Category : conference sessions

Many enterprises seek knowledge of the design patterns used by successful Web 2.0 companies.

This session starts with Tim O'Reilly's list of Web 2.0 examples and distills the abstract architectural patterns from behind the examples. By using the patterns notation, the core knowledge of the design principles is preserved in a template which can be reused in multiple contexts.

Duane will also show the evolution of the client server model into a 5-tier model based on the consistent concepts of most successful Web 2.0 patterns. The model serves as a useful starting point for anyone either designing business models or technology for Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 model is also used to illustrate a reference architecture.

This abstract set of technology components allows developers to start thinking about the types of technology decisions required for building Web 2.0 projects.

Design patterns for brochureware and editorial sites are well-established. In fact, they’re so simple and formulaic that even waterfall development processes can churn them out.

A producer has an idea, a designer mocks it up in Photoshop and then client-side types and engineers go all agile on its ass. But what happens when you’re pushing into web apps or social media? What happens when an absence of hierarchy makes left-hand navigation redundant? What do you do when design practice blurs into URLs and data structures, and where your service breaks the frame of the browser and start appearing in hardware, in desktop applications or on other people’s sites?

In this session, Tom will talk about new literacies that designers need to build things that are native to a web of data, the blurring and interplay between designers and developers and what it means to rapidly iterate in small multi-disciplinary teams to find the heart and soul of a new concept.

New websites don't exist in a vacuum any more. Users expect integration with the broad platform of Web 2.0.

Taking examples from the Ruby on Rails implementation of Dopplr (the social network for frequent travellers) this talk will show developers how to:
* Import social networks from popular sites like GMail, Twitter and Livejournal
* Integrate with Facebook
* Create and consume people and event data using Microformats
* Use OpenID not just for login but also to aggregate user information from OpenID providers like AIM and Livejournal
* Work with OAuth, the emerging open standard for API authentication

While OpenID is certainly gaining traction around the Web, many questions around security and privacy have been raised.

Additionally with companies like Sun Microsystems shipping OpenID code, the question of how OpenID helps the enterprise becomes increasingly important.

In under two years, OpenID has grown from a thriving grass-roots community to being supported by major companies, service providers, and open source projects.

This session will provide an introduction to OpenID, thoughts on how enterprises can benefit from integrating the technology, as well as a showcase of innovation around security technologies combined with OpenID such as smart cards, browser add-ons, and the like.

Speakers :
-- David Recordon
-- Martin Paljak

Microformats allow you to extend the limited semantics of HTML, thus allowing for a richer web of data. By embedding microformats into HTML it is possible to use the semantic meaning to extract unambiguous data from the web that can then be used in other applications.

Microformats focus on how people are already publishing their data online. This session focuses on the more technical aspects of microformats, how they interact with other Semantic Web technologies such as GRDDL and SPARQL, along with a look at browser plugins to detect microformats and browser integration.

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.

On November 6th, Google launched the OpenSocial API. This API is designed to let application developers create their apps once and have it applied to all social networks.

In this session learn about the new APIs, what they provide access to (profile, storage, and activity), their GData counterparts, and what sites will be accepting them.

The security landscape has changed dramatically in the past 12 months.

Unless you are aware of Intranet Hacking, CSRF, Javascript Highjacking, and the many ways to fool an XSS filter, it's likely that your web application will not be secure.

Attackers used to concentrate on ActiveX, but now Javascript, CSS and even simple HTML elements have are used against websites.

This session will outline the challenges facing the inhabitants of this strange world called 'Web 2.0' and the options for protection, both from the point of view of site owners, and web users.

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.

Given that the web is '95% Typography', why is most typography on the web so poor? For so long now, designers and developers have taken little time to learn the subtlety of good typographic design. But don’t worry, it’s not a black art; you just need to follow a few rules.

This presentation will take you through Five Simple Steps to improve your typography; type anatomy, types of typeface, choosing typefaces, size, space and weight, and basic typesetting.

Utility computing takes the ideas of utility energy provision and applies it to the world of IT, so that companies buy computing resources in much the same way that they buy electricity - charged according to metered usage. This market is growing, and will continue to grow in three distinct areas - SaaS, FaaS and HaaS.

It heralds in a new way of operating on the web, benefiting developers by reducing "yak shaving", business by reducing non-strategic costs and it may even benefit Ducks.

This session covers the concepts, economics, technologies, players, benefits and pitfalls as well as the future development of this field. It also explains what this might mean to those who work in IT, how the relationship between IT and Business will change, how new markets should form and why Ducks matter.

The user experience is more critical today with the emergence of Web 2.0 during the past few years. Today wikis, blogs, and widgets are a part of the daily nomenclature in the work environment, but there are many questions around how this Web 2.0 world moves into the Enterprise world.

How do software vendors bring the best features and functionalities to the masses? Are these companies spending their R&D on bringing to market small applications that focus on one task or are they focused on improving their core applications, or is both possible? Do Web 2.0 apps have enough speed, security, and stability for the Fortune 500 CIOs and thousands of employees around the world?

This panel will explore the intersection of the Web and Enterprise 2.0 worlds and discuss what is ready for prime time.

Speakers :
-- Brady Forrest
-- Lee Bryant
-- Sam Lawrence
-- Laurent Gasser

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

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.