Rachel Earley talks about Refresh Dublin and some interesting Augmented Reality projects!

Recently, Carsonified posted this video of a Kevin Rose (Digg) speech at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.  The talk, titled “Taking your Site from One to One Million Users”, covers a range of methods for growing web traffic and engaging users.

Although many of his examples are interesting in themselves, it is worth noting that a number draw upon core psychological principles first put together 25 years ago by Robert Cialdini in a book titled Influence.  Cialdini studied how social norms and ingrained behaviours have a massive influence on our responses to the various stimuli we are presented with on a daily basis.  He grouped them into six general categories:

You can read a little more about each of these here, but it really is worth taking the time to read the book (most libraries will have it).  It presents both the underlying motivators along with specific examples of their expression in practice, so it is more useful than hearing only the examples themselves, which don’t necessarily lend themselves to application in a range of different domains.

Cialdini also recently co-authored a book titled Yes!, which presents summaries for over 50 scientific studies relating more-or-less to the six categories above.  It is a fascinating read.  Here are a couple of the findings:

• Tips increase by up to 23% when waiters give mints to their customers directly, rather than letting them pick the mints up from a bowl at the counter.  [an example of reciprocity]
• A hotel increased guest towel reuse rates (an environmentally friendly action) by 33% simply by changing the wording of the call-to-action message on a sign in the bathroom.  The most successful message suggested that others who had stayed in the same room recently had reused their towels. [an example of social proof, and also liking - we are influenced more by those who share attributes with us]
• Asking people to predict whether or not they will go out and vote actually increases the chance they will go out and vote (by about 25% points in the study cited).  [an example of social desirability bias combined with commitment and consistency]

There are many other examples in Yes! that translate the six general principles into practice, so you are bound to find some inspiration for mixing it up and applying the principles yourself.

_____

ShortURL for this post: http://wp.me/pnqr9-2R

The Future of the Cloud by Simon Wardley (the technical lead for Canonical’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud initiative):

Simon’s Blog Post

Wie im Carsonified Blog berichtet hat Bruce Lawson auf der “Future of Web Apps – London 2009” eine Einführung in HTML5 gegeben und wie es zukünftig eingesetzt werden könnte. Da HTML5 ja auch gerne als “Web Applications 1.0″ bezeichnet wird, ging er dann auch auf diesen Aspekt der Spezifikation ein. Folgende Themen wurden behandelt:

1. Dynamic images and graphs with canvas
2. Eliminating much forms validation with webforms 2.0
3. Local storage automagically saving your data
4. Geolocation
5. Building toolbars and menus

Hier gibt es das Video dazu:
The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Und hier die Slides:

@joeloverton hat den Vortrag auch transkribiert. Das entsprechende Dokument findet sich hier: http://joeloverton.com/html5/

Auf carsonified.com gibt zudem viele nützliche weiterführende Inhalte zu dem Thema.

Future of Web Apps – Miami 2010

We are super excited to be bring FOWA back to the USA! That’s right – Team Carsonified are leaving the UK’s shores once again, heading across the Atlantic and returning to Miami Beach once again. We can’t wait!

We have a whole day of eating, learning and relaxing on the beach on Feb 22nd, followed by a day jam packed with talks from some of the industry’s leading minds, followed by a day of top notch, hands on workshops designed to help you make your web app kick ass.

When and Where?

Mon Feb 22 – Beach Party + FOWA Fair

Tue Feb 23 – Conference

Wed Feb 24 – Workshops

Party: Nikki Beach

Conference: Colony Theatre

Workshops: Adrienne Arsht Centre

Who’s speaking?

