Notes From FOWA London 2009

Lee — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:02:34 +0000

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 :)