Future of Web Apps London 2007 | Comments (1)
Posted in Events on 20th February 2007, 4:10 pm by Stuart
So I’m here at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. It’s a pretty full house and the hall is packed out. There are some noticeable differences to this year’s event. First I spent about 10 mins trying to figure out where the information to access the wifi was. Then early on Ryan Carson announces that there’s no free wifi and that you’d have to use BTOpenzone (Boo hiss). That announcement really sucked, but to be fair to Ryan he did reveal later that the wifi should be on tomorrow and the lack of it is due a screw-up with a Telco. We shall see. (Update: There’s still no wi-fi on day two).
Overall the quality of presentation is high though some are blatant sales pitches from people who have sponsor slots. Simon Wardley of Fotango in particular started off brilliantly and had something really interesting to say but then it was like a switch was flipped and he went into sales pitch mode. I guess it’s fair enough for them to pimp their products as they have paid for the privilege. However I think the less a presentation comes across as a pitch the better it will be received.
My favorite presentation thus far was the one about Last.fm Both Matthew Ogle and Anil-Bawa-Cavia both came across as really knowledgeable and passionate about what they do and their presentation was probably the most interesting so far. Also of note was Ben Holmes’ presentation on Venture Capitalism which a neat insight into the VC world.
I’ve been taking notes and I’ll be publishing them unedited here as soon as I can. Please note there will be typos and errors and I will look to tidying them up as soon as I have a moment. I’ve missed some presentations due to unintelligible audio or lack of content, but I’m sure someone else will have got you covered 
[...] finish off, I couldn’t talk about FOWA without linking through to Stuart’s excellent notes from the days. I’ve already used them a number of times to remind me of things I [...]