* Fred Wilson
* John Resig
* Neil Patel
* Steve Huffman
* Mike McDerment
* Alex Payne
* Tara Hunt
* Dion Almaer
* Aaron Patzer
* Molly Holzschlag
* Alex Hunter

* Kevin Hale

Workshops

Workshops will be taking place on Feb 24th where you can choose from two half day sessions. This is your chance to get up close and personal in this intimate classroom environment. A selection of the workshops on offer include:

1. Building a Web App A-Z
2. Converting Free Users to Paid Customers
3. How to build Facebook Connect + openID into Your App
4. How to use A/B Testing, Analytics and Goal Measurement in your Web App
5. How to use HTML 5 to Enhance Your Web App
6. Q/A with Fred Wilson
7. Kick ass marketing techniques
8. How to use jQuery to Improve Your Web App

There is a phrase that sticks in my mind from a film I watched at an impressionable age, where one of the characters (Otis) says “Gonna be a sparklin’ day! Sparklin’!” (extra points of you can guess the film and a much more obvious clue at the end of this post). This really sums up my time spent at FOWA (Future of Web Apps), London.

Well, I went with my colleagues Tim and John to man the GeoVation stand. As anyone will probably tell you, the actual future of what will happen on the web is a very difficult thing to actually predict. So really the conference, like many, has speakers talking about what worked for them, but uniquely we get to see what people will be launching in the near future. Beyond about a year, things become less certain. Some like death and taxes and a little easier to predict.

So what did I learn?

1. I learnt from Kevin Rose (“Taking your Site from One to One Million Users“):

• Keep the features of your new web app simple, ie not too many
• Build & Release. Stop thinking you understand your users. Learn from what they’re actually doing on your site, not what you think they’ll do. Decide on what you’re going to build… and build it (avoid analysis paralysis).
• Connect with your community and use it to promote your site, ie word of mouth
• Analyse your site traffic, more than just what Google Anayltics provides and act on the intell.

2. I learnt from Simon Wardley (“The Future of The Cloud”) how to give a presentation on a technically complex subject, but reach out to all audiences. If you haven’t seen it here is a link to a similar talk he gave at another conference.
3. I learnt that it is very difficult to sit through a presentation of HTML5….. well it’s just difficult.
4. I leant that any conference that has XBoxs in the foyer has a good vibe.
5. I learnt that the Yahoo! guys on the stand opposite me were a great bunch.
6. I learnt how much I like talking about what I do for a living and trying to instill the same enthusiasm in others.

Okay, so that last comment was a bit cheesey, but none-the-less it is good to be at a conference full of people who may be creating the stuff that you and I will be using next year.

(Clue: “Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.”)

While scanning through videos covering the recent FOWA (the Future of Web Apps) 2009 in London, I chanced on this reportage of a “Facebook Developer Garage” event held somewhere in the vicinity of the conference. It would be cool to have something like this in Metro Manila.

What attracted it to me was:

1. I’ve become interested in Facebook as a marketing and apps platform, and a networking opportunity for Facebook dev geeks like this would be very appealing.

2. It really did look like it was held in a garage.

The regular Roofcamp sessions held by Jay Fajardo of ProudCloud are supposed to approximate this “unconference” vibe. I’ve been meaning to drop by one of these soon – the only thing that holds me back is that Jay holds these at his place all the way in Calle Industria in Pasig. But someday.

The video of the full Atlas presentation at London FOWA 2009 is now available at carsonified (30′ length). It demoes the fully fonctionnal screens compositing (nested views), the RSS controller (that had also been seen during the first Atlas presentation in March) – we can also see Array Controller, FaceBook and Twitter controllers -, various project templates (among these a new document-based one), a Bespin text editor component, and a new “native” target mode (that is said to use an own solution instead of Titanium Appcelerator, for some explained reasons).

Finally I would like to thank Francisco for his kind words about Java server-side support for Cappuccino – that is CP2JavaWS –  (26′) :

About backend support, there are Lift, Scala, Rails, and Java as well [was the first, January, 5].  The Java support is pretty amazing, as it takes Java Objects [full objects graphs, through JSON] and serializes these into Objective-J objects.

The Direct2CP mode of CP2JavaWS, and its digest authentication management and automatic session tracking per endpoint, are also complementary to Atlas (that focuses mainly on UI components, but not to their behaviour on the server side – except the RSS feader component).

