Another year, another LIFT. I didn't blog the sessions as-they-went this year, for lots of reasons: they're streamed quite nicely nowadays; Twitter has well and truly replaced my live-blogging urges with a flow of instant pith; and I've found my ideal conference bag combo (iPad+iPhone, for 2-screen action) which doesn't let me type fast enough. Plus I thought I'd try and pay attention this year. You know, just for a change.

So, brief notes follow.

Day One: Lady Gaga, Moustaches and Lossy Translations

• Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott: a good run-through of "social software is changing the world" examples and a beautiful video of a murmuration but I didn't take away much of a conclusion from this one;
• Jean-Claude Biver was up next. I'd not heard of him but a few locals later apprised me of the high standing he's held in Switzerland. Like Don, I noticed he was using lots of technical language in his analogies (where Don spoke of "rebooting our institutions", Jean-Claude talked about education "formatting" children and wiping away their creativity). Like Don, rousing but I didn't feel I learned much: "failure is the only learning process" is a great soundbite, and I happen to think it may be true, but hearing it doesn't help me build a creatively strong organisation;
• David Galbraith gave what I felt was a strong talk, looking at 4 trends he'd identified: drawing a line from Rudolph Valentino to Lady Gaga, he put forward an economic model for celebrity (marred only by his insistence on financial valuations for data traffic built on the value-based pricing of SMS); real-person recommendations replacing algorithmic ones of Google et al (I wasn't convinced by this - it plays well to the "humans will also be superior" gut feeling our race naturally shares, but Dunbar's going to impose a limit on what you can achieve here IMHO); people-powered design (products designed for consumers outpacing those designed for enterprises, which we see with GMail vs Outlook); and the rise of separate public and corporate internets (the needs of financial services and markets meaning long-term we'll either lose net neutrality, get government-controlled networks, or have a separate corporate intranet);
• Ben Hammersley and his amazing moustache followed up with a talk entitled "Post-Digital Geopolitics": we're societally confused because the factor which we used to use to differentiate ourselves from others, distance, is less relevant nowadays. I didn't quite agree with his assertions that the Cold War fight against Russia was fundamentally different to contemporary battles against Al Qaeda (in both cases it was the West vs an ideology, manifested in many places), or that September 11th changed everything; but his conclusion that my generation's role is to translate between the worlds of those older and younger seemed reasonable... just as I suspect it has been for every such generation in the past.
• Alexander Osterwald (whose recent book I later realised sits, sadly unread, on my work-related reading pile) gave a sensible and solid talk about the need for startups to model a variety of different business models. Seems sensible, but I'd be horrified to think most people weren't already doing this.
• Then Dorian Selz, on virtual organisations. I was frustrated by this talk: clearly Dorian has managed to do what a few others (MySQL, 37signals) have managed, and many others have tried and failed to do. That said, I found his advice unhelpfully simple - "get rid of project managers" is a good rallying cry for anyone who's been badly managed or resents management, but I can't help feeling there's more to his success than this, and that perhaps he's internalised his lessons or is just innately really great at running an organisation;
• Couple Alexandra Bau and Birgitta Ralston followed, with a very personal story of building companies and a fantastic-looking home. I'm ashamed to say my notes are limited here, I was fading a little.
• Yasmine Abbas was next, on designing for transients - digita neo-nomads. It sounded interesting, and most of her subjects were probably watching in the room...
• ...and finally Jennifer Gay gave a 5-minute and deeply personal look into the world of professional translators; arguing that automated translations are naturally lossy and therefore not a huge threat to the high-end professionals, whilst confessing that cheap/instantaneous/approximate might present a threat to elegant/accurate/slower/costly human translators. I never knew the first simultaneous translations happened at Nuremberg (and threw the profession into turmoil); and I hadn't thought about the unique problems an event like LIFT might pose her trade, consisting as it does of constant shifts into the jargon of different domains. Respect due.

Day Two: Niche Communities, Understanding User Needs, and RoboMusic for Dyslexics

• Argh! I overslept and missed most of what looked like a really interesting and practically-focused talk from Tiffany St James. I'll need to go back for the video...
  
