Good news is that we finally launched our new website for Agile. It took half year. It’s funny how companies own website is always at last place. But its finished now and I got a lot of good reviews.

Another news – I’m now on M50 Platform Program to launch our new framework. I will be posting more news about that later.

Event page is updated again. Click here to see all events for August & September and some for October. There isn’t much happening now, but still some interesting conferences upcoming in September.

Project is still for limited users only. Tweet me if you are interested to try it out.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Now back to what you really want to see :

• 11th Nov 18:00 / Free Business Owner Network / Bewleys hotel, free – meet other businesses and try out your pitch in speed networking
• 11th Nov 19:00 / 10 Min Street Networking / Main Gate of St. Stephen’s Green, free – another great idea of business networking
• 11th Nov 19:45 / Southside B2B Visitors Event / The National Yacht Club, Dun Laoghaire, free – Southside Business Network is a business and professional networking organisation whose primary purpose is to exchange qualified business referrals.
• 13th Nov 19:00 / ISA Annual Awards / Burlington Hotel, 125 EUR – The Irish Software Association is pleased to announce the Annual Software Industry Awards 2009.
• 12th Nov 18:00 / World Usability Day & IQ Studio Launch Party / 34 Clarendon Street (opposite Saba), D2, free – there’ll be wine tasting (or bring your own beer), music, food, shorts and Powerpoint Karaoke!
• 13th Nov 20:00 / Cork pre-BarCamp Girl Geek Dinner / Gourmet Burger Bistro, 8 Bridge Street, 18 EUR – Girl Geek Dinner
• 14th Nov 10:00 / BarCamp Cork / Cork International Airport Hotel, free – people getting together, sharing ideas, learning from each other and finding like-minds.
• 16th Nov 08:00 / SME Links Ireland Breakfast Networking for Childline / Hotel Isaacs (Beresford Place), 10EUR (min donation) – the event will include a number of showcase presentations and offers an opportunity to network with other SME owners and managers while raising much needed funds for Childline
• 17th Nov 08:30 / Synergy Breakfast “Exporting” / Synergy Centre, free – yet another interesting topic you might want to hear about
• 17th Nov 19:00 / Dublin ALT.NET / Seagrass, free – event interesting for developers. This time discussing Open Rasta
• 18th Nov 17:45 / NovaUCD 2009 Campus Company Development Programme Awards Evening / NovaUCD, free – meet companies that has been successful from NovaUCD campus
• 18th Nov 09:00 / Winning International Business with the Web / Radisson BLU Royal Dublin Hotel, price €95/ €65 – how to grow your business internationally, increase your revenues and use the internet to expand into new markets cost effectively.
• 18th Nov 09:15 / Technology in Business Conference / Radisson Blu Hotel, Cork, 95-195 EUR – it@cork annual conference
• 18th Nov 19:00 / Python Ireland Meetup / Scruffy Murphy’s, free – 45 minute to 1 hour talk demonstrating the creation of a straightforward webapp from scratch on App Engine.
• 19th Nov / Golden Spider Awards / Burlington Hotel, from 300 EUR – eircom Golden Spider Awards (recognizing excellence in internet & digital media)
  
• 20th Nov / National Women’s Enterprise Day / Mullingar, 100 EUR – this event offers support to women already in business and those thinking of starting out
• 21st Nov 10:30 / Open Coffee Dublin / Dakota Bar, free – informal event for web / business people to get together and chat about anything and everything.
• 24th Nov 18:30 / Entrepreneurs Only / Mont Clare Hotel, 25 EUR – what do all these enterpreneurs (check out speakers) have in common?
• 26th Nov 09:30 / Virtual Desktop Roadshow / Sun Microsystems, East Point Business Park, seems free – explore the opportunities offered by a virtualised desktop from Sun Microsystems
• 26th Nov 19:00 / Connector – New Businesses / Kobra bar, free – Connector is looking for 10 new businesses to step forward and tell us their story
• 27th – 29th Nov / Xtival / free – XBox Live festival
• 2nd Dec / The iPhone as an Emerging Enterprise Platform / The Alexander Hotel, free – this is a chance for software companies to explore the opportunities presented by mobile applications and Apple’s iPhone in particular.
• 5th Dec 10:00 / GreenHouse Business Camp / O’Reilly building on the Trinity campus, free – event is about sharing information, knowledge & experience

more to come later…

I was very, very surprised that I started to get DM and replies from my followers that everything I did on game was posted on my twitter feed. I was spamming all my followers with posts like :

“@gita_m has just done a job in Drug Deal in #MobsterWorld http://bit.ly/A9N4Yabout 20 hours ago from Mobster World”

And this feed was really, really long… So then I decided not to play this game any more.

Today I received DM from few people saying that this Mobster World is direct messaging all my contacts and asking them to join my Mafia family. I went into MobsterWorld again and there wasn’t anything telling me how can I stop it. Even “Contact Us” lead to the gmail e-mail that got no response.

Finally with help from my twitter fellows (special thanks to @brenstrong @antgalvin) I found that in Settings > Connections tab you can “Revoke” application access to my account. Thanks god its gone for good! Now I should do the same on facebook as I did accepted some gifts from friend of mine there and it might be spamming my friends

So the bottom line:

Please ignore all DM I sent to you and don’t play this game! You gonna loose all your followers.

If you see anyone else “playing” this game then tell them its not worth it.

Synergy Centre holds 1 lunchtime and 1 breakfast seminar every month for startups and SMEs. We were invited to talk about SaaS applications on 10th of August.

Here is the presentation of saas-lifecycle. Send me mail if you want to know more about:

• how new features kill your applications and why
• why scalability planning is important from the start of the project
• why relaying on existing software / frameworks isn’t always the best solution
• why applications are rewritten every 3-5 years
• how we make web apps the way users like it

You see a lot of pages for conferences every year. Usually they are quite crowed, impossible to navigate through or find things you find. That’s why I love epicenter.ie , which was launched this week by Agile. It has awesome JQuery tricks and nice navigation. You can find everything about conference with just few clicks.

Conference itself takes place in Trinity College at the end of August. Did I mentioned you can get free book and discounts if you buy tickets for 3 days? All Java, Microsoft, Web and Open Source guys/girls should definitely visit it.

And if you do end up in this conference, please visit our stand and listen to our presentation. I would love to talk with all my blog readers!

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

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

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