Visit the GoSquared site tomorrow (Tuesday 11th January ’11) to see the latest from GoSquared.

Our elevator pitch with Hermione Way of Techfluff.

What a way to kick off 2010 – our first video appearance on YouTube.

Check out LiveStats if you haven’t already, we hope you like it.

Last week we attended Future of Web Apps London, a fantastic conference that the great guys at Carsonified put on every year for web developers to meet, chat, and learn about what’s going on in their field.

We attended FOWA London in 2008, but this year we came only days away from missing out on all the fun when all attempts to get discounted passes failed. That is, until we took a look at the Media Temple blog and their “Are you a FOWA geek?” competition… And yes, we entered (after much persuasion from people already happily attending the conference).

After piling our desks with every last piece of tech equipment we had lying around our respective pads, taking a photo, and tweeting it to the world, all we could do was wait. Wait and hope no one judged us. Confidence grew as (other than Geoff and I) only two more entries had been posted – for 5 tickets. Things were looking promising! Saturday morning involved waking up to a DM from the guys at MediaTemple congratulating each of us on winning, followed by jumping up and down yelling WOOP WOOP WOOP. We’d done it!

The best thing? Other than not having to pay a penny, we won VIP Dinner tickets as well as conference passes!

VIP Dinner at Gaucho

MediaTemple hired out the vaulted cellars of the wonderful Gaucho restaurant in Piccadilly for an evening of chatting, wining and dining with the who’s who of the web. We were lucky enough to be sharing a table with Kevin Rose (Digg), Britt Selvitelle (Twitter), CTO of Moo.com, and loads of others! Just incase you don’t believe us, here’s unflattering proof on Flickr.

The dinner was great – so great that we didn’t back home ’till 2am. This made waking up at 6am on the Thursday somewhat challenging.

The Conference

Up at 6am bright and early – that’s dedication to web apps.

Wi-Fi

Don’t even go there.

The Talks

Unlike last year we managed to get there on time for the start of the conference, which we’re very glad we did as Kevin’s talk on “Taking your web app from 1 to 1 million users” had some useful tidbits of info for startups.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

One of my favourite talks was from Francisco Tolmasky of 280 North on their upcoming awesome app for building beautiful interfaces in Cappuccino.

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky from Carsonified on Vimeo.

The Guardian talk stood out for me in highlighting just how far ahead they are on the web compared to most other newspapers. The Guardian have been busy building a platform, sharing their information through open APIs to distribute it further and deeper than they could possibly achieve if acting alone.

Brit from Twitter made an awesome entrance by kneeling down to the audience and proclaiming “I LOVE WEB DEVELOPMENT” just before announcing Twitter Labs would be coming soon (which rapidly became RT’d by everyone in the audience).

After Party in Piccadilly

We had a great time on Thursday evening meeting, dancing, and talking with some of the dudes and dudettes we met at FOWA in the day, introducing Kevin Rose to the finer points of Cockney Rhyming Slang, and learning that some of Digg’s employees really don’t know their way around London.

Gary and Kevin Show

Gary V’s talk on NOW being the time to get out there and start your web company was, for me, his most inspiring yet. No one else on the web manages to give me such motivation, such “why not” attitude to give everything I have to the business we run. If you haven’t wateched or listened to a talk by Gary before, I beg of you to watch the one embedded below – you’ll be glad you did.

Shortly after Gary’s talk, the Gary and Kevin show commenced. Involving stage diving, butt flashing, geek dating, a Kanye interruption, and live Twitter commentary, the Gary and Kevin show put Live Diggnation to shame.

All in all, FOWA London this year was awesome. If you couldn’t make it (for whatever reason), tickets are on sale for FOWA Miami right now.

P.S. Sorry the post a little delayed – we kinda came down with “FOWA Flu” shortly after returning which put us out of action for about a week. We’re all better now and working full steam ahead on the next version of GoSquared. See you soon!

As what seems like the entire world knows, WWDC is tomorrow.

We are all looking forward to seeing what’s in store for the final version of the 3.0 firmware for the iPhone – we all know it’s going to contain more than what we’ve been shown, but we don’t know what more.

Everyone also, with good reason, expects new iPhone hardware tomorrow. Some expect a new iPhone with a few updates over the existing 3G. Some expect a new iPhone which goes all out to be the best video taking device ever. Some expect a number of new iPhones, right from a tiny “nano” iPhone with 4GB of memory, all the way up to a “pro” iPhone with 32GB memory and every feature a power user could ever need for the next 3 years.

New Hardware

Personally, I think tomorrows announcements will follow Apple’s style over the last 2 years – there will be one new iPhone, and it will introduce new hardware features that will be tempting, but not mind blowing. By this, I mean I think there will be the much rumoured digital compass – that allows, with GPS, for the iPhone to know exactly where you are, and what way you’re facing; there will be a slightly upgraded camera, with a 3.2MP sensor, and (more important to image quality than the average consumer realises) an auto focus lens. I think the 3G will get faster, with AT&T and a number of other carriers upgrading their 3G networks to double their existing speeds.