• Chris Heathcote took second spot, talking about those communities which tend to fall into the shadow of Facebook: USenet, mailing lists, and especially Grindr and Gaydar. Really nicely put together (especially the lavishly-gathered map of Grindr search results volume, put together over what was clearly a hard Saturday nights work). Everything becomes a community, it turns out; people want to talk and will duct-tape a conversational service like PingChat onto the likes of Grindr to help them do so. Oh, and a lovely soundbite: "Maps are the Hello, World of data";
  
• Azeem Azhar spoke next about online reputation and its importance for communities. The financial crisis (referenced by many speakers) gave us an opportunity to see what happens when the web of trust which supports a market-based economy is taken away: when Standard & Poor ratings no longer counted, governments had to step in. The notion of brands as proxies for personal trust had, annoyingly, not occurred to me before;
  
• Then, Steve Portigal. I've been a fan of Steve ever since reading an excellent article he wrote on personas and how they're frequently abused in the design process, and he didn't disappoint. His talk focused on research activities: how to understand user needs, particularly latent ones, and he gave a huge range of practical advice here: role-play, logging, homework, stimuli, participatory design (explained nicely as "people thinking they're talking about solutions whilst actually expressing needs"), and so on. He called for greater comfort with ambiguity (something we've noted is more important if you head down an avenue marked "agile"), and for researchers to reframe how organisers think by creating new stories, freeing designers up to manifest these stories. All good stuff;
  
• Having surfed on endorphin through Steve's talk, I crashed and missed most of Nick Coates on co-creation, and Thomas Sutton of Frog Design. I surfaced again in the afternoon, jolted awake by Yuri Suzuki and his "music for dyslexics" project: gorgeous stuff linking visuals to sound generation, often with a side-order of home robotics.
  

Day two ended with the ALP Venture Night, a presentation from 8 startups. Two stood out for me - Atracsys, who do interactive surface and projection displays, and NViso who do real-time emotional analysis of faces. Both quite interesting businesses, but I was struck by how many of the startups focussed on their product and features whilst giving little indication of how they would sell it or make any money. I didn't get much out of Scoble's closing talk - it was a walkthrough of a load of Valley startups, but with so many mentioned none of them benefitted from any depth of analysis.

Day Three: Rent Your Clothes, Algorithmic Feedback Loops, Robots and Space Travel

Day three kicked off extra-early for me. I managed to get a place on the workshop Christian Miccio ran, "Let's create a product again". It was a repeat of the same format he'd used the previous year, which I'd also wanted to go to - but he had clashed with my own repeat of Mobile Mountains (which I think is similarly themed: "let's make something, quickly").

I and a few other volunteer Product Managers arrived 45 minutes early, and brainstormed some ideas for products. Unlike most brainstorms I've run, Christian started out with no constraints at all... which was liberating if initially quite daunting. Our little group managed to come out with a diverse range of ideas:
everything from an ATM finder through a Kindle-for-sketching (which I note someone has done), through to travel assistants. We settled on a rental business for clothes: as a traveller, arrive in a city and you can have the clothes you need for your trip ready and waiting for you. The rest of the group arrived, we presented the idea to them... then listened to their reactions, answered questions and gathered feedback.

They had a ton to say: hygiene was an issue for some (though we felt this was a problem the hotel industry had successfully dealt with), as was clothing-as-identity. Could they buy clothes they liked? Buy locally appropriate outfits? Would this be appropriate for men and women? And was it, as one person noted "like James Bond"? We noted this all down, sent our erstwhile customers away to caffeinate, and Christian gave us some feedback on our performance so far: rightly chiding me for selling the idea to the audience rather than presenting it, steering us away from thinking about pricing so early, and discussing the key issues of hygiene, identity and gender.

We reconvened, and presented a more focussed product: a convenience-oriented version stocking suits, tuxedos and shirts in major European business cities. Feedback from customers was correspondingly more specific, around product details and pricing. They generally preferred this version too.

An interesting exercise: in 2 hours we'd dreamed up a product, run 2 rounds of simplistic customer research, and come to something we and they were happy with. We had no idea of feasibility or the cost structure of the business of course, but left thinking that it might be worth looking into... and overall the session was really enjoyable. In my head, I likened it to a less tactical and more strategic complement to Mobile Mountains, though I think that may have been a function of the idea we had decided to work on (which was more of a business than a specific product), than the format Christian was using.

