New Tech Post - Galway

Starolas: The All-in-One Web Application for Academic Conferences

Lisa Jackson — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 08:39:10 +0000

Academic conferences allow researchers and academics to present, discuss and showcase their work. The conference chairperson generally organises the entire event from the paper submission stage, months in advance of the conference, right up to the event itself.

Galway-based company, Starlight, plans to simplify the organisation process for the chairperson through its conference management application, Starolas.

Starlight is a creative lab space of six people that focuses on the creation of web apps. Its diverse portfolio also includes website design and animation.

The name for Starlight’s app, “Starolas”, combines the “Star” from Starlight and “Eolas," the Irish word for knowledge.

The app is designed to be used for approximately nine months leading up to an academic conference. It contains four key modules:

Paper submission and review
Online payment and registration
Website
Delegate management

The final module above allows a conference presenter to upload his or her presentation and biography to the conference website in advance of arrival. The delegate management module will also download the presentation files to the presentation computer to negate the need for the speaker to bring it on a USB key.

Founder and Managing Director of Starlight, Paul Killoran says, “Academics are focused on research. They don’t necessarily want to organise a conference. At the end of the day, their key is that the conference goes well, generates a lot of papers, research and presentations. My objective is to create a piece of software that is robust and will provide that infrastructure. It will make them look really good and in doing that, take away all the pain of how to coordinate the conference.”

In terms of the current web apps available for an academic conference chairperson, Paul explains, “some of the competitors only do about 25% of what we do. For example Eventbrite
and EventElephant do online payment and registration. But we’ve tried to make it a one-stop shop for everything you would need to run your academic conference. We would hope that within five years this product could be the de facto standard for how to run a conference.”

Starlight is also considering adding a social networking tool to the app. Paul explains, “These conferences are not just about publishing papers. They’re probably more about meeting up with your peers from all over the world in the same subject area and then networking with them. What would be nice is an opportunity for you, before you get there, to see all the submissions or the presentations that are going to go on and to see a list of who will present those in a social way, almost like a Facebook.”

In addition, Starlight also hopes to include a feature that will allow the abstract book for delegates attending the conference to be complied through Starolas. The app will gather the individual submissions into one document that can be produced easily by the conference chairperson.

The idea for Starolas first originated from an Institution of Engineering and Technology conference held in NUI Galway in 2008. Starlight was approached by a lecturer to design software for the event. Paul remembers, “I said to him I can write that in a week. Six months later I finished writing it and it broke me. If I had a house I would have lost it. But we had built this amazing app.”

After the event, Starlight was approached by other conferences to use the app. Paul says, “After four or five conferences I thought: we have something here and we should make it in such a way that we can deploy it really really fast.”

Starolas has already been sold to twenty conferences. Paul notes, “We’ve never lost a conference. The first year we did two conferences, the second year we did seven. Then the recession hit so we maintained our seven and we’re hitting seven again.”

Starlight is most proud of having powered the 2009 symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC) in Germany as it was the first European sale of Starolas. Amongst others, it currently powers ARC 2011 in Queen’s University, Belfast and the Western Vascular Institute Symposium.

Paul recalls one particular moment where he realised the potential of Starolas. “I was sitting in Germany at ARC 2009. We had servers which were located in Galway. So I’m sitting there and there’s a guy in front of me with his Mac open and he’s working on his PowerPoint. There’s a presentation going on at the same time. He finishes the PowerPoint, closes it, saves it and goes to the website and uploads it. The presentation in front finishes and he walks down the stairs, clicks on the link and presents. His presentation had gone from Germany to Galway and back to Germany.”

The funding for the app was acquired from the Galway Enterprise Board with match funding from the bank.

Paul advises other budding designers seeking funding that “the best thing you can do is just be completely honest with yourself. There’s no point going in with a business plan trying to sell the bank manager on if you don’t believe in it yourself. To get the funding, we put together a very clear business plan, we showed a product that clearly worked, that was sold twenty times, that had generated x amount of revenue in 2 years and were able to demonstrate that this product would work.”

Starlight aims to have Starolas at alpha (the first phase to begin software testing) or approaching beta (the next phase generally when the software has all its final functionality) by May with a view to showcasing it at upcoming conferences in June.

