Tag : nov 6th

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Good design is much more than good looks: it translates what your users really need into the product they’ll want to use and love. For many startups however, “design" remains a mystery and an expensive art: they often think that they don’t have the time, money or expertise while they underestimate the impact that good design would have on their product. But going through the process doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated - and good design always starts simple.

This session will cover the essentials of interaction design methods and specific adaptations that have proven successful at several tight-ship startups: how to go from research through defining your users and iterative validation, all the way to launch and continuous improvement - while always keeping it simple, quick and cheap. Your users will love it and your release schedule, too.

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.

As you move from one social network to another, you're forced to re-declare not just your profile, but to find all of your friends all over again. Freely giving away the username and password to your online email address book has become a modus operandi when joining any new online service.

Fortunately open standards and technologies can help to solve this problem. OpenID is already taking root and helping to put control of your identity online back into your hands,

Microformats make it easy to exchange profile information in a standard fashion, and new technologies like OAuth allow for richer integration between services in a more secure and user mediated fashion. Each social network consists of people and relationships, making up a small part of the entire social graph spanning the 6.6B people in the World.

Shouldn't technology help you move your relationships between services as well? With a bit of glue between these standards, this is becoming increasingly possible with many companies and services working to make it a reality.

Make traffic, not money - that seems to be the mantra of many Web 2.0 sites. Yet, as many VC-backed companies start to explore exit opportunities, successful execution of the business model is key.

So how do you translate consumer adoption into hard dollars? Network effects are probably the single most important driver for the remarkable success of Web 2.0 properties...can these be used to fuel the revenue generation engine, and how?

Are the low CPM troubles of social networks a sign that advertising is not the solution? And what kind of content do consumers actually pay for? Where are the trade-offs between the different models?

These and other questions will be answered, along with a look at the current market situation and the future of monetization on the web.

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.

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.

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.

Self-organizing teams, transparency, and leaderless organizations have captured the imagination of the business community, but the paradigm of traditional hierarchy still dominates. What seems to hold us back are the huge unknowns of change: what happens when you restructure around these new principles?

This session describes CoreMedia's adventures in tossing out their organizational chart, redefining roles and teams, and decentralizing decision-making. They have defined personnel and technical management as discrete areas, and all staff members are assigned to one of the three Competence Centers. The directors of these centers give staff regular feedback, foster personal development, manage the career models and also oversee the assignment of staff to projects based on their specialist skills. Projects themselves are offered as "invitations to tender" and in regular "Waterhole meetings" any member of the staff can present an idea to work on. These are just a few examples of the structures of this self-organized company. They've made some bold moves and have real-world results to share with you. But one result upfront - creativity has boosted throughout the company.

The second part of the session is an open discussion with attendees about what has worked in other organizations and the challenges and benefits of evolving and/or revolutionizing your organization. Attendees will receive the results of research on Enterprise 2.0 acceptance, challenges and tools in German companies.

Additional Speaker : Nicole Dufft

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