There’s no better way to discuss technology than to get 6 CTO’s together on a windy New York City Monday night with some pizza and a few imports. Last night’s Morpho Mind Bar event was a triple-double-click above par.
The CTO of an online food delivery service arrived first, which I believe is part of their on-time delivery strategy. The others started blowing in soon after, greeted by a refreshing beverage and the Morpho Team. Side discussions began naturally between our attendees; platforms & frameworks, PHP & .NET, Ruby on Rails & Drupal, iPhone & Android, lack of females in the tech world & the Super Bowl. It was pure face-to-face interaction, human contact… and not one computer was in the room (except for the Smartphones, and oh yeah, the big-screen LCD shooting out sounds from Pandora). The conversations grew organically, the attendees were comfortable yet fully engaged – it was beautiful. How often can you find a group of tech heads enjoying themselves without a ratio of 2.45 monitors to every person in the room?
Our next event will be another invitational with a different small group of technology professionals. We will only invite a max of 10 people so we can continue keeping our event small and intimate. It allows for everyone to talk to one another, get involved in conversation about a topic that each attendee has in common, and satisfy their stomachs after a long day of work. We’re definitely looking forward to the next one.
Great thanks to our attendants for making this a successful event. Here’s some feedback from our attendees:
“I thought it was a great forum for technologists that as more and more people jump on can only get better. Kind of nice having it not driven by any one agenda as folks were free to talk about real challenges rather than what Information Week would like us to be talking about.”
“I learned…
That I have overestimated the mindshare/penetration of Rails
That I have underestimated the mindshare/penetration of mobile apps
That I should probably go to more events like this one.”
“I learned about a few useful services I didn’t know existed before – not just the businesses represented, but about a few third parties that could help our business. Also got some interesting insight into the sorts of challenges that other companies are having and how they overcome them.”
blip.tv presents at NY Tech Meetup
“New York City has produced about $35 billion in tech assets over the past decade. That makes it second only to the Bay Area.” – CNET
Allan (a friend of ours) at blip.tv (New York-based startup) presented their new dashboard at NY Tech Meetup this week. The dashboard is a single place where video creators can do almost everything they need to distribute their video across many sources and generate ad revenue. For starters, it allows creators to upload multiple versions of their videos in various formats and distribute them in a single step across 80% of all Internet-video providers, including YouTube, Vimeo, TiVo, Verizon FiOS On-Demand, a WNBC digital TV channel called New York Non-Stop, and more. They also built several new analytic tools into the dashboard, including the ability to see a timeline graph of your video that shows when people stopped watching or when they rewound and watched again.
The audience at NY Tech Meetup was impressed and so was I. The other demos were great and it was nice to see once again how packed the auditorium was (over 400 people on a Tuesday evening in August). It reflects well on the New York tech community as NY Tech Meetup has been growing rapidly in popularity, now reaching over 10,000 members. There are also many other great events setup in New York City for the tech community – particularly for Internet start-ups.
At an IxDA event in the Bloomberg building (which has a koi pond inside), two guys from IDEO did a presentation about interaction and business design. They considered “how interaction and business designers approach problems, how the relationship between the two disciplines has changed, and how collaboration can lead to rich user experiences and business solutions.”
This was intriguing. On IDEO’s website, they explain that their “business design specialists take a user-centered approach to understanding our customers’ business. We consider the capabilities of our clients and the needs of their customers to prototype new business scenarios. As we iterate towards a solution, we assess the implications of our design. Our goal is to deliver appropriate and actionable strategies… ”
What does this mean? It means that IDEO has expanded into business strategy consulting, usually provided by the likes of McKinsey, because there is a demand for something more than just traditional design or traditional business strategy – companies want a hybrid. Having been involved in the development and launch of so many new products and services from a design perspective, IDEO saw an opportunity to also consult on the business implications of the design, branding, and user-experience decisions. With everything changing rapidly as industries converge and social media transforms how you manage PR and your brand, companies need help figuring out the repercussions of potential actions to help guide their business to success, not just making things look aesthetically pleasing. An example of this is IDEO’s work with the Adobe Creative Suite, where they worked on “creating sustainable packaging for a design-savvy clientele.” Essentially, they helped Adobe make business decisions in combination with packaging design decisions. Learn more here.
Morpho’s approach to web development outsourcing is similar. Just writing code isn’t enough. Included in the cost of our developers, we provide a US-based account manager and South American-based supervisors, who are web developers / business consultants that continuously monitor progress and seek out opportunities for improvement. They are proactive – anticipating and addressing issues before they become actual problems, and they fill in the gaps that they identify in clients’ existing processes with our best practices.
We guide web development not just to completion by writing code, but to success by helping our clients maximize their outsourcing operations, which results in saving money, increasing productivity, and ultimately increasing the quality of their web-based products and services.
