My talk at Cambridge Network

As I blogged I was invited to speak yesterday at Cambridge Network on “Cambridge ideas that change the world”. I’d originally given a title of “The Semantic Web” and thought I would say something about it that would entertain and inform the audience – who are made up of companies, facilitators, lawyers, authors, university etc. etc. I hadn’t been before, though Jim Downing is a member.
As it drew closer I began to panic. I could say and show some fun things about the SW, but this wasn’t a Cambridge idea, and who was I to be speaking about this. And yes, it might and will change the world, but not through anything to do with me. I sweated over the weekend, not really knowing what to say, in what order, etc. Watched some of the rugby, while tidying the email on my new computer, etc. Read a bit of Nodalities on the SW. More panic. After all this was also about new market opportunities. Diverted by reading blogs, and then came across Peter Suber’s account (Is there a Steve Jobs of journal publishing?) of Alexandre Linhares’, A modest (billion-dollar) proposal.
This was a lifeline. I could reasonably talk about this. And our robots are going to change the world – at least in chemistry. And also bring in the “datument” – a portmanteau of “data+document” that Henry Rzepa and I invented 5-6 years’ ago and whose time has come. So I changed the title to
“Datuments and scientific publishing”
And started frantically preparing my talk. My talks are, as I have mentioned, normally a ski-run of hundreds of possibilities where I don’t know what I’m going to say in detail. But I needed new material, fast. And I could immediately mine the talks which Joe Townsend and Nick Day had given at ACS meetings. So I went to their Powerpoint presentations (and regular readers know what I think about Powerpoint) and found some exciting slides.
We were now less that 24hrs before presentation and it took till 0300 to put some stuff together. I’d resigned myself to using Powerpoint because I didn’t have time to do anything else. As the talk was 10-15 minutes that made some sort of sense, although I still planned to have 2-3 live demos. As we know, the shorter the talk, the harder to prepare it.
A theme had appeared – robots that change the world. We have a good series of robots, and I thought they would make a good storyline. (They did). However it was clear that I would have to forgo the live demos. Too much danger of losing time, etc. The dynamics would have to be provided by simple animation. Even here I had to call on Nick’s services as I am a Powerpoint incompetent. About 20 slides in talk.
20 slides (some with multiple components) for 10-15 minutes is tough going – almost skiing. But they are fairly visual and I can talk fast (which gives the effect of animation). Still had to get a number of slides the next day from collaborators. Found out that I couldn’t use the Internet in the talk (but I’d anticipated this). Finally managed to get something together.
Normally I have my little html menu so I know what slides I can choose, but with Powerpoint I don’t. I therefore wrote the subjects of the slides on a bit of paper. And I took some props to demonstrate – I felt exactly as if I were going into the Dragons‘ Den (where budding entrepreneurs pitch their products and get put under the spotlight). I was selling a new product – the Datument.
Suddenly during the first talk (I was third) I realised I’d lost my paper. Real panic. And the others really had something to show. Quantum computing, personalised lasers and manufacture, repairing brains. I had no clothes. What a stupid topic and title I had chosen. This wouldn’t change the world. And hundreds of Cambridge entrepreneurs had paid money for this event.
So – whatever – I pitched the idea of a billion dollar market in scientific publishing. When, not if, half the major scientific publishers go out of business. At least I was sincere about that – they will. I didn’t get any offers of even millions of dollars, but I did get a few laughs, and quite a few people came up afterwards and showed real interest.
But I owe a lot to my helpers on the night. Here they are:

OSCAR – the journal eating robot

The crystaleye spider (Nick) whose little dance amused the crowd

crystaleye itself

and the blue obelisk greasemonkey.
So thanks to them, thanks to Nick and Joe and Dave and Nico and Jim and …
The Powerpoint should be up on the website as soon as I remember the password…