Integrating Agile

Met some great people at yesterday's Integrating Agile conference at Hoofddorp in the Netherlands. Organised by the Agile Consortium Benelux, the event featured a number of high-profile speakers and attracted Agile afficionados and those keen to learn from across Europe.

I encouraged the conference team to promote the use of the #iagile hashtag to enable delegates to discuss the event in real time using Twitter, and to share their thoughts with colleagues back in the office and around the world and beyond the Claus Conference Center (great venue btw!).

I can't beat Sander Nagtegaal's (Twitter @centrical) excellent summary of the event so please go to his blog to read it. Many others were tweeting so search #iagile to pick up some useful comments and links.

In the meantime, I managed to grab some photographs, audio and video from the event, so please enjoy and share as appropriate.

Here's the Flickr stream:




Here's an interesting Audioboo interview with Keynote speaker Rob Thomsett (btw within minutes of tweeting the link to this AudioBoo, Mark Rock (Twitter @markrock) - AudioBoo big cheese - commented that their own funky iPhone mini-podcasting software is the product of an Agile house - w00t!:




Here's a mix of videos from attendees and speakers. Look out for Rob Thomsett's take on Integrating Agile, plus Pete Measey on the event's introduction of CHANGE - the International Association for Business Agility. This exciting new venture is aimed at reinforcing a genuine understanding is what Agile is about in the business world... taking it way beyond its software development roots.

Integrating Agile

Just getting under way is the Integrating Agile conference. I'm here to participate, listen, learn, understand and interpret, but also to introduce an element of social media to the proceedings. No Qiking, but participants will be encouraged to tweet about the proceeeding using the #iagile hashtag. I'll also be using my trusty Kodak Zi6 for capturing quick interviews with some of the attendees and speakers. They'll be tagged in the same way.

Here goes looking forward to it.

Fear Of A Green Planet

434 comments and counting for Bjorn Lomborg's Guardian piece from Monday on the downside of instilling eco-fear in children.

How Organisations Must Adapt to Social Computing

I picked this up from a tweet posted by @leebryant... a useful slidepack created by @oamprimo and worth a read:

The Adaptation of Organisations to a Knowledge Economy and the Contribution of Social Computing

PhoneBoo... It's For You...

Those of you without iPhones may have yet to discover the joy of AudioBoo - essentially they are mini-podcasts, recordable and quickly uploadable in great quality via the iPhone. Like an audio version of Twitter, these mini-recordings are ideal for observations or even mini-interviews and are increasingly being used by bloggers, journalists and regular-social-media-joes.

Now, anyone with a phone can join in using PhoneBoo. This service enables you to quickly register your phone number with the service and, if you already have an account, link it to your existing AudioBoo stream (Here's mine). From there on in recording AudioBoos is simply a case of a quick phone call and, within seconds it's live on the AudioBoo site and you've Tweeted a link to it to all of your Twitter followers.

This is me attempting to use PhoneBoo and, in this case, stuffing it up by forgetting to Press 1 after pressing the # key to put it live. Doh! (Eventually, I did get it right... audio quality not bad in the end... have a listen.)

People who follow you on AudioBoo can also pick this up via iTunes by subscribing to your stream as a podcast. Sweet. I'm already looking forward to VideoBoo on the new iPhone... it's already available for the Mac...see a useful heads-up on the Mac version from David Wilcox's Social Reporter blog from last year and actually made using Qik:

Bing arrives, Google Waves.

In the same week that Microsoft has beta-launched its own Google rival, known as 'Bing' - officially described as a 'decision engine' as opposed to a 'search engine' - Google has nudged ahead again with the announcment of two new innovative products.



Grabbing most of the column inches has been Google Wave, a new social media platform which will sit somewhere between Twitter and email as a messaging and collaboration platform. It's not available to play with yet and no-one's really sure what it is and what it will do... but they're pretty sure that it will have a major impact on the way we connect with friends, family, customers and colleagues.



Adopting a slightly lower profile, sneaking out of the back door via Google Labs but available to try right now is Google Squared. Always keen to share new ideas with the world, the Google Labs team release products relatively early on in their development in order to capture input from real-life users across the globe. Google Squared sounds a little lumpy, but comes to life when you try to use it. It is basically a tool to enable you to carry out and collate research very quickly, presented in a spreadsheet-style format, on any given subject. For example, a search on UK Banks, quickly presents you with a neat summary of all of the major players including logos, description, locations, employee numbers, revenue. Missing banks are easily added and more obscure overseas subsidiaries just as quickly removed. Hover over any cell and it will reveal the source of the data and allow you to click through for more.

Results are not perfect, several fields tend to be blank and findings can be inconsistent, but to get you mobilised at the start of a new research project it could save hours of trawling around separate stand-alone corporate websites trying to piece together the basics. It's always easier to fill in the gaps than to start from scratch.

It's not all work, work, work though. I tried searching for 'Smith's lyrics', 'UK Birds' & 'Booker Prize' all with fascinating results.