Cisco Quad: A Social Network for the Business Enterprise

Tom Murphy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:11:41 +0000

Quad is Cisco’s enterprise collaboration platform. It is a system where the social tools that are widely used in Facebook and Twitter and other social networks such as; newsfeeds, groups, relationships with friends and followers, contacts and the ability to be able to see activities that other people in our social network are doing, have been adapted to meet the demands of the business world. The emphasis here, however, is more on enterprise than social network.

The social networking capability that we are used to having with Facebook or Twitter has been enabled for integration with the enterprise systems that nearly all businesses have, and which already deal with the demands of CRM systems, document management and numerous other tasks.

Cisco developed Quad because they found that there was a need to provide integration between social networking and the requirement to maintain commercial security and fulfill various legal compliances. It was time to bring social media into the grown-up world. Quad transforms the idea of social network systems from being a fun tool to stay in touch with family and friends to a cutting edge business tool to aid communication and productivity.

Keith Griffin, Lead Architect of the Enterprise Collaboration Platform at Cisco, is based in Galway, Ireland. The Cisco site there is heavily involved in the field of unified communications: the combining of video, audio, instant messaging, online meetings and other collaborative solutions. Using their knowledge and experience, the team in Galway were able to make a large contribution to the work being done on the core development of Quad taking place in San Jose, California.

As Keith explains, “What we are doing here is adding horizontal social interconnectivity to a vertical directory structure. You can see in my profile (pictured above and below) that I have got directory information here. You can see my latest microblog about a research meeting that took place the night before last and my recent blogs and tags which I share with everyone else. If people want to go to this page, they can see all this. It is not just a static web page. It’s a full Web 2.0 environment.

“In the directory, I can see the reporting line. You can see all the people I am following in the directory. If I hover over anybody on the list here, I can see for example that so and so is not following, but this person is. That’s the difference between the 'following' model and the 'friend' model. If both people follow each other they are friends.

“When we did this integration (at one point there was in excess of a hundred thousand people participating,) the social activity was immense. As soon as people could see where they were in the directory and where they related to other people, they started sending friend requests and following requests.

“It just showed to me that vertical integration remains the backbone of the organisation, but it’s of limited value without this horizontal social activity because that represents the interactions that people do in real life, and in the virtual teams they work with, and so on.”

As it was felt that people have a little more to say in the business world, Quad uses 400 characters in its microposts. There is also the ability to have a 'watch list' where a separate filter of the main feed's social activities can be displayed. This can allow the watch list to be used as a de facto to-do list. It gives the user the ability to respond to the news, requests and information that is most pertinent and relevant to them.

How easy does Quad make it to access the vast and varied amount of resources and expertise that a company like Cisco has?

“A big trend that we borrowed from the Web is the concept of social relevance. If I am an expert on something and I offer an opinion or write a blog, that tends to be given a pretty heavy weighting. If someone offers an opinion and perhaps they don’t have a background in a certain area, then it tends to stay as an opinion with a lesser weighting.

"In a social network, because you get to see all the activities, you can see who is active in any particular area. Over time, if people aren’t getting the answers that they expect from somebody who has been represented with having those skills, then in a system like this you would see less social activity associated with those topics for those people. So their relevance and ranking overall can drop.

How is Quad modeled?

“What we have done here is modeled our entire system on people, communities and information. Those are the three dimensions of the system.

“If I search for something like the Semantic Web, which is something we research quite deeply with the people at DERI, it will bring us back a three-dimensional search result. We’re not doing anything special with search, but what we are doing is interpreting the results in the context of social network rather than in the context of a keyword search on a number of documents.

“What it is about is providing a richness of information in any given search."

A natural by product of social activity is the creation of communities. How are they handled?

“When people have a certain interest and that’s an ongoing interest, whether it is a project or it could be a sales campaign or a feature that they are working on, they can set up a community. The community can have a number of owners and contributors. We can have wikis and other Web 2.0 tools of the sort which you would expect, as everything running here is completely within a browser environment.

“Just like on the Web, crowdsourcing in an enterprise is significant as well. It is not just based on the hierarchy of our team. Anybody can come in and contribute their ideas. We use the crowd within our own organisation to get things done.”

While Cisco and companies like Cisco have been using instant messaging technology in preference to emails and telephone conversations for a number of years, particularly in the areas of engineering and software development, there is a major benefit to be had in harnessing one of the real powers of social media - persistence.