An extension mechanism to Atlas (through plugins) was suggested initially (in March’s first announcement), and I then explained it was a great idea, that could use Osgi bundles concepts, and would open the way for business (alla Eclipse plugins). I proposed to write a plugin for remote services calls (through CP2JavaWS), such a controller that could be added to existing RSS, FaceBook and Twitter ones. I hope such architecture will be provided by Atlas beta’s mid-November release.

There’s been much talk of demo’s and launches over the last  month with TechCrunch50 and DEMOfall09. It’s also been at the fore front of our minds with our startups launch and live demo at FOWA, London. I’ve posted about the pro’s and con’s launching at startup conferences. Launching at an event is an emotional roller coaster of a ride with the preparation effort required, pre-event expectations and then the post launch reality. Looking  back the launch peak is a brief moment in time after a long development  journey and before the journey to acquire real customers begins.

Killer Wave (Source: Telegraph ‘Beautiful but deadly’ )

Great  advice on  live demo and launch for startups includes: RRW and Jason Calacanis – Part 1 and Part 2.

Sean Power: “It may be the single biggest traffic spike you’ll ever experience.”, “After the bump, you’ll feel a tremendous rush of adrenaline, then deep, soul-sucking disillusionment as your traffic dwindles back to its former levels.”

There is so much effort needed to build and develop a product in preparation for a five minute launch demo (forgive me for my reminiscing links to many of my past posts):

1. Finding the team - Getting a great team together is not easy but it’s key to a successful startup.
2. Identifying the opportunity – Finding a killer idea first of is near-on-impossible or at least improbable.
3. Getting the investment – Making the money last long enough to build a working saleable product is a ‘Scrooge’ like challenge.
4. Building the app – Staying on target and not veering off on another exciting project is tricky.
5. Polishing the app - This takes time and you don’t have much of it. The devil is unfortunately in the detail.
6. Making it scalable – To prepare to scale or not to scale is a difficult question. No one knows the traffic and usage you will get.
7. Preparing a memorable demo – In summary Jason Calacanis says: show the product quickly; give a succinct presentation; temp the audiences; talk about accomplishments rather than roadmaps and show understanding of the competition.

Wow, what a journey!! This is why many startups fail to ever get a product  finailsed and launched. The decisions made during each of the above stages directly affects the outcome of the final 5 minute demo. However  this onstage  peak is only a brief  moment in time and a pause before the start of  a new journey.

After the curtains have closed at the conference its when the real hard work starts. You now have to convince customers and investors. The good news is that your startup will be taken a little more seriously because you’ve got a product. However, doubt will remain and very few really believe you have a good idea that will succeed because you have no customers. You now need to be flexible,  customer centric and have  a renewed determination to succeed.

The live demo launch is yet another emotionally intense thrill ride for startup founders. It is a deadline which gets things done and moves your startup towards the all important goal of getting customers.  “Buckel up because Kansas is going bye, bye.” – For the  5 minute demo anyway and then it’s back to reality

Another year rolls around to one of my favourite conferences, Future of Web Apps organised by Carsonified. It’s a little smaller this year and returns to the previous venue at the Kensington Town Hall. This is a comfortable size but previous problems with wifi were repeated on the first day. Intermittent though so I didn’t hear too many complaints. There is only one stream this year so we didn’t have to read through all the summaries to decide which to attend. Nice and simple was what I needed as I had been quaffing cocktails til the early hours with a few of the Microsoft web guys. They appeared at the show as well, so it was good to see that they’d survived. (Second day is here)


Fowa09 was kicked off by the ever enthusiastic Kevin Rose. I feel he has more direction this year, but maybe he has regained more of a focus and found his own niche. 10 rules to follow in order to move up to a million customers, sounded a bit simplistic, but all good advice.

Mike McDermot from Freshbooks, the online accounting/bookkeeping service gave us some of his “totally tubular” ideas. His Freemium accounts allowed users to get into the action easily and quickly, with few restrictions other than numbers and branding. His advice was to not build anything that you didn’t need to, apart from tracking systems. You need to be able to tell where your users are landing, the keywords that they used to get there and their path through your pages while they stay. He didn’t think that Google Analytics was good enough, but I’ve use Google to track paths quite successfully. Main point was to build the reporting systems well, so that your programmers don’t have to constantly work on management reports.

