Had a great time at FOWA London last week. Thanks to Ryan, Jo and the Carsonified team for hosting another superb event.
Rather than listing everything that was talked about over the 2 day event I’ve put together some notes on things that stood out.
280 Atlas
Atlas is a development environment for building web/desktop apps with Cappuccino. Looks really easy to setup and should be available in November – check out the demo below.
PayPal Change How We Pay
PayPal are opening up their platform. What does this mean? Check out the ‘Anthem Video’ below.
Facebook Connect Wizard
Facebook now has an easier way for you to setup Facebook connect on your site. Check out Facebook Connect Wizard.
HTML5
Bruce Lawson gave a great talk on HTML5. I’m definitely a lot more excited about it now.
Check out HTML5 Demos for some cool examples (best viewed in Opera).
Go Test It
Go Test It is a useful tool for running website tests across various browsers. Sign up for a free trial.
Other speaker notes
- Addison Berry – Make your app ‘open’, the more open it is the more you will have people contributing for free
- Osama Bedier – Remove friction and enable innovation
- Chris Abad – praise your passionate community, incentivise users to market for you, make use of viral channels (e.g. Twitter updates)
- Robin Christopherson – 80% of Twitter is from mobile devices, captchas = 7% loss in conversions
- Alex Hunter – Be emotionally invested in your brand and be willing to risk your reputation on your app
- Lynne d Johnson – 35% of adults now have Facebook profiles
- Dave McClure – Less = more, remove features, focus on UX, make fast iterations and measure goals
As far as I know the videos of each talk will be uploaded shortly.
Met lots of great people at FOWA, all doing really interesting things. If there’s an opportunity for you to attend a future FOWA, take it 
October 5th, 2009
Yaili says:
Thanks for the writeup, Lee, I had forgotten about a couple of these already.
It was nice meeting you at FOWA, and will hopefully see you at Build Conference in a month!
October 5th, 2009
bruce says:
Thanks for the write-up. Glad you enjoyed it!
October 5th, 2009
Lee says:
You too Yaili – see you at Build
October 5th, 2009
Yves Ferket says:
Got something jotted down from the freshbooks presentation?
October 5th, 2009
Mark McCorkell says:
That PayPal Anthem video is awesome – love the ideas!
October 6th, 2009
Lee says:
@Yves: I’m afraid I missed the Freshbooks talk (early flight from Belfast to London). Will have to watch it online. Met Mike at the after party though, nice guy.