Better Processor. Better RAM.

The much more noticeable changes to the iPhone hardware will be the core power of the device. If we see a doubling (or more likely, an increase of 50%) of CPU speed, and perhaps a doubling of RAM, the iPhone OS will suddenly feel incredibly fast. I would already argue that the 3.0 firmware, which we have been using for the last month at GoSquared, is far less sluggish than when we were all running 2.2, so these small optimisations, combined with dramatically increased CPU and RAM will pave the way towards improvements on an already very slick mobile OS. In fact, many complaints about the speed of internet access on the iPhone will be addressed by a faster CPU – web page rendering is where most of the bottlenecks occur, not as is a common misconception, at the data transfer point.

That Front Facing Camera

There has been a lot of talk about the next iPhone including a front facing video camera for video chat and for Photo Booth style self mockery. However, I can’t see this happening this year. Apple has filed a ton of patents on video conferencing with the iPhone, between iPhones, and between Macs and iPhones. When Apple finally allow video chat on the iPhone, and they will, it will be fantastic. But I don’t think they’ll do this tomorrow, for a number of reasons. Considering Apple has not even mentioned video to developers, who are building apps for the 3.0 release, and considering not one developer, or any “reliable” source has even so much as hinted at the possibility of video chat capabilities, I have my doubts. Then take into consideration the already overloaded 3G networks of AT&T and others due to the amount of bandwidth-hungry iPhone owners out there, and imagine what an influx of thousands of 2 way video calling iPhone owners would do…

I really would love to be proven wrong on this one – I want video calling on my iPhone. The US market, in fact, doesn’t always notice how commonplace it is in Europe and elsewhere – in the UK, the 2 phones I owned before my iPhone 2G both were capable of video calling. That was FOUR years ago. Yet, in the UK especially, video calling on phones has never taken off as it should have. It will be Apple who get the world speaking face to face on a phone. But to do that will take time. And my gut feeling is we’ll see that next year. Not tomorrow.

Oh, and that “spy shot” above? Gimme a break. The Ui while you’re in a video call will never be as cluttered as that. Expect something as minimal as the current audio call screen, without the large “merge, number keypad, mute, etc” icons overlaid.

A couple of Sketches

I decided to do a few quick sketches of what I reckon the new iPhone may look like based on the rumours that have been circulating. I sketched them on paper because 1) I didn’t have enough time to do anything in Photoshop, 2) I can’t use Maya to save my life, and 3) If I made them look at all realistic I would get at least 5 haters shouting FAKE – PHOTOSHOPPED. So, here are my honest, simple, quick sketches of how very similar the next iPhone may look.

And another, the Leopard style dock, in retrospect, won’t happen.

One More Thing

I know Apple applied for a patent on this last year. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why – Microsoft (gasp) have had a start screen like this for years. Either way, I want Apple to implement the option for me to see what’s happening today on my Unlock Screen. If not, I may consider jailbreaking.

Hope you like the suggestion, Apple. And I hope we’re pleasantly surprised by the announcements tomorrow. Heck, I haven’t even mentioned Snow Leopard. Although, then again, neither has Apple. Except one very nice banner.

Happy WWDC everyone.

Wow this post is long overdue but here goes anyway! A few weeks ago we attended the popular Future Of Web Apps Conference at London’s ExCel, two busy days of mingling with like-minded tech enthusiasts and web entrepreneurs, drinking free beers sponsored by Google and Facebook, and attending various lectures on all that is important to web applications. Oh and of course, gathering free stuff. Lots of it!

The event was magnificently organised by the friendly people at Carsonified, who had brought in speakers from 280North, Digg, Google, Revision 3, Twitter, Yahoo… the list goes on. If you were unfortunate enough to miss the event, you can catch the lectures online at the FOWA video page. Between lectures we explored the floor, meeting countless numbers of people and introducing them to GoSquared, who we are and what we do, whilst giving them free special edition copies of our Help Sheets which by general consensus proved to be extremely popular.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Expo is back in London for October 8th-10th at the London ExCel Center and boy, it’s going to be one hell of a show!

Speakers include Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Kevin Rose (Digg), Blane Cook (Twitter) plus many more from the likes of Google, Salesforce, AOL, and Mahalo. Also attending (and speaking) are the guys from 280North, creators of 280Slides and Cappuccino that we wrote about a while ago.

We are very excited as we were unable to attend last year’s FOWA and will be there on October 10th ready to chat, share, learn, and party!

Kevin and Alex are also going to be there shooting a live diggnation from the main stage at 7:30pm on October 10th where Google will be providing the (alcoholic) refreshments. After which, the wrap party will get started with Facebook and Digg kicking things off. (I’ve heard that Facebook are going to be sponsoring an open bar.)

The celebrations are going to be epic. We hope to see you all there and look forward to meeting a wealth of interesting people that are changing the web as we know it. There will ofcourse be free wifi for all (probably provided by the Cloud) so you can keep those posts coming even while you’re having lunch.

Get your passes for all 3 days of the event over at Carsonified’s FOWA site.

See you there!