February 29th
Matt’s presentation revolved around scalability. Scalability of platforms, business, people and brands. He shared examples from the growth of Wordpress as it evolved from 300K blogs in 2006 to Millions of blogs today.
February 29th
Kathy Sierra spoke about creating passion for users of your app and the need to speak to their brain and not their mind. Ok that sounds really deep but it is a great point. The brain reacts to emotions created by the experience without it the mind will say “WTF. Why do I want to waste my time doing this?”
February 29th
FOWA is being held in the Knight Concert Hall in Miami. House music is playing and seats are starting to fill up. The Carsonified team is busy making sure all last minute preps are in place.
February 29th
So its conference day at FOWA - Future of Web Apps and the Carsonified team led by Ryan Carson from Bath, England.
There is an awesome lineup of speakers including…
Tantek Celik formerly Chief Technologist at Technorati.
Matt Wullenweg from Wordpress.
Blaine Cook from Twitter.
Leah Culver from Pownce.
Kevin Rose from digg.
Kevin Marks from Google.
Cal Henderson from flickr
…and a host of others.
February 28th
No we are not learning to make Mojitos though a few passed my lips while at the Latin American at Bayside in Miami last night.We are sitting in the Knight Conference Hall waiting for Bar Camp to begin. Bar Camp is a free un-conference the day before FOWA Miami. The focus is on innovation and there are about 50 guys (and about half a dozen girls) most of whom have their laptops open…some of which are actually typing or looking at something…the rest just to look the part.The main event is the Future Of Web Apps conference tomorrow but this is just a pre-event.This is the first conference for Big Ahha. Brad and I drove in yesterday. After Checking into our hotel we asked the concierge where to get some dinner and he directed us to the tourist area of Miami called Bayside. Not exactly what we had in mind but we made the most of it. After asking one of the shop keepers where to get a good local dinner and with his recommendation being Chilis or Bubba Gump Shrimp we elected to go with the most latin sounding restaurant nearby. The Latin American. I had Masas Puerco something or other (Fried Pork Chunks) and Brad had Vaca Fritas (fried steak and onions). Mojitos and margaritas rounded out the meal.An after dinner cigar sitting next the bay finished off our trip to Bayside.
Conference is getting ready to start …more updates later.