Björn’s Blog

continuing from Barcamp Leipzig (part 1)

Storytelling for Companies

I have difficulties to recount what I learned from Till’s presentation, although it gave a lot of food for thought. The subject is a bit hard to grasp for non-marketeers, though, and towards the end the main thread got somewhat drowned in too many off-topic comments from the audience. So we actually only got to see the first few slides of the presentation.

The basic idea (as I understood it) is to present your company in a way that appeals to audiences (especially journalists). Several classic motives of storytelling come to mind as a template. A popular example is “David against Goliath”. If you are a startup, chances are good that the story would apply to you. So rather than proclaiming “we have the best product”, you could tell the story of how you were dissatisfied with the status quo and decided to try to improve the situation against all odds. If you ever walked across an IT business fair like the Systems in Munich or the CeBIT, you might know what this is about. There are so many companies who sound exactly alike – “we solve all your problems, and we have the best products” – but it is never clear what they actually do. A very frustrating sight.

It really is hard to recount, because I think it will only become clear once you try it. I haven’t tried it, but I can imagine what it could be like. As Till and commentators said, often the story takes on a life on it’s own. People start to muse about possible continuations for the story, and you yourself start to fit yourself into the story.

A lot of the off-topic comments were from the “Alternate Reality Gaming” crowd, in my opinion they missed the point a bit, because that was not the kind of storytelling Till had in mind. I could be wrong, though. Eventually, they decided to hold their own session for Alternate Reality Games, which I also attended.

This marked the end of the sessions for Saturday. In the evening there was also a party for barcamp attendees, but since Andreas and I first went home to see my girl-friend, we arrived there only late, and we also didn’t stay long. I felt I had already exhausted my capacity for socializing for the day, so that there was not much point to being at the party.

Sunday unfortunately I had to leave quite early to catch my train, but I got to see two more sessions.

Alternate Reality Games

Alternate Reality Games are games in which a team of puppet masters sets up fake clues and circumstances in the real world, to allow players to play in an alternate reality. For example, apparently recently some people received parcels with mysterious contents, without ever having signed up for a game or ordered anything. Those inclined could start deciphering the clues and presumably stumble across the generated story. An early example was Majestic a game that would communicate with the players by phone, among other things.

I am not sure how big the marketing impact of these games is, as I never stumbled across them before, but usually communities form around solving the game. At the moment The Lost Ring appears to be a bigger ARG, sponsored by McDonalds (other links are listed on the barcamp leipzig page). It also has a german branch – apparently the story is that around the world several people woke up without memories, and the goal of the players is to help them on their way. One of those people is located in Germany. As an example for actions the presenter mentioned to meet for sports with that person (ie go running), or try to talk to him to cheer him up and so on. I find it hard to imagine – how can the person go running with hundreds of players? But of course it is interesting in a way. A younger me would probably have gotten excited about it, but at the moment I felt that “normal” reality is interesting enough and I don’t really need to get involved.

Apparently there are also grassroots movements of people trying to organize non-commercial ARGs, but often they underestimate the effort that goes into them, and they fail. Thing to remember.

AntMe

Tom from AntMe seems to be a genuinely nice guy, and to be honest, I envy him a little. I have always been interested in Artificial Life, but industry jobs in that area were rare. With AntMe, Tom seems to have found a way to make money with Artificial Life, Game Programming and getting girls interested in Computer Science. Of course he had to sell his soul to Microsoft to do that, but it seems a small price to pay.

But slowly from the beginning: AntMe is a programming game, in which you program ants to harvest sugar and fruits as fast as possible, all the time evading the hungry, ant-eating bugs. You can write programs to control the ants and upload them, to be rated in the Highscores list. There is also a multiplayer modus where you compete directly with other ant colonies.

That is just great, fantastic, especially as apparently Non-Programmers actually seem to get it and enjoy it. The ants are programmed in C#, which explains the Microsoft endorsement (basically, I guess they pay the bills and salaries): they use it to win people over to C#, possibly even make C# the first programming language they ever learn. It sounded as if AntMe also visits job fairs, girls-days and the like to present the ants and get people interested in programming. A few days ago apparently there was something like a “girls-in-science day”, so Tom got to present the ants in front of a large audience of teenage girls, who actually liked it. I can’t really get over this – it is even more amazing than earning a living with Artificial Life programming

The game itself is very nicely done, with cute 3d graphics. I was sceptic at first because the ants seem to know a few tricks that real ants don’t, but once you see them running diligently across the screen, you can’t help but like them. Tom also had lots of stories about the ways the AntMe community managed to outwit the programmers of the simulation. For example they created a kind GPS system which allows ants to go to absolute coordinates, something they were never meant to be able to do. I was also interested in the “Ticket Ants”, which seem to be among the most successful AntMe competitors: if a sugar heap is found, they calculate exactly how many ants are needed to carry it away, and create tickets for the task. Idle ants then start accepting the tickets and getting to work – you can’t get much more efficient than that. I am interested because I wonder if “logistics” can really perform better than nature – it seems for the virtual ants the answer is yes, but of course real ants face other constraints (they don’t have a centralized server, for example).