Persistence means that a message is kept alive and relevant because it can be seen in the context of its usefulness and relevance by the people engaged with that conversation. Important ideas don’t get lost in emails or are forgotten to be passed on after isolated conversations on telephones.

As it is easier to see the relationship between different messages and their place in the context of activity, it makes it easier to obtain a better perspective on what has already happened, and as a consequence be more appropriately placed to make better decisions about what to do next.

How does Quad help with the issue of time zones in a company as large as Cisco?

“I work an awful lot with San Jose and I am not sure if I could get through my day without Quad. As soon as I come in, I get a snapshot of all my colleagues and all the projects and technologies they are working on.

"It’s not as good as the coffee machine conversation, but I can get a sense of what is going on. The alternative is reading lots and lots of individual emails which doesn’t give me the same context or the same conversational view.”

A tool or a piece of software will only go so far. There has to be a desire for a company to collaborate and want to work together. There is an organisational and business process that needs to happen with this technology as well. Software, as ever, is just a facilitator. It is just something to make things happen. But perhaps when people look at the powerful possibilities that technologies like Quad can offer, it can inspire them to drive the sort of changes needed to enable organisations to work more collaboratively and, hopefully, make things better for everyone.

Virtual 3D Galway

Tom Murphy — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:51:22 +0000

Click on any of the images to view amazing flyby of Galway City, Ireland.

Three years, two thousand person hours and fifteen thousand high resolution photographs later, Galway City has been rendered into a photo-realistic, wholly-accurate, three-dimensional model. Virtual 3D Galway is an immersive model in which you fly through the City, approach it from any angle and examine it from any perspective.

Gavin Duffy, Technical Director of Realsim, a Galway-based realtime 3D simulation company, began this epic project as a proof of concept. He says, “It is as far as I am aware the most detailed model of any city in Ireland. Because we have spent a lot of time and effort photographing from the ground with high resolution photography, very few of our buildings have people or lamp posts in them. So, we don’t suffer that Google Street View clutter. It’s clean, it’s high resolution, it’s geo-spatially accurate, we think it is as good as anything you’ll find anywhere in the world in terms of a 3D model.”

Realsim’s primary focus is in planning and development. Gavin explains, “Our bread and butter business has been supplying large organisations with realtime 3D models of their own property. Our first major customer was here in NUI Galway. The Buildings Office have a 3D model of the entire campus. They fly around themselves when they are talking to engineers or architectural consultants.

“When they are discussing the ever-changing parking plans, they can fly down to an area and say this is what we need to do here. The feedback has been that it is much more effective than looking at one of those white CAD plans. People know immediately what they are talking about.”

Stepping away from using traditional 3D architectural modelers who don’t normally take into account polygon and data volume, Gavin hired in as Chief 3D Graphic Designer, Eoghan Quigley, an experienced gaming programmer. The volume of vector information and the resolution of imagery that are in a given scene is very important. Even as powerful as modern laptop computers are, it is important to optimise data volumes, and there is a skill in getting the right balance between detail and data volume.

As Gavin points out, this has led to other interesting possible uses for the technology behind Virtual 3D Galway, “An interesting potential avenue [for us] is that because the model is game ready, it can then be applied to real-world games. If someone wanted to develop a game for Galway, it could be very beneficial as a promotional tool for Galway itself. We’re not a gaming company, but we can supply a gaming company with a ready-to-go real city environment on which they can develop a game."

At the beginning of the project, Galway was mapped by a series of aerial photographs - the raw material of the 3D environment. They provide the base map and it’s also the most efficient way to extract three dimensional shapes for the actual buildings.

But what makes Virtual 3D Galway so special is the time and effort spent walking down every street and alley over an area of three square kilometres containing over six thousand buildings, and even doing that was not as straightforward as it may seem.

Gavin explains, “It’s not just a matter of going out and photographing willy-nilly. The factors you’ve got to take into consideration are [things like] sunlight. Sometimes when sunlight is illuminating a building it can add a nice 3D effect, but if it’s completely in the shadow it is better to come back again on a cloudy day. You’re not going to get good photography in Shop Street (Galway’s main pedestrian thoroughfare) on a Friday evening. Nor are you going to get good photography first thing in the morning when all the delivery trucks are there. Particularly for city centre areas you have got to time exactly when you photograph. There were a lot of Sunday mornings [spent taking pictures] but at the same time you don’t want to photograph shops with the shutters down.

