Tag Archives: fowamiami08

Miami Days 4 and 5..

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Yesterday (Saturday) was good fun – it started as it so often does with a hangover but after breakfast at the massive but average Jerrys Deli (I gave the FOWA table a miss as it was rammed) I was feeling much better and spent a productive morning doing nothing at the beach.  A good amount of time was spent watching beach volleyball – which they a) take very seriously and b) are very good at here – like so much of South Beach though you get the impression alot of it is about being seen!

Anyway it was a good morning and after a bit of a power nap I headed off to the FOWA beach party at Nikki Beach – now a quick word about the venue: its like the set of a porno movie or at least a very sexy Nip/Tuck episode with shimmering tanned, hardbodies everywhere – what they thought of this massive geek invasion is anyones guess!

The party was alot of fun – chatted to a few of the Carsonified team and was again impressed by them – I think its cool that this little Westcountry company has this kind of US following – met and chatted to a few other folk and was amazed not only by bright they all were but by just how much they live this stuff – it really is on a different level and probably why so many start-ups are in the US.  To be honest, hand on heart, I felt a little bit of a fraud in this crowd as much as I love the (social) web and all that it stands for (and the fact its opened up a good living for me!) I’m just not in the same league as alot of these people and I wish them all luck in their various projects.

I sloped off after 4 or 5 hours as I was starving and hadn’t grabbed any BBQ when it was available (eatings cheating!) so I went to a steak house and ended up drinking with a couple from Virginia and some other guys and watching College basketball..was far too drunk by the end though and struggled to get back to room and to sleep!

Miami seems crazy today – the heat and the brightness have stepped up a level – and so have the crowds.  I spent a couple of hours wandering around and drinking fresh lemonade (lovely) but the ‘look at me’ culture is pretty full on today and its a little draining..I’m going to take a couple of hours off and head back out when its cooled down a bit for an early evening walk along the beach and grab some food but I think tonight will be taking advantage of this amazing room (including I found out this morning a Nintendo Wii that I can borrow anytime from the front desk!)

11th Street Diner and beyond..

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So I decided not to attend the Scrapblog party at Nikki Beach as it didn’t really seem to be my kind of place and my bodyclock seems determined to stick to GMT so it seemed one step too far.  So off I toddled to the amazing looking 11th Street Diner (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=diner+miami&m=text) for a few (4) Key West lagers (which was surprisingly good) and some Southern Fried Chicken (nice..) Sweet Potato fries (great) and coleslaw (freakin’ amazing!) and then weirdly a big group of the speakers from the conference showed up and sat behind me. Tantek Celik, Brian Oberkirch, Matt Mullenwag, Leah Culver, Joseph Smarr and others I think but being British I didn’t interupt or be obviously earwigging so can’t be sure.  Apart from the fact the fact only one of them had a beer and only Leah had real food they were seemed normal enough!  Though they really do live this stuff.  It looked like a few people might have been Twitter stalking as a few people from FOWA started to show up so I paid up and moved on.

As is so often the case I reverted to type and ended up in the Playwright Irish bar watching sports, chatting to the staff and getting quietly drunk – the place has a nice vibe and the dodgy covers band was kinda fun.  So I managed to get back in one piece – had a decent nights sleep and so am out and about again today.

FOWA Miami 2008

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The inspiration for this little trip to Miami was actually an email from Carsonified around Christmas some time.  I had missed the FOWA London in October due to work pressures but was still firmly in the grip of their distribution list and anyway I’d followed the previous FOWAs online and thought they looked interesting (plus I try to follow the Carsonified crew online anyway – I think its an interesting mix they have there).  Anyway an email advertising an ‘early-bird’ special of only $145 for a conference in Miami!  Now 145 bucks is like 75 quid and I spend that on a Friday night out sometimes so I was intrigued enough to see if I could build a few days holiday around it…anyway after a bit of time on Expedia I booked 6 days in sunny (ish) Miami including one day of conference going and 5 of people watching, beach sitting and mojito drinking!