Sadly, my aversion against C# is too great, so that for the time being I probably won’t join in the fun. But who knows. I understand the reasons for it being C#, and for some people it definitely is a suitable language (like if you know you will always stay on the Windows Operating System). Actually, as a Java developer I used to be interested in C#, but now I think it is not different enough from Java to warrant the effort of learning it for me, and I want to move to dynamic languages anyway.

Last weekend I went to the Barcamp Leipzig. Location, weather and the attending people were brilliant, so it was a weekend well spent. Barcamps are also called “unconferences”, as they are conferences without a plan. There is no predefined schedule, instead, anybody from the audience can declare to give a talk or host a session on any topic they fancy. Most sessions are about computer stuff, but it is not mandatory. For example, at the barcamp munich there were also sessions on magic tricks and night photography. Many people decide to host sessions without having prepared very much, but it usually works well, because it ends up more being a discussion with the attendees of the session, rather than a frontal lecture.

There is always something that puzzles me about events like that, which is the way I, and maybe most others, socialize. Why do I talk with some people, but not with others? Usually in the beginning I talk to a lot of people, and nearing the end I hardly approach anybody new. It wasn’t that extreme this time, but there were still some people that I have never spoken to over the whole conference. Last year I went to a one week workshop in Amsterdam, and there were people I never talked to once. What I wonder: are the people I talk to the right ones, and if so, how did I know? Not to be misunderstood, I didn’t meet anybody I didn’t like at the barcamp, but there might be people that have the same interests and would really click with me, becoming co-founders for the next startup, and I might not even have talked to them. In any case, if anybody reads this: I am happy to hear from you, even if we didn’t exchange contact information.

This question gave me an idea for another project: analyze social graphs available on the internet to see how people socialized at barcamps. For example, there is a twitter account for the barcamp leipzig, and it seems most attendees who also use twitter decided to follow it. Now I could look a these people’s friends lists on twitter before and after the barcamp. If they became followers of each other shortly after the barcamp, they probably met at the barcamp. Then I could analyze their tweeds to determine their interests and similarities (maybe some other social network would be more suitable, for example Xing lets people list more specific interests than twitter).

Finally, a brief overview of the sessions I went to see:

Genetic Algorithms

Kennon decided to use slides from his lecture notes to give an overview of genetic algorithms. There was nothing new for me, but it was nice to meet somebody else who has the same interests. Also, the barcamp organization inspired a good area of application for the GAs: it would be nice to arrange the session slots in such a way that as few people as possible miss sessions they would have liked to attend. Maybe one of these days I’ll try to implement that for fun.

Open Street Map

I have known about open street map before, and I have high hopes for it: it is the attempt to generate maps from GPS data that is submitted by volunteers. Similar to wikipedia, everybody is allowed to edit the maps, but some geeky equipment helps. Somehow I had never given it a closer look, but the enthusiasm of the two presenters Claudius and Nathanael was infectious. Clearly, they were having a lot of fun scouting for uncharted terrain to close the gaps in the open map. For example, if they were driving somewhere and see an uncharted road, they would make a brief detour to collect the data for OSM. To me, it sounds as good a motivator as any other to go outside. Also, as I descibed in my article about GeoTags, I have become interested in maps recently, and having freely available data would be great.

I hope to contribute to Open Street Map in the future, unfortunately at the moment I don’t have a capable device. Actually walking routes with a GPD logger is not the only way to contribute, though. For example, Open Street Map apparently was the first online map to provide maps of Bagdad, which had been transferred from satellite images by volunteers.
It was great to see how quickly OSM is growing – you can watch the expansion of charted terrain over time.

Innovationsmanagement

This talk ended up being more of a brainstorming session than a lecture. Scout24, the employer of the speaker (Cindy Beer), is apparently wondering how to ensure ongoing innovation in their company. One strategy could be to look at ongoing “megatrends” and think about what needs they could produce in the future. Examples for megatrends being mentioned were the aging of society and the increasing use of mobile internet. For me, there was no “new megatrend” that I hadn’t heard of before. It would have been interesting to hear what scout24 thinks are the important trends for them, but the presentation did not get to that point because of the discussions with the audience.

