Bar Camp 3 Berlin

I love attending bar camps and they are always great value to me.

They’ve got a simple formula which nails it why I attend bar camp. It is value=people+listening+passion. Let me explain.

What’s best is meeting and talking to people in a setting which is just fun and rarely business. The bar camp format makes people listen to each other more, imo. You’ve got less monologues/ego shooters than at business conferences, for example. That’s cool. But what makes it great is the passion you get to see the passion driving the attendees when they present their stuff or they opinions.

Two examples.

I attended Igor’s and Scotty’s session on the best TV series of the last few years. Product Reviews from passionate bar campers are always great and valuable to me. I don’t have/watch TV, am not really exposed to TV advertising and don’t have the time to read any reviews. Admittedly I do buy DVDs and watch movies. The solution: I need “mavens” I trust to advise me. Enter Igor and Scotty. I could not find a better review of that stuff in any quality paper. On a pragmatic note that review made me buy the first season of “Boston Legal” for Maciej’s birthday this week.

I will also treat myself to a christmas present after I saw Martin’s Thinkpad X61t running on Ubuntu. However, I want Leopard on that tablet pc and Martin was so kind to point out some instructions hot to get that done. Now I imagine this: Circus Ponies’ Notebook 3.0, Omnigraffle + that thing … ho-ho-ho, my kind of Christmas present. I’ve really craving for that thing … soooo looking forward to draw on it (I’ve got a visual brain and my organisational skills depend on me drawing project outlines, diagramms, manipulating data on a daily basis). Thanks, Martin!

So how am I hoping to contribute to bar camps ?

The passion I try to share at bar camps is a passion to explain technology/industry trends & concepts to people not familiar with them. I really get a kick out of it when I see people “get it” or “understand it” and I get a feeling that I can be of some help.

I spend considerable time “simplyfying concepts” and I take the opportunities at barcamps to test/iterate these simplifactions.

In this post I want to talk about some of the concepts and I’ve learned when covering Android.

Exhibit 1 & 2, Pages 21/23

There is this abstract overview of Android as an architecture at the left side of page 23 in my presentation. It’s also on the Google website and Google reps often use it on slides when they talk about the different elements of Android. Watching people I’ve noticed that it is effective as a “table of contents”, but does not work well for any other purpose.

Some people used it for example to discuss the advantages of Android …. and did not go far with most of the audience, imo. We sort of got ok results (quote from a developer: “oh, Android may really be up to something up there”) with that table on page 23 comparing the effort behind the various elements of the original chart. I think we spent 2 weeks researching and trying out different diagrams/metaphors before we got that one.

You can see how we use the diagram in an article here.

There’s another diagram on page 21 - on the right this time - which stems from that original Google diagram. I find I can use

well when I describe the different options developers have (option 1: SDK; option 2: webkit; option 3: chrome/gears) when developing in the nascent Android eco system.

The diagram also helped me to convince some developers that these options are superior to some of the existing alternatives (in business terms the mass market argument seems to work, technically people get curious when they see the Chrome-Android connection). Again, you can see how we use the diagram I at Venturebeat here.

The non-communicated Chrome-Android connection
In a related angle, does anyone wonder as much as I do what Google’s agenda is behind not communicating that Chrome-Android connection much ? Ok, there’s a reference in the comic at page 12 … but not that much more. By the way anyone noticed the insider joke of the speech bubble of the guy on the left at the next page pointing to the city of Dalvik, Iceland ? I hear some voices that Google thinks that the browser is becoming more important strategically than the Android SDK … we do’t hear anything on that from Google and I wonder why. Technically, Daniel thinks that strategical perception shift makes a lot of sense. In business terms, I totally agree, too. Shifting innovation towards the browser solves so many problems business models in mobile have … we tend to think that the mobile browser experience will be superior to the online one within the next 2 years.

But I digress. Let’s come back to the Berlin Bar Camp.

The mobile eco system

This time around my project was to explain the term “mobile eco system” . I believe “mobile eco system” is a must in any mobile bullshit bingo. Gauging reader and audience reactions’ I’ve seen it strikes me that most people take it as “a big mess & I can not even define what the elements of that mess are.”

My problem is that I can’t help but use “mobile eco system” when I want to argue Android’s importance and describe what Android really is. On “what Android is” I usually start with Rich Miner’s definition which you see on page 20. The Problem is that people usually draw blanks when I leave it the way it is.

The definition does not give context why Android is important. What I usually try to communicate to give that context is the following. 1) I say “The mobile eco system continues to be much more hostile to startups than the online one (page 6) and that is the reason why VCs don’t really invest much into mobile so far (the pages before). 2) then I explain how that mobile eco system may be changing on the level of 3) distribution & 4) Android.

In related news I’ve already ran into various Google employees who told me that “we are the ‘good ones’ / ‘we are about creating the mobile web’. Still, I have yet to meet a Google employee who can express that religious belief rationally in a couple of sentences. I should be bumping more into Googlers to increase the stochastic chances, I guess. Sorry, a lame joke.

Anyways, at that bar camp I tried to use the metaphor “cake” for Android and the folks on the pages 15-17 as “eco system”.

When I said the sentence “Android is a cake that all these people want/may eat as it is the best cake out there” I hoped to see signs of understanding in the audience. Daniel coined that cake metaphor by the way. Anything you find between pages 13 and 29 is really a way how to get across what Android is.

What was the audience feedback ? Not sure about the cake metaphor, that may be taking it too far. The eco system pictures seem to have done well, though.

For Android and how I think we should cover at Android at VentureBeat page 28 is the most important one. For VCs OHA is intriguing, but important questions remain. We’re trying to help VCs/mobile developers who live on doing
with our coverage at VentureBeat. I hope the Android team knows what these questions are and does a good job in communicating the answers.

I don’t want to go into the platform debate in this post but any rational person in a non-lifestyle enterprise has to develop independent of any platform concerns. Jason gives some additional advice on the Skydeck blog

The whole discipline of explaining stuff in diagrams/metaphors makes me hopefully a better amateur journalist/product marketing guy. I try to do it everyday. If you’ve got any feedback, drop me an email.

One feedback/thesis I got from the Berlin presentation is that most people do not understand the terms on-deck/off-deck. Explanations using words like “operator portal” or “Vodafone Live” are not effective, either. Guess I need to take a new shot at on “on-deck/off-deck” next time.

Update: I got this practical suggestion: I should ask the audience whether they place the game of “risk” before I introduce the mobile eco system faces and then use some analogies to that board game . Thanks.