Ryan had developed a “hello” app (using some help from RedBus and Microsoft) It was an experiment in crowd twittering and I though it intriguing but it may not give the expected results; perhaps there were no expected results. It was built around using tweets to show what type of people were sitting where in the auditorium (each chair had a unique code!), and to meet to discuss topics helped by the requirement to exchange tokens. In scoring points, the users would mix more and be collecting the points for prizes on the second day. (Interesting idea and could this be used for corporate?) We shall see. They had a small panel later with Scott Guthrie pushing Microsoft’s “spark” initiative which allows small companies free licences to all the tools for three years. Matt Lee from RedGate helped develop the app using ASP/MVC. It was like a sponsors message for Microsoft but done in a casual way. Interesting ideas as usual from Carsonified. The app will be open source after the conference. Websitespark.com for the Microsoft tools. If you’re a student, you get all the tools free anyway – search for dreamspark. Microsoft are being very friendly, friendly and even have an installation wizard for setting up all their server and development software. Surprisingly though it will also give you the option to install php under the IIS system along with a selection of open source software such as Drupal, WordPress etc. Looks good; it says it can handle updates as well, but not sure about the third party software. Expression 3 looked impressive. Definitely worth a try for the SketchFlow features and state control.

Dustin Diaz of twitter (@ded) talked about the beauty of Javascript frameworks. He’s been around several of the corporations in the valley – google, yahoo but is now with twitter. He didn’t pick between the libraries, (jQuery, Dojo, YahooUI, Mochikit, Prototype, Mootools, Sproutcore ) but was trying to tell us to roll our own. You’ll know the library better, and can keep the error checking and validation down to limits. His main advice – keep it small, separate the business and the look, use proper classes and avoid over abstraction. Pointed out Dean Edward’s Base, and Dan Webb’s LowPro, neither of which I had heard of before. I’ve been using jQuery with some success and I asked Yahoo about the size of their tools to compare. Their answer is that they have stored their libraries on their edge servers (and Google’s). This allows them to serve the library at top speed for any web site using them; probably faster than storing even a smaller library on your own servers. Interesting thought – more speed tests to do here.

Addison Berry (@add1sun) gave us a talk about the need for passionate people. She finds hers in the open source community, especially with Drupal – a lot of effort can be found for very little monetary return. If you can find some passionate people, treat them with passion and there will be great returns.

Francisco Tomalsky form 280North was next. He’s ex-Apple, from the Safari team and has moved on to bring Objective-J from the Objective-C background, and then ported a version of Coco to be the Cappuccino framework. Really impressive. He was brought back late on the second day because there was such a tweet around this first demo. I’d seen the demo before, but it still felt extra quick. They have moved from producing their 280slides application, to the full development environment with 280atlas.com. Original plan was to produce web apps, running in the browser; now everyone is asking for desktop apps so they’ll be competing with the likes of Air and Titanium. It will be based on a local webdav Cappuccino server, with html5 and Google Gears. Look out for the Beta on November 15, (priced at $20)

David Prager (@dlprager) from Revision3 next up with more passion. His advice was to that you can find a niche where there are lots of passionate people. Use this passion to find evangelists. They are the group that will spread the word and build your business. Another person advising the importance of having good reporting.systems; they allow you to monitor the effects of changes.

