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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