Tag Archive for '2008'

Singularity web conference speaker spotlight: Tim O’Reilly

Published on May 12, 2008 in Community, Conferences and Friends. 4 Comments

Tim o Reilly speakering at the Singularity Web Conference

I'm honored and humbled every time I look through the list of stellar speakers we have confirmed to present at the Singularity web conference. As such, I want to take a moment every week to highlight a new speaker, starting this week with Tim O'Reilly.

I had the honor of meeting Tim several years ago during a talk he was giving in London on the Open Source Paradigm Shift. In his talk, Tim predicted the mainstream commoditization of the web. Four years later, we stand as witnesses to the birth of the Commodity Web with Google's release of Google App Engine. (Simon Wardley, recently chronicled this very subject with great eloquence at his keynote speech at XTech.)

Several years later, I was in an elevator at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, heading to watch the keynote. There was one other person in the lift with me and I turned to ask him if he knew where the keynote was (the Venetian is huge). He told me that he was heading over there too and that I could follow him. Looking closer, I recognized Tim (he had a beard that hadn't been there in London) and re-introduced myself. Only later did I realize that Tim's conversation with Bill Gates was to be the highlight of the keynote. I guess it made sense that he knew where the keynote was after all.

Tim O'Reilly truly doesn't need any introduction. He is, of course, the founder and CEO of O'Reilly -- the most highly-regarded computer book publisher in the world. He is a true visionary who has both predicted and helped craft the state of the art on the world wide web -- not least by coining the term Web 2.0 to describe the social web of open data and applications that the World Wide Web has evolved into. (Few memes have had such lasting mindshare on the web today as Web 2.0 has.)

Find out more about Tim and our entire line-up of stellar speakers on the web site for the Singularity web conference and read Tim's thoughts on his blog.

The Singularity web conference is everywhere October 24-26, 2008. Tickets are scheduled to go on sale this month at $99 to coincide with the launch of the new web site on Google App Engine.

Plugg.eu European Web 2.0 Conference

Published on February 19, 2008 in Community and Conferences. 0 Comments


I'm Plugging PluggI met Robin Wauters at the LIFT conference in Geneva recently. He's organizing a very interesting conference in Brussels called Plugg.eu. I asked how I could help and ended up becoming a media sponsor.

The conference will take place on March 19, 2008 in Brussels, Belgium.

If you look on the right, you'll find a little badge that links to Plugg.eu. In making the badge, I created a simple Wordpress plugin. If anyone else wants to help promote Plugg.eu, you can download the Plugg.eu Wordpress Badge Plugin (.zip; 2KB) here.

After installing the badge, go your Widgets settings and you can choose from the various badge types that Robin has available.

Introduction to Flex course in Brighton, 21st March, 2008.

Published on February 18, 2008 in Community, Flex and Training. 0 Comments

Update: Unfortunately, I've decided to cancel this course so I can better focus my energies on organizing Singularity.

I'm teaching a one-day introductory Flex course titled Hot Shots: Introduction to Flex, on 21st March, 2008 in Brighton (Hove, actually).

The course will cover the fundamentals of Flex. No prior Flash or Flex experience is necessary. However, if you have previous Flash and/or ActionScript experience, you will be able to build upon that knowledge while learning about Flex and good practices in developing Rich Internet Applications.

If you have no prior ActionScript 3 knowledge, taking Colin Moock's free AS3 training in London on March 3rd before attending this course will not hurt (but is not required).

The day-long seminar will take place at The Werks in Hove.

Tickets are £199+VAT early bird (until Feb 29 or until the five tickets at this price are sold; once they're gone, they're gone!), £249+VAT regular price.

Read the seminar description and sign up to attend at Amiando.

Read testimonials from previous Hot Shots students.

View the full course outline in PDF format.

This is probably the last chance I'm going to get to teach a course this year so if you've been waiting to get into Flex, I can think of far worse ways to do it than to spend a day with me in sunny Brighton.

Sign up to attend.

Speaking at Scotch on the Rocks

Published on January 30, 2008 in Community and Conferences. 0 Comments

Scotch on the Rocks

You may be wondering why I'm speaking at a ColdFusion conference.

Three reasons:

Firstly, it's in Scotland -- Edinburgh to be precise -- and I'm loathe to pass up any chance to visit that lovely land.

Secondly, Scotch on the Rocks is branching out this year to embrace Flash and Flex.

