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Future of Web Apps - day one

Published on 2009-10-01 22:44:45 +0000

So today I've been down to London to attend the Future of Web Apps conference, and it has been a fascinating day for me.

Firstly, the talks were a suprising variety of business and developer focused.  As a developer I often find the business talks "fluffier" and less easy to get my teeth into, but not to the point that I think those are worse talks, just that they are not entirely aimed at me.  Some of my fellow attendee's made their displeasure known on twitter in a very forthright and in my opinion, unprofessional way.

Secondly, the conference has nicely provided power in what can only be described as a fire inspectors nightmare.  The power cables are a set of standard 4 way extension leads, that are daisy chained from the back of the hall, to the tune of 15 - 20 extensions or so!  However since my current  netbook battery lasts around an hour, I was pretty happy that they managed to provide power for me, however they did it.

In terms of interesting products, the demo of 280slides and 280atlas was just amazing.  I couldn't work out if it was mac OS X only, or would work under Ubuntu and Windows as well.  I obviously enjoyed Chris Thorpe talking on behalf of guardian.co.uk, his talk was entertaining and informative without being an overt pitch talk.  He was unfortunately bracketed by the two talks that stole the days show.  Bruce Lawson's talk on HTML5 was awe inspiring.  I've heard him talk before, at Oxford Geek Night, but he was even better this time.  He is probably one of the best speakers I've had the joy to watch.  On the other side of Chris was Aza Raskin from Mozilla who talked about how the web will be used in the next 3 years.  His view is that if we can sort out the security implications, the web browser will manage identity and payment, freeing the websites up to provide simple login buttons (like openid) and payment options and allow the browser to manage that kind of stuff.
  He finsihed off by showing off Ubiquity, which was an awesome presentation, but the reality on my ubuntu laptop seems to fall a little short.  However for a labs beta project, it does it's job, which is to inspire awe and get me to think about how to use any apps I write.

I'm sure there are many others that I've forgotten, I've got pretty full notes that I'll try to write up later, many of the talks were interesting, but without a lot that left me excited and able to write from the top of my head, these included talks about engaging the community, marketing your web app, using social media and so forth.

So off to bed for me, and another full day of FOWA tomorrow.