At lunchtime I went to one of the Uni sessions, this one with Gerry Gale (@vicchi) now taken over by Yahoo geo team. He set up PlaceEarth, a system of identifying everywhere in the world and being able to find the places from a huge variety of local and international contexts. 85% of the data on the net is unstructured and it is doubling every 3 months. As most of this information contains geo references, this system can be used to find an exact location from a variety of text phrases automatically. Yahoo are promoting their WOEIDs (where on earth…) as the index to the location, which could be a place or an area. They are building these from their own sources at the moment, but will bring user input sometime next year, to allow user authentication and editing. The developer API looks good; it even allows a call to scrape a remote url to get the information to pinpoint the location. It will then fix the html and give structured data to use with its YQL query language. No JSON yet and only POST but early days for the API and they will be looking at the developer response. Go to developer.apps.yahoo.com/wsregapp to sign up and to get a key. ygeoblog.com for the blog. Demo at Isithackday.com/hacks/placeearth

Paypal, another sponsor of the event, were pushing their developer API, Paypal-X. Find out about it on the x.com website (is that name allowed!) They have been through the various permutations of payments and seem to have most variations coverd – split payments to several people, chained payment through middlemen, commission payments, approvals. It looked good to cover anything that I would want. Still seemed a bit expensive for micropayments tho’, 5cents + 5%. They leave some room for competition. Their iPhone app has been popular. 4million downloads in 9 months and lots of cash passing through it. The Android version is coming soon. Paypal were predicting that the value of digital goods will exceed eBusiness revenue with the next year. They have their first developer conference in San Francisco in November. Use the FOWA99 code for a discount.

After lunch, Chris Abad (@chrisabad) talked us through his success with the Spymaster game. Why did Irata Labs have such success? They started with a great product, had some passionate fans and the scoring in the game was based around spreading the word and recruiting people. It used twitter to run the game, with points for followers and transactions, so the popularity blossomed as the hash tag became a leader in the trending topics. They also seemed to have some influential people invited to the initial game play, which meant the publicity arrived on the news sites pretty quickly along with strategy guides from the fans. It needed to be a good game to get the fans whipped up and features were added after listening to their feedback. Chris’ marketing slides are at iratalabs.com/spymaster_slides.pdf

Cat Lee came on to promote the use of Facebook Connect. There are interfaces to get Identity, Connections and Activities for users. The push is to allow web builders to add Facebook type functionality within their own sites; the Livestream box used on the German elections had 9,000 messages. Have a look at all the widgets that are available, http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/ There’s a lot of functionality from Facebook that you can put on your own web pages. Facebook has also allowed users to translate the various phrases on the site. By doing this, they had the French version done within 24 hours! Many other languages followed. Now they’ve opened up the service to allow people to use it on their own sites, with voting, monitoring and moderation services. Looks great if you’re doing a multi language site.

Ed Anuff, Mike Malone talked through the announcement of Motion from TypePad. It’s an API for developers to interface to a data store in the cloud. Initially for blogs and connections for users. Ed was at Kevin Rose’s Pownce before the takeover and a lot of the ideas have been rewritten into the new system. It’s Django/python based, storing all the data in the cloud. They have objects for all the normal user, connection, follower, blog type objects and could build a twitter or micro-blog type site fairly easily. I might give this one a try. The open source software is at developer.typepad.com. The example is at motion.typepad.com.

Vodafone were showing off the latest phones and looking for developers to produce some widgets for them. There’s a one million euro competition which should be some help. The sdk is all javascript, webkit based so it should be relatively straightforward for most developers. There are openSocial and micropayment interfaces, libraries for hooking into the hardware etc. Geo location is there now, accelerometer, compass coming later. Looks easy. Give it a go. The Appstar competition page is at widget.developer.vodafone.com/appstar .

Bruce Lawson gave another popular talk about HTML5. Canvas tag looks great but has accessibility problems and needs plugins for Internet Explorer. (excanvas.sourceforge.net ) Video without plugins is another winner. It will compete with Flash and Silverlight in my book. I have been moving back to jQuery and similar libraries as I don’t need my whole page being created by Adobe or Microsoft. Having used Thermo and Expression Blend, I find myself creating whole pages of application that need the latest version of a browser plugin to get the most out of. For day to day this seems over the top. If they can sort out the problems with html5 life could be far simpler. Javascript libraries such as modernizr will help the progress.

