Peeking Into The Future of the Web

Feb 22

Olivier LacanEventsNo Comments

On paper, the first day of Carsonified’s Future of Web Apps con­fer­ence in Miami looked like fore­play to the main con­fer­ence course on Tues­day. The windy grey weather made it a much more inti­mate expe­ri­ence than I would have thought. Strolling around the Nikki Beach Club we (the infor­mal Full Sail del­e­ga­tion) first didn’t find it very easy to break the ice with the many indus­try folks hunt­ing around for under­cooked burg­ers. But after a much needed nap, the atmos­phere had shifted quite a bit and peo­ple were start­ing to break into smaller groups. My cam­era helped me open up a lot of con­ver­sa­tion that started on the beast (a 5D Mark II, yes I’m a lucky bas­tard) and quickly shifted to web talk.

The guys at the Ama­zon booth had setup a Ninja Coder chal­lenge on a white board and were ask­ing peo­ple to solve dif­fer­ent pro­gram­ming prob­lems in the most effi­cient man­ner. At first it seemed like a fun lit­tle game (all geek­ery con­sid­ered) to win lit­tle Ninja action fig­ures and get con­ver­sa­tion started but it ended up (at least for Andrew) into more seri­ous talks of poten­tial jobs at Ama­zon based on the prob­lem solv­ing capa­bil­i­ties peo­ple demon­strated while solv­ing the chal­lenges. I remem­ber hear­ing about Google using sim­i­lar meth­ods (on a dif­fer­ent scale and level of dif­fi­culty) to recruit top engi­neers and com­puter sci­ence majors.

When we came back to the event at around 4PM we had another dis­cus­sion with some of the Ama­zon guys and answered many of their ques­tions on Full Sail University’s Web Design and Devel­op­ment pro­gram. Their inter­ests seemed peeked by the cur­ricu­lum and the unusual sched­ules. We basi­cally did what a Full Sail rep should have done (after all, the con­fer­ence is only 4 hours away) if they had the fore­sight of send­ing some­one. Surely FOWA isn’t close to the scale of SXSW or maybe even An Event Apart but it takes places right here on the school’s doorstep with some big com­pa­nies rep­re­sented (Yahoo, Pay­pal, Ama­zon) as well as smaller stu­dios from Florida who seemed inter­ested by the multi-faceted curriculum.

We (Andrew Smith and I) then talked to Tay­lor Gaw from Arc90 — authors of the great Read­abil­ity book­marklet — a Full Sail alum who now lives in New York city and was also inter­ested in know­ing how the school was evolv­ing and what we were learning.

For a few min­utes we jeal­ously eyed the group sur­round­ing Dan Ben­jamin (Hivel­ogic) who recently cre­ated his own broad­cast­ing net­work at 5by5.tv where he pro­duces a set of high qual­ity pod­casts. Most of them are indus­try related like The Con­ver­sa­tion and The Pipeline where Dan inter­views very inter­est­ing folks like Jef­frey Zeld­man, Ryan Car­son (whose com­pany orga­nizes FOWA among other great events) and Jason Fried from 37Signals (Base­camp). If you aspire to work on the web, for the web or with the web, these should all be house­hold names. It doesn’t mean their word is Gospel, but sim­ply that what they say, think or do mat­ters — and that it should make you think.

And if there needed to be another proof that social net­works play a cru­cial part in this indus­try, Andrew made me real­ize that in the small cir­cle sur­round­ing Ben­jamin, there was another famil­iar face I had dis­cov­ered while becom­ing addicted to Gowalla in Orlando. I intro­duced myself to Gregg Pol­lack as “his arch-nemesis” since he’s invol­un­tar­ily the per­son who made me real­ize how potent the mix of game mechan­ics and geomap­ping in Gowalla was. When I started play­ing in late 2009 it seemed like “check­ing in” where you actu­ally were plan­ning to spend some time was the only way to “play” Gowalla and it was hard then to see the addic­tive poten­tial of the game. Under­stand­ably, most peo­ple go to the same places every­day: home, work, lunch, work and home again with some occa­sional detours here and there. But never any­thing very adven­tur­ous. When I first noticed the num­ber of stamps Pol­lack had col­lected, it helped me real­ized there was another dimen­sion to that game, some­thing that could incen­tivize a crowd enough to have it cre­ate your data­base for you. Indeed Gowalla doesn’t ask busi­ness and loca­tions to cre­ate their vir­tual equiv­a­lents, it sim­ply lets thou­sands upon thou­sands of busy lit­tle ants do a rel­a­tively far less daunt­ing task them­selves. And at the end of the road, Gowalla can use the road that was paved by their users to cre­ate part­ner­ship with some of the busi­nesses that were indexed in the process. This whole Gowalla busi­ness requires a essay of its own, but in the mean time you can accounts of my early dwellings in the realm of Gowalla here and there.

We ended up talk­ing quite a lot about Gowalla with Gregg and his Envy Labs part­ner Nathan Bibler and lit­tle about their own com­pany, how they were try­ing to favor local hires. It’s great to see that even in a city that doesn’t have a rep­u­ta­tion for web edgi­ness, there are still com­pa­nies like Envy Labs pro­duc­ing qual­ity web­sites and appli­ca­tions. And unsur­pris­ingly, you may see a lot of them roam around Gowalla in Orlando.

One of the most sur­pris­ing dis­cus­sions we had was with Aalap Parikh of Pay­pal X (their devel­oper net­work) who explained to us with a lot of insight and a great dose of pas­sion how the future was in wallet-less pay­ments and how busi­ness big or small could use the brand recog­ni­tion and trust asso­ci­ated with Pay­pal to power third-party apps using uncon­ven­tional pay­ment meth­ods like split-payments. Andrew and I stum­bled on a few great ideas while talk­ing with Aalap and I asked him a few ques­tions about Square who seems to be a log­i­cal com­peti­tor in the small busi­ness trans­ac­tion arena. While not hand­ing out a defin­i­tive answer, he explained to us how the future was prob­a­bly less favor­able to a solu­tion that tries to make old phys­i­cal meth­ods of pay­ments (like credit cards) rel­e­vant again but instead chooses to use new, sim­pler and more secure tools. And while the ele­gant solu­tion that Square pro­vides to busi­ness own­ers today still appeals to me, I had to admit that it cer­tainly wasn’t future-proof.

I didn’t expect a chat with Pay­pal to leave me more inspired than any other con­ver­sa­tion we had on this first day, but it surely did and it’s only one of the rea­sons why this new edi­tion of FOWA seems to be up to a great start. Tomor­row I will try to touch on the con­cepts explored through the many con­fer­ences sched­uled for tomor­row. For now, back to bed.