[feedback20] Last feedback entries tagged with fundamentals

"From a Mobile Telephone to a Computer - a Reality Dysfunction" by Imran Ali

Imran Ali — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 20:53:43 GMT

The mobile phone is becoming more advanced, but should it? This talk is going to take a look at the reality of carrying a personal computer in your pocket.

Some of the trends that will be examined: * Smart vs simple - the buzz of iPhone/N95 vs. huge sales of low end handsets, perhaps it has to with cameras hitting 10MP with flash, auto focus, etc., storage hitting 8GB, GPS, UMTS/GPRS/HSUPA/Wifi and a net result of no battery life
* HMI (human mobile interaction) - as these devices become mobile personal computers the UI is (still) hugely flawed. Sure it can do anything, but only if you have time to click thirteen dialog boxes
* Development Platforms - there is a lot of work going on to provide abstraction layers from the device hardware (DirectX for phones) to allow easier development, at the same time operators are looking to bundle up apps into containers to simplify certification process

Led by Ian Hay and Imran Ali, two well known telephony experts who originally teamed up at Orange.

Speakers :
-- Imran Ali
-- Ian Hay

"OpenID: Emerging from Web 2.0" by David Recordon

David Recordon — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 20:40:01 GMT

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

"Location and Mapping" by Steve Coast

Steve Coast — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 20:34:14 GMT

Location is now fundamental to the dynamics of the web, and there are powerful tools from Google Maps to Wifi Location Based Services available today.

This talk takes a tour over the recent development of the 'where' of the web across techniques and both open and closed technologies.

Google Maps forms a core which many are familiar with but maps and location on the web really go far beyond, from base data to 3D 'spinny globes' such as Microsoft Live Local.

We will cover the major APIs (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) as well as some lesser known but powerful players such as MultiMap and Map24 and how you can use them with simple tools such as Mapstraction, an API to provide common abstraction over various map providers. When on the move, there are a variety of ways to locate yourself including GPS, wifi location and from cell towers and we will go over the tools available to use those.

Aggregating and sharing geodata is an expanding and powerful area including tools such as mapufacture and data formats like GeoRSS (extensions to the common RSS formats) and KML. Geodata itself makes a lot of this machinery tick and has it's own section. Who owns data? What can you do with it? Where can you get it?

We'll cover these topics and cover projects such as OpenStreetMap which aim to free up data and make it more usable to all with clearer licensing. We'll take you through the community aspects of many projects and why it pays to build community by using a few simple techniques and tools. Finally, where's it all going? We'll look at the immediate future of location online and place a few bets on the coming developments.

Speakers :
-- Steve Coast
-- Nick Black

"Building Web 2.0: Next-Generation Data Centers" by Artur Bergman

Artur Bergman — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 18:56:01 GMT

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

"Choosing the final RIA path or Choosing the appropriate RIA Technology" by Marco Casario

Marco Casario — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:27:14 GMT

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.

"Wuala, P2P Online Storage" by Dominik Grolimund

Dominik Grolimund — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:23:29 GMT

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.

"Your User's Privacy" by Stefan Weiss

Stefan Weiss — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:06:29 GMT

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.

"Living in a Multi-lingual World: Internationalization in Web and Desktop Apps" by Lars Trieloff

Lars Trieloff — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:53:50 GMT

Modern web applications pose a special challenge for developers that want to internationalize applications in order to address the European market: In the past, when applications have been a single more or less monolithic block, translation was hard, because all language-specific parts of the program code had be identified, extracted, translated, and merged back into the application, ideally everything on the fly.

With Web 2.0 applications this is not getting easier, as today there is not only one single point of translation, but four:
* the server-side web-application code
* the client-side web-application code, mostly Javascript resources
* the end user documentation on the web site, and
* often additional client programs to provide desktop integration

Additional challenges posed in web applications are:
* how to detect the language of the user * how to deal with graphical text, and
* how to internationalize user-generated content

In this talk, Lars Trieloff uses the example of Mindquarry GO, an open source collaboration software to demonstrate how to unify internationalization of server-side and client-side web applications, how to integrate internationalizable end-user documentation and how the same process can be applied to desktop applications leading again to a single point of translation, which means a lower barrier to translations and more web applications in your mother language.

The second part of the talk covers issues even more specific to web sites that use fine-tuned graphic text design, have visitors of different language preferences and how to enable cross-lingual sharing of user-generated content.

"Web 2.0 Design Patterns, Models and Analysis" by Duane Nickull

Duane Nickull — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:24:46 GMT

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.

"An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The Fast Rise of Viral Web Parts" by Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:07:56 GMT

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.

"Mining Social Data for Fun and Insight" by Toby Segaran

Toby Segaran — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:58:55 GMT

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.

"Opening the Social Graph" by David Recordon

David Recordon — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:52:09 GMT

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.

"We Build Our Tools And They Shape Us: How Lifestreaming Is Shaping Web Culture" by Stowe Boyd

Stowe Boyd — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:43:15 GMT

New applications like Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, and Pownce have rapidly emerged as the leaders in the exploding lifestreaming niche.

This networked form of communication has been compared to talking on a partyline, and the flow of updates, insights, and recommendations is having a big impact on how people perceive web sociality.

What are the long-term impacts of this new medium on media, business, and society?

"What is Web 2.0: The Rules for Creating Successful Online Products" by Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:03:53 GMT

For newcomers and industry veterans alike, this fast-paced, informative workshop takes a deep dive into Web 2.0 with detailed coverage of the specific design patterns and business models driving the next generation of the Web.
To illuminate the discussion along the way, many examples for Web 2.0 are examined and deconstructed.

Designed as a helpful on-ramp to the subject matter and conversations at Web 2.0 Expo, this session provides a "panoramic view" of the concepts, terminology, technologies, and ground rules for building products and services on the Web today.

This workshop will also include at least one hands-on activity to be completed in small groups. Note: This is an accelerated half-day version of Web 2.0 University's Web 2.0 Bootcamp.

"Building Social Applications" by Stowe Boyd

Stowe Boyd — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 12:37:43 GMT

Despite the widespread adoption of social applications (social networking, file sharing, instant messaging, and blogs, to name only the most well-known) creating applications that foster social interaction is hard.

It is altogether too easy to approach application development from an information management mindset and miss the greater social context: people interacting to accomplish personal aims, exploring their identity through social groups, and working in online marketplaces.

It is these three contexts - personal, group, and market - that form three complementary and distinct tiers of social applications. Users may opt to use an application for very personal reasons - signing up for a web filing sharing service to transfer a file to a colleague - but they become consistent users, and invite others to use the application, because of the social dimension: how well does the application support the users’ needs for social integration?

Effective social applications bring people into the foreground by making the social dimension intuitive and natural, and integrating information flow into the social. Information architecture must take a back seat to social architecture.

This workshop explores the principles of successful social applications, and presents a Social Architecture approach to model new - or remodel existing - applications. Examples of well-designed and successful social applications - including Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook, and Upcoming.org - are explored in the search for general characteristics and recurring design motifs. A number of badly designed sites are contrasted with "well-socialized" alternatives.

The workshop includes two group activities to explore the application of the approach in small team settings.