Future Of Web Apps London 2008 - Day Two

Day Two of FOWA kicked off with Tim Bray from Sun offering many words of wisdom to developers. With the looming financial crisis on everyone's minds, Tim stressed the importance for developers to remain flexible and not limit themselves to a single platform or language. Also during these tough times, your online presence and business networks will be more important than ever. Here is a video of his excellent talk.
Following Tim's great talk, Adam Gross from Salesforce gave a quick demo on using cloud computing in the enterprise.

The late morning sessions, I followed the Developer Track listening to Chris Messina from Vidoop talk about importance of OAuth, then Bret Taylor from FriendFeed talk about the importance of your online presence.

After lunch, Jason Calacanis from Mahalo and Tom Nixon from Nixon McInnes discussed whether a startup can have a work / life balance. Tom believes that startups can have a four-day-work-week and still be successful, while Jason argued its better to bust your ass for three years and retire a millionaire. Jason also gave a pretty compelling argument on firing the average.

Cloud computing was definitely the buzz word at the conference. Tony Lucas from XCalibre and Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Services talked about the important aspects of cloud computing. Platforms like S3 can offer alot of advantages to startups; high reliability, low startup cost, scale down or up as you need, however it's critical that you maintain data portability and don't lock yourself into a single provider.

In a fireside-style interview, Ryan Carson chatted with Mark Zuckerberg about the success and future of Facebook. I personally, was very impressed with Mark, even after all the success of Facebook, still remains down to earth and carries a clear vision of Facebook's future; to allow people to easily share their information.
Thanks to the good people at Carsonified, the videos from each talk have been posted online. Can't wait until FOMA!