FOWA London 2007 - Day 1 Summary
Lots of good stuff at FOWA today, some more interesting than others. A lot of talk about users and communities which was to be expected. The talk be Tara Hunt was particularly good as was the stuff from last.fm. last.fm get around 15m scrobbles a day which is quite impressive along with 10m artists, 70m tracks and 17m items tagged they have some impressive figures. A 100% growth in staff over 8 months also shows how quickly they’re on the move up. The presentation on soocial.com, online contact management syncing to multiple devices was probably the most fun and gripping slot and it was only 10 minutes, that said the talk from the chap from zimki was very good on their JavaScript API application and of course pre-shaved yaks. Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! didn’t really say that much other than API’s for it’s product stack were being released soon. I suspect the first will be mail, but, we shall see. Kevin Rose of digg announced support for openid which is cool and also had some great insight onto the stuff they want to do with real time tracking via flash of “swarms” around popular items and how users move around and what they’re looking at. Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon had some interesting stuff to say about the web services they now offer in EC2, SGS and the S3 storage service and they certainly have some grunt behind them. The ability to loose more than one datacenter entirely and carry on is an impressive claim to make. The presentation was however a little dull. Index Venture Capital I imagine would have been interesting to those interested! I wasn’t one, but, there was good tips in there for looking for VC if you need it. Another common theme on top of communities was don’t scale up too quick in the early days and also not to get more money than you need. All in all a good day. Looking forward to tomorrow.