Craig Rowe

Techlead / Developer

11th October 2008

FOWA!

FOWA Rocked! Heres the run down of talks I saw (to be updated/added to):

Day One: Speaker / Thoughts
Kevin Rose IMO a suprisingly good and interesting talk mainly about the future of digg rather than the future of news. However the talk of servicing niche interests via a combination of clustering like minded people together in a more personalised recommendation system + encouraging participation through increased impact visiblity was a thoroughly interesting listen.
The Future of News
Edwin Aoki I didn't feel like I took much away from this talk. However Edin did reinforce the point that successful web apps should, and generally are, based on a passion being turned into an application with the thought of money coming later.
Web apps are dead, long live web apps
Mike Ormand Another round of good silverlight demos. Difficult to know when and where I would put this into practice. Flash is still the winner for me.
What's all this Silverlight stuff?
Blaine Cook and Joe Stump Insightful and engaging these two probably provided the best talks. Often verging close to a rant against language fanboys they highlighted the core issue of IO in scaling situations.
Languages, don't scale
Kevin Marks Lots of that 'cloud' word (although quite a nice intro to it's usage). Kevin also spoke of the transition from email as a publically accessible end point that is increasingly used only formally, with social networks becoming far more intrinsic to the personal web experience. I particularly identified with his negative view of unnecessary web form info (I now tell most forms that I live at a well known London landmark).
The Future of Enterprise Web Apps
Andrew Shorten An excellent intro to Adobe AIR + a free book.
Taking web based applications to the desktop with Adobe AIR
Alvin Woon An interesting perspective on UI design. Adaptive UI (changes in UI based on context etc). Unfortunately not the best speaker in terms of clarity and engaging the audience with rather 'traditional' slides.
The future of social app interface design
Blaine Cook This guy is scary clever, but also cool in equal measure.
Colliding Worlds: Using Jabber to make awesome web sites
David Recordon Another talk that's given me something to read up on.
Blowing up social networks with Open Tech
Francisco Tolmasky A clearly intelligent guy with some crazy javascript app work going on, and yet I'm still put off by javascript being taken that far.
Building Desktop Caliber Web Applications with Objective-J and Cappucino
Crick Waters
Web will heal itself
Mike Butcher Essentially half an hour of Jason calacanis scaring the hell out of startups.
TechCrunch Pitch! @ FOW
Media Temple
Party @Fox
FOWA Expo 2008 (Uni Talks in grey)
Day Two: Speaker / Thoughts
Tim Bray
The Fear Factor: What to be Frightened of in Building A Web Application
Adam Gross
Cloud Computing in the Enterprise - How Businesses are Taking Advantage of the Future of the Web
Andrew Shorten This talk really highlighted to me the large similarities between Silverlight and Flex. Air/Flash and MXML are strikingly similar to Silverlight and XAML.
Building Rich Internet Applications using Adobe Flex
Chris Messina
How oAuth and portable data can revolutionise your web app
Bret Taylor
The future of your online presence
Jason Calacanis
Work/life balance or Blood, sweat and tears: Which is the startup way?
Elaine Wherry
Scaling the Synchronous Web
Jeremy Baines
How to build a desktop app for your web app
Michael Galpert
How to survive outside of Silicon valley
Dave Morin
Making the web more social with Facebook Connect
Andrew Shorten
Adobe AIR Competition Finals
Mark Zuckerberg
Fireside chat
Kathy Sierra
How to grow and nurture your community
Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose
Diggnation!
Digg and Facebook
Wrap party @Fox

This jquery slide down/up seemingly breaks in IE8 and FF2... doh I'll look into a fix or change


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