Walking Head

Thursday evening, I dropped by the Great Hall for a hi-tech job fair. With 600 confirmed attendees, I figured it'll be packed cheeks-to-jowls. Although how that would work was unclear as the venue was not currently licensed to host that many people. But there were much less than that and the mood more convivial. After all, beer was available at the bar.

I was pleasantly surprised at the nearly equal split in gender, even if there were designer/creative and product/marketing in the mix. I guess the exciting world of mobile apps startups do not skew so overwhelmingly male as other tech sectors. Most of the attendees were attractive and nattily dressed. If there were beards, it was trendy hipster beard. No neck-beards to be found. In fact, there were few over 45. In keeping with the demographics, companies actually had onsite perks (a massage therapist) or touted them in their brochure ("beer-o-clock", free lunch). There was also catered food for everyone. It reminded me of a recent online discussion about ageism, working hours, and expectation in IT. As one commenter stated: "Pay me in cash. I'm an adult, I can buy my own damn snacks." But I don't turn down free food. So skipping over the cotton candy, I grabbed some pork sliders, chicken skewers, and fried unidentifiables.

Products ranged from reading apps, tchotchke (okay, custom products for branding), to numerous do-it-yourself services (accounting, A/B testing). One company had a bracelet that uses your unique heartbeat to authenticate yourself (your car, your macbook).  How can I find the space for another armband given my Chi power bracelet, smartwatch, and Nike monitor? Seriously though, yes many major players are moving away from passwords and PINs. But some of their predictions were hand-wavingly optimistic. Hotels aren't even willing now to update their passcard entry despite a known flaw (and published exploit); yet they will spend millions to install a system from a start-up that will initially be used only by a tiny fraction of their customer base? But perhaps I could be a new "Ipod not as good as Nomad" guy.

Shopify had a large section to themselves. They sell their e-commerce platform to companies, usually smaller in size. Touting 100,000 clients, I asked them about the "hard problem". No surprise when they talked about strategies to scale out their services, support high traffic, and ensure long uptime. That got me thinking that this might be a "hard problem", but you'd think it's a solved one (for some value of solved). Any company which measures in millions of users need to do it, not to mention the "big boys" like Google, Facebook, Twitter. Is everybody re-inventing the wheel and hand-rolling their own solution? There was one embarrassing moment. Despite touting the ease-of-use of their intuitive interface, many attendees needed help walking through all the steps to make a "purchase".