FOWA day 1
Well it's been a busy but fulfilling week, Tuesday was spent at the first day of The Future of Web Apps conference (FOWA) organised by Carson Systems . This was a great start of a interesting week for me having been nailed in front of my desk for 4 out 5 days over the last month or so, and catching up with friends and colleagues in town this week has been just what I needed.
Mike Arrington kicked the FOWA conference of with a rather strange bias towards Adobe's Apollo platform. He seemed to be suggesting that the Apollo platform in itself was an opportunity for web developers. Success in my book it's about creating something useful (scratching an itch etc..) rather than being about the underlying technology, so I found he's whole talk somewhat at odds with his position. I can understand his point of view about startups creating features rather than products or services, but where does he get of on telling developers that the opportunity is in a platform, very odd and it just ended up sounding like a advert for Adobe, at this point I was beginning to wonder if attending was the best use of my time.
I won't enumerate the entire line up for day as I did not hear much that was new or interesting, this seemed in many ways like a push for the sponsors and there didn't seem to be much in for the web app creators/developers. Although the Talk by Index ventures was very informative about the background of VC in Europe and the UK particularly. I will not enumerate each speaker however as other colleagues have already covered this in much more detail. One of the reasons for not posting before this was a lack of Wifi at the conference, which we are informed was the result of a BT f*ck up. Not good considering one of the speakers (VP of strtergy) was there to show BT's software as a service offering! I should also point out that, out of the hundreds of attendees, many hacking away on laptops very few had windows pcs, it was difficult to spot them among the see of Macbooks and many commented on this.
There were some other highlights, like getting to chat with Werner Vogels about Amazon's S3 and EC2. A brief conversation with him and the small crowd that circled him after his talk enumerated some of the issues around there S3 and EC2 services. The most pressing of course is the lack of a relational backend offering for storage. Although S3 provides flat bucket/file storage no such facility is available for sql/relational storage. Using say Mysql or Postgres on your EC2 instance won't work as it is non persistant, instead itself relying on S3 for persistence, not practical for a relational backend. Ironically Amazon have solved these issues internally to run there existing businesses and partner businesses, but they are not yet ready to offer such services to the web community. An Other good question he didn't answer was about providing transactional backends, he deferred the questioner to the likes of Paypal but took there point in. Overall even though his talk covered nothing new, his passion in the discussion afterwards with the small circle of attendees indicated how serious amazon are about this market. It is also clear that they still have some more pieces up their sleeve yet to help change the nature of application hosting and SAS back-ends. It should also be noted that many of the the casual conversations I had with others in the industry around the Amazon offerings all indicated that similar services would be appearing from the other big players to compete with amazon in this emerging market place. I look forward to seeing these offerings and the effect that competition will have on both pricing and features.
One of the most important features about this week is people, and day one was no exception. Wandering the public areas of the conference was incredible, I would move maybe a couple paces before bumping into more interesting people, I can't possibly list them all here but I will mention a few of them. I caught up with Ian Delaney of Twopointtouch, he was there to catch up on the latest movers and shakers in the UK web app community. He is now responsible for the events at NMK that I and others in the UK regularly attend for good discussions around social software etc.. In the style of connectivity that the whole week exhibited I also bumped into CyberGal - Deirdre Molloy (see Innovation Cloud) who previously ran the NMK events but is now organising the Chinwag soirees. I apologised for not being able to attend their next event on Monday due to other commitments. Then I talked to here about some of the stuff we are working on here at Folknology around business mashups, instantly her notepad appeared from nowhere and she started scribbling, maybe that twinkle in her Eye for a good event story will lead to more, we will see, as always Deirdre if I can offer any support let me know.
Overall I despite the bad start to day 1 of FOWA I was very pleased, my time was far from waisted and I applaud Ryan and his team for his efforts to make this event happen.