Talks followed:

• Hasan Elahi gave an entertaining talk about his choice to expose every aspect of his life online as a commentary on the US terrorist watch list;
• Tara Shears updated us on the latest from the Large Hadron Collider;
• Kevin Slavin did a phenomenally interesting presentation, drawing a line from techniques for stealth aircraft to frustrate radar (by making themselves appear to be many smaller objects, like a flock of birds) to black-box trading (where large financial transactions are broken up into tiny untrackable pieces). With 70% of trades apparently being either algorithmically driven trades or attempts to flush out the same, financial markets are dependent on network topologies: an office 200ms nearer an Internet hub can bring serious trading advantages. And with the financial crisis providing an example of the consequences of algorithmically driven supply and demand, where else might we see these closed loops appearing? In Hollywood, say, in a world where 61% of Netflix video rentals are rented on the basis of algorithmic recommendations, and where companies can algorithmically decide what films to make - implying our entertainment industry is due a banking-style flash-crash (if it isn't already in one). Fascinating;
• Sabine Hauert followed later with a great primer on the current state of robotics: both the hype the field receives ("I read robots can feed on dead bodies") and the reality of the Roomba, Google Car, and modern warehousing robots from the likes of Kiva Systems... stopping by gliding robot-swarms bringing ad hoc comms networks to disaster areas, the Google Lunar X prize, and ending in a call for Roboethics committees;
• ... and then I stopped taking notes, sat back and watched a quad of incredible presentations: Honor Harger of Lighthouse in Brighton, presenting her work on the sound of space; Lucie Green on the sun, Jennifer Magnolfi of Herman Miller on the problems of designing habitats for long-term life in space, and Claude Nicollier showing us his holiday snaps ("me fixing the Hubble telescope", "me in my space ship", etc.) - in an endearingly humble and fantastically uplifting fashion;

Summing up

One of the things to love about LIFT is the obvious effort that Laurent and the organising team put into it. They're overtly self-critical and actively ask for, then act on, feedback from attendees. This year in his opening remarks Laurent talked about the need to balance far-looking stuff with more practical sessions, and I think they spent more time working with speakers to hone talks than normal.

The event had a really good hit rate of talks: David Galbraith, Steve Portigal, Kevin Slavin, and Claude Nicollier all really stood out for me, as did Sabine Heurt and Chris Heathcote. I took a lot away from the workshop Christian Miccio ran too.

Much of the more near-term stuff seemed to be around social media and reputation, which both felt a bit more mainstream than I'd expect from LIFT; they're the kind of things which get covered well elsewhere. But that's a minor quibble - there was plenty of amazing content, my head was stretched in new directions, and I left LIFT, as ever, already impatient for the next one.

We've just launched another iPhone app. It's called CNBC Davos Pulse, and it'll help delegates of the World Economic Forum organise their time in Davos, when it comes to finding fringe events to attend, good bars and restaurants, and keeping up with conference info.

To that end we've launched a few sets of features:

• Event listings (for both public and invitation-only events), with the ability to share events with friends by email (and soon, Twitter);
• You can build a personal itinerary of favourite events;
• A searchable database of bars and restaurants in Davos and Klosters, with links through to Google Maps to get directions;
• Blog articles from CNBC journalists throughout the event;
• A Twitter feed live from Davos;
• Regular video updates from CNBC anchors;

There's a few nice little details in there too. The events-searching feature is slightly fuzzy, so that if you mistype a search term there's a good chance we'll find it for you; you can retweet official tweets from the CNBC Davos feed with a single click; and the whole app is designed to sync events and venue details down to your phone when you're online, and work seamlessly when you're out of coverage or have data roaming turned off.

Technically, we built the app using JQTouch and Phonegap; it's the first product this team had launched using these technologies and the learning curve has been interesting (though shallower than some tools we've used). Behind the scenes, we're using Google Docs as the back-end of a content management system: a method we'll be using again on future projects, as it's worked quite well for us here.

Structurally, the project was very much by-the-book: FP did all the design, development, testing and project management of the product, working directly with CNBC. We kicked off with a 1-day workshop with CNBC staff and the whole development team, then spent a month going through a sketch/wireframe/visual design process whilst functional development occurred in parallel. The last couple of weeks, we've brought the two together and introduced styling and visuals into the live app; we put a first version through the Apple approval process before Christmas to get early notice of any problems, and a second version went through in the first week of January - followed by an update last week including all the Twitter features.

Whilst the app itself is probably only useful to delegates of the World Economic Forum, you can download a copy here.

