This post is split in different sections. First it’s my review, then there are links to presentations, other bloggers, pictures and even video.

My review of FOWA Dublin

For those who want to see what exactly was happening review #fowadublin on twitter and see what people had been writing.

While a lot of people wasn’t happy with the event, I’m quite glad I got there. I got my ticket to Fowa in courtesy of http://IrishDev.com. Presentations was quite interesting and I met a lot of people interesting people.

Here is my notes from all the presentations. I hope you might find something interesting for you. I didn’t attended last two presentations (as I had to run away), but I heard they were quite impressive. I was unable to spot presentations over the net. Even thought they did promised they will put them out somewhere, I couldn’t find them.

1. “How to sell your web app” by Ryan Carson (organiser of event)

Ryan Carson sold two businesses already and now is building third one. Here is his tips on building business for selling.

• Use balsamiq.com for mockups
• Obsess over numbers (e.g. time user upgrades from free accounts to paid)
• IT projects have around 60-70% profit margin
• Use your own app every day
• Dont plan to get acquired
• Separate Google Analyitics account from company account
• Start the domain transfer early (as it takes months)
• You will have to pay around 30k for lawyers and accountants when selling company
• Do serious tax planning
• When sale takes place, you have to work 100% of your time for about 4+ months to make it successful

2. “Unconventional Web Apps” by Contrast

To be honest I was sure they won’t be able to go through their 200 presentation slides in those 30min, but they really did it and it was awesome, funny and valuable. While it’s kinda hard to put points over their presentation, I could say in general they were talking about how and when break the conventions in web applications. E.g. layout of the home page or signup process. Their ending statement was “Break the rules, question them and have fun.”

3. “Apps for All in a Web 2.0 World” by Robin Christopherson

Really great talk about problems in web applications for those with disabilities.

• Captcha is one of the greatest enemy for blind people. Often even if they have sound version, it is not good enough to understand
• A lot of pages become completely unusable after JavaScript is switched off. So you have to check that before releasing your app.
• Each map should have text version for it. E.g. Google maps have great example.
• A lot of videos auto start. If person opens page like that, he don’t hear text with voice reader any more and can’t stop the video.
• Flickering images is bad for people with Epilepsy
• Videos without any text explenations might be confusing or even scary
• Image alt text is very important and you have to keep it up to date if site changes
• Flash sites are almost unaccessible for people that can’t see
• You have to check navigation by rows and keys (not only mouse)
• See more information at http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/

4. “How to build amazing web apps – Lessons learned from building Twitter.com” by Blaine Cook

Blaine talked mostly about Natural Social Networks and real time updates. His belief is that we are still in stone age for social media networking and it still gonna grow. It’s kinda hard to explain what he was talking about, but he did mention OpenID, OpenSocial, webhooks.org and others. Try to look it up for more info.

5. “The future is Ruby w/o Rails” by Emma Persky

Emma told her about her experience with Rails and w/o them. She believes that every project has to use programming language or framework best suited for that application. Using always Ruby on Rails aren’t the best option.

6. “Yet another web app? Or a successful business?” by Morgan McKeagney, IQ Content

His talk about why few web apps are successful and few aren’t were really impressive. What makes anotomy of success is: product, team&personalities, value, punters, commercial-savvy, local to global. His example was great : there was two groups U2 and The Blades. While second had much better songs, singers and publicity, U2 got global. Why? Because they  had “Vital Financial Breakthrough”. At the end of the day it is always – which one makes more money?

7. “How to build desktop apps that help your web app succeed?” by Matthew Ogle, Last.fm

Matthew told about his experience of building and growing last.fm with using “scrobble” and attention data. He mentioned that it is very important to make application Open Sourced if it is using user data. New software will be launched soon by last.fm – Buffin

8. “Web application horror stories” by Simon Willsison, Freelance

This was my most favorite presentation. We all love to hear how big companies failed on security and how we can improve our own apps not to fail similar.

• XSS – never let inject JavaScript. Don’t let inject HTML or CSS either. (e.g. “sany is my hero” – myspace worm, UTF-7 hole in Google.)
• SQL injection – worst case scenario you can let people do
• CSRF. Protection would be adding the crumb, but you have to protect the crumb by all possibilities. For example, if you have XSS hole, you will have CSRF problems as well. (e.g. Digg allowed to enter script that diggs post. Gmail got filter hacked. ING got funds transfers proceeded.)
• Login CSRF – to avoid it, force user to sign up on trused account
• Clickjacking – new attack with invisible frames (e.g. Flickr had “Don’t click this” worm.). Possible solution would be frame busting, but it will still fail in case of Clicky Game (e.g. how fast you can click on buttons on the game?)
• Do protect Admin access! (e.g. MacRoom life had problems with someone writting that Steve Jobs is dead. Twitter had problems with teenagers hacking admin account.)

