FOWA EXPO Bits and bobs - day two…. finished.
Thursday, October 25th, 2007Ok, ok. I am pants at this writing notes lark. Just spent most of my day off playing on the Wii and now starting to get guilty about not finishing this off. So here it is…
Well by day two, the geek in me had taken over and I was writing less notes and taking more photos using my Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3. I’ve posted them all up on my Flickr account so you can go check them out. The Carsonified team have also started uploading Mp3s and slides of the presentations as they become available. You can access these from their past events page. Apart from that here is some of the bits that make sense from the scribbles, er I mean notes, I made on day 2.
Reoccurring theme on day 2 was again Facebook, but also OAuth -”An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”
Paul Graham’s keynote presentation on ‘The Future of Web Startups’:
- Lots of them
- Standardisation
- New attitude to acquisition
- More risk = more reward
- Younger, nerdier founders
- Still need Silicon Valley? Still want Silicon Valley?
- Also needed: better judges
- College will change
- Lots of competitors
- Faster advances
Leah Culver who is the co-founder of Pownce, and their only full time developer on the platform, discussed the issues involved in Pownce’s development and what they learned along the way. One of the main issues was dealing with and listening to user feedback. To help them manage this process they use a service known as Satisfaction from a third party.
Dave Morin told the story behind Facebook:
- Over 50% users of Facebook returns every single day
- 60 billion pages per month
- Facebook Photos is the most trafficked photo application
- Find out more at Facebook Developers
Simon Wardley’s presentation on ‘Short on Cycles, Long on Storage’ was extremely funny. This guy attempted to display 300 slides within 30 minutes to aid his presentation. Still not completely sure what he was on about, but he really likes Ducks and makes up his own words. He also apologised for his use of Comic Sans at the start of his presentation:
- Commodisation = Yesterday hot stuff (new) -> Todays boredom (common)
- Service stack
- Portration = Portability and choice
- All depends on open source standards
- Commodification -> Commodisation
- Not a straight line
- Not always a thing
- Not everything spreads
- Acceleration
- Friend and Foe
Tom Coats presentation was an insight on FireEagle. But it won’t be called that when it is finally released. It is an open API that allows you to develop applications using your current location.
There you are, that’s all I wrote. Well apart from some ideas I have for work which I can’t tell you about, plus some other scribbles I can only just decipher:
- Brown seems to be the developer choice for clothing (even I was wearing my brown Digg.com hoodie so I was just as much to blame as everyone else).
- And the podium on the developer stage reminded me of a McFlurry - something about the shape of it
Gee that was shorter than my last post. (Note to self - next time, write this all up while you are there, cause you are just pants at writing this stuff up.) Can’t wait for the next conference in London. Hope to see you there!