22 February 2007
Highlights of The Future of Web Apps
Yesterday was the second day of FOWA (got a third day of workshops today), and I’ve gotta say … it has been so fun!
We’re going to be giving away all the conference audio and presentations (pending approval from speakers). Stay tuned here and I’ll let you know when they’re ready.
The program
We worked extremely hard on the program and I think it came out very well.
Based on browsing the blogosphere, it seems that the majority of the attendees agree with me (Read/Write Web, 23 Musings, David Mytton, Alex Little, Digital Telepathy, Tim Anderson, Izeo and Femmaissance) and a few that didn’t (Jonathan Mulvihill and Meg Pickard*).
Big announcements by digg and Netvibes
In addition to the quality talks by the speakers we also had two big announcements that happened at the event and I was delighted to see the coverage on the blogosphere. The two biggies that where announced:
- Kevin Rose announced that digg is going to support OpenID
- Tariq Krim announced the new version of Netvibes (with cross-platform widget compatibility) and that they would also support OpenID
Got some great coverage for FOWA on big-name sites, including:
TechCrunch
Read/Write Web
Gigaom
Wired
BBC
It’s an amazing honor for us to have companies like digg and Netvibes making major announcements at our event (and the coverage on the blogosphere is wonderful as well).
Photos
Here are couple event photos. Get the full Flickr treatment with the tag fowalondon07
Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) explaining the evils of slow code
Mike Arrington preparing his post about Netvibes
What I learned
I’m exhausted and can’t find the energy to recap the amazing talks, but here are a couple quick points that had an impact on me:
- OpenID is the future
Simon Willison’s talk on OpenID, plus the announcement made by digg and Netvibes really prove this is serious - We need to build a mobile web app
Daniel Appelquist’s talk about mobile really proved to me that one of Carson System’s future web apps needs to be focused on the mobile market - Venture capital isn’t as confusing as I thought it was
Ben Holmes (Index Ventures) gave a tremendously valuable intro into funding and how it works. If you’re considering VC to fund your app, you need to listen to download the MP3 and slides from this talk (available soon). Ben really took the mystery out of the whole process. - Commiditization of IT is a beautiful thing
Zimki and Amazon talked about their services that make building web app simpler. They’re not right for everyone, but it is certainly a game-changer
See you at the next FOWA
We’ll be bringing FOWA to the USA in September. We haven’t decided which city yet, so feel free to let me know where you’d like to see it!
* Meg emailed me and asked to be taken off the “Didn’t like the event” list :) She said she wasn’t impressed at first, but by the end of the event she was really glad she attended. Sweet!
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Mat Atkinson
# February 22, 2007 - 12:39 pm
Ryan
Better event than last year. The quality of the speakers was generally very high. Great job from you again as MC!
The debate about “European Start-up Culture: Playing Catch Up with the US” was a disappointing (http://www.approvr.com/wordpress/?p=4). Too many panelists, too little time – maybe a small Carson event on the subject would be worth doing. Remember the Red Herring Entrepreneurs Workshops in bubble 1.0?
Obviously lots of frustration about the lack of web access. Thanks for being so up-front about it. Can you get my £10 back from BT Openzone? :)
Looking forward to next year.
Yan
# February 22, 2007 - 1:01 pm
I’m disappointed I couldn’t make it out. I decided to hold out until there is one in the US. I’m really looking forward to it, from what I’ve read in many blogs, you guys throw a great conference.
Ryan Carson
# February 22, 2007 - 1:38 pm
Fair point. It was our first one and we’ll definitely make tweaks for next time.
Thanks Yan :)
alan
# February 22, 2007 - 2:41 pm
I nominate Cape Town for the September FOWA. Great city, great conference location, hey, even the exchange rate is in your favour… ;)
Giles Palmer
# February 22, 2007 - 2:42 pm
Hi Ryan
Great event. even better than last year. nice work and good selection on speakers — hurrays go to simon willison, mike arrington, kevin rose and a lot of the others…. boos go to crap connectivity (and expensive) and no free coffee (c’mon – that was cheap!)
looking forward to the next one….
ps nice little business you have built up there Ryan!
Giles (UK entrepreneur) – i’m going to start using that tag and hope it catches on – maybe we can get some self-publicity going
Silv
# February 22, 2007 - 3:05 pm
Congrats Ryan!
Will there be mp3 available for all the speakers?