“The very process of acquiring the photographs and getting the optimal times in terms of lighting, lack of people, cars, vehicles, was a challenge in itself, but we were willing to put the the time and effort in to get the very best photography for the model.”

Data currency (the recency and relevancy of data) was, is and will always be a major challenge. Urban environments are in a constant state of flux. Old shops close, new shops open. Warehouses are torn down and cinemas built and so on. Sometimes an old map can be worse than no map.

“Building facades change quite regularly in Galway and we’ve ended up photographing the same facade several times just to keep the model up to date... That will be an ongoing challenge: one of the reasons why I think in the long term other cities in the world will probably have to localise the development and maintenance of their [own virtual] cities. [In order] to maintain an up-to-date city model, a local company will need to manage it.

“For example, Google have covered the UK and Ireland but when are they going to come back? The aerial photography for Galway is well out of date. You don’t see Webworks, and you don’t see the TK Maxx building because they were all construction sites then.”

So as environments and technologies change, the need for new skill-sets and outlooks emerge. New opportunities emerge. But Virtual 3D Galway is more than a backdrop to a game or a functional engineering tool. It is a view of ourselves and where we live reflected back at us in an unerringly accurate manner that we have never witnessed before. The true value of Virtual 3D Galway is in what it can tell us about how we live now and perhaps inform us in some way of how we can live better in the future.

Gavin says, “In the absence of knowledge and proper information, fear and distrust build. [Virtual 3D Galway] allows people to see objectively the true shape of things to come.

“Part of the problem that society has had in terms of imagining a way forward is that people have not been able to communicate their vision. If you can create that vision in a virtual environment, it then becomes a very, very powerful means to promote it and even let people in a virtual way to experience it. I think virtual worlds will have a powerful way in helping people to create a really good and powerful vision for the way we should go forward using virtual world technology.”

Social Bits Joins us to Help Expand our Community

John Breslin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 09:26:17 +0000

We are pleased to share with you the news that we will be working with Social Bits a Galway based Social Media technology company. We will be working together to expand the online presence of
Socialmedia.net on the various social networking platforms.

As our output of articles grows we have concluded that it is time to bring in some dedicated expertise. We know from our own behind the scenes measurements that the most effective way to use social media is by making practical use of the results from the monitoring and analysis of our data.

Social Bits specialises in measuring the return of investment in social media from a business perspective. Social Bits also develops Semantic Web strategies to help companies organise their data. It is an absolute necessity to measure your social media outreach as we know measurement is extremely important in the effective use of social media.

For those of you who haven’t come across it yet we have a Facebook Pages site for Socialmedia.net.

Facebook is huge with 500 million users plus, and we are think it is time to increase our level of activity there. We know from our own articles such as How to Influence on Twitter that engagement comes through activity and activity leads to further engagement and so a virtuous circle is created.

As well as linking articles and blogs to our Facebook page we also plan to share more of the workings around their creation. Pictures that we like that we couldn’t fit into a piece. Quotes that didn’t make it into articles, more video and audio clips that we would hate to have disappear forever but have no place on the main site for.

In the spirit of transparency we will also show some our thinking. We have already got a picture up of a font pattern that we have decided to use. We also posted Emma Creighton’s Jogo video as a standalone from the main article on her work because we thought it was that good.

Social Bits plans to use all major social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Digg and other social bookmarking websites to define, measure, analyse and improve our use of social media.

However, we will continue improving and developing our main site. We are very much looking forward to the Drupal 7 upgrade in September which will allow us to enhance all sorts of things both at the front and the back end of the site.

Our ultimate ambition is to build a strong community of people who are interested in the subjects we cover and the stories we write about.

socialmedia.net Is A Sponsor Of Blog Talk 2010

Tom Murphy — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:47:13 +0000

socialmedia.net is one of the sponsors of BlogTalk, a conference taking place at the National Univeristy of Ireland, Galway on the 26th and 27th of August. We will have speakers not only from Ireland and Europe, but we also have some who are flying in from America especially to present.

These conferences are important because even though the wonders of the Internet and its associated social media services allow us to be more accessible to each other than ever before, there is stil no substitute for getting a bunch of people into a room and having them meet and talk to each other. Despite all our wonderful technology, there are some things that can only be communicated in person and in not in any other way.

