Joulex win SmartCamp Munich

Yesterday in Munich we held our first SmartCamp event in Germany.  A big thanks to all our partners who were key to a very successful event.  

As expected we had some very strong teams however the judges selected Joulex as the winner. Joulex leverage big data in order to create business intelligence by aggregating and correlating the energy information from all IP-enabled devices to provide unprecedented visibility into the energy consumption and utilization of those devices throughout the distributed office, data center and facilities environments. JouleX takes this a step further by applying advanced analytics to identify energy, cost, and carbon savings opportunities and a management platform to implement policies to realize this savings.

They have offices in Germany, US and Japan and are headed by Tom Noonan – Tom was previously CEO of Internet Security Systems (ISS), which was acquired by IBM for $1.5 billion.

We look forward to working with them in the coming months.

moscow street cleaning

file:///SDCard/BlackBerry/pictures/

Building Web Sites – Part 4

Well it seems with cut and paste anything is possible – now embedding twitter widget – how easy is this stuff – no need to understand entity relationship diagrams. But no! The following widget worked fine on Tumblr but wordpress doesn’t like it! Back to the drawing board…..

Object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,124,0″ width=”290″ height=”350″ id=”TwitterWidget” align=”middle”>

Building Web Sites – Part 3

Image via Wikipedia

Spent the evening and morning getting my engineering juices going building Star Wars Armored Assault Tank in Lego with Louis.  Once we established division of labour – Louis building, Martin covered stock control and QA things started to move.  All worked well for an hour before boredom set in and we had to rotate roles.  Like coding the initial challenge was to find the right piece in a sea of lego blocks (read: find the right function call).  Later the challenges was to figure out a way of getting by given that one vital block had been eaten by the cat.

Back to bulding the web site.  As usual spend 30 mins getting lost reading readwriteweb and thinking about how the semantic web might be useful.  Anyway this random walk led me to slideshare and I’m still finding it hard to believe that simply by cutting and pasting the following text ‘slideshare id=814987&doc=rwwpresentationdec08-1228338052874869-9′ into WordPress the following happens.

Easy peasie lemon squeezie.  But it crashes my machine on full screen view model.  Now I need to understand what is actually happening under the hood which  might take a little while

Building Web Sites – Part 2

Image via Wikipedia

Every 6 months or so, I get a strong desire to build something and learn about a new technology in detail. Having spent 20 years in IT, the last 10 of which were almost solely commercial focused, I worry about becoming disconnected with the underlying nuts and bolts.  Seems the most enjoyable parts of my career has resolved around building something (sometimes on my own, most of the time in a team).

So, as the level of abstraction increases and the majority of a time is spend on intangible things like building relationships, communicating strategy, selling an idea, it is reassuring to actually build some from thin air (e.g. write code).

This Christmas it seemed like a good idea to focus on creating a community web site.  Setting this as a goal should mean that I learn about the latest tools and how to integrate.  So 24 hours into the project, have managed to learn some HTML basics, register a domain name, and start this blog in wordpress.  The web site is here http://www.smartcampforglobalentrepreneurs.com/

The next steps are to merge the blog with the web site

Building Web Sites

It’s ten years since I last tried to build anything on the web (aside from playing with Ning a couple of years ago to build a mini northern soul community).  Having studied computer science in college followed by 10 years as a techie (including sysadmin, dba, systems programming) I’m amazing at how complex we have managed to make building simple web sites.  Back in 1993 the industry believed that 4GL’s were the future – no need to code anything again – seems like the paperless office that vision never happened.  The IBM 402 accounting machine is a good example of the current engineering challenges we face.  However we have made great progress in other areas.  I logged onto WordPress this morning for the 1st time and this is the result after 20 mins (very easy to use) now how to I build a simple site that includes a small database application (CRUD) functionality

Image via Wikipedia