aiaio - alexander interactive

The great Ai Baking competition

2009-01-12T13:21:00.006-05:00

Web development is a process that takes time and depending on how you set things up from the beginning, it can have a strong effect on how things turn out in the end.

There is another process that is similar to this... Baking.

A few of us have discussed having a bake off where the participants will bring in a baked good and then have the rest of the crew judge based on appearance, taste, overall impression and creativity. Any Ai'er can bring something and those who don't can judge. All submissions to the Ai Bakeoff must be baked from scratch.

We've decided to have the bake off this Thursday at lunchtime. We're bringing in prized baked good and a healthy appetite. Photos and happy stomachaches to follow.

OmniGraffle tutorials, Part I

2009-01-09T17:35:00.005-05:00

Ai senior information architect Mike Piastro created a series of short videos explaining the ins and outs of OmniGraffle, the popular diagramming tool that has become a standard Ai app. They're great tutorials, so we're going to post them here.

The first one goes into template setup and variables. Click here to view (opens in a new window).

We have several short tutorials underway. Look for a new one each Friday.

Kick your footer into gear with a dynamic copyright

2009-01-07T13:26:00.003-05:00

Year after year we end up changing copyright footers. Here are some snippets that will automatically update the year in your copyright text.

Django:

{% now “Y” %}

Ruby on Rails:

<%= Time.now.year %>

PHP:

<?php echo date('Y'); ?>

Smarty:

{$smarty.now|date_format:"%Y"}

JavaScript:

<script type="text/javascript">
    document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
</script>

How businesses must react to information flows

2009-01-06T12:35:00.002-05:00

The online-offline impact of user experience is vital in today’s economy, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the travel industry. I experienced the best and worst of it on a recent business trip, and the learnings I encountered were enlightening.

Airlines, like many other businesses, have become accustomed to controlling the information flow. Curious about gates, seats, flight times, or other details? They’ll tell you when they’re ready to tell you. But the Internet has changed that, and continuing improvements in ease-of-use and access have forever changed the game.

Organizations today need to be as aware as their consumers of data streams and information sources. They need to be proactive and accommodating. Consumers want their needs addressed by people who are as informed as they are. The alternative—the old way—can be galling.

My Story

Here’s what happened to me: I had a trip planned from New York to San Francisco, originating at JFK on a 6 p.m. flight. My departure day was filled with weather-related delays. Morning flights were taking off more than three hours late, although they were pushing out from the gate on time, leading to "on time departure" proclamations by the airlines.

When I checked my flight status around 2 p.m. my airline's website declared my flight was on time. Skeptical, I checked the condition of JFK on faa.gov, which revealed five-hour ground delays due to weather. But the airline's website begged to differ, so I called the airline directly.

On the phone, the customer service representative repeated the flight’s on-time status. I asked her to investigate the difference between the airline’s estimates and the FAA’s. She put me on an extended hold. While waiting, I checked my flight status on the airline’s website again, and discovered my flight had been canceled!

When the rep returned to the line, I asked for alternate arrangements. She told me the airline was filled to capacity and couldn’t honor my Monday ticket until Wednesday, which would ruin my trip. The rep referred me back to the airline’s website to edit my plans, but the site declared my flight ineligible for a weather-related refund. At the same time, the rep on the phone put me back on hold to look for other options, and wound up disconnecting my call. The airline had stranded me in two different communication paths.

I ultimately booked a flight on another airline for the next day (at more than twice the price). An hour or so later, I was able to get a refund from the original airline's website.

Nearly two hours after I discovered my flight delay, and 90 minutes after I rebooked my flight, I received an automated message on my home phone advising me of the canceled flight. I almost screamed in frustration.

The game has changed

An airline’s only real differentiator is service. JetBlue stands out for its leather seats and TVs; Virgin for its hip, knowing accoutrements; Southwest for its easygoing, cheeky demeanor. But every airline has the same base concerns: comfortable flights, timely service and good communication.

