Simon G's Blog

Arranged by Mike Riversdale, the NZ Google Barcamp 2010 brought together a bunch of people from throughout New Zealand to engage in discussions with a focus on Google. Here's a synopsis of my notes from some of the sessions I attended.Location Based ServicesThere was a good discussion re GPS / Location apps that would be great for Primary School kids.  Some of the key areas discussed (which are definitely not limited to only being suitable for kids) were:Museum tours (such as My Tours).Scribble maps enables you to easily scribble on Google Maps.Augmented reality and being able to visualise what a street looked like in 1910.History Pin has already collected some good content from the past.This is adding a time dimension to location.Simile (MIT) is focused on developing robust, open source tools that empower users to access, manage, visualize and reuse digital assets.There is a lot of excellent information available in Layar for augmenting the real world with what you can’t see.A lo…

There is a lot about Software as a Service (SaaS) that I love, but it is important to ensure that if you are looking at a SaaS solution to also consider what some of the cons are.

I recently posted these as a comment over on Ben's "Software Delivery Approaches – Debunking the Myths" post and thought it worthy to reiterate the key points.

The key Pros (from my perspective) Ben articulated with SaaS were as follows:
Ability to provision almost instantly.Pushes infrastructure, service, and support costs to the vendor.Upgrades are automatically applied to all users – all customers work with the same application.
Cons of ASP and SaaS options (which will have differing levels of risk based on who the vendor is):
If the vendor goes out of business, then you may have a significant problem with little or no warning.Depending on where the data is hosted you may be subject to different laws.From an information/data security perspective you are placing trust in another organisation. …

I attended an excellent presentation from Daniel Szuc last night at the UX Auckland meetup.  There was lots of excellent content and one of the slides he presented was a good reminder about asking the simple questions when embarking on the delivery of a new product:
What does this product do?What do you love about the product? (Would you buy it?)What does the product team love about the product?  (Passionate?)Could you sell the product? (if asked to)By asking these questions up front you may avoid progressing with delivering a product that provides no or little value.  Up front it is easier and cheaper to either redesign or abandon as required.