Sarah Ward’s Blog

Ok, I am now back and rested after a very busy 48 hours at the Future of Web Apps EXPO Conference at the London Excel Centre. And to sum it up it was a brilliant couple of days which I thoroughly enjoyed. The actual conference itself was excellently executed by the Carsonified Team (Carson Systems announced this rebrand at the conference). And the Live Diggnation filming is probably the best thing I have been too this past year. It was like being at a rock concert!

So I had been to the Future of Web Design event back in April, and that was ok, but it felt like the companies they had speaking there was really trying to push you to buy or use their product, or just using it more as a platform to boost their company profile. However, with the expo floor this event, they were able to keep sponsorship messages down to a minimum. Plus the sessions themselves were only half an hour, which ensured that the speakers gave all the key issues in what time limit they had. There were some really great stands on the EXPO floor too. I was really impressed by the Adobe stand. They were giving away free books, had a couple of Nintendo Wiis to play, and were giving live demonstrations of Adobe Air, not just what you could do with the technology, but also how to do it. I remember seeing them demonstrate Air (or as it was known back then as Apollo) but not really feeling impressed by it. Now I really want to build with it.

In terms of the speakers and the presentations, I pretty much kept to the Developer track (- but I didn’t miss out on the other track cause they were selling the Conference in a Box package for a really good deal, so good i ended up buying another 2 Conferences in a Box discs) which was really well run and directed by Simon Willison (check out his blog at simonwillison.net). I could tell you about all the speakers presentation’s and their content, but the nice guys at Carsonified will be adding MP3s of each to the website shortly so go check that out. I have a whole bunch of notes with some key pointers that I picked up, so I will blog them separately later when I have a bit more time.

I took a load of photos of the whole 2 days, about 400 in total. Of course, since it was me taking them, a good proportion of them are a bit dodgy and slightly blurry. I put them on Flickr, but forgot there is a limit to how much they show. So you can at least see some of the Diggnation filming and day 2 of the conference. The tag for all photos from the event posted to Flickr is ‘FOWA’, so if you do a search on that you will get a good indication of what the conference was like. (Note to self: Look into getting a Pro Account at Flicker, cause with the amount of photos you take at these things, you are going to need one!) Anyone else notice that the speaker plinth looked a bit like a McFlurry cup? No, just me?!?

I’ll talk about how awesome the live Diggnation filming was later. I’m still trying to get over it.

Last thing I’d like to add is I met a bunch of great people down at the conference and at the after party, but I didn’t catch all your names, so drop us a line to say hello if you happen to come across this blog post