Blog - Web design Leeds, Big Red Circle we do web design and web applications

Every year I go to at least one conference (if you don’t I would highly recommend it) often The Future of Web Apps or The Future of Web Design, other conferences are available for the web design industry.

Each year and I come back and  write up my experiences. This is both informative and therapeutic. At BigRedCircle we try and focus on useful content and usability in everything we do and outings to The Future Of Web Aps should be no different.  

So this time the experiences of one man and a conference have been summed up in the infographic below. (Click to Enlarge)

The Rules - how it was rated

Each speaker was given a score out of 20, given at the end of each talk which was split into the following categories: Inspirability, Engagability, Teachability and Wowability. What do you mean ‘they’re not real words’?!?

5 – Inspirability (How inspiring was the speaker)
5 – Engagability (How engaged was the audience with them)
5 – Teachability (Did they teach me anything new)
5 – Wowability (How much did it make me go WOW!)

I also added a bonus ‘self promotion’ score but as this is a web conference and the speakers are generally talking about themselves or their products I decided not add this to the overall score.

Panels or talks with more than two speakers were not added to the results.

Topics covered by the speakers

A Percentage rating was also given for the content of each speaker

% – Web apps (how much of the talk is actually about web apps)
% – Marketing (how much of the talk was about marketing)
% – Development (how much of the talk was about web development)
% – Business (how much of the talk was about business)

Although this information was taken the infographic only displays the % of webapp content. This made the graph a little easier to understand.

This is by no means a scientifically accurate representation, the scores were given by one person and are massively biased so enjoy. If you attended let me know if you agree.

The BigRedCircle has been out expanding the size of its circle, filling it with information about the future. Attending The Future of Web Apps Conference in London hosted by those lovely people over at Carsonified.

When the internet is exploding with blogs, tweets and photos of the conference I was left thinking what could I possibly add to the plethora of FOWA web apps based knowledge.

So, racking my brain for that unique angle that nobody else will think of. I had a moment of clarity. For your blogging pleasure I will give you my top 3 speakers of the conference. This will be a totally biased David McGeorge certified opinion ©. (No cashback or refunds available)

As Pat Sharp once said “Lets hit the charts!”

Down 2 places to number #3 is Kevin Rose with his talk on the future of news

An interesting insight into the way that Digg works and some pretty in-depth explanations of Digg’s new recommendation engine. This guy actually knows what he is talking about, he isn’t just the geek chic Diggnation star that we all know.

Staying put at number #2 is Blaine Cook & Joe Stump with Languages Don’t Scale

Blaine is the ex chief architect at twitter and Joe is the lead architect at Digg. This was an uber geekfeast marathon, each sentence more geekey than the last. Not sure what this says about me but I loved it. These two knew their subject and gave great presentations.

Holding on to that top spot is Francisco Tomalsky with his talk about Building Desktop Caliber Web Apps with Objective-J and Cappuccino. #1

You know when you hear someone who is genuinely enthused by what they do it makes everything seem so much better. If I didn’t know better I would say Fransisco jumps out of bed every day with a massive smile on his face because he is off to work at 280 North. My favourite talk of the conference.

I would also like to give honourable mention to Ben Hun from i can haz cheeze burger for his excellent talk on How to take your community to the next level.

And… one final big massive thanks to the guy on the AbilityNet stand who withstood my uncomfortable and overly extended barrage of accessibility questions. Unfortunatly I never got his card.

FOWA London 2008 – survived it and was inspired by it.