Raw Notes from Future of Web Apps London 2009 – Day 2

Again these are just the short(ish) notes I made during the conference on stuff that caught my imagination, made me think or make me want to do more research on.

Future of Frontend Engineering

Hasn’t said anything whatsoever.
Twitter Labs launching
Open source stack
Build an API NOW

Future of the Cloud

Transition
Confusion managements trust security transparency
Lack of transparency – need to know whos providing layers
Cost of not using vs risks of using
commoditisation is driving towards a service based economy
too many providers at the moment to allow secutriy and interoperability of the platform
ubuntu supporting ec2 api and have ubuntu distro that provides same api
standardisation will happen
cloud not green
enterprises not ready
standardisation will lead to more innovation

Rails 3 and the Future of Agile

Defer decisions to the last responsible moment
Rails makes it easier to experiment with other techs
Ruby Rails Agile – yay

Mobile Widgets – meh

jil.org/vodaphone/appstar

Yahoo Geo

Border info and historical data. Removal of Vapids (Paris Hilton, Lewis Hamilton etc.)

Accessibilty

http://blog.gingertech.net/2009/08/03/aspects-of-video-accessibility/
Chrome Frame – accessibility black hole
Using s screen reader is tough

Marketing

Believe in your product. Best experience.
Not just founders and CEOs – whole company.
Consitency is state of mind
If you build it they will come is bullshit.
Be real. Be human. Admit mistakes – people will forgive you.
Qype have meetups – get their community involved – take them out and reach out to users – get all folk who’ve been to bars or vegetarian restaurants and invite them out.
New restaurant opens – email biggest reviewers. Then show this on the site?
Local as a platform. Needs to evolve.
Chilango had a buritto eating competition – awareness.
Create new identity from what your team values

The Future of Print Journalism

Fastcompany.com – launched on Drupal
Print – an elitist commodity – will cost more.
23 of 25 top news papers numbers decined
Craigslist and google killing print?
SodaHead – social news. Promoting news
Huffington Post – high FBConnect integraton
Digestable news
Glam Media – Tinker – apps for top conversations from twitter and facebook
Picure the impossible – newsy, get video for websites – service modes
Engagement new revenue streams
Where are kids viewing content?

Startup Metrics for Pirates

Keep it simple & actionable
fast, frequent iteration (& feedback)
measure conversion
focus on user experience
Progress is not equal to features
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Referral
Revenue
Product / Market Fit – if we took a feature a way would it matter?
Focus on critical few actionable metrics
Focus on stuff you already have – be brave enough to kill shit features.
Kill a feature every week. Iterate on the stuff that visitors really love.
Make a good product
Market the product
Make money
“You probably cant save your ass and your face at the same time so choose carefully.”

Practical Advice for Managing the Growth of your Web App

Efficiency != Scalability
App will eventually become i/o bound – cpu, db, disk, netowkr
Scalability means overcoming i/o boundries in financial terms
Working on scability is always beneficial – optimisation is sometimes beneficial
Premature optimisation is the root of all evil
Steve Souder books
Smaller – focus on scalability
Larger – focus on optimisation
Process 250k feeds every 45min
Adding hardware to go faster is trivial (but costs)
Could be more efficient (but resources best used elsewhere)
Facebook saved money by changing to commodity storage systems – efficiency savings implemented once implemented
Hal Henderson – Building Scalable Websites
Scalable Internet Architectures

http://go-test.it/fowa – > testing script

Raw Notes From Future of Web Apps London 2009 – Day 1

As the title says these are my raw notes that I jotted down in Evernote while listening to the presentations at Future of Web Apps London 2009 on day 1.

I’ll need to distill them into something meaningful on Monday for my colleagues to read but for now they’re here in all there messy glory.

Anything thats missing I either 1) Didn’t hear anything interesting in or 2) Had arrived late due to travelling from Glasgow in the early hours so missed .

3 Vital Marketing Items

Don’t build what you don’t need to launch.
Tracking system – build one right at the beginning to ensure you know exactly whats working for you.
Sometimes GA cant give you as much data as you need so build custom metics to know exactly what your users are doing.

Future of Javascript Design Patterns

“meta programming is like trying to do crack cocaine responsibly.”
Use relevant frameworks – simpler tools for specific reuirements.
small taks
seperate business logic
Checkout:
Dean edwards Base
Dan Webbs Low Pro
Avoid over abstractions
Trust your code – dont bloat with error and type checking.

