This year I have finally had an opportunity to go to the Login 2012 conference. It’s been advertised as a “Progress conference” and I’ve heard some good responses about it last year.

The conference was during two days – Thursday and Friday. The tickets costed about 25-50 USD (25$ for two days, 50$ for two days + after party). I’ve bought the cheapest ones as i didn’t have any intention to go to the after party.

Their website looked nice, and i liked that i could click a few checkboxes on their page and print out only a list of the speakers i would like to go to.

Day 1

First there was a sound! – Mark Dewings, Soundcloud

In his speech, Mark was talking about the importance of sound in our life. During his speech, he emphasized the importance of sound quite a few times. He mentioned that sound to Soundcloud is the same as pictures to Flickr and videos to Youtube. Soundcloud is a platform of storing sounds – and that’s what everyone gets mistaken about. It’s not only for music, it’s also for sounds, podcasts, recordings. Soundcloud stores the sounds in raw format and re-encodes them during the delivery of content.

He also mentioned that Soundcloud can be used by musicians of publicizing their albums as it has integration with iTunes and Amazon.

Special keynote from Jimmy Wales – Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia

That was probably the second time Jimmy Wales visited Lithuania. First time he visited Lithuania, nobody would even want to meet with him. Domas Mituzas has wrote a post about it (in LT) in his blog. Jimmy started his talk by remembering that visit to Lithuania.

Jimmy continued the speech by remembering the failures he had before the success of Wikipedia.

In 1996, Jimmy tried to talk to the restaurants and suggested to put their menu on the internet so that everyone could see the menu online and order something without need to go to the restaurant. Everyone looked at him strangely as almost nobody knew what internet was.

Later he tried to start his own search engine called Three Apes, but it was also a failure. Jimmy blames the name of the search engine. 🙂

Next, he tried to start an online encyclopedia with articles written by the experts. He has spent 250,000 USD for the first dozen of articles. It happened to be a failure too. He still has them near his bed and reads them every evening 🙂

Then, he had this very very stupid idea of a free encyclopedia written by community, with no advertisements…

The Future of online TV – Tomas Okmanas, 5ci

I went to Tomas’s speech as i know him in person and wanted to see what exactly he will be talking about. The speech was about IPTV – how it looks now, and what it will be like in the future, how the TV will interact with your home, how everything will be ‘smart’ at your home. We will be able to ‘visit’ our doctor just by calling him on the TV. By the way, by TV he meant any device with a screen – tablets, phones, computers, TV’s. He also mentioned the usage of IPv6 because there are so many new technologies and so few IPv4 addresses. Every device at home would have an IPv6 address – your fridge, your windows, tv, phones, conditioning and etc. Also, all these devices would require more and more network capacity, and currently Lithuania is one of the best in this field. On the other hand, Lithuania is so good in technologies but doesn’t have lots of technologies other countries have implemented years ago – like e-government (we actually start to have it), e-voting.

Why technology is not more useful than a Bacardi cocktail – Nerius Jasinavicius and Mindaugas Voldemaras, commonsence.lt

This speech was about some myths related to IT and the wrong way of using IT. Some of the things i remember are:

• People implement the technologies but do not change the rules. This leads to the technology being inefficient. A real-life example of it was a grandma using her desk phone. You buy her a new mobile phone, but she still uses it as a desk phone – always plugged in to the power outlet, and not mobile at all.
• Multitasking is useful, but it doesn’t always help. An example of multitasking failure was a test. People had to write down numbers from 1 to 25, and letters from a to z. Once they had to write them one after another (i.e. 1 a, 2 b, 3 c, 4 d and etc.) and the other time they had to finish writing numbers first, and then write down the letters – i.e. 1 2 3 4, a b c d. Of course, the result was that writing the numbers without ‘multitasking’ was faster in this case.
• Lots of companies try to secure and hide their information. Some even hide it between their own departments, which, of course, leads to a big failure.

Day 2

The website is down?

It seems that their website – http://www.login.lt – got hacked on Day 1. Somebody dropped their database, and the “progressive” conference couldn’t restore them. They have removed their website and only left one HTML page on it. In the end they have redirected the website to their Facebook page. Now, it’s impossible to find information about the speakers or the talks they were giving. The information is all over the internet, but there’s no single place with links to all the information or recordings.

I tried to google for a list of speeches, but couldn’t find one even if only a few days passed after the conference. I asked a friend to scan the one we got on paper.

The story of Skype – Tiit Paananen, Skype

Most of the talk was about how great it is to work at Skype. Skype almost doesn’t have any sales people and most of the value is created by the engineers. Company tries to focus on them and create the best work environment possible. Engineers get free food, clothes, and can work any time as far as their work is done. That’s how i actually think all companies should be working – stop limiting the workers, and rate them by the work they have done, and not when or how they did it.

There was also some information about how Skype service/quality has increased by the time. Tiit also promised that they will try to focus on mobile platforms. The current main problem with them is that software like Skype is a big battery hog and the smartphones batteries don’t have that much capacity.

The Beauty of Interaction – Patrizia Marti, University of Sienna

Patrizia’s speech was about the beauty of interaction. The first video she showed was about the usage of vending machines. Currently we need to find something we like in the machine, put in some money, press a few buttons and bend down to pick up our purchase. She suggested a new way of doing it which doesn’t require anything like that – no bending, no button pressing and anything like that.

After that all the speech was about robots and their usage in medical facilities. It was interesting to see how patients were playing with robots and new technologies and what impact it had on them (they become calm, they interact with you more and etc.). It was an interesting speech, but in my opinion it should be shown to the different people – not geeks.