Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Om Malik, (GigaOM) & Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) First up on day one was Om Malik of GigaOM and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Michael Arrington was late and had people wondering if he was ever going to show. Ryan Carson talked to Om Malik about the Techcrunch 40 and the Gphone project. Then got talking about the European startup scene. Om Malik liked the european scene because of the broadband options and mobile phone usage. This is about the time when Arrington came in and joined in and a brief discussion started about the state of the music industry, including DRM free stores. The discussion turns to bad business models and startup pages like netvibes comes up along side Truemors. Om Malik warned against copying whats already out there. Before long Facebook comes up and some discussion about facebook copying ideas comes up, along side Facebook's new FB Fund. Both agree the facebook applications are good but not good enough yet. After a while, Arrington confirms he thinks mobile is where the action is. The iphone comes up and both agree its super highend niche and not worth developing for yet. Plus Steve Jobs bricking of the iphone comes up And before long there, off the stage followed by a bunch of people. No chance of a interview.

Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, (Founders of JPG Magazine) We've Got This Community - Now What? I missed most of this session but these guys provided some excellent pointers for working with a community. A lot of the ideas came from the cluetrain, design for communities and there presentation laced with real life examples.

Dion Almaer, (Ajaxian.com) How to take your app offline Don talked about why you would want to take your webapp offline and then what options were available to developers. Currently the most popular options are the Mozilla specificiation, Google Gears, WHATWG specification and Dojo offline kit. Most of these will be combined into one specification once Firefox 3.0 hits the streets

Robin Christopherson, (AbilityNet) The Art of Attractive Yet Useable Sites Highlight the fact that Accessibility is being left behind in the rush for other features. Robin showed how painful Amazon.com still is and how easily fixed most things can be.

Daniel Burka (digg / Pownce) How User Feedback can Influences Design After lunch, Daniel talked about feeding back peoples behaviours into the system. He used the example of twitter and its users using the @ symbol to signal to that person they were talking to them but publicly. He then went into ways to Gathering feedback and React to feedback. His lessons learned were plan for lots of feedback, anticipate negative feedback, learn from the community, make time for testing and dont react instantly.

Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) The Architecture Behind WordPress.com Matt had to be one of most relaxed speakers on stage all day. Even when his microphone dropped out, he just took it on the chin and used another one. His presentation was about wordpress.com and wordpress the web application. The stats of users and traffic were highly impressive. He also ran thought how to give most standard LAMP type webapps some level of scaliablity by outlining how they scale wordpress for companies.

Matthew Haughey (MetaFilter) Building a Community I felt the founders of JPG magazine were better that Matthew but they did seem to be saying pretty much the same thing. Its all about the social aspect, Gmail is the only succesful non-social web 2.0 project according to Matthew. All site should include social aspects, if not why are people coming? Communities are communities, they can be successful or your worst enemy, be respectful of this and never take them for granted. Excercise true Transparency by having a place to talk about the app or site with the people who actually work on it.

Heidi Pollock (BluePulse) Taking Your Application Mobile Heidi was shocked by the number of people who had come to her presentation but quickly you could see why. Heidi, ripped up the notion that all mobile phones data users had devices like iphones. She swore not to rant about the iphone, but made it clear the basic phone across the world now has a rez of 176px across and some colour.

Phone browsers are so different and there are so many of them, its not worth the hassle of trying to break outside the box. She also put across bandwidth and memory issues and offered a complete list of the html elements/attributes we should all be using. Noticebly there was no lists or headings, which someone asked about later.

John Resig (Mozilla Corporation)
The Future of Firefox and JavaScript
John in his 2 part presentation talked about the future of Firefox and the power of Javascript 2.0.
In a nut shell The future of Firefox includes, beefing up of features in regarding SVG and Canvas3D. Inclusion of the Video and Audio tags which supports Ogg Vorbis/Theora as standard and the rest are plugins. Global Offline web support like Google Gears. Even better XmlHttpRequest support and Desktop intergration using XULrunner and Webrunner (code named Prism). The Javascript side of things was less interesting but made it clear that Javascript 1.8 will be in Firefox 3.0 and Javascript 2.0 will make it into Firefox 4.0. There was talk about the same javascript engine making it into the Flash 9 engine too.