What does my recent experience say about my first airline’s service orientation? Aside from the obvious—that the airline has some serious internal issues to resolve—I spotted several lessons that can be applied to all businesses, not just the airlines.

Businesses no longer control information flow. A smart company will accept this and learn to work with it. Whether it’s me looking at faa.gov or consumers Twittering issues amongst themselves, news and facts about a company’s offerings are no longer dictated solely by the public relations staff. Companies that insist on rigid lines of communication will find themselves outsmarted by savvy consumers and disparaged by uninformed ones.
Nimble trumps rigid. My airline couldn’t put me on an alternate flight within two days of my original plans, and it never considered putting me on another airline and sharing my revenue. My company’s travel service couldn’t find a replacement in its system for under $1000. Yet I booked myself on Virgin Atlantic, via its website, within minutes for far less. The folks looking to me as a customer could not help me spend my money with them, because their basic systems didn’t allow flexible thinking.
Responsiveness is everything. Two hours to inform me about a canceled flight is unacceptable. Losing my customer service phone call and not calling me back is, in this circumstance, unacceptable. The airline’s website not acknowledging my canceled flight? Unacceptable. Discerning consumers will avoid companies that make these kinds of mistakes. Firms that get communication right—on time, proactive, and helpful—will win.

Commercial airlines are in a unique industry with unique problems, but their customer service concerns are universal. Any business that communicates with its customers—which is every business—can find clever ways to improve by watching the airlines manage a crisis.

Happy Holidays

2008-12-23T10:58:00.005-05:00

Happy Holidays to all of our friends, families, clients, blog readers, and fellow internet-makers. Be sure to check out our 2008 Holiday Card.

Each year we close the Ai offices the week before New Year's. This year, the way the weekends fall, we'll be out for 11 consecutive days. It's a well-deserved break for our hard-working staff. And while we're off, free of blackberries, Photoshops, Rails gems, and AJAX libaries, we'll be thinking of what is ahead for us in 2009: contributing to open source projects, speaking at conferences, more mobile websites, and continuing to crank out incredible design and dev work on some of the web's most challenging interactive projects.

Have a wonderful holiday season, and a Happy New Year.

One year at Ai

2008-12-19T13:43:00.001-05:00

Junior front-end engineer Skottey Forden penned a heartfelt letter to Ai that he wanted to publish publicly. Happy holidays, and happy anniversary, Skottey:

One year ago today I sat down in my desk chair for the first time. Uncertain of what to expect of my first real-world industry job, especially as a lowly intern, it’s easy for me to express the mix of nerves and excitement I was enduring. To look back on that day seems almost silly considering how much Ai has grown on me. It has become my life and my reason to wake up in the morning, and in one year’s time I now feel like my employers and co-workers are more like family to me than merely people I work with.

Throughout my internship and from the start of my full-time employment, this company has given me endless opportunities to flourish and grow for myself and my abilities in the facets of work that we do here. I learned a great deal in my years of higher education but the skill sets that I have obtained through my time at Ai have no comparison. Every day that I spend in our office I am surrounded by the most inspiring and intelligent people who collectively work together to create the most beautiful and functional interactive works I have seen and am proud to play a role in.

To work at Ai, one must obviously have the talents necessary to do your part in building a quality product for our clients. We must know how to execute the tasks assigned each day, how to manage time, and how to treat your work as if it is your baby.

But a spirited attitude is almost an unspoken prerequisite to be a part of our team. Ai prides itself not only with its work but the cheerful and diligent demeanor of all those who call Ai “home.” The Ai family is constantly motivated to learn and build on capabilities to produce high-level and technology-driven design and interactive works with the end-user in mind. To achieve this sought-after quality of work, sharing a positive attitude is almost a necessity. You will not find a single person through the Ai office doors who does not share a claim to this perspective.

