My first ever FlashForward started today. I still feel a bit like the odd man out in the Flash community. Anyway, I got the message: Flash is still cool. But is it anything more? The conference was surprisingly small and I don't believe it was sold out, though I've heard it traditionally does so. The first half of the first day was pretty boring. The opening keynote was missing its subject (Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground), it was incoherent and it didn't have any good point to deliver except for maybe hyping up some cool technologies. The next session was about Flash Fundamentals and Actionscript and oh boy, were they really fundamentals. Really, I don't see the point in teaching basics of Flash in a conference like this. Then again, while I've participated in numerous academic conferences, I've never been in a marketing conference like this, supported by one company for promoting that company and its products. So maybe it's just that my expectations were too high.
Some more ranting: On day one, most of the sessions were duplicated. The problem was that they were way too basic and there were no other choices, and I would believe that most of the audience felt the same way. In the afternoon, the network just went down. One thing I've learned from past conferences is that you want to locate a good spot near a power socket to get your laptop re-charged during day. I did just that during the morning sessions and after lunch I was happily sitting there, waiting for the first afternoon session to start when one organization staff member came by. He said they can't allow anybody to use the power outlet. I asked if he was serious and if this is the case everywhere in the building. He politely said yes, and then taped up the socket. So what do we really get for our money? For six hunder bucks per seat you would expect that you could at least get free electricity. And some food couldn't hurt... Price aside, all is not lost though, as the program for Thursday and Friday look much much better than it did for today.
The highlights of the day: The exhibition hall (EVERY company that is somebody in the Flash business was there); Flash video session and the Steve Ballmer video (now that was funny :) and O'Reilly's very enjoyable presentation that ended the day one.
I posted my raw notes for the day one on the extended entry below in case you are interested.
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Opening keynote Bill Buxton: Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground
Wireless ubiquity x 2, every 4 1/2 months?
- Everything has been techno-centric, but should be humancentric: Think who, how, when
- Check out E-ink (the company)
- It's the society of appliances as much as the society of people
- boring
- check out the laser projector company
Flash fundamentals: the last 10 mins
- Flash quizes, XML api is getting better
- XML is the answer for app interoperability
Flash Actionscript:
- Extended localConnection classes in Central
Video in Flash:
- add queuepoints in video for each slide and label them the same as the slides
- Video drives the playback with queuepoints
Flash for mobile developers:
- interesting
- Flash player in Nokia s60 mobile
O'Reilly session:
- William Gibson: "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
- All the "killer apps" today are running on multiple computers
- The Internet, not the PC, is their platform
- Built on top of open source, but not themselves open source
- Services, not packaged applications
- Exploring how to become platform players via web services APIs
- Data aggregators, not just software
- User contributions key to market dominance
- Microsoft will own map space in 2-3 years because they are the only one figuring out how to make the map service available to other applications
- Apple iToons going to be a billion dollar business
- Like Amazon backend built-in to a hand-held device
- Rendezvous-enabled
- Web services-enabled (CDDB)
- We've only seen the tip of the iceberg
- but no user-provided content in iTunes - "architecture of participation"
- no longer thinking about PC as an island, but an interworking device
- We need a set of best practices - "human interface guidelines" for network-generation applications!
- Network Centric Software = Social Software?
- Listening to Napster: The architecture of participation
- Network navigation metaphors needd
- Who owns the data?
- creating content for everybody driven by selfish needs of individuals
- Amazon sells because it has this architecture of participation
- Barnes & Noble doesn't have this architecture; promotes its own publications
- Orkut cool. But how do you make money with it?
- Orkut went from nothing to 800 most popular sites
- Orkut should provide an addressbook web service
- Netcrat is the trueteller. Apache winning the webserver war
- Data visualization.
- netscan.research.microsoft.com
- Orkut reaching Friendster
- Google AdWord Technology Index
- Greater data visibility is changing how the market works!