And finally, they asked me very nicely during MAX Europe: "we know you're not the biggest fan of Coldfusion but we'd love to have you speak anyway!" How can you say no to that, really?

(And the reason I'm not the biggest fan of ColdFusion has nothing to do with the technology itself; it's because I personally don't see a widespread future for closed-source application servers in general when there are so many excellent open source alternatives available as to make them into commodities. That said, ColdFusion does have a lot going for it, especially in the enterprise market and for building internal systems. It was revolutionary when it was first released and I've dabbled in it myself in the past. It is very easy to learn and use. It just doesn't excite me like some other technologies do.)

As I mentioned earlier, Scotch on the Rocks is expanding this year and you can see this in the speaker line-up which includes (among others) Kai Koenig, Sean Corfield, Ben Forta from the CF side of things and Peter Elst and Neil Webb from the Flash world.

If you're into ColdFusion and live in Europe, don't miss this. Especially if you're also interested in RIAs, Flex, and the Flash Platform in general.

Tickets are currently available for £199 (early bird discount) until 29th February.

Singularity sponsors BarCampBrighton2

Published on January 23, 2008 in Community and Singularity. 0 Comments

Singularity is proud to sponsor BarCampBrighton

Singularity is sponsoring BarCampBrighton2, a gathering of 150 geeks that is scheduled to take place on March 15th and 16th, 2008 at the University of Sussex in Brighton.

It's no secret that I love BarCamps and Hack Days. They're wonderful unconferences where there is no speaker/attendee divide. I attended my first BarCamp in London and it was a blast (if you haven't been to one, you really should go!) BarCampBrighton, which took place at Madgex's offices last year (thanks, Glenn!), was similarly wonderful. Furthermore, it coincided with the Brighton Food Festival which was yum and a half!

All this to say that it's an honor to have Singularity sponsor this year's BarCampBrighton.

(What is Singularity? Those of you with badges on your sites will be finding out in about a week!)

BarCampBrighton2 is being organized thanks to the efforts of Paul Silver, Matt Weston, Jon Markwell, and Jay Gooby. Keep an eye on the wiki and on Upcoming as once the tickets are released they usually go in the first half hour or so.

Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

FITC Amsterdam and Phlash5

Published on January 18, 2008 in Conferences and Music. 4 Comments

Fitc Amsterdam 2008

FITC is coming to Europe with FITC Amsterdam in February and I'm honored to be speaking at it. Not only that but our band, Phlash5, is going to be performing again. We had our debut performance in Hollywood at FITC Hollywood and it's going to be great to have the whole band together again for Amsterdam.

Phlash 5 Video Still from FITC Hollywood. Aral Singing.

As always, there's a great line-up of speakers (including all the Papervision 3D project leaders together for the first time) and the Netherlands is one of my favorite places so I can't wait!

Give me a shout out in the comments if you're going to be there and make sure you come by and say hello at the event! :)

Apple to debut flying MacBook Pro

Published on January 11, 2008 in Apple. 24 Comments

Flying Macbook Pros

ArseArs Technica have photos from the Moscone Center ahead of MacWorld on Tuesday where you can clearly see the message "2008 There's something in the air". I guess you know as well as I do what that means.

Yes, my friends, it's as good as official:

Apple is going to be releasing flying MacBook Pros (dubbed the MacBook Pro iFly) on Tuesday.

The iFlies are expected to relieve geeks of the physical pressures of carrying around their notebooks which will henceforth follow them around.

AralBalkan.com can also reveal that Steve Jobs is expected to announce the immediate availability of the new flying MacBook Pros by releasing a flock of them on stage at the end of the keynote.

It all makes sense. We've all been expecting the MacBook Pro line to get a radical overhaul this year. While Apple was busy spreading misinformation about an ultra-slim notebook they were secretly putting the finishing touches on the new MacBook Pro's dilithium crystal-powered nano warp drives. Insiders close to Apple have revealed that although the new notebooks are theoretically capable of Warp 9 speed, Apple will be artificially clamping speeds at Warp 1 for the initial run. We have, however, learned that Philip Torrone and his elite Make ninjas are close to perfecting a trans-dimensional time machine which they plan to use to go back in time, hack the new MacBook Pros before release to remove the restriction and create the world's first pre-hacked product release in the process (good luck guys!)

Several industry analysts that we spoke to predicted that we should grow accustomed to seeing flocks of MacBook Pros flying over major cities and an almost permanent spectre of circling notebooks should be expected to circle local Starbucks stores and university campuses.

