Tim Keller

I was privileged to get to spend the day with some of the brightest entrepreneurs and founders in Cape Town at the Silicon Cape launch. It was incredible to see how quickly founders Vinny Lingham (of Yola) and Justin Stanford (of 4Di Capital and FireID) have been able to bring their vision of a Silicon Valley in the Cape to light. The event included big hitters like former Mail & Guardian Online GM Matthew Buckland, South African billionaire Johann Rupert, Western Cape Premier Helen Zille, and Dr Ramphela Mamphela.

The essence of the day can be consumed via various news sources, but ultimately three goals were exposed:

• To develop a digital innovation hub
• To give entrepreneurs a kick-start
• To set up a Cape VC fund for start-ups

The main take-away for me was an issue raised by a delegate during the open-floor panel discussion: we have a drastic skills-shortage in the local tech start-up space. While the Silicon Cape may foster a community of entrepreneurship, we can’t do much without high quality, skilled employees. The majority of our bright minds are picking up corporate bursaries after High School, and moving straight into black suit and tie after 4 years at University. If we’re going to have great startups in the Silicon Cape, we need great programmers, sysadmins and techies who are available for employment.

With that in mind, I’m going to kick off a little group around this. I think it should be called “Develophpers Cape Town” – a community for PHP devs, aspiring and experienced. Let’s see if we can get some discussion going in the comments here. What is needed most: training, social geek-out events, hackathons, etc?

It is clear to me, that the Cape is onto something really exciting and potentially powerful. Let’s be a part of it.

Hopefully this doesn’t across as an ad – its not. I want to discuss why we bothered building an application to help make teacher’s lives easier. Here goes.

The majority of my life has been spent around teachers. My father is a principal of a local school called Sun Valley Primary and my mother is the remedial teacher. My grandmother, aunt, brother and even fiancé are also teachers. So I’m fairly surrounded by them.

What I love about teachers, is their willingness to search for ways to improve what they do. Gone are the days of grumpy Latin teachers, and angry PE instructors who don’t. Despite the often difficult South African teaching environment, the teachers I get to see on a daily basis are passionate, dynamic and innovative individuals who work tirelessly to give their kids the best education possible.

The problem is that they’re caught in a system which requires inappropriate amounts of “admin” to be completed. There are paper-based assessments, markbooks, schedules, reports and moderations that have to be completed well outside of the standard working day. The tragedy is that, by the end of the term, they’re too worn-out to be effective in their core competency: teaching.

Enter Staffroom from Stage Right.

In late 2006, I visited my father’s school and saw how the teachers were using an arrangement of Excel spreadsheets and Word Documents to file their termly academic reports. The overworked academic heads would prepare these elaborate spreadsheets and give them to teachers on USB flash drives. These flash drives would eventually return a week later for processing.

Very often this “processing” would involve changing the font from Comic Sans 12pt back to Arial 10pt, the text justification from Justified to Left, and the textbox from two centimeters off the page to where it was meant to be. All in all, it was a circus that left staff and teachers disheartened and exhausted.

I knew there had to be better way, and I set about developing a replacement system with the following characteristics:

• No Duplication: Capture information once.
• Access Anywhere: Web-based
• Teacher-friendly: Intuitive software, designed, tested and approved by teachers.
• Security and Access levels.

Three years later, we’ve achieved that and more. Umoya Networks has integrated the software with the rest of its products. We re-branded the service “Staffroom” and launched it at the South African Principals’ Association conference in May 2009. Our operations team is busy rolling out Staffroom to several South African schools, both public and private/independent.

I encourage you to read more about it at http://www.mystaffroom.net

We recognise that we’re not going to change school admin overnight, but if we can make the painful daily tasks of being a teacher less painful, then our country’s teachers are going to be a whole lot happier and able to train tomorrow’s much needed leaders.

I recall the first time I came across YouTube in 2005. Ryan Warzecha suggested we at The (then highly active) Cavern Today put our video content onto a new website called “YouTube”. My immediate reaction was somewhat negative. I assumed it was nothing more than a collection of barely funny memes, myspace-crazed teens, and keyboard cats. And, importantly, it was really slow on my 56k Dialup internet connection.

Fast forward to 2009 and I can easily lose an hour an evening on YouTube. In fact, Amy and I spent more than a few minutes this evening watching some very talented Yale students’ music videos. Amazing.

The talent of some YouTube posters is absolutely astounding… and most of them are in High School or College. When I was in school (not terribly long ago), Tech-savvy meant knowing some Python or Java, running Firefox version 0.7, and hacking Linux on the weekends. Today, the tech-savvy youth are producing amazing creative work through simple (often free) audio and video editing apps on Macs, PCs and the web. It is hard not to be impressed.

Here’s a couple of embedded videos from a YouTube-exclusive series produced by a bunch of Yale students. I think they deserve a watch. Enjoy!

College Musical

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Facebook, the insanely popular Social Network, has acquired Friendfeed, the increasingly powerful Social network aggregator. The financial terms aren’t being discussed but Facebook’s primary gain here is talent over product. The Friendfeed team of ex-Googlers like Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail) and Bret Taylor will take up lead engineering roles at Facebook.

