After one week on the road, various complications we had to battle with and a persistent cold that is haunting me since Dublin, I finally found some time to look back on the past events we’ve visited: FOWA in Dublin and FOWD in London.

 
Thursday, 13th May

Since Hannes, Michi and Volker didn’t have the time to do both conferences, we decided that I should go to Dublin on my own. Michi would then join me in Dublin for the weekend and we would meet the others on Monday afternoon in London. So I started my trip on the 13th May from Bratislava. Since I live in Vienna this is the nearest airport that offers a fairly moderate price for a flight to Dublin. But Ryanair can you hear me? This was my last flight with you. Half an hour delay and overflowed toilets just some examples of what you are going to witness when it comes to low-cost airlines.

 

Future Of Web Apps

Friday, 14th May

The Future of Web Apps conference was taking place at the O’Reilly Hall on the UCD campus in Dublin on 14th May. The crowd there was rather small (approx. 150 attendees and very quiet) but the speakers were really great. Most of all I enjoyed the talks of Raffi Krikorian about location based services in combination with Twitter, Simon Wardley with his slightly scientific presentation on Cloud Computing and Alex Hunter, marketing guru and former brand ninja who was talking about how to market your web app.

 
Sunday, 16th May

Since our flight to London on Monday morning was cancelled due to the Dublin airport closure we had to rush to get the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead and then continuing on the bus all the way to London. It turned out to become a 12 hour nightmare ride, in uncomfortable tiny seats but we expected this and therefore we prepared for this by drinking as much as we could during the 4 hour ferry ride to catch at least some sleep on the coach.

 

Future of Web Design

Monday, 17th May

Unfortunately sleeping cycles weren’t as deep as we had thought so we arrived in London pretty tired on Monday morning. After checking in at our Hotel in Islington and after a hot shower and a short power nap we headed down to the Brewery said hello to the Carsonified crew and were eager to set up our booth.  In afternoon we welcomed the rest of the HotGloo team and headed out for traditional Fish & Chips and also a couple of pints.

 
Tuesday, 18th May

Tuesday was the start of FOWD so we tried to be there early putting the final touch on our booth and setting up our three private demo laptops so people would have the chance to give HotGloo a try. All four of us were busy answering questions and introducing visitors to our service. The feedback and interest was phenomenal. We were asked specific questions about certain features as well as how our service would work for absolute newbies. We were given so many insights on how people are using wireframing software, about their likes and dislikes about feauture requests, that we finally put together a list which we will discuss in the coming days and where we can build upon.

Before doing his presentation “Smart Tips for Wireframing” Brad Haynes, Creative Director of Paramoreredd walked by and said hi. So we were giving Brad a short crashcourse on HotGloo and hopefully we made a lasting impression on him.

 
A hard working day … had suddenly come to an Gin & Tonic end.

 
Wednesday, 19th May

Wednesday was slightly quieter since there weren’t so many new faces turning up. Thanks to Patrick from the Opera Booth we managed to organize a LCD screen. We set the screen up in the back of the booth and displayed the HotGloo promo video in an infinite loop and this immediately attracted people walking by, stopping and diving into wireframing.

We also had the opportunity to present and demo HotGloo in two University Sessions. You can watch the video of the demo session here. Many thanks to all of you who participated in those sessions. We received really profound feedback, which will flow into our thoughts on future improvements.

 
Props out to great people we’ve met on our trip: the Ubilabs crew: Martin, Christian & Michael. FOWD speaker Brad Haynes of Paramoreredd. Also greetings to our booth neighbours Hammerkit Mark and Anu – whishing you all the best for your app! And of course to all the nice people at the Opera booth who helped us out organizing our LCD monitor for day2.

Many thanks @ Ryan, Will, Keir and Lorraine and the rest of Carsonified for organizing such a great event and taking good care of us. We really appreciate – until next time … and now back to the future of wireframing.

 
Click here for the FOWA slideshow.

Click here for the FOWD slideshow.