Future of Web Apps, London 2007 (Day 2)

First a word from our sponsors…

Adobe, the Diamond sponsor of the event, use today’s first presentation to talk about Flash, ActionScript and Flex 2.0. Mark Anders focuses on, and demonstrates, the speed improvements in the new ActionScript 3 VM. It’s impressive stuff with a ten-fold increase in speed. The really great news is that the VM has been open sourced and is set to be the core VM in Firefox 4 (which right now seems eons away).

Next, a word from our sponsors…

Chris Wilson, Product Manger of IE at Microsoft, starts off as he did at last years’ @media. This talk was billed as “Future of the Browser” but it should actually have been called “Future of IE”. I know Microsoft are the Platinum sponsor, and I know that Chris is the IE big cheese, but this was just blatant marketing. Towards the end he talked about WPF/E which was far more interesting and I expect we’ll be hearing more about this in the coming months.

Subtraction.com is Khoi Vinh’s wonderful and wonderfully popular site, famed for it’s crisp, clean design. Today he gave an equally crisp and clean presentation about the design, present and future, of NYTimes.com, where he works as Design Director. He talked about the challenges of bringing art-directed articles from print to the web, something which isn’t really possible now because of the limitation of the tools. It’s thought-provoking stuff. I guess there’s a gap in the market for a Quark-a-like web publishing system for the press industry…

Khoi is followed by Simon Willison who gives an enthusiastic and passionate talk about OpenID. Simon’s an excellent speaker and he does a great job of explaining the technology, both why it’s useful (SSO) and it’s pitfalls (phishing). OpenID is going to be big this year.

At lunch I sat in on the panel debate, the topic of which was “the current state of European start-up culture“, something I’m interested in. The debating chamber was a proper 70’s UN Assembly-style room, complete with a Space Shuttle-tastic push-button interactive voting system.

The panel droned on a bit too much at the beginning but once the debate got going it was great, even heated at times (note to self: don’t crack cheap Bush gags near Mike Arrington). I can’t speak for continental Europe but I think that the lack of a technology centre like Silicon Valley in the UK doesn’t help. It’s so fragmented here that it’s difficult for a proper tech culture to develop. I also think people have no real idea about getting early stage investment for a business despite there being a healthy supply of business angels (so we’re told). This funding area really needs to be promoted and made more accessible to the majority.

Post-lunch we had a solid presentation by Jonathan Rochelle about how Google Docs & Spreadsheets was created (or, rather, how the technology was bought). I’m a big fan of Docs & Spreadsheets and it was interesting to hear some of the decisions which had been taken, such as dropping “cool” but unpopular features. As ever, Google were tight lipped about new features (they’re even more secretive than Apple) but I can imagine we’ll be seeing some sort of off-line tool for manipulating these documents in the not-too-distant future.

After the truly excruciating Open Mic slot, Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, astonished the audience by speaking about how he found programming “so boring, hard and tedious”, and how he only “endured the pain to solve the problem”. Fascinating stuff, a bit like Henry Ford complaining that he hated cars and only built one so he could get to the shops a bit quicker.

The final slot was left to Richard Moross and Stefan Magdalinski of the fabulous Moo.com. It was a slick presentation (Richard is clearly a natural) and, although nothing really to do with web apps (they do have a website, but that isn’t the core product), it was great to hear about and, for me at least, great to hear about another Brit success story. Bravo-oo.

<applause>

And there ends the conference and overall I’d say it was pretty successful. The venue was a solid choice (if a little too packed in the ground floor social area… and by all accounts the (not free) WiFi sucked), it was well organised and there were some strong presentations. As ever the sponsorship was too heavy for my liking and too influential on the schedule. What costs so much to require this level of sponsorship? Is it the venue? The promotion? The speakers? I’d be interested to see a cost breakdown. It certainly wasn’t the sandwiches, that’s for sure :-)

Finally, I would have loved there to be a stronger British representation on the stage, but, like it or not, there’s no denying that Silicon Valley still rules the web app world. At least for now…

Technorati tags: fowa, fowalondon07, futureofwebapps, openid

Posted by Olly on February 22, 2007 at 1:10 am in fowa, fowalondon07, london
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Future of Web Apps, London 2007 (Day 1)

It’s wet and I’m late. Registration started at an unfeasibly early 8am but I arrive just in time to get a seat at the back of the conference hall and see the lampost-like compere Ryan Carson take the stage and introduce Mike Arrington, journo-in-chief at TechCrunch.

Mike gives us the lowdown on the huge amount of VC money funding “Web 2.0″ projects ($600m in 2006), how to run a good start-up (have a good idea, business plan, revenue model), why the USA is better for tech entrepreneurs (Brit families tend to view start-ups with caution - you know, “When are you going to get a proper job?”) and how technologies like Apollo will be revolutionary in allowing a single applications to run both on the web and on the desktop. I remain unconvinced.

