More notes, mostly for my own benefit – if you want any more info, just drop me a line. Good day today, despite being shattered after a long week and good party last night. Shame I have to leave early, sure the remaining talks will have as much quality content as the rest. Good job from Carsonified team – feel shame they got let down by the WiFi, but doesn’t seem to have affected the conference too much.
The future of Front-End Engineering
Britt Selvitelle – Twitter Inc.
Check out the forthcoming Tweetie2 - http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/ - Nice new features – that’s what gets twitters devs excited.
Twitter = Platform … twitter.com = the Twitter ‘web client’
Announced here - ‘twitter labs’ (to be renamed) - facility to allow them to be more playful and experimental with features – relaeasing them to a small subset of users
- Dark coding(?) – turning features down according to demand // capacity / issues.
- If you’re creating a service, aim to release an API with alpha 1.0.
The Future of the Cloud
Simon Wardley – Canonical
to summarise – either ‘the cloud’ is based on open source, or we risk losing internet freedoms.
What we need to avoid some of the pitfalls – is open source and standardised method of switching betweensproviders.
The Future of Agile (and Rails)
Yehuda Katz - Engine Yard
Responding to Change is the key statement… or Preserving the ability to change in the future.
Basically … Suggestion is that Ruby, and Rails offers a framework that is supports the above ethos.
Creating a Mobile Widget
Interesting demo – showing how easy it is to create an App for use on the Vodaphone 360 device (and others). USing HTML/CSS/JS, runs in chromeless opera browser
- JIL – joint Innovation Lab (consortium of Vodaphone, Verizon and others)
- App star comeptition, and HelloApp widget comp
How to increase the Accessibility of your web app
Robin Christopherson – AbilityNet
Literacy, Dyslexia… Accessiblity is importnt. It doesn’t jsut benefit disabled users – able users are better able to complete tasks.
Great demonstration of how a disbaled user experiences Facebook. Such a different experince with the voice. Mobile version make for a much more streamlined and less confusing experience – due to the lack of functionality related javascript and markup
- MVDA video accessibility
- JAWS very much the more advanced screenreader. Using WAI-ARIA, elements like drag and drop list boxes become usable with alternative options for making selections
- Captchas – bad. see zurb.com. Plenty of alternatives; such as
Marketing your Web App – The future of online marketing
Most developers believe that ‘Marketers are the cancer on the nutsack of creativity’
However – it is important. Without it, your app or brand is set up for a whole load of Fail.
Important thing to remember when looking at social marketing and networking is that people don’t want to connect with ‘Brands’ they want to connect with ‘people’
why – because we feel they care. Staking your own reputation on it. Belief in your product says a lot. Belief equals credibility.
The Future of Print Journalism
Lynne D. Johnson - (ex FastCompany.com) … Advertising Research Foundation
Print will continue, in one form or another – most likely at a premium, subscription tyope affair. Print IS in decline.
- Craigslist took the classifieds
- eHarmony took the personals
- Google to the little ads for niche products
- … and Argos can email its customers itself, if it wants to announce a sale.
Social is where it’s at… as we know.
SodaHead and The Huffington Post are examples of the personalised news, from social sources.
As per the Guardian yesterday (with their Data store and platform), the New York Post has a developer centre. Traditional print organisations need to start thinking like web developers… platforms and apps. CONTENT PROVIDERS.
Start-up Metrics for Pirates
Dave McClure – Founders Fund
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Retention
- Referral
- Revenue