Torsten de Riese, the Digital Director at CNBC, said: "It has been a great experience working with Future Platforms. Tom and his team have shown real expertise and exceptional enthusiasm throughout the project – from the design phase to build and support. Building an app that is going to be judged by top CEOs and world influencers is a nerve-wrecking project at the best of times, but if you have to deliver within 10 weeks it can be the cause for sleepless nights. However, right from the beginning I felt reassured by the calmness and clinical efficiency of the team. During the late stage of the project they always went that extra mile when it came to change requests and tweaks. These guys are brilliant! Thanks Future Platforms!". Then we untied him and sent him home.

Credit due to the team at FP who've worked on this one: Thom Hopper and Adrian Bigland built the product, Ali Driver and Trevor May did all the UX and visual design, Tariq Tamuji did testing. Thanks to Torsten, Bryn, Katya and Ed at CNBC for all their help and input too, and to the Chelsea Apps Factory, in association with whom the product was launched.

1..I’m not a man. I’m dynamite. (Friedrich Nietsche)
2..Laissant derriere lui bruler Moscou fumant. (Victor Hugo)
3..Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?
4..No this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine.
5..If you wish to win a man’s heart, allow him to confute you. (Disraeli)
6..If you are idle be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle. (Johnson)
7..Money is like muck, not good except it be spread. (Francis Bacon)
8..Raise the stone and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and I am there.
9..St. Mary and St. Nicolas College was founded in the year of revolutions.
10..Truth sits upon the lips of dying men. (Matthew Arnold) Sohrab and Rustum.
11..C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre. (Marechal Bosquet)
12..Le travail eloigne de nous trios grands maux, l’ennui, le vice et le besoin.
13..He was not of an age but for all time. (Ben Johnson on Shakespeare)
14..Neither do thou lust after that twwny weed tobacco. (Ben Johnson)
15..Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. (Horace)
16..Dis moi ce que tu manges et je dirai ce que tu es. (Brillat-Savarin)
17..The First World War ended at 11 a.m. on 11th November 1918.
18..Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requires. (Catullus)
19..A man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority.
20..Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. (Samuel Johnson 1775)
21..It doesn’t bark and it knows the secrets of the sea. (de Nerval)
22..French poet gives his reasons for leading a lobster on a blue ribbon.

These are the lines we were given to write out as punishment, when I was at school. Some memories tied up with these...

The simplest phones are open to "SMS of Death"?

I seem to recall (though can't find a reference, and Google is very mute on the topic) a talk at WAP Wednesday in 1999 on this exact topic, from some folks who went into a lot of the technical detail of how to do nasty buffer overflow things through binary SMS. It's pretty poor that 10 years on these exploits still exist, I suppose.

And I do like the conclusion of the article: that making firmware updates straightforward is the answer, as it'll allow vendors to patch such bugs after a handset launch. It's another win for the gentle divorce of mobile software from hardware.

P.S. Yes it has been quiet here. No I haven't stopped thinking.

I'm a little behind on writing up some launches, including some work we've been doing over the last few months for UK startup Touchnote.

I met the Touchnote team at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this February. Unfortunately for them, it was the day after the Swedish Beers party and I wasn't capable of much more than the odd shiver and groan, but we kept in touch and a couple of months later they asked FP to do a little review of their mobile products to date. We spent a few days on this, then a few weeks later had a call out of the blue from them: did we have any experience working with Microsoft tools? And would we be interested in helping them get their product onto the upcoming Windows Phone 7?

As it happened, a couple of our dev team had worked on XBox games and done some work with Blender in previous lives, so we had more than a passing familiarity with The Microsoft Way. Time was, as ever, tight, and so we kicked off simultaneous design and development efforts.

One of the big problems Touchnote face is that prospective customers think their product is "just another digital postcard service" - i.e. don't understand that it's all about real-world, physical cards being posted. So we made a point throughout the UI of emphasising that a real postcard is being built up: after selecting their photo from their on-phone gallery the user is presented with a preview of how the printed card front will look. We then flip to the back so they can fill out the fields as they would in the real world: writing a message, signing it, adding an address to send it to — all performed on the card's reverse before presenting a final preview of the front and back.

Colours were mostly dictated by Touchnote's (existing) brand, but combined these with a more natural paper-esque off-white - again, to emphasise that the user is creating a real postcard.