Edwin Aoki, architect at AOL, has the honour of giving the first of many ‘advertalks’ which are liberally sprinkled throughout the schedule. FOWA07 has seven hierarchically arranged sponsors. AOL are a Gold sponsor but even this shiny label leaves them in a lowly joint third place. Edwin talks about web apps becoming syndicated, mash-ups, embedded content and… well, nothing hugely thrilling really.

The fourth speaker, and fourth North American, is Tara Hunt who talks about online communities and tells us all to throw away the business plan, no doubt to Mike Arrington’s dismay. Tara is a really good presenter, passionate about the web and she enthuses about all things social using quite remarkable terms such as “fulfillment of needs”, “self-actualisation” and “karma points”. Compelling stuff.

The first Brit to take the stage is Simon Wardley of Fotango who’s a natural presenter. It’s another advertalk, this time for Zimki, but at least it’s a funny one.

After an excellent in-depth look at the funding of web apps from the mighty VC firm Index Ventures (to get your hands on their cash all you need is “an excellent product, an excellent development team and a large potential market opportunity”) we get the best presentation of the day from Last.fm’s Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa Cavia.

Last.fm is one of Britain’s most celebrated web start-ups and rightly so. Their recent figures are staggering: 15 million tracks scrobbled a day (or 175 a second), 6 billion scrobbled since 2003, 10 million unique artists scrobbled in total along with 70 million unique tracks and 145,000 artist wikis created. We get the full story from Matthew, from the founders living in tents on a Whitechapel roof terrace through to the company doubling in size to 40 employees in the last six months. Anil gives a technical overview and goes into some detail about “attention data” (buzzword alert: “MyWare“) and how to monetize it. I’m hugely impressed.

A tough act to follow and poor (well, loaded probably) old TJ Kang, ThinkFree CEO, didn’t fare particularly well. Neither did Amazon’s Werner Vogels who talked at great length about the wonders of S3 and and other Amazon services but I’d heard all this before at dConstruct. It hasn’t got any more compelling for me since then. The Soocial plug-a-thon was really good fun and, to end the day, eagerly awaited hacker hero Kevin Rose gave a great talk about Digg, it’s data and where they go from here.

And that was that. It was a good day but what would Day Two bring…

Technorati tags: fowa, fowalondon07, futureofwebapps

Posted by Olly on February 21, 2007 at 11:09 pm in fowa, fowalondon07, london
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The price is wrong

For some reason us Brits have a bit of a reputation for moaning. I can’t think why but it’s often said that we moan about the weather (”It’s too hot/wet/dry/cold”), the trains (”They’re too crowded/slow/dirty”), each other (”And so he said…”)… apparently we even moan about the fact that people say we moan a lot. I mean, you know, that’s just typical isn’t it? Bloody cheek if you ask me and it wouldn’t have happened in my day. In your day?

Anyway, what we royal subjects like to really moan about these days is Rip-Off Britain. We just love a bargain more than anything, and thanks to globalisation and the sweatshops it creates, we’re swamped with more bargains than ever before. Jeans for a fiver? No problem. DVD player for fifteen quid? You got it. 5p more for a litre of petrol?

<silence>

You what? You’re ‘avin’ a larf aintcha?

Just as we love a bargain, we absolutely detest being ripped off. And as our pound gets stronger against the dollar and the euro, the more, so the theory goes, retailers will sneakily mark their goods up, and the more we get ripped off.

A case in point is computer software. I read today about the new version of Roxio’s CD/DVD software, Toast. I checked it out on their website and it’s yours for $79.99. Unless you’re a Brit that is, in which case it’s £69.99 which translates to, at today’s exchange rate, $136.27. A SEVENTY percent increase.

And this happens across the board. Adobe charge $649 for Photoshop CS2 to North Americans and offer it to us at the bargain price of £569.88, or $1109.59. 70% again. Apple are a little more considerate and only mark up OS X by 34% (although songs cost 55% more on iTunes UK than on iTunes US). These blatant rip-offs are dwarfed, however, by Microsoft’s Office 2003 Professional which is a steep $379.99 on Amazon.com whereas Amazon.co.uk is charging a positively vertical £437.99 ($852.79). A colossal mark up of 124%.

And there’s not a lot we can do, other than, I suppose, moan.

Some people just object and persevere with GIMP and OpenOffice. Some will try out an ‘evaluation copy’ they found via Bitorrent. Most Brits, though, will begrudgingly accept it, buy it on credit, put the kettle on and get back to the Daily Mail. Now, about those trains…

Posted by Olly on February 9, 2007 at 3:49 pm in software
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