Dr Chris Thorpe (@jaggeree) of The Guardian then gave a talk about the future of Guardian services. They seem to be progressive in their search for new media possibilities. They are very aware of the fall of print media and are trying to be part of that disruption and the move towards what he called “mutualism”, or reaching out to get audience input and opinion. They now have an API to all their back content, with output in xml, json and atom formats; free developer access. He pointed out that data from http://data.hmg.gov.uk is now available on Google Groups. Over a 1000 data sets. They are pushing a green ad network , helping novel tweeting in Westminster politics, they have an app in the iPhone app store, their datablog and a flickr group. They’re trying to create a monetising ad network where there can be shared proceeds. The django app that they put together to allow the public to notate MP’s expense was very popular, only took a week to produce and cost less than £100 of the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Aza Raskin (@azaaza) finished the day with a talk about Ubiquity from the mozilla team. They are trying to smooth out some of the users workload, trying to take on some of the tasks within the browser. The work should centre around you. The browser knows your identity, your data, your social connections and it could deal with more of the interfacing that needs to be done. It allows you to search with more natural language, to cut and paste maps with a click or two. You keep your train of thought because you don’t have to switch to thinking about how to do something else. Also mentioned the jetpack plugin for Firefox which I hadn’t seen before.

Everyone seems to be talking social this year, but with a more combined effort. The openID movement a couple of years ago has moved to a position of not wanting to remember any of your personal details. Perhaps you could log in at the beginning of the day, but after that your movement around the web should be aware of your contacts, your tastes and your history. Different systems may start to help this, but Kevin’s thoughts were that perhaps the browser will do all this. The browser will control how your information is put onto the web. Many more browser apps will hold information, presumably in the Cloud somewhere so that the data is accessible from where ever you are. There will be more sharing of data between secure, approved connections.

Link to the second day blog.

Some videos (two only for now) from London 2009 FOWA are available at ustream.tv, as well as live chat. However we cannot find yet new infos about the Atlas presentation that took place today. We just learnt from Cappuccino forums (and people that went to FOWA) that a beta of Atlas will be release November, 15, and priced 20$, and that the final version will be priced more.
We can also follow posts from the famous almost.at Cappuccino application.

Cappuccino’s Atlas on-browser editor will be finally unveiled at London FOWA, October 1, at 12am ! In the schedule entry we can read :

Trust us, it’s going to blow your mind :)

In addition to launching our new website monitoring app at the Future of Web Apps, London 2009 conference we’re now an official FOWA sponsor. This will be the first time we’ve sponsored an event.

Our sponsorship gives us coverage in Carsonified’s pre-FOWA  newsletters and a posting on their partner page. We hope this investment gives our new app more exposure before we launch on stage.

It always feels a bit strange writing the first post for a new blog. Where do you start? In case you don’t know us I’m Nick Barker and my co-founder is Simon Oxley. Right now we’re busily finishing off the development of our new website/web app monitoring SaaS service. This is the blog for the service.

The start of a new day

In summary our service alerts and reports on website performance to help avoid slowdowns or downtime. If you’ve not signed up to our beta programme please do (Click here). Your feedback very important to us.

We’ve made the bold move of committing ourselves to launch our app on stage at  the Carsonified Future of Web App’s (FOWA) conference on the 2nd of October 2009. This is either a great decision or an ambitious one. Kevin Rose the Founder of Digg and many more Web stars are going to be at the event. No pressure then. It should be fun though!

Stay tuned in for more on our progress (click here for our blog RSS and email updates).

I am definitely heading to FOWA this year and I wanted to list the workshops I am attending here.

1. How to build Facebook Connect + openID into your site ?
2. How to build a Web App from A – Z ?

The full list of workshops can be found here. Ping me if you are attending and want to catch up for a beer after the workshops or at the FOWA Party.

2009 is flying by very fast. It’s already August and FOWA is just around the corner again. The lineup this year looks to be very interesting and I will be trying my best to get to this conference. If you are going then do let me know and I would love to catch during or after the conference to discuss web apps over beers.

