This year I attended day one of the Future of Web Apps conference here in London. Overall it was a well organised, useful event with moments of excellence although I still have a niggling issue with the price (see below for more). Firstly though, here’s a quick run down of a few of the talks (in rough note form). Standing head and shoulders above the rest of the people I saw present were the guys from Contrast - this is what the quality of most if not all of the talks should have been like.

Grasshopper - NOW is the Time

• Stand out from the crowd, don’t join it.
• Pitches and PR material needs to have an angle. For example, ‘New web app succeeds where others fail.’

Freshbooks - Marketing Your Web App

• Benefits are what people buy.
• What is the single greatest benefit of your app?
• Actually speak to your users.
• Your story is very important (people remember stories).
• Be intelligent with marketing and apply scarce resources carefully. Focus on one market, vertical, etc.
• Share ‘interesting’ - write about what you’re doing.

Content Strategy (not a main talk)

• Have 2 different blogs if necessary - content vs product.
• Post news/blog at least once a week.
• Use the digest model in newsletters.
• Sign newsletters by name (shows human element).
• Always provide value!
• Voice is important.
• Be human.

280 North - Web Apps State of the Union

• Customers always tell you their perceived solution to a problem, not the actual problem.
• Return to web apps seen as hugely important.
• Tools for developing web apps have improved massively in the last 2 years.
• Both native and web apps are being developed as opposed to one app for all devices.
• Tools for mobile app development still lacking.
• Open Source doesn’t fit with standards (not necessarily a bad thing).

MailChimp - Proven Email Marketing Tactics

• In 2009, 247 billion emails a day were sent.
• Respect your user.
• ‘Retargetting’ cited as an example of a negative way to target people.
• Send less emails and only when you have something important to say.
• Consider context when sending email marketing.
• Re-frame your thinking: ‘publishing’ not ‘blasting’.
• You don’t have a lot of user attention with emails - make it count.
• Plain text still relevant for some companies.
• Successful email marketing takes time.
• If you can’t beat someone on resources, beat them on being thoughtful.

Brightcove - The Dream and Reality of HTML5 Video

• Video content companies focussing on cross platform video.
• Much fragmentation in the market.
• HTML5 has strengths for mobile web.
• HTML5 needs to be put in the context of delivering to the market.
• There are technical constraints to using HTML5 video.
• HTML5 ads are being trialled.
• HTML5 very important but still inconsistent.

Contrast - All That Glitters is Not Gold (**Best talk of the day by far**)

• Decisions can often be broken into ’sexy’ or ‘meaningful’.
• Beware launching sexy apps or strategies.
• Best to market trumps first to market.
• Beware me-too products or trendy startups.
• What’s meaningful? If you could solve the problem 5 years ago (i.e. if the problem existed then) it’s likely to be a meaningful idea. Focus on things that don’t change.
• Choose people on talent and discipline.
• Investment is often a bad, bad, bad option.
• Design trends are not meaningful (e.g. Google, Craigslist).
• Do meaningful marketing!!
• Don’t chase overnight success (it doesn’t exist).

MailChimp - Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design

• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs relevant.
• Apps we build need to be pleasurable, useable, reliable and functional.
• Personality is important.
• Products are people too.
• Put emotion into apps so people connect and forgive.
• Work treats into user experience (showed hilarious example of the MailChimp monkey’s arm being pulled off if email design is too wide).
• Trust is essential.
• Bake love into your apps.

I’d recently written a post asking Is FOWA worth the money so this was fresh in my mind when at the event. Some of the negative issues I (and others I spoke to) experienced include:

1. Some suspect speakers.
2. The track 2 room was way too small, while room 1 was huge. In many of the track 2 talks people were sitting or standing at the side/back of the room. Nobody should have to sit on the floor for a £350 per day event.
3. In some ways they went for style over substance.
4. A small bugbear, but the food wasn’t as good as described by the organisers (except the bread and butter pudding, that was delicious).

For me personally Future of Web Apps isn’t worth the money you pay. Although I’d hazard a guess people see this differently depending on your set-up - if you’re coming from a company or startup that has paid for you then how much it costs probably isn’t an issue. I own my company so think a lot about where costs are going and on this occasion felt it should have been lower. I’d really like to see teams and startups of 5 or less given discounts to attend (something I emailed Ryan Carson about). Other than that, if they can make next years event absolutely flawless, with most talks excellent, then maybe it’ll be worth the money.

TwileShare now has a snazzy looking holding page that is starting to show how the site will take shape once we launch. It’s a Twitter app so we have the obligatory design elements. Bird in the logo? Check. Big fonts and buttons? Check. Funky background? Check. Ryan has done a brilliant job and is currently working on the the app design. So, to find out when you can start sharing files on Twitter leave your email address. And if you blog about TwileShare we’ll even send you an invitation first.

Two days into a new working home
Inspired into crafting a miniature tome,
About pleasures of being surrounded by peers
Feeling already I’d been here for years.