My initial and unexplored thoughts on this:

1. Facebook just became the biggest and most popular aggregator of all Social Media Networks. They now own the social space, even moreso than before.
2. Twitter will be worried. I believe this is the first nail in the coffin.
3. Google will look to acquire Facebook, and Facebook will do everything it can to avoid acquision.
4. FriendFeed’s (geeky) userbase won’t be happy. This will give rise to an OpenSource, federated alternative, not unlike Laconica (and by extension, Identica). In fact, Laconica might be the perfect staging ground for this project.
5. For the most part, Facebook’s userbase either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. They’ll rise up against the inevitable Home Page changes that this will eventually bring, and then quickly learn to deal with them.
6. Facebook care much more about their platform than the current services they offer. That’s why they purchase new talent and ideas in the form of Parakey (2007) and FriendFeed. Expect interesting cross-social-platform integrations over the next 12 months.

Here’s my prediction as we move into the era of the Realtime Web. The next major web war will be waged between Google Wave and FaceFriendBookFeed.

Title: Embrace OpenSource on CodePlex
Presented: Microsoft TechEd Africa 2009, Durban, South Africa.
Date: 3 August 2009
Link: View on Slideshare

If you’re a software developer interested in running an open source project or just looking around for a particular tool to download, come check out the latest from CodePlex. CodePlex is the open source project hosting site from Microsoft. Launched in May 2006, CodePlex hosts thousands of open source projects. CodePlex users can start open source projects with support for source control, bug tracking, wiki pages, downloads, forums, and project statistics. Additionally, CodePlex supports the widest range of source control clients. This talk explores the top downloaded projects, outlines the CodePlex feature set, and explains how we build the CodePlex software.

Title: Windows Server and FastCGI technologies for PHP
Presented: Microsoft TechEd Africa 2009, Durban, South Africa.
Date: 2 August 2009
Link: View on Slideshare

PHP is a wildly popular scripting language for the web, and powers some of the largest websites on the Internet. Traditionally, PHP on Windows has been something of an oxymoron. 

Join us and find out why PHP is now highly performant, scalable and efficient when run under FastCGI on Windows Server and IIS. Presented by a local PHP developer, you’ll gain insight into how you can take advantage of PHP on Windows, and integrate it with technologies like PowerShell, ASP.NET and SQLServer.

Well, looks like its a mere 4 days ’til Tech•Ed kicks off in Durban. I’m putting the finishing touches on my two sessions and look forward to delivering them on Monday 3 August and Tuesday 4 August.

• Windows Server and FastCGI Technologies for PHP
• Embrace OpenSource on CodePlex
• Whiteboard: Web Experience

I’ll post the slides here on Tuesday evening, straight after the conference.

I’ve been asked to present two sessions at Microsoft Tech•Ed Africa 2009. Its being staged again this year in Durban and should see 2000 IT Pro’s, Developers and miscellaneous geeks decend upon the outstanding Durban International Convention Centre from 2-5 August.

My sessions are:

1. Windows Server & FastCGI technologies for PHP (DTL204)
   Developer Tools, Languages, and Frameworks
   Mon 3 Aug | 300 – Advanced | Developer, IT Pro

   PHP is a wildly popular scripting language for the web, and powers some of the largest websites on the Internet. Traditionally, PHP on Windows has been something of an oxymoron. Join us and find out why PHP is now highly performant, scalable and efficient when run under FastCGI on Windows Server and IIS. Presented by a local PHP developer, you’ll gain insight into how you can take advantage of PHP on Windows, and integrate it with technologies like PowerShell, ASP.NET and SQLServer.

2. Embrace Open Source on CodePlex (DTL302)
   Developer Tools, Languages, and Frameworks
   Tue 4 Aug | 300 – Advanced | Developer

   If you’re a software developer interested in running an open source project or just looking around for a particular tool to download, come check out the latest from CodePlex. CodePlex is the open source project hosting site from Microsoft. Launched in May 2006, CodePlex hosts thousands of open source projects. CodePlex users can start open source projects with support for source control, bug tracking, wiki pages, downloads, forums, and project statistics. Additionally, CodePlex supports the widest range of source control clients. This talk explores the top downloaded projects, outlines the CodePlex feature set, and explains how we build the CodePlex software.

I’m looking forward to spending time with some great techologists. Let me know if you’ll be attending!

Despite the fact that some believe that RSS is dead (well, some don’t), I still use it frequently to catch up on the day’s news at a glance.

Historically, I’ve kept my feeds in Apple’s Mail.app. However, I’ve recently found myself wanting to catch up on RSS when I’m in the car or at the gym. I needed a way to move from Mail to Google Reader.

The trouble is, Apple doesn’t have a way for you to export your RSS links our of Mail (as text or OPML). Thus, I turned to the Google, and found a fairly simple solution:

1. Export the RSS feeds as URL links in plain text (Mac OSX Leopard-only). This bash link places the export on your desktop.
   

   IFS=$'\n';for i in $(find ~/Library/Mail/RSS/ -name "Info.plist");

   do grep "http://" $i | sed "s/.*\(http[^<]*\).*/\1/" >> ~/Desktop/Mail\ Feeds.txt;done

2. Convert to from Plain Text to OPML. I used the excellent converter at http://unold.dk/code/opmlgen/
3. Import into GoogleReader!

Simple. I know have all my feeds in GoogleReader, and can access them whereever I am.

I’ve been asked to speak at Microsoft’s TechEd Africa from 2-5 August. Around 2000 IT pros and developers will assemble at the Durban ICC to hear about some of the latest technologies in the tech space.

As with Microsoft DevDays earlier this year, I’ll be keeping Microsoft honest with two Open Source sessions:

• Windows Server & FastCGI technologies for PHP
• Embrace Open Source on Codeplex

Some vital links

• Agenda
• Register

Hope to see some of you there!