Few bad points I was unhappy about

First thing – the wireless was crap. Most of the attendies used either macbooks or iPhones and it was almost impossible to get connection.

Second thing – you had to buy drinks and food. For the price I paid for this event I expected at least get some free drinks or suggestions where to go eat (only sandwitches provided by bar). I heard Contract and IGOpeople both payed €200 for drinks for ppl at the bar. Great to hear that.

ANNOUNCING PRIZE (you can still apply for this)

Announcing IQ prize of €10,000

Slideshows and other info on presentations

Web Security Horror Stories Presentation

Web Security Horror Stories Notes

More info on Sun StartUp Workshop

Notes by Renate Valdes Olmos

How to build webb apps to succeed Notes

Apps for All in the Web 2.0 world Notes

Blog posts about FOWA Dublin

FOWA by Andy (quite unhappy review of the FOWA)

Fuck the Real World by Peter (about one of the last presentations)

Fuck the Real World prsentation review by Thomas Wittek

Unhappy FOWA review by Peter

FOWA Review by Dave Concannon (quite short and very nice review)

John Keys review of all talks

Lessons Learned from FOWA by Kabling

Great speakers, poorly organised by John Breslin

Photos from FOWA Dublin

Flickr FOWA Dublin tag pics

One pic of “Fuck the Real World” speaker

Another pic of “Fuck the Real World” speaker (ppl really loved the presentation)

Paul Seys photos on Flickr

Photo by blurredfocus.co.uk

Paul Seys TwitPic (the one in middle is organiser)

Last.fm presentator on Mobypicture

Fowa crowd on Mobypicture

Movie on after party

The Official FOWA wrap party will be taking place at The

Dandelion Club on March 6th 2009. See youtube

Three forums I found in last few weeks are Business Advice Forum and Irish SEO, Marketing & Webmaster forum and Irelands online bookclub forum

Few useful links for businesses & IT

Free Irish Fax number – great way if you are just starting your business

Updated List of Irish Marketing Comms Blog – if you are doing your own marketing

Few technical people might love U-Buntu Ireland Resources. The mailing list isn’t really spamming me and they have quite a few meetups.

Just something to read

10 Harsh Thruths About Corporation websites

How to become Happy Freelancer

Few out-of-work links

Our friends came over and were searching for best outlet shops in Dublin. While there were few, somebody suggested them to try out Kildare Village. Didn’t know about it before.

Though it’s past the Valentines I’m completely in love with these animated e-cards

I’m absolutely amazed how busy Locle is this year. Less than a year ago Locle won Eircom Labs Web Innovation Competition and ever since you can hear about them just about everywhere.

Their website got launched in two versions in October – eircom.locle.com and www.locle.com . At the end of February as part of OSLO (Open Sharing of Location Objects) alliance Locle appeared in news announcing “an agreement to enable their 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks, which until now has not been possible across different social networks”.

And now they won 10k in HotHouse Program! See photos on my new Pix.ie account

Update few days later:

• Locle application can be bought through iTunes store now
• Eircom Labs are now open for 2009 nominations

Today I decided to start using Technorati more serious. While I have created account like few months ago I wasn’t using it at all. So I decided to go through all the people I’m following on twitter (and most of them are IT persons based in Ireland) and add their blogs to the favorites in technorati. And believe me or not, it didn’t took me a lot of time. However I was surprised that less than half people on twitter has blogs. I rember survey going around about month ago on twitter for all non-bloggers using twitter. And I thought it was nonsense to put it on twitter as everybody probably have blogs…

So why twitter but no blogs?

1) Person don’t use twitter much and don’t care about social media. There is a lot of twitter accounts that haven’t been used for months. I wander – is twitter gonna delete them at some point? Because even if it is only few rows of text, a lot of users like that might take space on their server.

2) Person twitter profile link leads to their company website. I do have problem with that – unless it is companies twitter account, I can’t get more info on person twittering.

3) The blog is hidden somewhere on their website and can’t be found right away. What the point writting blogs if nobody can find them?

After I added all those blogs on the technorati, another problem came up – there is too much of them now! And I still haven’t found button “remove from favorites”.

Reason I started all this is because I’m still newbie to blogging. I love to write. I have always written diaries, short stories and some ideas. But blogging is something more challenging. What would people find interesting? What would make people write comments? Why would they blog about me or put link to me? And how do I get more popularity and traffic to my blog? Kinda challenging, but fun.

The IIA Net Visionary Awards 2009 will be held on Thursday 21st May in the Crowne Plaza, Dublin Northwood, following the IIA National Congress. Awards is always good way of promoting you and your business. I must check out categories (there is 15 of them) and decide whom I should nominate from our clients. We will go for “Web Developer Excellence” this year so don’t forget to vote for us!

