Andy Mitchell

I can personally declare FOWA 2007 a success, if not for the content then for the networking potential.
I’ll say from the outset that is because of the environment and the mixture of people who attended, for which Ryan Carson is owed a thumbs up. It is not the more gimmicky attempts like the ‘networking basement’, the business card hunt and the ‘i need/i have’ stickers.
For us, networking simply needs a good mixture of folk, clear indication of what they do (developer, marketeer, entrepreneur), common topics (the presentations) and… the magic ingredient… beer. I’d also add that some of the best networking moments were to be had when I was not in a presentation (and others were); simply because those of us who had skipped it could have a far more relaxed conversation, without the hustle & the bustle of everyone being there.
On that topic - beer - I’m interested in the logic of encouraging everyone to go a long way across town to the Collection - an immensely pretentious club with the classic hallmarks of extortionate drinks and hostile waiters (not to mention rich old men and young young girls…).

So what presentations worked?
(have linked to slides where avaiable)

• Tara Hunt
  A delightful discussion of community and how to encourage it.
• The Last.FM boys
  This is what a presentation should do; not educate; but inspire your own ideas. Their passion, and their attention to the data led directly to new ideas for Meecard.
• Zimki
  An interesting product that allows complete interactive sites to be built easily in Javascript. The coolest parts of this product were the fact they were open sourcing the client (”we want 20% of a big market, not 100% of a small one”); and their ‘electricity grid’ metaphor. Rather than just Zimki hosting a site; you can host Zimki sites too (using the open source software); and thus you can earn money when you have excess capacity; or rely on other people’s bandwidth/CPU when you have high demand.
• Index Ventures
  Very insightful comments from a VC. It was a boon for Index, who are now no doubt first on every entrepreneur’s ‘to call’ list; while at the same time giving a very honest insight into what they offer, the benefits, the pitfalls and the reasons.
• Soocial
  10/10 for presentation. With a 10 minute slot, the crowd was completely won over by this high energy and funny performance.
• Moo
  This is just such a cool company. Again, very inspiring; and some great points. The one that really struck was ‘less is more’. That is, they wanted all their users to feel like designers; so they reduced the functionality to the point where users simply could not make an ugly business card.

Off the platform, I really liked,

• MediaStores
  These guys are opening up the sale of books and more for bloggers; only with a very good commission. I like the focus of their offering (just bloggers); and the passion they seem to have for what they’re doing.
• Segala
  Close to my heart, this is a business dedicated to both trust, the Semantic Web and Firefox extensions. Thank god someone is doing something practical in this space. In a nutshell, they are providing certificates on a given website in various areas (suitability for an age group, accessibility, and the accuracy of their ‘expert’ content); only they are doing it by hijacking existing search engines (e.g. to say ‘this search result is valid’), and thus it is very practical.
• MagPie
  A business with 2 years of research; and very valid reason to exist and few competitors, it’s hard not to love Magpie. Simply, they find when a brand is mentioned on the Web, and automatically try to infer if its a positive response or negative. A great market need given the fact news is no longer made by large, easily followed news outlets; but by millions of small individual bloggers; all with their own opinions. This information will be very useful to brand managers when suitably aggregated.

Oh, and the evening was followed up with Ian Forrester’s dinner, in celebration of Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. This, for me, was a vast improvement over last time; simply on the strength of a much cosier venue. Big plaudits to Tom Morris, for his new venture getsemantic.com. The best part, his bastardisation of the “long tail” buzz… Microformats are the fat (common) parts of the tail; where as the Semantic Web is the thin end of the tail - for the many small cases where you need the additional flexibility RDF gives you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Chasing Cats.