King & McGaw Developers

This week thousands fellow web makers, CEOs, VCs and geeks descended on Dublin for the Dublin Web Summit. They had done an amazing job of promoting the event - there were flags on the mains streets, front-page coverage in papers and loads of media reporting live from the event (to the point where the wifi was almost useless!). The event itself had four stages, an expo room with startups from all over the world, and startup pitching stages. The overall highlight had to be DWS By Night, where they had taken over a whole street of pubs and clubs with free drinks for attendees. There were bound to be some sore heads on Thursday morning!

Startup pitching stages

Though the calibre of speakers on the stages was second to none (in Europe at least), I spent a lot of time on the startup pitching stages seeing what was happening in the startup world. Some highlights from the pitching stages and stands:

• Copygr.am. Tools for Instagram, and photographic prints. The design is lovely, but the prints are too expensive.
• Fabsie. Designer flatpack furniture manufactured on demand from crowdsourced manufacturers. I was really impressed by this but wonder how far they can go with the aesthetic they are locked into with laser cut wood.
• Resump. “ResumUp is a service which shows you who and what you need to know to achieve all your career goals.” It helps you visualise your skills and connects you with people who are already in your network to progress your career.
• Atoomba. Basically IFTT for your (Android) mobile.
• Smart Things. These guys won the pitching competition for their impressive system to connect devices to the internet. This (or something like it) is going to be a big deal.
• Tictail. Quick and easy online stores with a killer UI. I tried it out and had as store online in 2minutes, and actually enjoyed the process. The resulting stores are just OK but the creation process is really impressive.

Chris Poole 4chan, Founder

The subheading of this talk was something like how I unwittingly became a sysadmin, and was a story of how 4chan serves 600m page views a month and 1m new posts a day on five second-hand servers - each of which is a single point of failure - and no full-time staff.

By looking at the numbers that Google Analytics (which fires in the client via JavaScript) and Cloudflare (which was the entry point to the web request) were reporting, he realised that that half of their traffic was coming from web scrapers and third-party extensions, so it was only then that they added an API (which now serves 50m requests a day).

This was a really interesting talk with some refreshingly honest views, but it does go against a lot of things I believe as a software engineer, and I very much doubt that he has taken the same approach with his VC-funded startup Canv.as

Curating the e-commerce revolution

A panel discussion with:

• Chris Morton, Ceo & Co-Founder of Lyst
• Diego Berdakin, President of BeachMint
• Shauna Mei, Founder AHAlife.com
• Carl Fritjofsson, Co-Founder & COO Wrapp
• Olivia Gossett, founder of ILWYW.com

The basic theme of the discussion was that in online fashion retail, customers expect recommendations and a back-story (and increasingly customisation) in order to connect with the product. There seemed to be general agreement that the Net a Porter “shop the story” approach is a model that works well.

Amazon’s approach is to fulfil commands (you search for TVs, you get TVs), but is terrible for serendipitous discovery. “You never go to a grocery store and bring back only what was on your list”.

Serendipity through content. Create desire through stories and context.

Here’s a recording of the panel (watch from 1:47:40)

More highlights in brief

• The BBC’s Chief Architect, News and Knowledge Gary O'Connor on BBC’s dipping their toe in the water of cloud computing. An interesting perspective on the challenges in selling it into ops (they had no choice really, because they had to scale to accommodate London 2012 coverage), selecting a provider (AWS).
• Mike McCue, Founder and CEO of Flipboard with MG Siegler, TechCrunch. I didn’t really consider Flipboard to be important to publishing, but I have changed my mind now.
• Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker provided some interesting insights into the state of the web at the moment and Mozilla’s mission to keep it open.
• Patrick Collison from Stripe was really interesting talk about how they got started, their challenges and growth.

Most of the event should be available on this Livestream page.