AWS Summit 2013 & Facebook Mobile DevCon 2013
NYC on Thursday April 19th was a technologically happening place. Amazon held #AWSSummit at the Jacob Javits Center and Facebook was holding Facebook Mobile DevCon a block or two away from Chelsea Piers. While it would have been preferable to clone ourselves to attend the entirety of both events we decided on a more split approach, attending the AWS keynote followed by the Facebook break-out sessions.
At Stuzo we can and do deploy on premise, to enterprise clouds like Savvis, and deploy our global offering on AWS. It has been a cost effective, high performance, scalable and flexible solution. Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon delivered an excellent (dare I say inspirational) keynote focusing on how far AWS has come, how it is being used, and thoughts on where it is going. He was supported by several case studies illustrating how AWS is used presented by clients from a range of industries. The Mortar guys are doing some interesting work with Hadoop and big data on the cloud.
What really resonated was the thought that we no longer weigh the cost of turning on a light. The cost of electricity is so low that we use it indiscriminately. Dr. Vogels then posited the idea of what would happen if we no longer weighed decisions based on the cost of computing resources? You can’t help but get excited about the future of computing, cloud or otherwise.
We then quietly and humbly left Javits Center walked down to Chelsea Piers and were able to attend the Facebook Mobile DevCon hands-on sessions. For us the following sessions turned out to be the right mix
- Facebook Login for Android
- Open Graph For Mobile App
- Facebook For Mobile Web
- Cross-Platform Apps
- Technology Partners Program
- Panel with folks from Nike, Fab.com, GetGlue, and Poshmark
- Office Hours & Drinks
There is too much information to go over each of the sessions so here are three takeaways.
- Simon Cross presented reference architecture for cross platform development. This clearly laid out the best practices for building integration with Facebook. In a diagram he detailed how things are shared and the impact of having a presence on all mobile platforms. Would be great to see some presentations and documentation come out around this reference architecture.
- Connor Treacy presented on building for Facebook mobile web, which he noted is still a large percentage of traffic is mobile web instead of native applications. In the short presentation he demonstrated integrating FB Login, Sharing and AutoLogin features.
- Finally the panel discussion demonstrated social engagement with your audience matters. Each of these companies increases their customer satisfaction, expands their customer audience and drives more revenue by working together with Facebook.
Overall a great day of knowledge, thank you so much to the sponsors of these events.
