Future of Web Apps (London '07) - DAY 1

Tuesday 20th Feb, 2007

Well - what  a day.

I've been pretending to be a geek today (yeah, like I have to pretend!) in the most amazing geekfest I've ever been to! Carson Systems Future of Web Apps conference has had some increadible speakers - thats "incredible" at both ends of the scale - from the awesome Kevin Rose of Digg, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo!, to some, well, meaningless sales pitches from companies that don't even exist yet!

Never mind - it was a worthwhile day. I've never sat in a room with 800-900 techies - a third of whom must have been sitting with laptops on their knees (accessing a really slow BTOpenzone wifi network, bless), blogging the conference live. Go on, do a Google search and check out what some folk have been saying! I've got keyboards ringing in my ears - so please do it for my sanity that it wasn't a waste of time having to hear that!!!

What did I learn? 14 presentations over 11 hours (and nice relaxing lunch and coffee breaks, so GREAT chairing and keeping things to time guys!!) is a lot to take in, but I learned that Kensington Conference Centre chairs - when stacked close together, have been designed for CHILDREN only, and WHY was I always sitting next to big guys who clearly work out their upper shoulder strength all freaking day???

Seriously, some good stuff came out - here's the highlights;

- things to watch out for when creating a start-up in todays post web1.0 world (e.g have a GREAT founding team, a VERY strong CTO (above a very strong CEO!), always watch the burn rate - even if you have the funding to spend it!)

- learned some really useful stuff about what makes a good social network, or B2C community (Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency was awesome)

- learned that there are some really cool ways to keep development costs down with stuff like zimki, and Amazon's EC2 / S3 stuff) - great to know when I'm building my "can I have some seeding money please?" plan for my start up idea!

- what goes through the minds of VC's when you ASK for money - and their perspective on the deal (very interesting - looks like they're trying to fleece you, but actually it all seems fair!)

- I learned what Attention Data was and how vital it was to understand to get the most out of community interaction - then forgot again by the time I got home (argh!)

- re-comfirmed just how crazily creative Kevn Rose of Digg really is ... when he described in some detail about how they're going to develop the Digg service - nice (AND he made an exclusive announcement about moving to use OpenID in the near future. Whoopee!

And finally ... apparently there are more women in the audience this year than last year - I dunno guys, the smell of testosterone was quite overwhelming at times. Particularly in those jammed-together seats!

Looking forward to Day 2!!!