Post FOWA 2008

After experiencing FoWA for the second time, I felt it was a bitter sweet conference. The talks were not as compelling as last time around overall but there were plenty of them and a few gems in there. The real suprise for me was Ben Huh. His talk about keeping users interested in your site was fantastic and his interactive choose-your-own-presentation-ending idea was inspired.

There was a lot of “Doom and Gloom” (TM) about the economic downturn alongside people telling you to start your own business and others seeming to be really successful in doing so. Which seemed to me like a slight contradiction in evidence.

Following on from last year another running theme was commoditisation. A couple of talks focussed on the “XaaS” idea including Simon Wardley’s, who did pretty much the same talk as last year but with some very interesting stuff about innovation this time… and less ducks which was a shame. Stefan Fountain was brilliant on this subject too and his energy and passion for his product – Soocial, a contacts storage service, really came across (3 of us signed up for the service in the audience!). We met him in Fox later where he was like a Hasselhoff sticker producing demon but really interesting to talk to.

Diggnation was good, not as much energy as last year, even Kevin and Alex seemed bored with the stories. Digg seriously needs a purge and overhaul in my opinion and Kevin’s conference openning talk pretty much outlined Digg’s plans for doing so, which was not very interesting to hear about really.

On the EXPO floor, Salesforce.com tried to sell us something every 10 minutes and Microsoft gave me a free mouse for being able to scale a circle in WPF. I R 1337. Oh and Surface was fantastic to play with. I can really see it taking off. I wish I’d had a video camera with me!

I’m not sure I’ll go again next year unless I’ve got a start-up by then. Which maybe on the cards but I’m saying no more about that. Not that anybody reads this anyway.

Thanks to Ryan and the Carsonified team for putting so much effort in though and the free journal was inspired!

A lot of the talks are online here if you want to watch, this is great because I can watch the ones I missed!

[Photos by James Simm Licenced under CC Share-Alike Attribution]