Fused Reality Studios | Dundee & Edinburgh Web Design & Development

Yesterday I spent multiple hours with quite a few developers and folk at Sun Microsystems in Linlithgow for Carsonified’s Future of Web Apps Tour – Edinburgh. Overall, it went great.

Morning Talking Points

While most of the morning felt quite like a product placement, the information dealt with scaling an application was quite interesting. This was the main info dealt from both Microsoft and Amazon but I found Amazon, one of my little crushes on the web, did their service justice. They discussed their EC2 virtual servers that helped build scalable applications on the web, and their methods of ensuring uptime made me feel assured about who I’d probably go with if the time came by.

The virtual servers work by a ‘pay by the hour’ principle–starting off at $0.10 and going all the way to $0.80 with many different platforms to choose from. Data storage was provided by their EBS service, which gives up to a terabyte worth of space on a single store. Not too bad.

The big idea

Interesting talk at #FOWA – focus on a SMALL target audience, getting 4000 consumers to pay £20 a month for a service = profitable business! – Dave Gardner

Roan Lavery from FreeAgent brought a bright spark in the lunchtime to wake us all up and made me think about how I really should turn my ideas into a business. One surprising thing he mentioned was the change of wording from “Free Trial” to “See Pricing & Plans”. Overall, they saw 50% more people join thanks to leaving notice of the trail up. Not what I would have thought. He went on to talk about pricing as well, and stating that business apps can often charge up to 10x what people are paying for a personal app due to it’s usefulness.

Moo

Building Moo wasn’t as easy as you’d think, or was it? It took 3 hours worth of developing time to get Moo US up and running. It was interesting to see how they managed their business, and shared the one secret that some will relate to–”Simplicity trumps features”.

Oh, Ryan

Ryan Carson’s talk focused about marketing on the web, and how it’s changed since the old days of print media. It’s no longer about branding & control but rather it focuses on conversation & empowerment, as well as on the honesty and openness of your business.

He’s a big user of Google Analytics and says that we really should spend at least two hours per week looking at the stats and measuring our conversions religiously.

In terms of twitter, he even had his own way of marketing yourself. If you have to, only market yourself every 10 tweets or so. Nobody likes a marketer who makes it obvious. Make the rest of your tweets interesting and relevant, but also make it about yourself.

Then, he left with three little tips to get more marketing interest:-

• Trade Flavours. Another site that’s similar? It wouldn’t hurt to share.
• Write Content for others. Just ask around, it won’t hurt.
• Make a PR Stunt. Maybe it’ll get you noticed?

Network fast, party long

One thing that Carsonified was trying out this time was a little speed networking. Just like speed dating, you had about three minutes to talk about who you are, what you do and any other interesting bits and bobs. I met some great people in my little circle, many with interesting start-ups that they are making. Not all were great though, as while I was switching my next guy just walked away. Manners!

Thanks to, I think, Amazon there was a tidy little tab started at the bar for us all to get started on the after-party and for me to meet new people in my much more sociable, inebriated, state. I manged to talk to Ryan Carson and got his views on using Coldfusion as a teaching aid over open-source development language. He was not wearing his trademark hat.

The only other person from Carsonifed who managed to stay the night, and get acclimatised to drinking Tennents, was Louise. It was nice to hear about the odd move she made from being a producer in live television to working as the events manger, but if it works… I spent most of my time after that talking to Gordon and Dennis while the football caught most people’s interest. Nice guys, and I enjoyed my time being there!

Points of Interest

• Sun gave us a tour of their complex before lunch with some really awesome pieces of technology. I definitely liked their ‘Black Box’ which was a server system set up in a regular shipping container. Seeing the applications and how they’ve managed to force all that tech, which can use 40KW worth of power, is kind of astonishing.
• Sun, in themselves were very hospitable. Free lunch, drinks and WiFi? I never expected that!
• Their main server area was loud, and I have the video to prove it.
• I can’t wait till the next one.