FOWA Miami

So I'm going to start back-asswards as my uncle likes to say.

FOWA Miami was pretty cool. Some of the presentations were awesome (Gary Vaynerchuck's was a complete surprise!) and others were a little over my head (as soon as they started throwing out terms like queries and stacks my eyes would glaze over).

So here's a quick recap of what I enjoyed in no particular order

Aza Raskin demoing (eventually!) the Ubiquity plug in from Mozilla - it's in Alpha but I urge all firefox fans out there to download and try this one. It's hard to explain in words but if I had to I'd say it was a really cool way to interact with all of your applications by simply using prompts (I know this sounds like we're going backwards but you have to see the demo to believe me when I say my jaw dropped ever so slightly when I saw this)

The 280North guy demoing Atlas - an amazing way to program rich user interfaces with drag and drop functionality. Again, you have to watch the demo to believe this but I think EVERYONE (even those jaded- too- cool- to- smile- developers) dropped their jaws. Spontaneous clapping erupted and they deserved it. Did we just witness a milestone making moment in history? I guess time will tell.

Kristin Halvorson from BrainTraffic ending her talk 15 mins early so she could ask "Why am I the only woman on the program?" The few of us in the audience (maybe 15% but I could be wrong) clapped. It was a difficult conversation and I could feel the bristling of some in the room but Ryan Carson and Chris Messina handled it rather well and asked the audience to help by proposing possible women speakers via twitter (#FOWASPEAK). I just sent a tweet with the URL to the article by Fast Company this past month on the most influential women in technology.

OK, it's past midnight and I think I'm running out of steam and even though I'd love to cover how all of this relates to education and kids I think I'm going to have to call it a night. I'll save some juice so I can write more quotable quotes from Jason Fried of 37signals and Gary Vaynerchuk in my next post.