[FOWA 2009]: Let’s go learn some stuff!

Introduction in German before we get started in English:
Vom 30. September bis 2. Oktober werde ich die Future of Web Apps FOWA in London besuchen. Ich werde auf diesem Blog live darüber berichten. Allerdings auf Englisch, da dies auch die Sprache der Konferenz ist und es daher einfacher fällt, auch gleich in dieser Sprache mitzuschreiben. Und Englisch spricht zudem ein grosser Teil des Zielpublikums, das diese Einträge dann hoffentlich in Google finden wird.

Today is the day I’m heading off to FOWA in London. I am looking forward to an interesting event which will hopefully give me some insight in new, undiscovered technologies and some good tips and hints on how to make an online plattform successful.

For all of you who stay at home there is an interesting website which was created for just this event. It’s called HelloApp and let’s you see who is in the audience and who’s talking to whom. I’m curious how this will work out in real life. It obviously seems to generate quite some traffic on my Twitter account which might not be liked by my other followers… Therefore I created a brand new Twitter account just for that reason: sprainFOWA. Smart idea? I don’t know, but we will see.

Anyways, let’s talk about the schedule. On September 30 the workshops will take place. For the morning session I signed up for Building Web Apps Using Atlas – simply because I don’t know what it is and because it comes from the same guys as Cappuccino, which I was fascinated by last year. In the afternoon I’ll go listen to Kick-ass Online Marketing Techniques. Let’s hope they’ll live up to the session’s lofty title…

The schedule of the two conference days on October 1 and 2 contains some goodies, too. I’m curious to hear Kevin Rose, founder of digg.com, talking about Taking your Site from One to One Million Users. He promised to tell us «how to encourage users to tweet about your app». There will be a talk about current online payment trends which can be very interesting – if it’s not too much influenced by the speaker’s opinion (he’s from Paypal). I’m also looking forward to hear about The Future of HMTL5. There’s a lot to tell about, therefore also the warning «The speaker cannot be held responsible for your head exploding.». Let’s hope we’ll get close to that point!

The last day will start off with The Future of Frontend Engineering – Learning from Twitter. There’s definitely a lot to learn from Twitter, looking forward to it! A surprising talk for a web conference is The Future of Print. However, with my background of having worked very closely with a prepress company I’m curious what they’ll have to tell. Then I expect Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! and Practical Advice for Managing the Growth of your Web App to give some very practial real-life ways to apply in a startup.

This is just a glimpse of what will be awaiting me for the next few days. As said, I’ll be blogging along. You can find all the related post right here.