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Since last week and FOWA my feet have hardly touched the floor, with the TechCrunch article giving us stupid amounts of traffic and then top spot on del.icio.us and a few other big sites it all went a bit mental. So this is my rather belated FOWA and Mashup Demo report.

Mashup Demo

On the Tuesday we attended Mashup Demo which was held at the CC Club. The event covered 16 companies showing off their products, everyone had to give a 3 minute pitch which really was a hard task for me. I ignored most of my slides and gave one of my rambling (but hopefully passionate) pitches on how we are trying to open up the Blogosphere beyond the rather niche demographic that are capable of getting involved. Something I said must have struck home as I got a lot of calls/meetings out of it.

FOWA

We had on the previous day before Mashup Demo rushed over to the Excel centre and setup our stand. We turned up at around midday to find that only half the stands had been constructed, luckily enough ours was one of the first to be finished and our furniture arrived very shortly afterwards (so congratulations to melville and Carsonified)

The two days were made up of quieter periods while everyone was watching any of the talks intermingled with chaos as everyone rushed out to grab food and look at the stands. I must say I was slightly disappointed that there were not more stands and I am sure the next event in Miami will be much larger.

It was great to see some friends also demoing at the show, Yuuguu which had just announced a week before that their screen sharing technology now worked through the browser (very useful for giving demos). XCalibre were officially launching FlexiScale (they also got great coverage from TechCrunch shortly after us).

I did not attend many sessions myself because the stand was busy enough to keep me constantly occupied with giving demo’s and talking to lots of interesting people about the future of the web. I was also lucky enough to get interviewed by the nice people over at intruders.tv.

Zend Framework

Because we were being supported by Zend I did also field quite a lot of PHP / Zend related questions, mainly relating to ‘Why should I use Zend Framework?’ and anyone who is still not convinced of its merits should go check out ‘fav.or.it and Zend Framework‘ - . I did come across many misconceptions from programmers who came and spoke to me, these mainly involved not understanding proper OO and how to really get into the mindset behind the Framework.