Well today George and I went to The Future Of Web Apps Summit in the Kensington Town Hall conference centre. I actually had a really fun day, and some of the talks were really quite interesting, a couple of points might even prove useful.

The speakers included such luminaries of the Web 2.0 world as Joshua Schachter the founder of Delicious, Tom Coates of BBC, Yahoo and Plastic Bag fame, and Shaun Inman. I think the awards for the best talks go to Tom Coates, Joshua Schachter and Ryan Carson. Each of these guys covered some different territory, from Tom’s more esoteric conceptual musings on the direction of the ‘atomic’ web, through helpful technical details from Delicious, to an interesting case study of the economics of starting a web services based business on a budget from Ryan Carson.

Coates also included a slide of the Chatsum homepage in his presentation, and while I’m not totally sure he meant it as a complete compliment, it was still good to get a shout-out and we got some good feedback from people as a result.

The two presentations I enjoyed the least (barring the advert from Adobe) were Shaun Inman and David Heinemeier Hansson. Shauns’s talk was a little on the short side. He was supposed to be talking about APIs, but to be honest the other guys had already covered it, and in more depth. I think it’s a shame he didn’t focus on how visual interface design can contribute to a web 2.0 app as I think that’s his real strength. Hansson’s presentation was a pep-rally for Ruby On Rails, and although I could see a certain elegance in what he was evangelising, it did strike me as the sort of technology only someone with OCD could really love, and he came off a bit prescriptive for my tastes.

All in all it was a very enjoyable day, and our first outing as Team Chatsum! Oh, and check out the photo of Ryan looking a bit like action man. How does he get his skin to be so perfect and shiny?!

Posted in News, Chatsum