Tag : nov 8th

The Future of Firefox

Speaker :
-- Tristan Nitot

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apache Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on Lucene, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, advanced caching, index replication, and a web administration interface. Solr is utilized by organizations such as Netflix, United Way, Smithsonian, News.com, Gamespot, Internet Archive, and Digg.

This session will provide an introduction to Solr, showing how these powerful features can be used to increase website findability.

We know that social networks and other participatory sites are new online gathering places for consumers, and that these consumers are highly involved and keen interacting, not just consuming content.

Because of their high traffic and intense involvement, these sites are very interesting for advertisers… but are Web 2.0 consumers receptive to advertising? What kind of impact does a banner insertion have in a social network?

This panel will discuss the effectiveness of advertising on social networks and other user-generated sites, as well as corporate willingness to devote advertising budgets given the various unknowns.

Speakers :
-- Axel Schmiegelow
-- Nate Elliott

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.

Game design has dealt with a lot of the interaction issues that designer-developers are just beginning to face today. Ideas like flow, easter eggs, and feature discovery have been used and refined for years by game designers to achieve some of the same user experiences web designers are pursuing now.

This session looks to games and other related fields for both inspiration and practical strategies for improving web design.

Speakers :
-- Alice Taylor
-- Sampo Karjalainen

After some initial high-profile successes, consumer-generated advertising campaigns have proven more difficult to get right than they seemed. Context, community, and control (or lack thereof) are hard tricky to balance, and it's easy to get burned or simply miss the target. While companies seem eager to tap the creative potential of their customer communities, marketers must understand what works and what to watch out for.

This panel explores case studies demonstrating different approaches to this potentially powerful advertising strategy.

Speakers :
-- Benjamin Long
-- Dieter Rappold

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.

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.

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.

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.