FOWA London 2009, was held in Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall. This was a 2 day event. What follows it a very brief write up, in no particular order, and does not aim to waffle about every talk!
Day 1
Taking you Site from One to One Million Users – Kevin Rose / Digg
A rambling, dull opener, though mainly because I think I have now heard the same talk/presentation at least 3 times.
The Future of JavaScript Design Patterns – Unleashing Full Object-Orientated Capability – Dustin Diaz / Twitter
Dustin is great and likeably, but to me this was far far too short on any tech details. Maybe I drifted off, but it seemed to be lots of lists of different frameworks. “jQuery is like crack.. one line and your hooked”. Oh and Twitter will be doing a Google style “Labs.twitter” type thing. God knows what will be on it.
How we Built HelloApp….
Yawn… I walked out, obvious advert / sponsor slot for Microsoft and their MVC.net thing.
Advanced Web App Marketing Strategies – Chris Abad / Spymaster
This was a controversial one, Spymaster was a Twitter game, that as you played spammed the hell out of your friends. Really questionable morals on this one “Well it’s sort of opt-in.. sort of opt-out”. Again, like the majority of the talks at FOWA, it was very light on any real detail. What was interesting was the story that on day 3 or so after the game was launch, Twitter had one of it’s epic failure moments, and was down for hours. This killed off most of the momentum of the game. Interesting moral there!
Going Global: The Future of Facebook Connect – Cat Lee
Facebook Connect and Facebook Translate were pimped here, Cat was “lovely”, had stunning shoes.. but really just gushed for 20 mins
Future of Social Web Apps – Ed Anuff & Mike Malone / Six Apart
Another advert slot, from the guys that bought and closed Pownce (with 1 weeks notice). Nice idea of a system, but I find it hard to trust them with my sites / data after Pownce.
The Future of HTML5 – Bruce Lawson / Opera
Cracking talk, finally some techy bits, even code on the big screen at last. Really fired up now over HTML5, lots of very lovely things coming. Will experiment more in the coming days. Lots of resources here: – http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2009/10/05/future-of-web-apps-london-html5
How the Guardian is using APIs, Framworks and Tools to Build a Mutualised Newspaper – Chris Thorpe / The Guardian
Interesting, meandering talk. Need to investigate more into their platform. Also mentions of the UK gov. trying to open up it’s data.
How People will use the Web in the Future – Aza Raskin / Mozilla
20 minutes of blue-sky thinking. Very entertaining and a good one to finish off day 1. Must investigate their Ubiquity thing http://labs.mozilla.com/ubiquity/
Day 2
During day 2, I skipped a lot of the talks, as I was too busy waffling to people / pimping myself.
The Future of the Cloud – Simon Wardley / Freelance
Probably the best talk of the show, very entertaining, very interesting. Basically Ubuntu have hedged their bets on Amazons EC2 standard for cloud computing / services.
The Future of Print – Lynne d Johnson
Very American biassed talk. Didn’t catch a great deal of it, was basically a “Print is Dead! Long live Print” type thing. Journalists become online content creators, editors become Online Commutity Directors.. etc etc. Not very convincing.
Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! – Dave McClure
Again, half listening.. lots of it seemed to involve the idea of stop adding shit to your web app.. instead cut stuff.. if people complain.. you’ve found what your users love.. so bring it back.. but better!
At the end of Day 1, I was kindly invited along to a dinner at Sticky Fingers by Benjamin Dyer (of Actinic) with around 40 or so varied and interesting folk. Thanks again for the invite.. was a *lot* of fun. After far far too much red meat, we skipped the invite to the “official” party, which was miles away in Piccadilly Circus. Instead we ended up in some dodgy pub in Kensinginton *hooray for random pubs!*.
Sponsors
The event was sponsored by the following:
Microsoft – They were showing off their Expression Web / Blend / Thing software (*yawn*), their MS Table/Surface thing (*Wow.. huge fun*), and a few other touchy feely things.
PayPal – Showing off their new platform at www.x.com I had a 10 minute chat with one of their guys, and I was still none the wiser as to what it was all about. Felt I was playing buzz-word bingo.
Yahoo – No talks from them on the main stage, but they were upstairs in force. Great schwag, and got to talk geo stuff to them… Lots to play with on – http://developer.yahoo.com/
Ordnance Survey – Wow.. finally OS data coming *slowly* and painfully onto the web. http://openspace.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/openspace/
Vodafone 360 – Vodafone is attempting to take on Apple App Store/iPhone or Google Android with it’s own open platform for developing widgets/apps for a range of handsets. Interesting stuff… doubt it will gain much traction for now. – http://info.vodafone360.com/en/experience/index
Sun / Sun Startup Essentials – These guys took over most of the basement. Interesting! Got an idea? Need hardware/funding.. These guys offer it (in exchange for some of your stock etc…).
To Sum Up…
The venue suffered from tech failure. The WiFi was dire, just plain didn’t work. I ended up paying for 24hrs access on the BTOpenZone which was in the building and more-or-less worked. With so many geeks in one room, most were on iPhones on O2, which meant that cell-phone reception was also pants.
Overall a great show for me for the people I met, new contacts, faces put to skype/twitter accounts etc etc… The talks though, generally were not really up to what I expected from the event. I paid a semi-early-bird price of £230 for the 2 days (ignoring the cost of the hotel / travel / 3 days away from invoice-able work etc). If I’d paid the full price of £400, I’d be asking for at least a part refund.
Carsonified (the event organisers) need to try a lot harder. Pay more for proper wifi, pick less obviously promotional speakers, and learn that if you want to talk about the Social Web.. that there is more out there than just Digg and Twitter.
Networking – 9/10
Venue – 5/10
Tech – 1/10
Fun – 7/10
Talks – 6/10
Overall – 6/10 – Must try harder!