It was fun to explore what could and couldn't be done with WP7. It's so new that we couldn't just look at other apps to see what did and didn't work - aside from a few metaphors at the OS level, it's all up for grabs. So we were trying things out, seeing what happened and using/tweaking/throwing out as appropriate. Could we use images in the panorama header? How could we best transition users from one screen to the next? How should the back button function in various places? To a great extent, we answered these questions through trial and error, bouncing ideas between developers and designer.

We pared back the process of creating a postcard into key stages: Photo, Message, Recipient(s), and Preview, then developed a series of icons to clearly depict where the user is in the process without the need to use words (which also made it a lot easier when it came to internationalisation - the product is currently available in 8 languages). We used these icons both as an indicator and a navigation tool, so whilst you're being gently guided through the process, you can also skip around if you want to.

Meanwhile, our dev team tackled the two largest risks we could identify: getting integrated with the Touchnote back-end, and a WP7 app running. As the design effort proceeded, they put together a stub application: no user interface so a little ugly, but just enough to take a photo, post it to Touchnote and trigger the sending of a postcard. This was incredibly valuable: our first stub app taught us how to do threading properly in WP7 and let us fiddle with all sorts of parameters and networking code without having to wade through a user-friendly UI on every test cycle.

As expected nowadays in mobile, we ended up spending most of our time on UI and its polish. Early experiments with the panoramic parallax effect which characterises WP7 highlighted some unexpected limitations to do with maximum panorama widths, so there was a fair bit of back-and-forth between design and development as we dealt with this, learned about the types of animation that WP7 offered, and so on. We found the animation side of things quite straightforward - we found a couple of hours of noodling was all it took to get to grips with Silverlight - and similar in principle to the iPhone; in fact our early feelings were that on the surface of both the device and the SDK, WP7 is similar to the jabscreen.

Other parts of the SDK which impressed us were the isolated application storage (good for bulk storage of data) and the by-name object storage, which serialises C# objects for you - very handy. Less fun was dealing with the tombstoning (assuming that your app might shut down at any second), but hey, this is mobile and we expect to be doing something strange to handle limitations of battery life and processor.

After some UX reviews internally, with Touchnote, and from the team at Microsoft, we took a bit of time to add some polish: updating the tile image for the Touchnote app icon to have the background of the last postcard you sent, and adding "finger signatures", to let you scrawl a little image which gets printed at the end of your message.

Testing presented a few challenges; no devices were available at the start of the project, and whilst emulator tools were quite reasonable, they weren't sufficient to let us simulate multi-touch UI. Prototype hardware arrived about half-way through the project, and then left the building again when we were burgled :( In general the prototypes were quite decent - a few device-specific problems were noted on them, particularly around rendering of gradients in image files. Compared to some we've seen (and we have a great deal of experience with prototype hardware) they were solid.

The Touchnote APIs also proved solid enough for us to work with, though with the common caveat that they weren't designed with the triggering of edge cases for test purposes in mind. There was a worrying incident which involved all the Touchnote servers becoming clam-obsessed, but I'm sworn to secrecy on that.

The tooling was broadly good (the debugging tools garnered particular praise), though frequent releases of dev kits meant downtime reinstalling them; documentation was of variable quality and APIs changed over time (early releases let you add elements to Hashtable, but not remove them). The support we received from Microsoft, on the other hand, was consistently phenomenal: Paul Foster, their Developer Evangelist, routinely went above and beyond the call of duty in supporting our effort. We've never had such good support from an individual at an OEM.

Microsoft haven't had the best track record trying to crack mobile, and there's still a great deal of work for them to do to make WP7 a commercial success, but we were pleasantly surprised by our experiences launching Touchnote onto the platform - and we're proud of the product. You can watch a review of it here ("pretty damn good"), or read this really nice thing that Raam Thakrar, the CEO of Touchnote, said to get his children back:

"Working with Future Platforms was really good. We'd had some pretty mixed experiences in the past with offsite development - and Tom and co have completely bucked that trend. They were fantastically easy to work with, came out with a great product, and really were key in our WIndows Phone app. We're really happy with their work - and I'd whole-heartedly recommend working with these guys.

The process of working with FP was really refreshing - they knew how to manage us (with kid gloves when necessary!), giving the clearest guidance we possibly could. This made a very welcome change. They were flexible as well as being transparent - and that only served to delivering a great final product."