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Impressions of FOWA 2007
Posted by Cathryn in : Technology , trackbackToday and Wednesday, I’m at the Future of Web Applications conference in London, mixing with geek entrepeneurs.
The speakers are a parade of young Americans. Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, turns thirty tomorrow. These geeks are remarkably articulate.
Its a lot more about web business than the applications themselves, which is something of a relief. I had wondered if it would turn out to be a developer-fest, but they’re talking about entrepeneurship and venture capital, not java wierdness. Someone gives me a copy of the product that’s about to replace Microsoft Frontpage, Microsoft Expression Web. Apparently it does real css, so maybe my developer mates won’t be quite so scathing if I use it. Maybe.
Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch, sees a big future as integrating offline and online apps - email, photo libraries and editing on your PC with photo sharing on the web. If the web is ubiquitous, should it not be transparent.
Provide services, not a portal, suggests Edwin Aoki from AOL. I’m amazed AOL are even speaking at something like this, don’t geeks snigger at anyone with an AOL address anymore?
Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency translates some fairly standard sociology into the idea of virtual communities, and it is so clear why some sites work and those which treat their members poorly do not.
I learn a new term. Yak shaving is all the stuff you have to do before you get down to the real work. If you’re developing software, its getting the development and test environments set up, making sure you’ve got source code control and standards in place. Scarily, its a lot of the stuff that keeps me busy in software development projects, and here is a crowd of people who’ll take all that away and commoditise development and staging environments. They’re right of course, and they give me a t-shirt, so I guess I’ll have to find something more useful to do.
At lunch, I see an old friend from university days, and learn that GuardianUnlimited has taken over the role of newspaper of the liberal left in the US, not so much a gap in the market as a yawning chasm.
Now, I thought amazon sold books, but it turns out that they’re a giganormous provider of disk space and processing power as well. They have a server and disk farm that would make the average IT Manager’s eyes water, and sell it on a pay-as-you-use basis. Interesting, but without some SLAs and good guarantees, I suspect its of more use to the entrepeneurial market than my corporate clients. Still, an area to watch. I become ever more convinced that there is no more point in a normal commercial company running their own data center than there is in their having their own power station (except Google of course, but they ain’t normal). Simon Wardley, a man who likes ducks and runs fotango, the yak shavers, confirms this view.
And then a couple of shy looking geeks shuffle onto the stage to explain that they’d spent two years studying how quotations work. Yes, ‘Alas poor Yorrik’, ‘alea jacta est’ and all that. In the meantime, they missed web 2.0, but now they’re catching up. With flickr for your photos, youtube for movies there is a missing piece - and the answer was launched today at www.quotationsbook.com. This is what the entrepeneurial web should be about. A couple of guys with an odd passion, hacking away somewhere to make something which just might change the world. I hope they make it.
It is inspiring to see what people outside the mainstream corporate world are up to, and to realise that the days of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard building their first device in a garage in Palo Alto are still going strong. After 20 years in IT, I am still impressed by something clever, something I’d never have thought of but once I’ve seen it, it’s obvious - yahoo pipes, groups of people moving through digg together, or perhaps a quotations website.
And more tomorrow.
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Comments»
[...] We spoke to a tepid reception - although Cathryn and James didn’t think so. It was obviously a challenge, plus our webbo isn’t ready (it’s pre-alpha). Quotes and socialising about them shouldn’t be the next geek train to catch. They’re a new take for quite a lot of under-served people. I agree some with Chris. We had so much fun, and met oodles of people and the geekdinner was super! We stumbled over to Edgware Road that night and the morning after was a bit ..eh! [...]
[...] A kaj bi pisal, kar so že drugi. Organizator Ryan Carson je konferenčno dogajanje povzel na svojem blogu, blogali pa so tudi nekateri udeleženci. Recimo john in cathryn. [...]