* FOWA Miami – Jason Fried, Gary Vaynerchuk, Joel Spolsky, 280 North, Mike Arrington…
* FOWA Dublin – Blaine Cook, David Heinemeier Hansson, Matthew Ogle …
* FOWD London – Folkert Gorter, Jim Coudal, Mark Boulton, Molly Holzschlag …
* FOWD NYC – Previous speakers included: Hillman Curtis, Dan Mall, Paul Boag, Derek Powazek, Nick La..
* FOWA London – Previous speakers included: Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Rose, Tim Bray, Kathy Sierra…
* 1-day intimate workshops – Eric Meyer, Dan Cederholm, Daniel Burka, Tara Hunt & Ryan Singer
* Fuel London – Previous speakers included Tara Hunt, Richard Moross and Paul Boag
* FOM London

All you need to do is enter Carsonified’s first ever Twittercomp! Just follow these instructions:

1. Tweet the following phrase: Please retweet this to help me go to http://bit.ly/10Sgh or http://bit.ly/4w7t (Rules: http://thinkvitamin.com/uncategorized/win-a-free-pass-to-any-carsonified-event/

2. When you get 20 retweets let us know by posting your details in the comments below.

A winner will be picked at random and announced on Monday 9th February.

Good luck :)

We have seen many mobile music services come and go over the last few years. This begs the question, what is the key differentiator between success and failure? Nokia have big pockets and are continuing with their Windows only DRM embedded music. T Mobile and Google have sensibly partnered with Amazon to deliver DRM free music from a vast catalogue to the G1 phone. Apple are holding a middle ground with iTunes content for the iPhone but do make it a deliberately obtuse process to move any content into other media players and devices.

The increase in the onboard memory of mobile handsets seen in the last year is typically eight fold, meaning that many users now see their phone as replacing their mp3 player. As with all aspects of mobile the user experience is the key to success. Will users really take to a service that can fill the phone up with music, but locks it in there so they can’t knock up a virtual mix tape and pass it on to a friend? I doubt it, since the launch of the cassette tape people have taken great pleasure from sharing music with each other.

New services such as Didiom in the USA really understand what users want from their music collection and the collection of devices they have in their lives. This interoperability is the key to a successful service. The insightful J P Rangaswami perfectly summed up why DRM is always destined to fail on his Confused of Calcutta blog this week. Companies that really get it are going from strength to strength like the UK’s Indy Mobile who build lasting relationships between the record labels and mobile consumers.

At Future of Web Apps in London last week I had the pleasure of discussing the mobile future with Stefan Fountain, founder of Soocial, who is one of the most astute mobile theorists there is. He says…

“The future of mobile is not about a device, it’s about the service, maybe not even that. It’s about what you want to do”.

This quote is taken directly from his FOWA presentation which is available to watch, embed, and share right here.

(Photo credit: Chuckumentary)

This year we spent a great deal of time and effort consulting some of the movers and shakers in the mobile industry to get ideas and themes for this years content. Many many thanks to all, for the kindness and help received along the way. There are some very interesting speakers confirmed already and we are still talking to several organisations to secure some more great content over the next month or two. There is a lot of very intelligent comment on matters pertaining to the mobile industry coming from the UK. It is a great pleasure to welcome six of the UK’s most interesting technology bloggers to FOM for the 6X6 session. This will provide some strong and occasionally contentious opinions to stimulate the conversation at the event.

A conscious effort has been made to broaden the horizons of this conference to ensure that the future of mobile is examined across much more than the mobile web and in a worldwide context. We are building a programme designed to inform and inspire people from all walks of the mobile industry. It is never going to be possible to cover all the important topics and please everyone in just one day though. There is still a little room for more so please go ahead and comment here once you have looked at the event, or contact me directly.

There are great early bird discounts available now and student tickets for less than the cost of a decent evening of binge drinking.

We filmed the team again for Day Two of Matt week, sped it up and added another cool track. All i can say is we really need to work on our postures!

Matt Week – Day Two Time Lapse from Elliott Kember on Vimeo.

There is a bit of an air of pandemonium, but all the team are weighing in with a tremendous effort. We are getting an enormously valuable insight into what web development companies have to go through day in day out.

Keir and Elliott are looking a little pale but assure us they are catching themselves up on the development schedule. They have faced some huge challenges in the last two days as neither has developed in the Django framework before. Elliott summed up the learning curve like this.

“Writing an app in a different language, or framework, is a great way of learning. The frustrating bit is that you know exactly what you want to do and how you’d do it in your environment of choice – and then we have to translate these ideas into a completely new system, with a new set of tools. Everything’s in different places, the setup is always different, and you’re writing in a foreign language so you have to re-learn even the most basic syntax and bits of code. The best way to get around this is to keep messing around with bits of code, and using examples and tutorials from the web – then you start to get a feel for the way things work and you’re not stumbling around in the dark. It’s kind of like writing an essay in French – before learning French.”

They really went for getting all the code to work by the end of the day yesterday but hit a few stubborn obstacles along the way. We caught up with Elliott and cajoled him into briefly describing the progress in the development …

“Well, apart from some source control issues this afternoon, things have started coming together. We’ve got the login and authentication going, and we’ve built our queue system for queuing up our mass tweets. There was a funny moment where I was testing the queue system and forgot that I was using my @elliottkember account, so suddenly people were congratulating me before I realised I’d even sent anything! Now we have to tie up the loose ends, and slap everything into the fantastic templates that Mike’s producing. We’re looking good for Thursday!”

Mike really is the man under the most pressure in this whole project. He has to not only think creatively to design all the elements of the web app, from sketch book to screen. He also has to lay all of his fully formed ideas out into the templates for the pages that make up the app. The work he has done so far is nothing short of incredible. The Matt character is great but really just scratches the surface of all that he has achieved. We can’t offer any more previews at this stage but Matt’s world will be a lovely place to tweet.

Will and I got through to a few choice journalists and started conversations that we hope will generate publicity. They are chasing up the media like champion trails dogs today.

Natasha has made some great contacts in TV and is hoping they will be interested enough to come and see us. She is also busy organising the launch event, this is great as she really knows how to break ice and keep people happy.

Louise has pretty much written all the copy for the app ahead of time, which is fantastic as she is now pitching in with the PR effort.

Jo has been the internal media queen, busy filming and photographing us for the blog posts. She has been ably assisted by Matt’s on the spot reporter and interviewer Ryan Carson. All this media is being uploaded (not without a large dose of connectivity trouble) to various places:

• Vimeo
• YouTube
• Flickr

Last and undoubtedly not least, Ryan is going to be writing a guest post tomorrow for the most gigantic online technology oracle there is, awesome.

How to build a PHP5 web app in a day. Make your coding life easier, enjoyable and more rewarding. This is a practical and intimate course designed to give you a sound understanding of the programming techniques for PHP5 app development. Take your coding to the next level, you will be put forward ideas and ask questions. This day is a great forum to resolve all the issues you have experienced in your own PHP5 programming.

Full details are available at carsonworkshops.com