In addition to Doug Kushin (who assisted me with video production), I had a couple of friends helping me out at TNNI – Dennis McDonald and Joseph LeBlanc. Each have very different backgrounds and thus different perspectives on the conference.
Joe is a talented Joomla programmer, who recently is back to freelancing now. Here were some of his thoughts:
There were two takes on Ruby and Ruby on Rails: 1) The 10 to 1 productivity gain is irresistible. 2) Programmers comprise a very small fraction of the overall IT budget. However, as a developer, I felt that these views were missing some key points. First, a productivity gain of that magnitude makes it feasible to implement a new idea several different ways, get feedback, and debug the top choice all in the time it would take to write it once in another language. Second, if you can save your developers that much time, they be able to build more tools to help the IT department save money. Finally, great developers love using good tools. You have a much better shot of attracting and retaining talent if developers have the flexibility to choose the best solutions for each situation.
Dennis on the other hand looks at things from a much more strategic and managerial perspective. He writes about one of the Technology Showcase competitors Voxant:
Voxant has developed content licensing relationships with a variety of video, image, and text news sources including CBS, Fox News and Bloomberg. Voxant re-licenses the content, including built-in advertising and streaming video, to individual web sites and blog operators.
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Assuming this all works as volume and complexity scale up, what Voxant is doing is, in effect, developing a new distribution platform that “traditional” news outlets can use that balances the needs of monetization with the “viral marketing” model where participation, sharing, and relationships drive ever-growing volume.
Thanks to Dennis, Joe, and others who helped me out at the conference.
