Tag : nov 6th

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

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

Today's successful corporate communications and PR efforts are moving faster and faster towards the Web 2.0 channels of the day. Even some of the largest companies are using blogs, podcasts, videos - even Twitter and Jaiku - to reach customers, employees, and shareholders.

Many of these efforts have had excellent results, others not so much. How does PR and corporate communications operate today, in a world full of direct communication with customers via web sites, email, blogs, and video?

In order to use update your corporate communications plan, you need to consider corporate blogging practices that fit your company and situation, understand the variety of channel and tools available, and learn to blend the old with the new.

Through a variety of corporate case studies, find out how businesses can use blogs and other forms of online communication to reach out and inform their customers, connect with their employees and their community, and create conversations and relationships that last.

Increasingly, turning the high-value content and functionality of a web site into user distributable web parts that can be hosted anywhere else on the web is becoming a key adoption strategy for Web 2.0 applications.

These informal web parts, often known as badges, widgets, and gadgets are gaining popularity as the Do-In-Yourself phenomenon grows on the Web, where everyday users can copy and paste their favorite pieces of the Web into their own blogs, "spaces," and web sites to bring together the content and functionality they care about.

When built correctly, these portable visual elements can spread virally and sites like YouTube have taken their video badge nearly to an art form when it comes to having tens of millions of users helping broaden their distribution and enable network effects.

This session explores the state-of-the-art in badges and widgets, what the industry leaders are doing, the different ways they can be built including key design characteristics for mass distribution and uptake.

Attendees should have a basic understanding web protocols and standards to get the most from this session.

It's been several years since web standards were championed by designers and developers alike. But even now, the majority of web sites and web services aren't standards-compliant or fully accessible.

If you want your content or services searched and consumed by millions of web and mobile users, designing and developing with standards isn't an option - it's a necessity.

Learn how to implement standards across browsers, platforms and devices, and hear from experts on how semantics help web sites, search engines, and ultimately, people.

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.

Huge sets of data are generated every day by people using online applications, whether they're blogging, shopping, or just clicking on links. Many techniques for analyzing and interpreting these datasets exist in the fields of data-mining and machine learning, making it possible to use this data to draw new conclusions and build predictive models.

This talk will use this idea to explore some analyses of how bloggers and buyers cluster together, what message boards tell us about psychographics, predictive models for hotness and home prices, and other insights that can be gleaned from publicly available data.

I'll show you the way the data was collected, an overview of how the algorithm works, and some results.

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.

Analysts tell us that the market for in-game and virtual world advertising is expected to grow by a factor of ten in the next five years. But this is still a new frontier and marketers are confused about what's required to reach audiences in these worlds and what they can expect from investing in this area.

We'll look at the most common and the most creative approaches to reaching these cyber-citizens, highlight common pitfalls, and discuss how to measure the effectiveness of these programs.

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.

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.

You build your application, hopeful to gain a large audience. You follow other peoples advice on how to make it run fast, but do you know how to keep it running fast; or keep it running at all.

Covering monitoring, performance analysis, EC2 & S3 and disaster recover it tries to show you how to lay the proper foundation, while still being small and nimble, so that when you grow large you can continue to run.