The Turing Festival a.k.a. the Edinburgh International
Technology Festival saw the cream of technological and digital
talent come together over 3 days during the world's largest arts
festival. An impressive list and an even more interesting mix of
high-profile speakers including, Ade Oshineye from Google, Pirate
Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and free software activist Richard
Stallman who all took the stage to discuss some of the internet's
burning issues - connectivity, trust, freedom and how do we make it
better.
Here are some of our highlights:
It all started with a talk from venture capitalist Albert Wenger
called 'We Ain't Seen Nothing Yet' who really set the tone with 'We
invented agriculture, then we invented industry, and then we
invented the internet.'
We rather liked Stephen Dunn of the Guardian too, who coined the
phrase it's "the age of point at things" as he talked about the
launch of their new API for connecting to the newspaper's content -
looking forward to getting in and about that.
On the TV side, Jen Topping, Business Manager for Channel 4 Online
explained how the company is using the internet and broadcast to
complement one another as in their Embarrassing Bodies format with
its online clinic and live Skype calls.
Ade Oshineye and Peter Sunde had two different but interesting
takes on how to endorse online content. Google (who took a fair bit
of flak) clearly wants to build it on the back of the reputations
of people. Peter Sunde however suggested that we should pay
money to content creators (the one's we like at least) - quite
a departure from his Pirate Bay days - and of course his new
service entitled 'Flattrd' does exactly that.
Richard Stallman was there with his 'A Free Digital Society'.
The prolific American software freedom activist and computer
programmer, argued that trust is
everything and if we don't have access to the source code of the
technology that surrounds us in our day to day lives then we can't
be sure what our technology is doing. It's a fair point.
We also went along to the Facebook Developer's Garage where Colm
Doyle of Facebook gave us an enlightening insider perspective on
the analytics of Facebook traffic, and discussed the direction the
platform would be taking in the near future. He also gave us some
useful insight into the tools the Facebook development team used to
build and upgrade the service.
Are we going again next year? Totally.
www.turingfestival.com