Diggnation Live in London
At the end of the first day, there was a special treat in the form of Diggnation live. Diggnation is a weekly show about the top stories which have bubbled up on the main Digg.com site. For those who have never seen Diggnation it was certainly an experience and those who watch it regularly a great night. The conference was packed solid and there was standing room only. A rough total says there were 1000 plus people watching the event.
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The final video will be live on , soon.

Paul Graham (Y Combinator) The Future of Web Startups Day 2 started with Paul Graham is always a great speaker but never without some Controversy. This time in a list of reasons why there will be more startups and how they could be more sucessful. He made the comment that you need to be in Silicon Valley, this caused quite a chill in the room and after Paul Graham's talk Ryan Carson stood up on stage and disagreed with him.


The second was his point about college. College will change, if the degree system is all about impressing your next employer and your aim is to setup your own business. He claimed the meaning of college will change if you don't need to worry so much about the final result. Maybe students will bond together a lot more and setup more little businesses during their college time? There was a bunch of thoughts from Paul on this topic and what was interesting was how it echoed back from university to college to schools. I asked the question what could a public service broadcaster be doing in this area to stimulate growth? He replied, saying that the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ should create good polished documentaries about what its like to be in a startup and grow a idea into something special. Although a reasonable answer, I was hoping for something a little deeper.

Developer Stage: Edwin Aoki (AOL) Predicting The Future of Web Apps Paul Graham is a hard person to follow but Edwin talked about a few technologies and ended with webapps need to run everywhere, build on good foundations and we need to remember Technology moves faster that socity

Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare) Making Your App Social Rashmi creator of Slideshare presentated slideshare and talked about Levels of particiption, Embed as a social glue and How online editing is going to take a generation. It was positive to see and hear from someone not from the usual background of startups. The Slideshow talk was quickly followed by a discussion on the future of Presence with the guys from Placez and Jaiku. Then a talk from Suw Charmen about Preparing for Enterprise Adoption. All talks were good but aimed more for a business/startup crowd.

John Aizen and Eran Shir (Dapper) Practical Semantic Web This had very little to do with the semantic web and was off putting because of the diggs and references to the semantic web. In the end they showed off Dapper as a good mashup tool for non-programmers.

Matt Biddulph, (Dopplr) Smart Web App Integration With Third Party Sites and Services Matt gave away a load of free invites to Dopplr the new social trip site. He talked about his motivations including Small pieces loosly joined and the web as a platform done so well you don't need to visit the website at all. He claimed dopplr was so open you can interact with it via rss, openid, etc, etc. That there is no need to login. I did question how he was going to make enough money to stay up, but he said they are using advertising for most people and expecting to find other ways to make money off people who don't login. Matt is ex-Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ but is honestly on to something very big with dopplr.

Joe Walker, (DWR) Comet: Making the Web a 2-Way Medium Joe did a good job making it clear that Comet (long lived HTTP connections) are useable right now and can be used in many places. There were some difficulties with NAT and firewalls but generally it works and can degrade gracefully.

Ambient Intimacy /leisa - disambiguity.com Leisa's talk was one of the best of the conference, the room was packed and its hard to put into words. The talk centred around Continual partial freiendship as coined by david weinberger. Leisa led the crowd through different examples of how we know people through 3rd party systems like twitter, blogs, social networks. Then left some excellent hints how to design for this new world. Keep it lightweight, Stay out of the way, Open your API, Portable social networks, Use small movements and Allow for time shifting.

Dick Costolo (Feedburner) Launch Late to Iterate Often Dick finished off the business track with a light hearted but insightful look at how to run a small company. Feedburner recently was bought by Google.