Anyway yesterday was the event and I dragged my slightly sunburnt body to a taxi at 7.45 and headed for the venue.

General Impressions:

The venue was stunning – really nice space with what seemed like decent tech and lobby support (though I did see a tweet from Mel Kirk the Event Manager from Carsonified that suggested she had ended up doing alot of the running around herself)

Never seen soooooo many Macs in one place before – they must of outnumbered Windows machines about 5 to 1

Very techy crowd – the badges were colour coded so it was easy to tell who was what – though alot of people had ‘founder’ badges and the ‘Investor’ badges guaranteed a crowd at all times!

Its all about the money!  For all the very nice talks about openness, standards, community and the like the overwhelming topic of conversation was how to make money

Everyone is so young!

OK more specifics now though I am only going to stick to my highlights…will link to wider coverage.

Tantek Celik and Brian Oberkirch opened the conference – they were chairing the day and had helped put the programme together – they did a great job of making everything hang together over the day and should be congratulated for that.  One of themain themes for the day was the idea of openess (open is the new black..or is it pink?) which is obviously something I can get behind.

The keynote speaker (though if everyone is a plenary and has the same time how is it a keynote?) was from Kathy Sierra.  Kathy gave a talk on Cognitive Seduction and I’ll be honest it blew me away!  I’m not going to try and cover the actual talk here as its covered better elsewhere but it was the first time I can honestly say a conference keynote has inspired me – and if I’m honest I didn’t even understand half of it! Really brilliant and makes me want to revisit alot of my thinking about stuff.

I was really looking forward to the Matt Mullenwag talk but I think I came to the wrong one really.  He gave a talk on Scaling – which started looking at the architecture which was snoozeville for me (but I’m sure useful to 99% of the audience) and then he skimmed over scaling Community (what I would have really been interested in!) spoke about Scaling the Business and then Scaling people – the interesting stuff here was how WordPress serves ads which was very clever and also how similar Matts attitude to recruitment is to mine!

I struggled with the next few sessions really – the Future of Social Networks was interesting but not anything i didn’t really know – this kind of standards based development, open access content, ownership of data is pretty standard fodder in the corner of the blogosphere I lay my hat!

Blaine Cook from Twitter is obviously a gifted developer with alot of commitment and imagination but he is no public speaker – also Twitter crashing while he was on stage was a priceless moment (though not for him)!

Unfortunately I missed most of Leah Culvers speech as by this stage I was starving and had to sneak out for food.  She has an impressive confidence though and really controls the stage and is obviously very bright (and again – young!)

I’m not really sure what the point in the Build a Web app in 40 minutes session was about – but they looked natty in their hats and it was one hell of a panel – still it was mainly just a bit of fun rather than anything useful.

I missed the ‘Next Great Startup’ on purpose as VC talk in of little interest to me but missed the Emily Boyd talk by accident which I really regret and I’ll have to dig up coverage of her talk.

The last 2 sessions I attended were both by ex-pat Brits and were both a little over my head but very skillfully done.  Kevin Marks from Google talked about the Social Clowd and especially the Social Graph API and OpenSocial – I am starting to get my head aound the importance of the Social Graph stuff but still find OpenSocial a waste of mind-space.

Next was Cal Henderson from Flickr/Yahoo via the UK.  I have no idea what he was talking about really but it was one of the most entertaining talks I’ve ever seen.  His slides were fun and he completely controlled the stage – fair play.

I missed the Winelibrary.tv talk/taping as I needed a beer and to be honest Gary Vaynerchuck was a bit full-on for me so that was that.

All-in-all it was well worth going – the Kathy Sierra talk was worth the admission alone and it was a well done, reasonably slick set up that has given me ideas for my own event which is good.

Laura Dewis from the OU is here and live blogged the morning til her laptop died and her notes are here http://conclave.open.ac.uk/openair/

More coverage is available at Google Blog Search.