As is becoming more apparent in the conference world and in the ideas underlying the notion of unconferences, the audience is equally important if not actually more important than the speakers. To quote Dan Gillmor, one of our scheduled speakers and whose interview with socialmedia.net we will be publishing on Tuesday, August 17th, “The Q&A portion of a talk is always better than the talk. I’ve been to and done several conferences where it was assumed that the main panelists were the people in the audience.”

So, if you do have space in your calendar we would urge you to attend.

At socialmedia.net, we will be featuring some of the speakers either through interviews or by way of their response to our popular Social Media Ten Questions item. So look out for those.

Also, we will be covering the actual event with audioboos, tweets, updates and further blog posts here. So if you can’t attend, please don’t feel that you will be completely missing out.

Look forward to seeing you and if we don’t see you, we look forward to hearing from you.

Doocracy: It's The Doing That Counts

Tom Murphy — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:43:34 +0000

Image by Kevin Flanagan.

Upfront disclaimer: From previous posts, many of our regular readers will have heard of 091 Labs here in Galway, Ireland. It is a hackerspace project that we at socialmedia.net support with regular shout-outs and by participating in other ways.

What may not be apparent from our previous coverage is that 091 Labs is run as a doocracy: a place where people can come together, self-organise, share, co-create and collaborate.

The sixties and seventies were times of a great many counter-cultural experiments in which many ideas were explored as to how best we could live our lives. Several such strands of exploration containing the elements of libertarianism, Zen in the momentness, and some good old fashioned American, "can do!" spirit, came to be mixed together bringing to the fore the startling and radical idea that the easiest way to do something is to do something.

Burning Man is one manifestation. A whole bunch of people take themselves off to the desert away from the possibility of disturbing others. They do their thing and express themselves in whatever way they feel most appropriate, and when it’s all over they clear up their mess and leave.

Another important result of doocracy thinking is the open source movement. Nobody asked anyone to make Gimp or OpenOffice to name just two great applications. Individuals just decided to get on with it and make it happen.

Declan Elliott, who is one of the speakers at this year’s BlogTalk which is taking place in Galway on the 26th and 27th of August, is the person responsible for bringing the ideas underpinning doocracy to the City of Tribes by means of helping to found 091 Labs.

Declan says, “A doocracy is a self-organising system where everyone participates and everyone treats each other as equals. There is no leader or follower here. Everyone is a fellow of the hackerspace.”

Very importantly he adds, “This is very much the direction for organisations in the future. We will no longer have intensely hierarchical organisations. They will be much flatter, much faster and much more permeable. People inside and out the organisation can connect directly with each other and do what they want as they wish, when they wish, mindful of what they are a part of.”

Trust and responsibility are key to the doocracy ethos. In a world devoid of Big Brother and his evil spawn of micro-managers, one’s own sense of what is right and just becomes of the utmost importance. It becomes the benchmark for decision making and action taking.

Doocracies are about doing in the context of working with other people. If you do it, you do it. If someone else does it, then they do it. Of course, certain activities require the enrollment and the coordination of the division of labour, but even then you do it because you have agreed to do it, not because the group has ordered you to do it or even expected you to do it. Either it's done or its not: it's that simple.

Working with others can occasionally produce moments of disharmony. For instance, there can be disagreements over use of space and time when it can be used, etc. However, these conflicts can be resolved by remembering that sharing, co-creation and collaboration are fundamental to a successful outcome, and that it is better to cede one's point, gracefully we hope, rather than be a person of obstruction.

Like other 'alternative' ideas, the principles of doocracy will eventually find a place in the more conventional world, particularly in mainstream businesses. In a previous article, "Corporations Must Embrace The Principles Of The Social Media Revolution To Evolve And Survive", we spoke about how employers are going to have to revise and change the structures of their organisation which inhibit communication. The very next evolution of that process will be to up their level of trust another notch from freely allowing their workers (or should I say collaborators) to communicate to freely allowing their collaborators to do things mindful, of course, of the attendant responsibilities.

Who wouldn't love working at a company that was all about trusting its people and getting things done.

Other images by Darren T. & Tom M.

091 Labs Has A New Home [VIDEO]

Tom Murphy — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:48:59 +0000

091 Labs (the Galway Hackerspace) has a new home at the Exchange Building, Foster St., Galway, Ireland. For more background, you can read this article or view the official announcement. Click on the image below to view a short video about 091 Labs' new space.