Dates for your diary:

23 February 2009 – Nominations Open
27 March 2009 – Nominations Close
9 April 2009 – Judging complete
13 April 2009 – Voting Opens
1 May 2009 – Voting Closes
21 May 2009 – Net Visionary Awards – Winners Announced

I have always problems explaining people what our company does. Not because I don’t know what it does, but because other people isn’t knowledgeable enough to understand the concept. If I say “eBusiness” – people don’t know the term. If I say “business process optimisation” – they think we aren’t IT company. If I say “we do web development”, they usually reply “ah, web design”. Wrong! (Of course we do web design too, but it’s not our main business…)

So I met my mentor last week and he told me that people do not care how I call it – websites are still websites. They want their project done and they don’t care how we build it. And he asked question which made me think – “Which comes first design or development?”.  By logic and all the good concepts I and probably most of you would reply “design”. But is it true in agile development?

I searched a bit over the net and found one really good article about it. And now what I think is that in agile development pilot project comes first. Pilot project is proof of concept that developed idea can work. You can argue that it should have some design anyway, but it’s just something to get ideas from for the finalised design.

Agile development is test-driven. You write tests first and only then code and then design. Have I proved my point? Any ideas about this?

Did I had fun evening? Yep! Would I go to another Twestival if there would be one tomorrow? Definitely. So for lazy persons who didn’t went to the greatest events of all, this post is for you.

What is Twestival? Official statement : on the 12th of February 175+ cities were hosting Twestival bringing together Twitter communities for a charity:water. Non-official statment: go meet with people who you usually chat with, have a drinks, talk and lots of fun.

DubTwestival took place on The Sycamore Club in Temple Bar. It was organised by @qhussain and @aido (maybe someone else too, but haven’t seen them on twitter). One of the topic talks was the open ceiling, which actually was quite cool. Music was awsome – I would loved to do some dancing, but people weren’t drunk enough when I was there. Actually even knowing that beer is for free, I met quite a few who decided not to drink on the night.

I got the coolest picture with @jaimekristene (background put by @JamesLS) and got feedback from @czajkowski and others right away how great pic it is (because everybody uses twitter on twestival). I met quite a few girls from Girl Geek Dinner, people from Open Coffee Dublin meetings, from IBW forum (e.g. @helentreacy), from IIA (@iia and some others) people who started using twitter yesterday and people like gay crusher in toilet who said he will start using it tomorrow. I met also people who was following me, but I never knew they was following me. Nice bunch anyway.

There was amazingly lot of lottery awards. While I was there, they went out 3 times 3 awards and I think there was more after. @maryrose and @debbiemet kept going around and selling lottery tickets. As it was very loud I couldn’t work out the prizes, but I overheard that there was shaving kit, gym memberships, some event tickets and holidays to be won.

I talked with people about everything starting from business with @e_eric, OOSBarCamp with @czajkowski till Nintendo games and travel with people I didn’t know. I didn’t manage to meet @cambellscott (from IGOpeople), @mcawilliams (twitter legend), @martharotter (GGD organiser) and few other persons I really wanted to meet in the short 2.5h I was there. Anyway at the end I lost my voice completely and hearing as well (music was too loud) and there was meeting tomorrow so I had to go.

When I decided to went home finally (it was only 9pm) somebody almost took my scarf to wipe the spilled drink. I run for bus and sat in the wrong one. Realised I’m on the wrong one after a while and had to walk 20min back. Felt like guy on the buss stop was geeky enough and I should try talk with him (I didn’t). No, I wasn’t drunk, just too washed away from reality by the event.

p.s. Can’t get photos out of my iPhone :< So check other ppl photos on DubTwestival website

This is already my 3rd post about twitter. Somehow I feel like Twitter fan now (even if I’m not reading twitter very often).

Today I googled for my company and some other blog that appeared in my Google Analytics, just to see where does the hits came from. And accidentally I found one interesting site – muumoo.jp. While you wouldn’t understand a thing what’s written there (it’s in Japanese), I found that if I write http://tw.muumoo.jp/_twitter name_/friends_web then list of all twitter friends + their links appears on the site. As I wanted to add friends blogs in Technorati, this is great way to see all blogs.

Check out my friends list: http://tw.muumoo.jp/gita_m/friends_web

“The Irish Internet Association (IIA) is the professional body for those conducting business via the internet from Ireland. It has been and remains one of the driving forces behind the adoption of the medium. Established in 1997, the IIA provides leadership to enterprises and society conducting business in Ireland.”

Last year we joined different associations and networking groups but couldn’t meet our target audience through them. I believe IIA is the right choice for us, see post about joining at IIA blog.

Just a few min ago saw @walters post on the twitter: “It was a long circuitous route but I’m now in the T-Shirt business http://sxoop.com/twitter/mosaic.pl“. Check it out. For you, who are completely into twitter, it will be nice way to show off