meish dot org: life, unfolding

So I’m at FoWA London 2007, and so far…meh.

Bearing in mind that there’s still a chunk of the afternoon and the whole of tomorrow to go, I’m willing to give the Carson folks a bit of a chance to pull it back, but so far, I’m a bit underwhelmed.

So first up, the positives: there are more women here this year. Last year there were about 600 men typing away furiously on laptops to the sound of millions of sperm dying from radiation exposure. This year, more women…and less macs. I don’t know if these things are related. Probably not.

Also, there have been some really good speakers on the stage today, giving engaging, comprehensible presentations about things they’re clearly passionate about. Werner Vogels from Amazon was probably the head of this pack. The boys from last.fm and Tara from Citizen Agency also gave good talks, but inevitably for people who do the conference circuit a bit, there’s a sort of a feeling that they’re going over ground they’ve covered before, elsewhere, using the same presentations.

And, inevitably, there’s probably an overlap in the audience, too. This probably says more about my recent conferencewhoredom than anything else - perhaps I am where the conference overlap occurs?

This leads me to wondering who this conference is actually for. Is it for people who - like me - were here last year, or is it really intended for people who weren’t? Last year, it was very much pitched as a developer conference, a bit of a geek fest, which was reflected in the mix of speakers and content covered. It seemd to be targetted to small startups and developers, and you know, that’s a good niche audience.

This year, it’s a bit different. Everyone’s got colour-coded badges on, denoting their function (picked from a horrible range of options, especially for someone like me who doesn’t tend to fit in any particular shape hole (except a Meg-shaped one) - I’m a “manager” though I should be quick to point out that I don’t have a pointy head.) So as well as managers, we’ve got developers, founders, media, academics, designers, investors, marketing, sponsors and speakers. Oh my!

The idea is that you can, at a glance, get an indication of who’s at the event, and whether they matter to you. This is reinforced by something involving stickers saying “I’ve got money that I want to give away” or “I need a job” - I’m wondering if there’s a market for creating stickers that say “I’m quite happy with both my financial and professional circumstances, thanks for asking” possibly with a little box into which you can write your dayrate ;)

The thing is, you get a real sense that the conference is aimed at all of these categories of people - those with startups, those with ideas but no starup, those with development skills but no ideas and those looking to fund startup development, as well as those attached to bigger organisations.

That means that so far, it’s failed to hit its stride a bit, I think. There’s some reproduction of content from last year’s event – or, more accurately, reproduction of the conclusions from the event. How to make a good startup. How to scale. How to make (or keep making) profit.

That’s what makes me wonder about the intended audience - like, if they were here last year, then I think a lot of people will know this stuff already. Anyway, I hope it becomes clearer as the event rolls on.

And speaking of rolls (well, sort of), there’s a couple of things worth saying about the facilities in Kensington Town Hall.

First off, in the programme there was a promise a catered lunch. Er, sandwiches and a queue of 600 people does not a catered lunch make.

Secondly, and more irritating, the brochure talks about there being ample wifi? Um, it’s actually been woefully inadequate (and paid) BTOpenzone nodes which have conspired to only let me get onto for a handful of minutes (countable on a single hand) during the whole day so far, and even then it keeps dropping out more often than a rebellious teenager. Diabolical!

To be fair, Ryan Carson did say that they were hoping things would get better tomorrow, and I believe him…but in the meantime, I’m suffering from serious wifi rage.

This image shows the manifestation of the connection fallacy (the wi-lie?): it alleges that the connection exists and that it’s good. But I can assure you it isn’t.

Update, just before the end of the day:
The wifi improved and the latter speakers - Bradley Horowitz on social software, deriving meaning from metadata, MyBlogLog and Pipes, followed by Kevin Rose from Digg on their approach to analysing user attention data, with a well-executed appearance by a guy from Soocial as well - picked the pace up and set a good standard for tomorrow. Nicely saved.