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