Jon On Tech

So The Daily is live. Just finished watching the launch announcement and was impressed. The app is really feature rich. It can live update during the day, has 360 degree video, live audio articles, a large sports score database, games and good social integration. And it even has the weather!

Good news. CMS Geeks are getting tanked up all over the world, and it’s spreading. If you live in/travel to one of these areas, join your groups and tell your friends. A few cities with a visible CMS presence haven’t joined in yet. I’m talking to you Stockholm and Copenhagen. And Western Europe could use a couple. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India need to represent too.

Time up. The votes have been tallied, checked and verified by our independent auditors. Let’s announce all of our winners.

It’s the biggest competition to hit the web in a long time – The 2010 CMS Haiku Beer Contest. We created the fourth worst poetry in history, caused the CEO of Sun to resign, and inspired a prize for the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco.

As I write this, we’re kicking of the BCS Event – Public Funds in the UK: Open Source for Document and Content Management? I’ll write more about the event afterwards, but I thought I’d share my presentation.

I did this using Prezi, which I really enjoyed. First time I’ve used it – apologies if it makes you feel sick. And it probably doesn’t make any sense without me talking over it. Probably doesn’t make sense then either, but anyway.

Just finished my “Inconvenient truths and unsolved industry challenges” session at JBoye09, with Janus Boye and Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch. You can download the slide deck as a 2MB PDF here

How many WCM implementations leave customers grinning from ear to ear? The statistics make sad reading. But if so many projects don’t meet expectations, who is to blame? Is it the vendor, either because of a crappy product or dodgy practice? Or the implementer that eats your budget while making a beautiful product smell real bad? Or are the customers naive, unrealistic or worse?

So I managed to get to the EPiServer Customer and Partner Day in London. The main goodies on the roadmap are the new Marketing Arena, and EPiServer 6.

Last week, LBi hosted the Umbraco 2009 UK meetup. This was mainly due to the enthuasism of the organiser, Darren Ferguson, and the power of Twitter. Niels, the founder, joined us from Norway.

CMS Exhibitions aren’t just happiness and joy. You can meet a lot of interesting people, see a lot of demos and have nice beers afterwards. But there is also a dark, depressing side to these things which is, to me, embodied in the Used Car CMS Salesmen.