Another problem is how to manage the innovation. For example, one approach would be to create a dedicated “innovation team” within the company. This could result in all the other teams becoming “uninnovation teams”, though. They might decidedly not innovate, or even worse, if any other team would innovate, the innovation team could feel threatened and try to undermine the other innovating teams.
Incentives are another problem. At least I feel that I would not like to give my best ideas to a company that I was employed for. If the company would make millions from my idea and I would get nothing but my paltry salary, I would feel cheated. So some kind of reward scheme seems necessary. It is not always obvious how to quantify the value of an idea, though. Not every idea translates directly to revenue for the company. If a team in the company is responsible for evaluating the value of an idea, the “innovation team” problem kicks in again. What if you have a great idea, but for some reason, the evaluation team doesn’t like it? O2 had a system like that – I think it was still better than having no means for employees to give input on new ideas at all.

For me that discussion reminded me about “prediction markets”, which are apparently successfully used by some companies. The idea is to create a market similar to the stock market, but people can bid on ideas with virtual money. That way, the evaluation of the idea happens through crowd wisdom, instead of single individuals. A public example is Yahoo! tech buzz, but some companies also use such tools internally.

Another point that was raised that to look for new ideas, one should not only think about problems that look for solutions. Sometimes just going for something fun works, too. I am not sure I am convinced: making something fun also solves a problem, the boredom or loneliness of people. But maybe only looking at everything as a problem really is cropping too many thoughts.

Twitter for Corporations

Twitter continues to boggle the minds of everyone, even the people who use it on a regular basis. Since I am a fairly new Twitter user, I was hoping to gain some new insights by this session on corporate twitter. The plan for the session was to look at several examples of corporations using twitter, but because of the unreliable internet connection, it did not work so well. Instead, there was a lot of interesting discussion with the audience. Some examples for corporate twitter blogs were available, though.

Fail: the Deutsche Bahn is twittering about problems with their trains in remote locations, which can’t possibly be of interest to a wider audience. However, some people in the audience questioned the authenticity of the twitter, they thought it was just somebody else posing as the Deutsche Bahn. It certainly seems to be becoming a problem, people are already registering other people’s domain names as twitter accounts to mess with their reputation.

Fail: Preisbock – they are an example of twitter spamming. Whenever somebody decides to “follow” you on Twitter, you get an email that informs you so. It is not required to follow back, but generally considered the polite thing to do. So some companies simply try to follow everyone, and a lot of them follow back. It is very comparable to “trackback spamming” for blogs. However, if it fails, you leave the target of your spam with resentments against your company. Not good.

Success: I don’t know, the presenters liked the twitters of bild and some other magazine whose name I forgot. Bild is of course the specialist for catchy headlines, so it is not a surprise that they do well on twitter (the main attribute of twitter being that messages are limited to 140 characters). They do the same they do with their headlines, short, catchy sentences that are almost impossible to ignore, even if you actually despise the newspaper. The other magazine was giving their writers turns to twitter about the things happening at the office. Some people liked it, but others thought it made a very unprofessional impression.

Success: Till from Sonntagmorgen.com was in the audience (and they provided excellent coffee for the barcamp). They have a twitter account for sonntagmorgen and as an example, track people twittering about coffee and follow them. That approach seems more acceptable than the random approach taken by Preisbock, although I guess technically it is still spamming. Sadly I forgot what else they do and how successful they are. I think Till is a very good marketeer, though, so I think they must be doing well.

Success: I don’t understand what betacamper does, but they were successful with viral marketing on twitter. The trick is simple: after signup, redirect the user to twitter with a prefilled form field saying “I just signed up to beta camper”. Users are just the press of a button away from spamming their friends with this message, and apparently many did so. Much more effective than the old “recommend to a friend” email forms. On twitter, you don’t need to enter your friends email addresses, and because of the short sentences, you don’t need to wreck your brain for something interesting to write to your friends. I am definitely planning to copy this approach.

Other interesting points in the discussion: some people thought that Twitter is just the same thing as an IRC chat. Andreas told me about a friend who some years ago really used IRC the same way people use Twitter today: hanging around in one channel all the time, messaging about things like “cooking something for dinner now” or “going to sleep now”. The difference with twitter is maybe that you are not constricted to a specific channel, and of course it is much more accessible than IRC. Everybody builds their own channel on twitter – most people said that twitter is more like background noise than a dicussion you follow closely. I asked some twitterers who follow more than 100 people how they do it, and to my surprise they admitted that they use filters to only see important messages. So twitter becomes a farce in the end: it is a symbolic act to follow somebody, but people do not really read each others messages in the end.

Still, I think Twitter has a lot of potential. The service itself is maybe too basic, but a lot of other pages build on Twitter, and some killer apps could emerge. I like the idea of mining the network, as I described above (who made friends at the barcamp), there are filters to see only important messages, and so on.

(to be continued – I have to leave for work now…)