We were very happy to sponsor Day of Fosterly 2013, which happened this past weekend. More than 600 attendees showed up, and you could feel the energy in the Artisphere. Congrats to Adam Zuckerman and the entire foster.ly team that made the weekend a great success.
A special shoutout to Dov and Brittany who helped get us everything we needed to make DOF2013 a success for Intridea as well.
Here’s what went down…
Design, UX/UI & You
As part of a panel, our very own Jurgen Altziebler weighed in on current design trends and what should really drive design – the customer.
At the end of the day, everyone agreed that design is super important. Frankly I couldn’t agree more 🙂
Here’s a pic of Jurgen not on the panel, but giving Google Glass a try.
A big thanks to Stephanie Nguyen for letting us all geek out with the glass.
Workshop: How To Develop A Responsive App Quickly With DivShot And Rails
Tom Zeng and Brandon Hunter led this well-attended workshop, where they showed attendees how to quickly and efficiently prototype a 3-page responsive app built on Rails.
Check out their presentation:
If you haven’t tried Divshot yet, sign up for the free beta. Build your UI using drag-and-drop, and then export to HTML and CSS.
Walt Mossberg Keynote Highlights
Walt Mossberg is the author and creator of the weekly Personal Technology column in The Wall Street Journal, a column that’s appeared every week since 1991. He is also the co-creator and co-producer of the “D: All Things Digital” conference, as well as the executive editor of the All Things D website.
When Walt speaks, people listen, and listen they did – to his keynote. Here are the main lessons Walt gave us, paraphrased by me. Additional comments in italics.
- Customer: focus on a single customer. The way I like to put this is that it’s expensive to sell and market to everyone. Select a group of people to help, and focus on helping them.
- Product: focus on your product and executing it; crappy products never win.
- Curate: choose what to put in, and even more importantly,leave out.
- User Experience: the business model is crucial, however the business model doesn’t drive the product; the product is driven by user experience. If the experience isn’t good, you’re dead.
- Mobile: mobile, mobile, mobile. If a site is not mobile-friendly, it won’t be a very rich experience for mobile users. Build for mobile first – the world is becoming mobile centric, here in the U.S. and especially elsewhere in the world.
- Ignore Computer Theology: If you spend a minute of your time in a theological debate about apps versus the web, iOS vs. android, you’ve wasted it. Spend your time figuring out how to reach people. People don’t care what your app was written in. _At Intridea, we develop web applications in Ruby on Rails, along with other technologies including Node.js, BackBone.js, and mobile applications for both iOS and Android. So when it comes to web apps, we’re a bit biased 🙂
See You Next Year!
If you missed DOF2013, be sure to catch us next year at Day of Foster.ly 2014. I’m sure it will be excellent and well worth your time.
