David J Rice

Today my main highlight was Paul Graham talking about the “Future of Web Startups” as inspirational as ever he depicts the changing web landscape that is allowing more startups than ever to be founded and even flourish, I really suggest checking out his talk.

Another was Simon Wardley gave his presentation “Short on Cycles Long on Storage” which has probably the MOST slides I have ever seen (300) and in half an hour at that. Really enjoyed the analogy that launching an app and building the hardware, server software and framework is like building a house and with it’s own power plant… Utility computing is the future, and will allow better commoditisation of ideas.

The talk by Matt Biddulph from Dopplr talked about “Smart Web App Integration With Third Part Sites & Services”. Very interesting, and yielded a couple of links I wasn’t aware of.

* Mofo (a microformat parser for ruby) * RFacebook (a ruby interface for the facebook API) * Woosh (hosted trac + svn hosting) * Pre built ec2 rails images

Tom Coates from Yahoo gave us an insight into a tasty project from yahoo labs FireEagle, nice name. I can just picture countless animated intros to Ze Frank’s “Ride the Fire Eagle Danger Day” feature from his podcast. Cool stuff, can’t wait to see it in the open.

Finally there was an interesting panel discussion with a number of the speakers from FOWA, citing their best tips and screw ups. All together a great conference, good laughs, some learning and new contacts. Props to carsonified for a successful one, oh and the free beers too :) looking forward to the next one.