With one year past there is a clear and bright future ahead for myself and Ai as a whole. With a new year just around the corner the boundaries seem endless in all that we as a team are capable of. Tonight our collaborative team of programmers, coders, designers, project managers, strategists, quality assurance specialists, system administrators, information architects, interns, and of course the head honchos all embark on our year-end holiday party. I could easily say, “Hey guys, thanks for throwing me an anniversary party, that’s terrific!”

On the contrary, my humility is saying that our party is just that--a celebration and a time to reflect on the spectacular work that we have accomplished. To the Ai family: I thank you all for taking me under your wing and giving me a place to grow and call home. I look forward to stepping into a new year with all of you and I can’t wait to see what is in store for us.

Throttling ActiveResource

2008-12-16T15:28:00.013-05:00

Rate limit. It’s an essential, if somewhat bothersome, consideration in accessing any public API. Twitter’s API limits its clients to 100 requests per 60 minutes. Exceed that, and you, the client, are locked out for a good ten minutes.

The other day, I was using ActiveResource to build a library to interface with the Harvest API, which implements a rate limit of 40 requests per 15 seconds. While a generous limit, I knew that the reporting tool I was building would need to make a lot of requests. And I was indeed getting locked out.

Since ActiveResource provides no throttling functionality, I decided to build a simple gem to add it. Thus was born ActiveResourceThrottle.

To use, create a generic base class to access the given RESTful API. Then, use the throttle method to specify the request limits you’d like imposed. Requests originating from any subclasses, representing the various API resources, will be throttled accordingly.

require 'active_resource_throttle'
class Twitter < ActiveResource::Base
throttle(:requests => 100, :interval => 3600, :sleep_interval => 10)
end

Further documentation can found in the README. Happy Throttling!

The clever twist

2008-12-12T10:08:00.005-05:00

I've spent the morning fascinated by Swoopo, a new (to the US, at least) online auction site, which is both more and less innovative than its peers--and a great business model case study.

The site turns eBay's successful auction model on its ear. eBay uses fixed-duration auctions, free bids, and sellers' fees for revenue. Swoopo, in contrast, sells bids to buyers, who then bid in 15-cent increments on products. If an item gets a bid in the final 15 seconds, the end time is extended, giving other bidders a chance to dive back in.

This is at once radically different--from eBay--yet more similar to the traditional auction business. In the real world, auctions don't stop short at 10:13:32; they go until the high bidder has outlasted the competition. Swoopo allows this to happen.

Placing the operating-cost burden on buyers is a shift as well. With bids costing 75 cents each, buyer aggressiveness is artifically limited; the multiple bids required to win a typical auction raise the final cost to the winning bidder. Interestingly, competing (losing) bids help subsidize the winning buyer, which may deflate prices.

The open-ended auction timing is what fascinates me most. I watched a Playstation 3 controller auction on the Swoopo home page ratchet up from $23 to nearly $41, all in 15-cent increments, for several minutes before the auction ended. Sniping is eliminated, and in its place is a tense few minutes and frequent page refreshes. And, most likely, a handful of additional bids, each adding 75 cents to Swoopo's bottom line.

Swoopo has a remarkably clever (or truly wicked) business concept. It's also beautifully timed. As eBay evolves away from auctions, the market is probably ready for a savvy competitor to nibble away at market share.

Expect several Swoopo (and eBay) competitors to appear in the next year or two, all with new twists on the auction model. And keep a watchful eye on eBay, which may or may not realize that its auctions, while slowing in growth, are the make-or-break business proposition of its flagship.

Update: this write-up of Swoopo is worth reading, as it notes the clever (if insidious) model behind the business, and also exposes some of Swoopo's questionable business practices, which I hadn't caught on first observation. "It's not clear that Swoopo even has the items they auction; they appear to sell first, then use the money they gain from the completed auction to buy and ship the item. Furthermore, they have a clause in their Help under Delivery and Shipping that lets them ship 'equivalent' items." The post later calls Swoopo "pure, distilled evil," which may be pushing it a bit, but point well taken.