Passion and Paychecks: Opensource

Communication
sell brain trust
community
free time built in
clients pay top dollar for passionate people who know their shit
work atmosphere makes people not want to leave – lullaby. find good passionate people and pursue them
passionate people – hiring people not positions
keep people passionate or they’ll leave and go somewhere else
let people kick ass

Atlus

280atlus.com – $20
Cappucino – server agnostic
Cappucino server – running javascript.
RESTful interface for accessing server side.

Go Niche, Get Rich and go Mainstream

Revision 3
New generation of consumers have abandoned tv and traditional media.
Digital natives.
IPTV – what you want, when you want it.
City Sourced – allow users to report problems about a city. GPS location, direction, photo – crowdsourced IPhone app
Low budget & targetted approach – lower cost/ higher return – hit evngelists

Yahoo: Place not space, geo without maps

Can use yql to parse bad html and get back proper html
50k input limit
http://isithackday.com/hacks/placeearth
http://github.com/codepo8/placeearth
geoplanet -> information from woeid -> children, area codes, postcodes, neighbours, parentage, belongs to (local geography), poi’s geographic features, streets (coming),
http://slideshare.net/vicchi
http://ygeoblog.com
2010 – add places, providing minimum information. update place with correct information.

Paypal X

Boosters size -> rail -> trams -> wagons -> chariots -> horses asses
Innovation enables new monetisation models
Social networks will redefined ecommerce
Mobile ecommerce – unprecedented takeup of ebay mobile app – $350m paypal transactions through it in the last month and a half.
Paypal platform launching November 3rd. Send money, payments etc. paypal.com/innovate2009

Web App Marketing Strategies

Spymaster?
Build a great product
Passionate Community
Engage with the community
Incentivize users to market for you
Empower your heaviest users.
Usual stuff

FB Connect

Registration
Interaction
Social context – friends
Fan box, comments box, live stream box
Live feed on big news items? Live stream on live tv shows?
traffic – share link
engagement
registration peronsalisation – activity of friends – what have your friends done?
Huffington post traffic referrals increased 300%
Translations app released
Wizard for setting up connections.

Typepad

Motion – like an easy to drop in twitter (js based) Open source – for building communities.
Developer.typepad.com
Run on Django / Python
University session tomorrow.

HTML 5

Yawn

Guardian – Stacks for a mutualised newspaper

Mass media does not have bi-directionality
Be part of disruption
Mutualisation – linking consumer with the journalists – everyone has a means of production
Consumers asked to provide footage thats used to generate stories – reaching out to audience to help co creation.
Co-fabriction and co-distribution – XML JSON ATOM of over 1m articles. Datastore – excellent datasets that can be used- weave the guardian into the fabric of the internet
data.hmg.gov.uk – 1000 datasets
People make amazing things with open data
Promotion of the Guardian outside the uk.
Guardian app gallery / store – community
Guardian data blog
Flickr group showing data use
Django framework – scaleable – used for Guardian app for analysing expenses
Rapid turnarounds
1 dev / 1 week
1 designer / 2 days
Deploy on EC2 for limited time
Collating conversations of journalists
AppEngine task queue
Guardian as a platform not just a publisher
@jaggeree
http://www.slideshare.net/openplatform/building-the-stacks-for-a-mutualised-newspaper

Filthy Little Secret at Pivo Pivo

Took a bunch of shots of Filthy Little Secret at Pivo Pivo in Glasgow last night.  Currently whittling through the 190 I took – best ones will appear on my Flickr.

Over Koh Samui

Over Koh Samui, originally uploaded by WeeJames.

On the SECC

Like eating tinned soup. It’s alright and you get most of the flavour but its lacking that extra something special.

On demoing our new site in IE6

It’s like asking someone to have a look at the lovely view outside, but making them do it through a dirty window.

STV Player Launched

Over at STV we’ve just launched the STV Player.  Similar to the iPlayer it offers 30 day on demand catchup of channel 3 networks shows (ITV in England, UTV in N. Ireland and STV in Scotland) such as Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Taggart.

Have a look and let me know what you think.

Ailsa Craig from the beach at Turnberry

Ailsa Craig from the beach at Turnberry, originally uploaded by WeeJames.

Flags at T in the Park

Flags at T in the Park, originally uploaded by WeeJames.

Nine Inch Nails at T in the Park 2009

Nine Inch Nails at T in the Park 2009, originally uploaded by WeeJames.