I went to FOWA 2007 in London and here some notes taken:
The emphasis of the conference was more about business, I was aspected a more technical approach. But was nice though.
Mike Arrigton(TechCrunch), Bubble 2.0 - are we in a bubble?
He said there are still a lot more to come:
We have not yet seen the peek of what's happening in the new web 2.0 era.Some advices:
- Have a good idea:
- Invert a market
- Destroy a market
- Remove friction
- Have a business plan
- Have a revenue model
- Build it cheap, test the waters
Tara Hunt(Citizen Agency) talked about the "Community Building":
- Lightweight social processes
- Low-barrier social involvement
- Collaborative information structures
- High end collaboration
- Simple platforms
Simon Wadly(Fotango) talked about Zimki, personally I don't understand the idea of selling this product.
Mike Anders(Adobe) gave a nice technical demonstration of Flex, he created a interface for searching photos on Flickr. Was quite impressive.
He also talked about Actionscript 3, which ships with Flash 9 plugin and has some improvements in performance(up to 10 times faster than Actionscript 2.0).
Chris Wilson(Microsoft) was talking about the future of web browsers. He talked about the features in IE 7, namely tabbing and alpha transparency in PNGs(WOW, no comments on this). He also focused in the effort to follow the standards.
Matthew Ogle & Amil Bowa Cavia(Last.fm) gave some "Early growth lessons":
- Don't overextend - Scale with your growth, not before
- Make some revenue, scale with increased usage
- Google adds
- User subscriptions
Kevin Rose(Digg) talked only about the Digg annual report.
Khoi Vinh(NYTimes.com) exposed some of the design challenges at the New York Times.
Simon Willison rock the crowd with his speech about OpenID, Simon you're the man!
Daniel Appelquist(Vodafone) gave a nice talk about the future of mobile.
Ramus Lerdorf(Yahoo!) the creator of PHP, gave us a trip down memory lane, he talked about Mosaic, early versions of HTML and PHP. Not very interesting stuff.
Some quotes:
I hate programming. It's tedious. It's no fun. It's like flying: setting in a smelly metal tube with other people. But I love problem-solving.
Basically, you can never click on a link.
I have two browsers: one to for browsing and one for sites that I have personal data.I think this quotes says all.
We had a Portuguese in the speakers, Bruno Figueiredo that talked about JEDI(Just Enough Documentation for Interactions), a documentation technique.
Final thoughts:
This is only a few speakers, you can take a look in FOWA 2007 website for more details and MP3 recordings.
The overall result of the conference was good, the best was meeting the people and exchange some ideas.
The bad was no WI-FI and Carlos that couldn't make it, I went alone.