Online sales and the economy

2008-12-04T15:04:00.004-05:00

The latest news from the world of ecommerce is that the weekend was much better online than it was elsewhere. Sales rose 13% on ComScore's Black Friday-through-Cyber Monday annual index--not a huge number in online terms, but strikingly robust when compared with the overall 4% retail decline in November.

Some tips for ecommerce sites looking to maintain the pace through Christmas:

Compete on price. Ugly, and the last thing I usually recommend, but when the New York Times is running 1000-word articles on coupons, penny-saving is a mainstream fact. Use discounts and promo codes to make customers comfortable with your price points.

Accommodate. Comfort levels are always a differentiator: extended return policies, prepaid shipping labels, and custom order requests will make people feel good about buying from you.

Don't run scared. In this environment, customers are getting skeptical of sites with continual "Buy today!" come-ons. Maintain a consistent voice and use promotions in the typical manner, so people aren't spooked away from completing a transaction.

As mentioned previously, a successful, happy purchase now can lead to low-cost repeat business leads in 2009. Despite today's challenges, retailers must avoid sacrificing the future.

Ai on email best impressions

2008-12-02T09:58:00.003-05:00

Tips for making the best impression with your emails is my latest column for iMedia Connection. As with the last one, it's practical advice for email marketers, based this time on my observations and experiences with airlines' communiques. Check it out.

The power of people

2008-12-01T10:22:00.003-05:00

How many times this weekend did someone warn you not to buy gift cards this holiday season? I bet the warning came with mention of an email that had in it a crazy long list of store closings. Indeed, a million people are saying the same thing right now.

Never mind that the email in question is misleading at best and fear-mongering at worst. How quickly did it spread? How deep was its impact? How hard will it be for the stores in that email, unwitting participants in a national red flag, to undo the damage contained in that one email? How many people do you know that will give cash instead of credit this season?

Bad news travels fast, even when it shouldn't. Companies today must work twice as hard as they once did to monitor, repair and prevent the spread of misinformation. One angry customer can affect a million potential shoppers (much as one happy customer can reach a million readers too, only far more effectively).

Today's consumer is carefully weighing options on every spending decision. Service and positivity will be more important than ever in earning trust and repeat business.

Swimming against the tide

2008-11-26T10:58:00.002-05:00

The New York Times reports ecommerce is shrinking this month, the first time since the industry began.

This is distressing news as we head into the holiday season. What can the industry do for 2009?

1. Improve incrementally. Test pages and categories at length. Small victories can lead to substantial gains in an economy looking for good news.

2. Improve correspondence. Talk to customers more often. Survey them, get their feedback, respond to their requests and suggestions. Because....

3. UX is king. Any degree of user experience improvement will be welcome at this time, and the easiest place to try harder is in customer service. Flexible, friendly assistance will create good impessions and loyalty, minimizing acquisition costs. And "minimizing costs" is the magic phrase right now.

UX Critic: cold medicine

2008-11-21T16:59:00.004-05:00

I've spent much of the week battling a nasty cold. One of the last things I expected when sent to the pharmacy was to think about user experience. Doc said, "Get some Mucinex D," so off I went.

But what is Mucinex D? I asked for it at my usual pharmacy but they only had plain Mucinex and Mucinex DM. This sent me to the nearby chain pharmacy, where my head began to spin.

Mucinex--a basic guaifenesin expectorant--comes in seven varieties. There's plain; D, with a decongestant (requiring the pharmacist keep it behind the counter); DM, with cough suppressants; a dedicated cough version; a maximum strength version; a severe-cold formula; and a nasal spray. Each has its own color scheme.

This theme plays out similarly throughout the entire cough-and-cold aisle. Every product has multiple versions that exist in part to satisfy finicky customer demand but mostly to consume shelf space at competitors' expense. Thus the pharmacy becomes an experiment in patience at the exact point in time when pharmacy customers want speed and efficiency.

I ultimately got my Mucinex D (and a righteous bout of post-nasal drip, thank you very much). But I also got overwhelmed. Is this the best way we've found to treat the sick?