The Mac rumor community will no doubt be completely blindsided by this latest development and I expect MacRumors.com, TUAW, etc. will be linking to this post within minutes of it going live (losers! pwned!)

The mystery of the rune…

Published on December 13, 2007 in Tease. 10 Comments

2008. On the web.

Web ‘08 predictions: The rise of RIAs and the 3D web

Published on December 7, 2007 in .net magazine, 3d, APIs, Flash Platform, Rich Internet Applications, Web '08 and iPhone. 16 Comments

Recently, I gave a talk titled Web '07 - Web '08 at the Christmas charity dinner (linking to the Google cache as the original site appears to be down at the moment) organized by Sussex Geek Dinners. It was a lighthearted tour through the highlights of Web '07 and a look ahead to Web '08* with predictions by myself and some of my friends.

In my predictions for 2008, I talked about how we will be seeing more RIAs in 2008 -- both from Adobe and third parties -- how Silverlight is not going to have a widespread impact (although is definitely something to keep an eye on for 2009/10 and the competition is going to give Adobe a welcome push in the right direction), how mobile Flash is going to move away from Flash Lite to full-scale Flash playback on devices and how we're going to see Flash on the iPhone, how sometimes-connected applications and web/desktop hybrid applications are going to gain importance with AIR, Google Gears, etc., and how real-time 3D in Flash is going to change the aesthetics of the web.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might remember that last phrase. It's the same thing I uttered back in 2005 before the release of Flash 8. Back then, .Net magazine pasted my prediction on its cover and I was talking about alpha-channel video, not 3D. I think we can agree that alpha channel video in Flash has altered the aesthetics of the web in the intervening period and I am convinced that 2008 is the year that Flash is going to do the same thing with 3D thanks to Papervision3D.

Specifically, the combination of alpha-channel video, bitmap effects and filters, and real-time 3D is going to create a new benchmark in production values for online experiences. We're already seeing trailblazers like Carlos Ulloa, Ralph Hauwert, and John Grden are pushing the boundaries in this area and, in 2008, we are going to see more mainstream adoption of these techniques.

(I just read a somewhat myopic article in 3D World magazine titled "The look of 3D in 2008" that didn't even touch upon web 3D in any of its predictions! Could it be that web 3D is going to blindsight the traditional 3D community?)

To these predictions, I add two new ones that are closer to my heart: Firstly, Flash developers are going to get a lovely toy-box of APIs to work with and, secondly, we're going to witness a conference that's also going to be a technological tour-de-force to very visibly and publicly define how far we've come in Web '08. The latter has me more excited than I've been in a _very_ long time. And that's all I'm going to say about that for the moment.

The web just keeps getting more and more exciting... here's to a most wonderful 2008!

* Just as an aside, can we please drop the version numbers? We know in software that the moment an application gets its version number it's out of date. So why do we want to apply the same paradigm to describing the web? It's far more accurate, imho, to analyze the characteristics that defined the web in a given year. Hence, Web '08, not Web 3.0).

Go Beyond the Buttons at FITC Amsterdam 2008

Published on December 5, 2007 in Community and Conferences. 4 Comments

I'm going to cut down on my speaking engagements in 2008 as there are a lot of other things I want to do but I will still be speaking at several events, one of which is FITC Amsterdam where I'm presenting a session titled Beyond the Buttons:

Learning new programming languages, development tools, and technologies is a fun (and essential) part of what we do but they are not ends in and of themselves. Integrated Development Environments like Flash and Flex Builder, scripting languages like ActionScript 3, and technologies like AIR are merely tools, like the painter's brushes, easels, and paints, the animator's lightbox, and the photographer's camera. In this session, Aral looks beyond the tools to what you can make with them.

Aral's session will take you on a tour of cutting edge Flash and Flex and journey beyond the Flash world to find inspiration in the trends and trendsetters from the greater web. Video, 3D, open data, APIs, mashups, accessibility, development processes, application architecture, usability, social networks, open source, and tons of links for you to continue your own inspirational journey are just some of what you will experience in this talk.

This session will not teach you new tools or programming tricks but will widen your horizons and provide you with ideas and inspiration to spark your own creative endeavors.

I trialled this talk at FlashBrighton's Big Day Out and it went down really well so I'm going to expand it for FITC.

FITC Amsterdam is February 25-26th.

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