Category : conference sessions

The new wave of sophisticated, community and/or location aware, mobile services, have the potential to radically alter the mobile marketing landscape: providing more targeted and more relevant mobile marketing, as well as expanding the number and type of advertisers.

This panel will discuss the potentials and pitfalls of this new environment for consumers, carriers, agencies and brands.

Speakers :
-- Simon Davis
-- Marko Ahtisaari
-- Helen Keegan
-- Justin Davies

Google's commercial success is based on the idea of identifying a variety of factors, from text analysis to human interest, and use them as variables in a giant mathematical equation that generates billions of revenue, widely known as AdSense. But how would a traditional corporation look like when it'd work like AdSense? Will we offshore intelligence to machines? What are the opportunities and threats? What happens when the whole world, from culture to politics become financial markets driven by algorithms?

A joint state-of-the-art review of a new breed of businesses relying on mathematical models, potential scenarios how this approach will become mainstream and what this might mean to you and your business.

Speakers :
-- Dirk Baecker
-- Tom Fuerstner
-- Jean-Paul Schmetz
-- Sean Park

E-commerce vendors used to try to control the customer and their shopping experience. Now, consumers are rapid acquiring new ways of searching, discovering and purchasing new items, both consciously and subconsciously. The vendor has lost control, the customer is in control, no longer the passive target, but the active discoverer of your company, and, of course, of your competitors.

While consumers used to search for products manufacturers’ sites or Amazon.com, search engines have become the starting point, exposing the user to a plethora of opinions, reviews, ads and recommendations for alternative products.

Many points along the trajectory of creating and refining product space awareness influence the eventual purchase. As increasingly more individuals express their interests on the web readily to their friends and to people with similar interests, a more serendipitous trend of discovering new items through social recommendations has emerged.

This trend can be observed in several places. In social networks such as Facebook, people see what items their friends have purchased or are interested in, and in specialized social shopping sites such as ThisNext.

The important underlying trend is that very little of the search and discovery process happens on the actual e-commerce site. It is no longer about customer acquisition and capture! Moving onto the perspective of running an e-commerce operation, many of the technologies required to power e-commerce operations (content management, payment, A/B testing, CRM, bandwidth, storage etc) are being commoditized and today readily available as services.

Companies now need to focus on their data strategy: What data should be published on the site itself to create a better user experience and enhance the success of the store? Should it be revealed that there are only two seats left on a flight at a certain price? And how can technologies such as AJAX help both the business and the shopper?

With the rapid uptake of social media, the notion of the standalone sites has been disappearing. E-commerce sites now have the potential of being represented across the web. Data strategies now include widgets to replicate the company’s presence on blogs and profiles of individuals. What APIs should companies create that encourage third party developers to create applications that will benefit both developers and customers, and thus also the company?

What does it mean for e-commerce to become “social media friendly”?

Speakers :
-- Andreas Weigend
-- Mehrdad Piroozram

Modern web developers have a broad range of delivery platforms to choose from. Gone are the days when servers, racks, and cooling were the only option.

Today's web platforms can be completely virtualized, using third-party infrastructure and robust services; or they can run client-side in browsers with only minimal hardware at the core. And they can run in a wiring closet, or out of a drop-ship container.

This session looks at the advantages and shortcomings of web platforms, from turnkey services and virtual appliances to storage containers and old-school racks.

Speakers :
-- Werner Vogels
-- Philipp Huber
-- Mike Tobin

The idea of building communities around products and brands is not new, but the rise of social networks and the advent of Web 2.0 have changed your customers' expectations of online communities.

At the same time, marketers have new tools for building connections not only with the brand but also among members of the community, and for fostering and engaging in the market conversation.

What are the key success factors in developing and cultivating communities? What tools are available? How can marketers understand brand management in the context of active online communities?

Speakers :
-- Konstantin Sixt
-- Bjoern Negelmann
-- Christian Clawien
-- Nils Andres

The geonames.org geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 6.5 million unique features whereof 2.2 million populated places and 1.8 million alternate names.

It's developed mainly by speaker Marc Wick, Geonames is integrating geographical data such as names of places in various languages, elevation, population and others from over <a href="www.geonames.org—data-sources.html"> thirty-five sources</a>.

The data comes in different data formats : flat csv files, gml files, proprietary xml files, excel, esri shape files, binary files, even ms access dumps.

Learn how he handles this data with his LAMP software stack: linux, apache, tomcat, java, lucene, postgres/postgis. He'll also touch on his liberal Creative Commons licensing.

As Sir Tim Berners-Lee said, "This is a tremendous set of data you have there." Come learn how Marc did it.

