around the political process. The idea is to offer a portal that empowers citizen candidates, political entities, and social activists with a combination of web tools and social media services to affect change in public policy.

When I found out that Product Camp Austin Winter 09 was on the calendar, I immediately sent a note to the organizer, Paul Young, asking for the details. Take the day off for this event. This is going to be a good one.

Lynn Bender: The first Product Camp Austin was a huge success. You had a good crowd, and folks came away raving about how useful the event was. Given the word of mouth, I expect that you are going to have a bigger crowd for Product Camp Austin Winter 09. Will the venue be larger? Do you anticipate having to cap attendance?