Phew – the inaugural whistle stop Future Of Web Apps (FOWA)  UK Tour has finished. I attended 3 of the 4 Tour stops: Leeds, Cambridge and Bristol. The Tour was a condensed version of the highly successful  Carsonified FOWA conferences. This was the first time  Carsonified had taken the UK tour on the road. The aim of FOWA is to help developers, freelancers and entrepreneurs learn and socialize. On the Tour we met many wonderful people and heard some great talks.

Taking the Tour out of London (a conceptual London bus)

The Tour followed the same format for each venue: big company demo in the morning and other talks in the afternoon. This was followed by speed networking and then drinks in the evening. The demo from Microsoft’s David  Gristwood was on the Azure’s solid architecture and road map; Simone  Brunozzi  from Amazon Web Services gave a very useful demo of EC2/S3; and Doug  Merrett/Simon Wheeldon from Salesforce.com showed how simple it was building an app on fly with Force.com. Tony Lucus of Flexiscale also demonstrated their Cloud platform at the Cambridge event.

Many of the attendees I spoke too at each event felt that the corporate sessions were too much of a pitch. I guess they were sponsoring the event to keep ticket prices  down. The managed hosting providers EveryCity also sponsored the Tour and took heaps of photos of attendees wearing EveryCity stickers in the most unusual places:

Nick Barker
(Some will do anything to get their photo taken
vote me & silly hat to win, click here )

2st Stop – Leeds – “Fares.. please”

Simon  Collison from Erskine Design gave an entertaining talk about building client trust. Simon high recommended involving customers in an Agile feedback loop to create a usable app. An important point we need to remember. Dan Rubin then gave a wonderful talk on designing intuitive user interfaces which mimic non-frustrating real world physical interfaces. Dan used great images of taps, buttons and door handles/locks. Like his slide deck: Keep it simple, don’t over design and “don’t give instructions to users” – if you do the apps not intuitive. Next up was Lorna Mitchell, a senior developer  from iBuildings, who talked about developing in PHP and database architecture. Click for Lorna’s slide deck. Finally Ryan Carson of Carsonified gave an excellent talk on marketing web apps through on-line measurement and building social capital. Ryan’s slide deck to follow..

3rd Stop – Cambridge – “Hold tight..”

First up was Wil  Harris of ChannelFlip with a wort’s n’ all presentation on “Lessons learned starting a successful digital media publication with no budget, no technology and no idea”. The key message was start something, NOW! Then learn and iterate. With an offering in 87 countries Stefan Magdalinski of Moo.com gave an insightful talk about scaling and growing an international business. The American market proved to be the most demanding. Dorothy Briggs of Rabbitsoft then gave a talk on using Web2.0 in the Enterprise. Our startup knows all about Enterprise 2.0. Last but no means least was the charismatic German Christian Heilmann from Yahoo. Christian gave an enjoyable and entertaining talk on Yahoo’s exciting YQL API platform. The Tech crowd loved it!

4th Stop – Bristol – “All alight”

Our good friend Andy McLoughlin from Huddle give an excellent talk on partnering. Click here for Andy’s deck. His advice to finding partners was as to über network and get lucky. Once found, partnerships take  a long time to develop and can be challenging to finalize. You also need the ability to scale rapidly.  The next presenter was Ian Broom of Weboo. Ian give a useful reminder on goal setting, having fun and staying fit to be being super effective.  Richard Healy from BaseKit then gave a talk on their exciting new DIY website building app. Like our website monitoring app they are also  in alpha Last up was Dan Rubin again, who gave a very similar presentation to his outstanding Leeds talk.

The speed networking was very intense. After the sixth person I generally started to loose all ability to speak.  However it was good to meet so many people in such a short period as we made some great new friends

I last attended a 3 day London FOWA in 2007 and taking FOWA into the regions proved to be a great idea. It shows there is startup life and thriving web community  outside of London. Roll on the next Tour!

(Ok, so thats a white lie), but we said we would be back, and we are! We have now fully rolled out FlexiScale v1.5 to all our customers, and decommissioned the former system.