Michael Kamleitner
# February 22, 2007 - 3:10 pm
just returned to vienna from fowa2007. me and my mates agreed that this year’s conference was pretty good, probably better than 2006. personal highlights included the last.fm guys, Khoi Vinh & Rasmus Lerdorf (esp. for the tech-geeks, his talk was definitely worth hearing).
as mentioned by others, wifi was a joke (Rasmus quite hit it on his first slide ;) ), but these things happen. I also understand that people were expecting more from the “catering”.
what I really didn’t like was the sudden end of day 2 – not everybody could attend the geek dinner, so it would’ve been nice if socializing in the lobby would have been encouraged – by serving drinks like on day 1 :)
however, the trip was worth it & I’ll probably sit in the kensington congress hall again next year!
Mark
# February 22, 2007 - 3:17 pm
Ryan – can you share the feedback URL? I didn’t have time to write it down, even though it was a tinyurl!
Thanks.
Kendall
# February 22, 2007 - 4:46 pm
Hey Ryan,
I’m glad it was a success. I’d love to see FOWA up here in Seattle.
Cheers.
Meg
# February 22, 2007 - 5:44 pm
Hi Ryan,
Just wanted to point out that although I wrote about being disappointed on the first day of the conference because of a perceived lack of focus (and yes, frustration about facilities), I did actually update my post saying that things picked up in the afternoon of the first day, and followed it up with a post saying that the speakers on the second day were great.
I don’t mind you linking me above with the context that I felt the conference was lacking something at first but
a) I wasn’t disagreeing with you, I was stating my own opinion of what I’d experienced so far and
b) since I went on to say that the wifi improved, the speakers were engaging and so on, it’s not really fair to paint me as a naysayer.
In any case, it was clear that you and your team had put a lot of work and thought into the programme, and it was clearly a success. I’ll look forward to the next event.
Brian
# February 22, 2007 - 6:44 pm
Looking forward to the MP3s and slides.
Austin, Texas is where the cool kids all want to be :-). And it’s about the same distance from either coast, and it’s already known for its springtime SxSW (http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive)…
Aaron Dragushan
# February 22, 2007 - 8:24 pm
Hey Ryan,
Congrats on what sounds like a very successful event! Looking forward to the USA event.
Rodney Joyce
# February 22, 2007 - 8:42 pm
Hey All,
It was great to attend FOWA and I met a lot of cool people (and finally got to say hello to you Ryan ;)
Great job – my only criticism is that I was expecting more HOW and WHAT the future holds – some of the presentation read like advertisements (I know some were) for the company in question as opposed to focusing on what the future holds. Just MHO ;)
I agree with Michael – perhaps we should have had more beers on day Two (Alcohol- the glue that binds us – one for QuotationBook ;)
I personally enjoyed the Google Uni on day Three – we had a very good hands on mashup session…
Actually – one other complaint – those seats were not the most comfortable!
Well done to the Carson team and all others responsible – see you next year!
Rodney
PokerDIY – Connecting Poker Players
Philip Wilkinson
# February 22, 2007 - 9:33 pm
Yep -congrats Ryan. Really like the event.
Less sponsored “places” next time would be cool.
michael arrington
# February 22, 2007 - 9:58 pm
Ryan, best conference I’ve been to in quite a while. You guys are very professional but also add a very nice human touch to the event. Great stuff.
I’ll definitely be attending your next event unless it overlaps with ours (we’re in sept. too). might be interesting to put them back to back in the same city.
Javier Marti
# February 23, 2007 - 1:09 am
Hi.
I am Javier, the founder of Trendirama.com, a community of online amateur writers. We write about the future of everything. I would like to invite you guys to write an article on the Trendirama.com website, perhaps based on what you mentioned here. Maybe you can write “The future of Web apps” there? It is up to you, you choose the subject.
You would get a link back when you link to your own article, if you wish.
You can even re-use some of what you’ve written here, in the last part of the article, “your view and comments”. That would save you time and still be interesting for readers.
Don’t underestimate this opportunity!
Look forward to hearing from you
Best regards
Javier Marti
http://www.trendirama.com
chris
# February 23, 2007 - 1:21 am
Sounds like the conference went great. I’m amazed you guys have the ability to organise conferences, build web applications, write blogs, manage Vitamin and all the other things you do, with such little manpower. Having organised a conference myself I must say its a lot of work.
Anyway I wanted to suggest a blog topic I’m interested in hearing your take on: How credit card fraud affects ppl who run web applications and what you do about it (as well as handling merchant account providers).
Simon Wardley
# February 23, 2007 - 10:06 am
Hi Ryan, it was a great conference with some very interesting attendees – overall it was wonderful event.
As to the HOW & WHAT issue raised by Rodney, I speak on the subject of commoditisation (both IT and manufacturing through digital fabrication) at more open source conferences & tech gatherings. In those cases the talks are always on the future trends and concepts.