Exposing online video trends

2008-11-14T17:11:00.003-05:00

Techcrunch posted a great item on online video penetration earlier this week. The numbers are both inspiring and sobering.

Among them:

YouTube is streaming 5 billion videos per month
Only 4% of those videos support paid advertising
Online video is generating ad revenue at one-tenth the CPM of television ads
So far, only 1.4% of video watched by Americans is online
The online component is expected to double by 2010

As it always has been, video streaming is a great potential resource, but it remains largely potential in nature. Financial aspects will have to catch up to other mediums (or expand greatly in volume) for the industry to become fully viable.

Apple's market-dominance strategy

2008-11-10T13:23:00.002-05:00

According to research firm NPD, Apple's iPhone was the best-selling cell phone in the U.S. in Q3 2008.

Which, frankly, is remarkable: a company that didn't make mobile phones until 2007, and which introduced its phone at a staggering $599 price point, has in less than 18 months come to dominate the market.

Perhaps Apple isn't the biggest cell-phone maker overall; that's left to mobile-phone companies that produce multiple models. But in having the best-selling, and arguably best, product in the industry has completely altered the landscape.

The one-two punch of the iPhone and iPod underscores Apple's incredible product strategy. The company creates a product, optimizes the user experience, markets it like mad, and basically comes to own the product segment.

A decade on, iPods still represent more than 75% of the portable music device market. The millions of iPhones suggest that Apple is succeeding in its goal of becoming the default option for consumer-grade smartphones. No other product--from video game systems to household electronics to automobiles--has such dominance from a single player with narrowly focused product segments.

This is now a company that plays to win. It's a far cry from the Macintosh era, when Apple was content to make products that were simply better than the competition. Now they are the best, and the marketplace is responding in kind. No wonder so many companies look to Apple as their aspirational benchmark.

Free shipping index

2008-11-07T11:55:00.000-05:00

A great follow-up to my whitepaper on holiday shipping promotions: this new weekly index of free shipping across 100 ecommerce sites. Great research.

Ai at Apachecon

2008-11-04T13:43:00.002-05:00

Ai technical director Martin Anderson and senior developer Ed Samour are speaking at Apachecon in New Orleans this week.

Developers attending the conference should visit the OFbiz symposium Thursday to see their presentation, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love OFbiz. The rehearsal was fascinating and fun--don't miss it.

Happy Halloween from Ai

2008-10-31T16:29:00.007-04:00

Ai has a unique holiday tradition: on Halloween, the office exchanges costumes, Secret Santa-style. Everyone gets dressed in full upon arriving at work, and we spend the day in costume, including an all-hands trip into Madison Square Park.

Among the notable costumes this year:

Several impressive homemade costumes, including human sushi, an oompa loompa, and a person dressed as Facebook (my favorite)
Three men in tights
A banana and a monkey, who chased each other in public at lunchtime
Several personality-appropriate costumes, most notably the official Hofstra University mascot (although we all love Mario from Nintendo)

Our park trip included lots of showboating and laughs, and culminated with engineer Skottey, dressed as the Burger King, ordering lunch at the Shake Shack. "Don't tell anyone I was here," he said to the cashier.

We're a convivial bunch, so you're invited to check out our photos of the day and a video of our lunch excursion. Don't miss the races in the park.

Ideation

2008-10-30T17:47:00.003-04:00

IDEO's toy group generates up to 100 ideas in a 60-minute brainstorming session.

Each week at the Onion, editors propose as many as 600 articles before settling on 18 to write.

Creative organizations need room to experiment. Give people space to think, propose, iterate, attempt. From the many sparks of creativity come the flames that burn brightly.

Ai adheres to this mantra. We rcently developed a logo for a client that began with 94 different suggestions (and 30 or so concepts in the first revision). Had we done less, neither we nor the client would have found the best solution.

Do you give yourself room to be creative? How?

