Slick interface required for venture funding

images.jpgI recently moderated a session for the Australian Chamber of Commerce on Australians in Venture Capital, together with Warren Hogarth, Tristan Langley and Spencer Maughan.

One of the interesting discussion topics was how important it is for software to be designed with aesthetic interfaces. Whilst driving home from the session held at the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel, I began to think about how software entrepreneurs today must build interfaces that are slick, polished, frictionless and all things you’d expect to see as a default application experience on any Apple device.

In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty where aesthetically the most pleasing one is the one with the shortest description. Are we saying Twitter is beautiful or the simplicity is elegance. What is important is that VCs today expect applications to be not only disruptive in technology but the interface to be touchy, feely and beautiful in design.

Humanities in Tech: Stanford University hosts Biblio-Tech

In the past 6 months, I’ve been helping the folks at Stanford University to put together BiblioTech. From the humble beginnings during coffee conversations and lunches at the Faculty Club, the conference has gained momentum. I read articles about their being “too much tech” in the world and their is a concerned quorum who are keen on balancing our techno-terrific lives with creativity from the humanities departments.

Innovation is not only binary in computer code but comes from the meshing of arts, literature, philosophy and languages. Perhaps Biblio-Tech is a reflection on the true meaning of the global village. That said, I will be giving my views on May 11th at Stanford along with some learned and distinguished colleagues.

Learn more about the program at http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/bibliotech/program