In this conference, my talk was a ten minute vendor presentation so I attempted to balance hopeful humour (ducks & kittens), commoditisation concepts & trends and our product (which we are open sourcing).
However Rodney, yes I’m guilty of avertising what we are doing as a vendor in my ten minute vendor slot, and maybe the balance wasn’t right. I’ll take note of that – thank you.
Personally it is a real privilege to talk at such events and any comments or feedback is always very much appreciated.
Ryan Carson
# February 23, 2007 - 10:42 am
I can give you a quick answer to that: It hardly effects DropSend. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we encountered credit card fraud.
This is probably because we don’t have millions of users. It’s very likely that if we grew quite a bit that we’d have to contend with this.
Thanks Mike. It was great to have you on the speaker’s roster. Looking forward to TechCrunch20 as well!
Good idea. We’ll try to do that next time.
Howard Scott (NOT Jonathan Mulvihill) :)
# February 23, 2007 - 11:40 am
Hi Ryan
well, I don’t mind being on the “does not agree list” alone now that Meg has pulled herself off it – especially if you think it was my co-blogger Jonathan and not me :)
Overall it was a good conference, and I did enjoy it a great deal, but it was a bit hectic for me and didn’t give time to breathe or contemplate what was being said.
overall a success, and I’ll def be going next year if you’ll let me in :), but a few tweaks here and there wouldn’t go amiss I think.
It’d be a boring world if we all agreed right?
Cheers
Howard
http://www.adventuresdm.com
Ansar Mehmood
# February 23, 2007 - 3:29 pm
Hi Ryan,
Congratulations on a successful event.
Any idea when we can expect the podcast/mp3’s of the speakers?
Ansar.
Rodney Joyce
# February 23, 2007 - 6:32 pm
Hi Simon,
Yes, I enjoyed your talk (not a duck man myself, but I like birds ;) – I was not singling anyone out – I just thought the overall ration could have leaned towards what the future holds with smaller ad slots.
Michal Berg
# February 23, 2007 - 8:33 pm
Hi Ryan,
thanks for the event, it has been really worthy reason to make a short trip to London :) More minor comments in feedback form.
Michal
Vinny Lingham
# February 24, 2007 - 7:54 am
Hi Ryan
I was saddened that your show was sold out! I really wish I could have made it! I made a post on my blog as to why web apps are superior to desktop apps. You might find it interesting.
V
Alan O'Rourke
# February 24, 2007 - 3:37 pm
I Posted the bad today:
http://www.spoiltchild.com/pinstripe/article/the-disappointment-of-the-future-of-web-apps
But the good will come tomorrow :)
Alan
Patrick
# February 26, 2007 - 7:20 pm
Can you guys have some type of discount at your events so students and recent grads, such as myself can attend? I would love to attend but quite simply I can’t afford to at this time in my life. Just a thought.
Ryan Carson
# February 26, 2007 - 7:31 pm
Hey Patrick,
We’ll try to sort out a Student Discount. Please poke us and remind us for the next event :)
Kind regards,
Ryan
Amit
# February 26, 2007 - 10:22 pm
Thanks for the quote Rodney!
Couldn’t be more true ;)
eirikso
# February 27, 2007 - 8:30 pm
I feel that during the last couple of years conferences in general are not that interesting. We’re all pretty up to date on technologies and products thanks to the web.
But with events like this one, with high quality speakers managing to communicate an interesting message it’s really worth every penny.
I have posted my first in a series of articles here:
http://www.eirikso.com/2007/02/26/future-of-web-apps-07-part-1/
Will be back with more…
SoftWave » Buducnost Web aplikacija
# February 28, 2007 - 9:47 am
[...] Necu puno pricati o predavanjima i novostima objavljenima na konferenciji — o tome cete vise saznati iz tekstova Davida Lenehana iz PollDaddyja (s kojim sam se sinoc upoznao dok smo se zajedno borili s musicama BTOnlinea) i naseg Sase, par rijeci i linkova je dao i Ryan Carson, a mozete baciti i pogled na fotke. Zao mi je sto Sasa nije mogao doci, ali bila je tu cetveroclana delegacija Web.Burze, te Zeljko iz Imaga, s kojima sam se dobro zabavio u utorak u Wagamami i sinoc na GeekDinneru u Medvjedu. [...]
Aplikacije prihodnosti - FOWA 07 • mitjamavsar
# February 28, 2007 - 3:10 pm
[...] A kaj bi pisal, kar so že drugi. Organizator Ryan Carson je konferenÄno dogajanje povzel na svojem blogu, blogali pa so tudi nekateri udeleženci. Recimo john in cathryn. [...]