From @chuckiebaker on the door to @mikebutcher starry-eyed
With @evarley diligently dashing and dignified,
Super fast broadband to upload with glee
And plentiful supplies of coffee and tea.

Dreamers and makers all plying their trade
Proud of the beautiful apps they have made,
Yes, I think I’ll be happy in this little club
So come join the family they call TechHub.

Since the app is being built on Twitter’s open API and uses various pieces of open source technology along the way, I thought I’d share our latest logo concepts (lucky you). We’ve settled on a particular type face and Ryan has been playing with a range of colour schemes. This being a Twitter app, the logo of course features a chirpy looking bird.

A holding page (with email sign up) is coming soon but let me know if you want to be a first-time beta tester before we launch to the masses.

Support Details is precisely that tool. Simply send your client (or the person you’d like settings for) a link to the website and their set up details will be handily displayed, which you could discuss over the phone, get them to send by email or export in CSV and PDF formats. The following pieces of operating system and browser data are available:

• Operating system name and version
• Screen resolution
• Web browser
• Browser window size
• IP address
• Colour depth
• Whether JavaScript is enabled
• Flash player version number
• Whether cookies are enabled

All in all a valuable asset for web designers and developers. It’s one of those tools I wish I’d thought of myself so hats off to Imulus who are responsible for it.

Update: You can get a 15% discount on FOWA tickets with the following code - 15DISC.

Recently I made a promise to myself that I would start attending more events once again. When I first started my own business (just over 3 years ago) I regularly attended popular meetups like Open Coffee, Internet Peeps dinners and others. They were a great way of meeting tech peers and getting new business, particularly for start-ups. Once you’re more established and picking up clients regularly it’s easy to fall into the routine of working hard and not getting out enough. I made the decision a few weeks ago and at my first event in a while met someone from a very large publishing group who we’re now in talks with for various opportunities, which goes to show how valuable these meetups can be.

I started talking about this with other developers and entrepreneurs and the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) came up as the next big one to attend. Almost at the same time all of the group mentioned the price as a substantial stumbling block; unless you’re a student, the cheapest ticket cost to attend the conference is a whopping £351.33. And that’s just for one day, with no workshops (which probably hold the most value). There is a great line up of speakers but that’s a reasonable amount of money, particularly for small teams, single developers or boot strapped companies.

So I thought I’d contact Ryan Carson (of Carsonified fame and FOWA founder) to find out what he thought. As you might expect, I got a couple of very nice and honest replies:

Thanks for the honest feedback. I appreciate it.

Have you considered a 1-Day pass as an alternative?

Can you please let me know what you believe *would* make it worth the cost?

As it happens, the 1-Day pass is something I had considered since it would mean not taking much time off from client work and keep the cost at the lower end of the scale. I also had a few ideas about what would make the cost worthwhile and suggested these to Ryan:

• A slight price reduction for teams of 5 or less (or similar).
• A deal on attending single workshops for conference pass holders.
• Providing videos free of charge for conference pass holders (so they can see the track talks they can’t attend). Note: This is already part of the deal when you pay for a ticket, although it’s not clear on the FOWA website.

These suggestions went down well and, who knows, feedback like this might result in a change. I’d particularly like to see deals for smaller teams who are boot strapping their start-up, although I appreciate that might be difficult to police. If nothing changes it’s good to see genuine feedback taken seriously. As a result, it’s likely I will attend FOWA. I’ll let you know if it’s worth the money…

1. First of all, and this is important, plug in your O2 mobile broadband USB stick.
2. On your Mac, go to System Preferences > Network.
3. Click the + (Create a new service) symbol.
4. Select HUAWEI mobile from the drop down.
5. Enter *99# in the Telephone Number field, leaving Account Name and Password empty.
6. Click Advanced then choose Generic for the Vendor and GPRS (GSM/3G) for the Model. In the APN field enter mobile.o2.co.uk.
7. Click OK.
8. Select Show modem status in menu bar if you’d like to be able to connect easily from the top Mac menu (I find this useful).
9. Lastly, remember to click Apply before leaving the System Preferences screen.

Happy mobile browsing.

This is the Ford Start Concept car recently unveiled at the Beijing Motor Show. Beautiful.

If you’re anything like me and do web development for different sized companies, from small businesses to bigger brands, you sometimes have to live with the hosting choice of the client. If you can avoid it though, I would strongly suggest not using 1and1 - their offering is outdated and support has been widely criticised. There are much better options out there for not much more money such as Bytemark’s virtual machines or The Rackspace Cloud.

So, here’s how to add the Facebook Like button to your Wordpress blog:

That’s it. Well, almost. You need to drop this code into your Wordpress post template (generally single.php) or sidebar.php. The get_permalink tag tells Wordpress to add the current post URL to the Like button.

There are various ways you can customise the button and there’s also a JavaScript version for deeper integration.