Holiday whitepaper: free shipping and ecommerce promotions

2008-10-27T16:01:00.004-04:00

I am pleased to announce the release of Ai's first whitepaper, Free Shipping: Holiday Hit or Headache. As the title suggests, this paper summarizes the research and opinions across the ecommerce industry about free shipping for the 2008 holiday season.

Following the research is an eight-point list of suggested holiday strategies. We cover free shipping, as expected, as well as discounting, loyalty programs and repeat-purchase incentivization.

Since this is the blog, I can tell you I had great fun researching and writing the whitepaper, and that I have more topics in the works. Look for them here and on the Ai news page in the coming months.

The art of the favicon

2008-10-23T15:13:00.004-04:00

Today's item is a guest post by Ai fender Skottey Forden.

The visual components of a website are, quite obviously, the primary impact on a user's impression of that site. Ai takes pride in creating visually compelling sites while taking an immense amount of care with the gears grinding behind the scenes. One aspect of the visualization that is often overlooked is the shortcut/favorite icon, more simply referred to as the favicon.

This tiny 16x16-pixel icon shows up in the address bar of nearly all modern web browsers, and is generally also visible in tabs when using tabbed browsing. One might notice a favicon, but chances are good that users never dwell on it or consider it to be of much use.

When a website does not make use of a favicon, it is potentially decreasing usability and a branding opportunity. That little 16x16 symbol adds value. It is a branding element and a visual component to which a user can associate a favorite website. This holds true especially when a user opts to bookmark that site. When applied to an e-commerce website, a favicon is a crucial element.

Online businesses want customers to access a site with as little effort as possible. If a favicon has not been set, the site it will show up in lists and browsers with a generic icon, or none at all. If a user has multiple sites with a generic favicon in the list of personal bookmarks, a site will fall into a pile of other "generic" sites. This may seem mundane, but it can limit accessibility as well as brand.

Over the past month I have performed a spot-check of Ai’s client sites to validate if a favicon has been implemented. If one existed, I checked to see how up-to-date it was, based on the most recent design of the website itself. If it needed an overhaul, it got one. If there was no favicon present at all, I created one. It is not a difficult process (and it’s fun!), but one must also consider that a favicon essentially sets a brand for a website, so it's not a trivial item, even within the confines of that tiny square.

To date, a large percentage of Ai’s client sites, as well as our own internal sites and browser-based applications, have favicons. All future Ai sites will have a favicon implemented before the launch date.

UX critic: DHTML navigation

2008-10-17T13:58:00.005-04:00

Someone at Blockbuster thought it would be great if its movie categories were easily found, perhaps with on-rollover navigation.

Someone else at Blockbuster insisted on preserving the company's intricate category format.

Which begat this second-level menu item:

Click to zoom, and note the many "See All" links. Even at this level of detail Blockbuster couldn't fit everything in.

Original is here. Happy browsing.

SSDD

2008-10-13T16:43:00.002-04:00

The blogosphere has noted at length recently the prevalence of sad stockbrokers in news item photography in recent weeks.

The stock markets finally had a good day today. To support the story, Yahoo News used this accompanying photo:

Right, even when he's wrong

2008-10-02T17:18:00.005-04:00

I had just finished a terrific bowl of Farro Soup at Spiga, a small Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side, when the kitchen runner appeared with the entrees for our table.

My wife got the orata. Placed in front of me was a large, cheesy, white mass of pasta--not at all what I had expected.

"What's this?" I asked the runner.

"That's the lasagna," he said.

"That's not fettucine bolognese?"

"No sir, it's lasagna."

"But I ordered the fettucine."

At this my wife piped up. "No you didn't," she said. "You ordered lasagna."

"I did?"

"You totally ordered lasagna."

"But I hate lasagna."

"Well, you ordered it."

"Why would I order lasagna?"

The runner, equal parts confused and amused, asked me if I wanted to exchange dishes.

"I don't know," I replied. "Can I? I mean, if this is what I ordered--"

"I can check, it's no problem, if you don't want this I will see."

"Okay," I said, feeling extremely guilty. "Please let the chef know it's my mistake and not yours. I'll eat the lasagna if I have to, since I guess I ordered it."