The only problem being Arnie though, is we are meant to be destroying Skynet, and from where I’m sitting, we’re building something almost as clever! (Better make sure we don’t let it start ordering it’s own hardware though)

FlexiScale v1.5 is a massive leap forward in scale, performance and speed compared to v1. We suffered from a number of scaling issues as we grew last year, so took the decision to replace a key part of the system that we had licensed in, with our own internally developed code.

As a result of this the new platform can scale significantly better, and faster. You can literally provision a server from scratch, start it, and be using it, in less than one minute. You can start server after server every few seconds, and in the future with the improvements we have planned, you will be able to start multiple servers every second!

As we have been concentrating on rebuilding the underlying software, we haven’t released any new features for a while, but now that the big upgrade is done, some of the things coming in the next few months:

A brand new shiny web interface (as we know how much you all hate love the current one.)

Integrated layer 4 & 7 load balancing using the ZXTM software from the very clever guys at Zeus.

Custom Image uploading (so you can upload your own server images)

Image Cloning & Templating (clone existing machines at the touch of a button, or API Call)

and….

Our second site, that’s right, in the next few months, we will be launching FlexiScale in our second datacentre, with plans afoot for more after that as we grow.

In summary, it’s been a tough ride dealing with the growing pains we experienced last year, and we are eternally greatful to our customers for the support we recieved. We ploughed on through it and accomplished what we wanted to, and we look forward to welcoming both old and new customers onto the new platform.

If anyone wants any more information, please do drop us an e-mail or give us a ring. We will also be at a variety of events in the next few months as well, generally with the word ‘Cloud’ in them, starting with the FoWA Tour in Cambridge and the Hosting Transformation Summit (both tomorrow).

See you soon!

Tony Lucas

Although FlexiScale was only launched in October 2007, things have moved so quickly that the site in now in need of a revamp and update to reflect the changes and developments in FlexiScale.

The team are currently working on releasing the newly designed and updated site for launch mid May 2009.  The launch of the new site will coincide with new pricing for FlexiScale, and promote the newly architectured FlexiScale platform v1.5.

FlexiScale continues to support and sponsor CoudCamp events in the UK & Europe – www.cloudcamp.com

Jacqui Petrie

FlexiScale Sales Manager

Simon Oxley, my co-founder, and I are attending several UK/European conferences this summer. If your also going to be at any of these let us know and we’ll hook-up. We’re really looking forward to them all

Dave McClure, of Founders Fund does the pirate move at FOWA. Founders Fund is a VC firm known to support some of the most famous startups in the industry including Facebook, Powerset (now acquired by Microsoft), Yammer and Slide. Dave McClure joined Founders Fund as an Angel Investor.

For more FOWA related photos click on the right arrow.

munky met a real life pirate!

Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV was the last speaker at FOWA. If anybody could finish a day with such energy for all attendees, Ryan Carson picked wisely. When you thought you couldn’t hold anymore information in your head, Gary stepped on the stage and made us all sit up straight again. If the audience wanted to know how many red bulls he was on, then it was rightly so because I’ve never seen anybody with so much energy. The line I really took away from it all, “the tipping point is the day you start!”.

munky needs to know where garyvee gets his energy!

Jason Fried of 37 signals opens the conference speeches and drove the ‘its time for paid users’ philosophy home. This speech set the tone for the day and the rest as we say is history. For truly, the demo of 280Atlas was one of those moments. The importance of developing it is perhaps most well spent on me. As a designer, I prefer to stay away from too much coding. I would rather showcase my ideas without taking too big a leap outside my comfort zone.

About the photograph: Jason Fried (37 signals) delivers his talk for FOWA at Adrienne Arsht Convention Center in Miami. I loved this hall. It was modern yet simply elegant and I’m sure is an extremely beautiful opera experience.

munky is revved up and ready to go!

This past Sunday, I was attending BarCamp in Miami which was insane. It was my first BarCamp and I was totally blown away. The ease with which people come together and sort out the sessions. After that everything goes in order. Its so beautifully handled because everybody has clear time guidelines and the simplest of board calendars. People wrote times and sessions they’re interested in on phones, netbooks and even coffee cups. Glad I got this shot.

munky had an excellent first barcamp!