America created laws that protected firms that were in the selling-information business even as the rapid spread of IT made it easier and easier to copy anything represented as zeros and ones. It's a bad bet, something like betting on the blacksmiths to beat the automobiles.

Now Europe is following America's lead with a series of legislative and normative initiatives that criminalize entire sectors of the IT industry, reducing the Union's competitiveness just as China is ramping up to swallow the world's entire manufacturing and service industry.

Europe doesn't need to do this - it has already turned its back on software patents and can go further, by refusing to let America's ailing entertainment industries drive its continental policy.

In current generation of makers and consumers, the attitudes and trends we see in Web 2.0 aren't limited to the online space.

Using projects by Schulze & Webb and others, I'll show how ideas such as community, connectedness and creativity can manifest in physical products - particularly in the area of consumer electronics - and how they form a design approach applicable off the Web and on it.

Rich user interfaces and a satisfactory user experience are fundamental factors of Rich Internet Applications. Improved productivity, more effective work, time and cost reduction in the field of both operations and applications development are an important plus which deserves to be higlited when evaluating the suitability of tecnologies for applications projects.

New development approaches have recently come to market : Flex, AIR, Flash, XUL, OpenLazlo, Silverlight, WPF, JavaFX. There are so many different technologies that it’s easy to lose focus and misjudge goals when choosing a RIA platform.

How to choose the best technology? What are their advantages? Which one is going to get the widest adoption? What can you do with them? This session guides you through the ecosystem of RIA's technologies, analyzing and comparing the benefits, features and disadvantages of each approach. Make the final RIA choice for your web applications.

After three years of research and development on a distributed storage system, we are ready to unveil the result: Wuala (http://wua.la).

Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. Unlike traditional online storage systems, Wuala is decentralized and can harness idle resources of participating computers to build a large, secure, and reliable online storage. This enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free.

About a month ago, we launched the first closed alpha, which has been a big success. We've hit the press with some great reviews and now thousands of people are signing up on our website.

In this technical talk, I will take a look behind the scenes by showing you how Wuala works and what challenges we had to overcome, including reliability, fairness, incentives, and routing.

For some time now browser evolution has been slow and fraught with politics.

In recent years the only innovation there has been has come from the Ajax community, in the form of exciting libraries and frameworks that allow programmers to push the browser to the limit.

But this has in turn created two further problems; first, these initiatives are not standardised, and consequently they don't take advantage of the native platform in a way that compiled code can.

In this session Mark Birbeck explains a two-pronged approach to addressing this problem. On the one hand small and focused standards need to be created for new APIs that will be useful in many different kinds of application.

But in parallel, a new kind of library needs to be developed that will take advantage of native implementations of these standard APIs when they are available, but will fall back to Ajax implementations as necessary.

This opens up many exciting possibilities for internet-facing that run on both the web and the desktop.

Your users are trusting you with their data. What is your responsibility to them, what are you allowed to do with their data, and what can be done to make them feel secure with your application.

New Europe is not only Eastern European countries who joined EU (recently Bulgaria and Romania) but the term comprises the emerging part of Europe increasingly gravitating towards the West which includes former Yugoslav countries (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro), Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova..with a total population of nearly 200m.

It is a very vibrant and dynamic economic and social environment; after years of political and cultural hegemony, the new generation is starving for freedom to create and decide on the future on their own.

Hence, opposite to Western Europe, New Europe is producing world-class engineers and innovators, especially in high-tech and internet. Skype (Estonia), LogMeIn (Hungary), and many others...The iPhone first-ever hack considered mission impossible was done by a Macedonian.

And now New Europe is experiencing strong growth, especially in media and IT: - massive growth in internet penetration in general and broadband in particular; many countries are leapfrogging to state-of-the-art infrastructure (i.e. Macedonia might become the 1st WiMax 100% covered country in the world, the world's first national wireless broadband network.

The Macedonia Connects Project, a program designed to provide the entire country with affordable high-speed wireless connectivity) - strong economic growth as GDP per capita levels tend to EU norms; - increasing advertising spend in these markets as disposable incomes increase; and - a wholesale shift in the structure of the advertising market as advertisers move from traditional media to online media. This panel will examine the climate and opportunities of this market.

There is a commonly held belief that Agile Methods and User Centred Design do not play nicely together. On the contrary, Agile and UCD have much to offer each other. Each can learn and benefit from the other, and work together as a robust design and development methodology.

Including an introduction to the principles and practices of Agile Methodologies, this presentation explores the opportunities for UCD in an Agile environment, how designers can shape Agile to better support their work, and what designers can learn from Agile methods.