"Oh, you ordered it," my wife said.

"I think it's okay. Let me see," said the runner. He took the lasagna and disappeared into the kitchen. My wife gave me a who-are-you-and-what-did-you-do-with-my-husband look, and we waited.

Not five minutes later the runner reappeared with a piping hot plate of fettucine bolognese. I thanked him profusely.

"We're happy to do it," the runner said. "The chef said if it's busy, we might not be able to, but since it's quiet we want you to eat what you like."

The chef voluntarily took back an $18 entree for no reason other than a customer's mental error. No allergies, no spoilage, no poor preparation--just "oops, I didn't want that," corroborated laughingly, yet replaced at no additional charge, and with a smile. Several smiles, in fact, as our waiter ribbed me good-naturedly after the fettucine arrived.

In exchange, our very good meal became an outstanding one. The flavorful meal was enhanced by the excellent service. We left with a story to tell about our experience, which will encourage friends to try the restaurant for themselves. We will certainly be back.

Does your business dedicate itself to this level of customer satisfaction? What would you gain by doing so? What are you missing by not?

Web 2.0 Expo: thoughts from David

2008-09-29T12:06:00.002-04:00

Ai technical lead David Yoon made a great compilation of Web 2.0 Expo observations, below. This wraps our conference coverage.

General points from the conference:

Technology: the conference from a technology perspective was very heavily focused on just a few topics:
-- cloud computing and the problem of scaling websites
-- next generation of browsers and bringing web applications even closer to desktop applications
-- graphics and the re-emergence of Javascript as a hugely important language

Wednesday

Lessons from Visual Programming with JavaScript: John Resig (creator of jQuery) talked about Processing.js, a new library that he created to help interact with the canvas element.

10 things we’ve learned at 37 signals
--I thought this was one of the better talks of the conference
-- planning is overrated/decisions are temporary/optimize for now
-- create waves of interest -- momentum is very important
-- interruption is the enemy of productivity
-- out-teach, out-share, out-contribute
-- most of these points are applicable for small, non-client facing tech shops

Go REST with Rails
-- DHH gave a great talk about REST and Rails, aka reasons for a restful architecture (mainly for communication/interaction between sites), and discussed some of the features that are built into the framework to handle it. Most developers here already know the principles/reasons but it was a good presentation.
-- Support in rails 2.1 for etags/not modified headers

Thursday

Building in the Clouds: Scaling Web 2.0
-- Panel discussion about cloud computing from a variety of companies (google, 10gen, amazon), where it currently is and how to make best use of it.
-- Ability to scale massively in a very short amount of time – example of the facebook photo application that scaled from 5 servers to 5000 in a week using amazon.
-- Not suited to all application/companies, developing for cloud applications requires a shift in developer mentality.
-- Relevancy/importance of cloud computing

Designing for the Internet(s) of the future
Very interesting talk by Genevieve Bell – anthropologist researching trends in global internet usage
-- China now has more active internet users than the US, this trend will continue
-- Internet is becoming widespread in the developing world, though generally it’s become shared (1:many people per device), asynchronous (delay of days/weeks between the transfer of information)
-- Trend toward disconnecting from the internet
-- Concerns: Privacy issues, cultural health

The sequel to SQL: Why you won’t find your RDBMS in the clouds
Great technical talk about object databases/cloud computing.
-- scaling databases: partitioning (sharding) over multiple servers is hard/slow when using relational databases
-- object databases
- examples: BigTable (google), SimpleDB(amazon), Mongo (10gen)
-- pros: scaleable
-- cons: - no joins across tables…
- eventually consistent (not good for banking transactions)
- query limits (1000 entities for google, 250 for amazon)

Friday

State of Web Development
-- chrome/gears, web applications are becoming more and more like desktop applications
-- js will become *really* fast in the next generation of web browsers, the language will potentially have much more influence
-- rise of Ajax as the important medium for providing a better user experience.