The list today is shorter since I overslept a little. I chose not to rush: Picked up the newspaper outside the door of my hotel room - which seems to be complimentary at Sanderson. Read it. Checked my email. Took a shower using both shampoo as well as conditioner (Silvia would proud!). Got dressed. Packed my suitcase … and away I was (well, after a cup of coffee at Starbucks and a sandwich at Pret).

It’s important not to stress - right?

Speakers I listened to Day no. 2 at FOWA:

Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design. I was looking forward to this. I’ve been following the work of Stamen Design for quite some time now. The work they do is simply awesome taking data visualization to the very next level. Stamen is a huge inspiration to me and the rest of the R&D team at TraceWorks. Eric’s presentation was the best I saw at FOWA.

Eric speaks extremely fast, he’s very articulate making no mistakes - showing example after example of beautiful data visualizations. It was very cool. Great presentation. The only time he was a little of “balance” was when someone from the audience asked something sounding like this: “Do you do any visualization for blind people?”. Eric was silent while considering he’s response for about 30 seconds. Then answered “no”.

Some examples of Stamen’s visualizations could be digg labs, cabspotting.org, and twitter blocks.

—-

Joe Walker of DWR. I didn’t get much of it. Pretty technical stuff. I think “DRW” and “Comet” were the keywords in his presentation :-).

—-

Tom Coates of Yahoo! (Brickhouse). Great stuff. Tom’s presentation was about Fire Eagle - a yet to be alfa-launched service from Yahoo:

“Fire Eagle is a new way to share your location with friends or with other websites and services! It’s built on open APIs so that developers can build all kinds of applications that respond to your location…”

Very inspiring since I’m involved in a few different projects in which location sharing could be part of the value proposition … Dan, are you listening? Check it out!

Share This