Sessions at Future Insights Live 2012 on Wednesday 2nd May

While some companies use their brand as an opaque facade to hide their questionable practices, others are opening up to their audience and sharing their true personality. The result is a more honest relationship with customers.

With so many methods available that allow people to share where they are at any given moment, how do you, as an engineer, sort through the increasing clutter to aggregate data into one format, like a map? Ross will share the process of managing complex data formulas to ensure cohesion in a product and user experience. What you'll learn:

• Algorithm challenges in compiling aggregated data for a map
• Loading data from one’s entire history into one view
• How to help people understand data well at a high and low level
• How to manage aggregated data ongoing in so many unrelated verticals

As web designers, we love to boast about our user-centric approach to web design, but what about our clients? Most web designers resent clients, seeing them as a barrier to producing great websites. However, a website doesn't just need to meet users needs - it also must meet the needs of your clients. Web design is not just about building websites. It's about providing a service to our clients. In this talk Paul looks at how to establish a collaborative relationship with your clients that produces websites far better than you could build in isolation.

Lots has changed in the past few years that has made our lives as developers easier. The rise of reliable and useful version control systems like Github, configuration management, countless frameworks & cloud hosting platforms have changed the game... but still... we are still stuck building on our own local environments. We should be able to work how, when and with who we want to without today’s hassles. Let’s face it, localhost is broken and we should fix it.

In 2011, more than $70billion was spent to advertise on the web in the US. Every one of those dollars was trying to drive customers to take an action, but shockingly few succeeded. Web users are getting savvier, more ad-resistant and care far less about those who interrupt them with a paid message than following their own interests. Inbound marketing works to both parties advantage - earning customers' interest and trust by providing them with content they desire on channels they use organically. This session explores inbound paths for marketing and how businesses can earn their customers, rather than buying them.

Brian will discuss a fundamental shift in the way brands can create a truly emotional connection with consumers and speak about mobile gaming, the power of the Aha! (achievement and winning) moment, and how brands can celebrate that moment by bridging the mobile and real worlds by driving in-store and online interactions. The session will explain how brands can start feeling and building the classic emotional engagements that was once the underpinnings of the world's most successful advertising motifs but have been displaced by cold, technology-driven "solutions."

From recommending items to spam filters to personalizing a page, there are a many opportunities for integrating machine learning algorithms into every web app. Hilary will give an overview of the most common methods and algorithms and point to tools that make them simple to use for common web use cases.

Physical architecture is about how environments interact with people. Interaction design is about the mind moving through abstract spaces. Somehow the two must intersect. This session is aimed at taking two design disciplines (physical architecture and interaction design) and finding where they relate, and how they can learn from one another. Interaction design has taken a lot from the field of architecture's creative and scientific process. For example, wireframes are very similar to blueprints (construction documents). These similarities are ever present between the two. Truly, both fields blend art and science, as well as both sides of the mind. Expect to come away with a high-level understanding of how phenomenology influences our interactions, tangible and intangible, and how cognitive science can be used to manipulate perception. This talk will be a lot of fun, so come down with an open mind and a lot of questions!

In this presentation blind renowned accessibility expert Robin Christopherson will demonstrate the amazing potential that mobile devices (and even more so, their apps) have to change the lives of users with disabilities. Find out why a camera is so vital for blind users, and how apps that cost a few pence are replacing specialist bits of kit costing thousands of pounds. Inclusive design has a compelling legal and moral case - but it is also an absolute commercial imperative. Robin will go on to explain why it's so vital that every single app you develop should have accessibility well and truly baked in.

"Cut The Rope" is one of the most successful Objective-C games on iOS. In this session you will learn what it took us to port it to an HTML5 game and a Metro app, including some code, best practices and developer tools.

We've all been there. You start a project thinking "This time will be different; This time my stylesheets won't get out of control." and before you know it CSS spaghetti is staining your beautiful design. Join the creator of Compass and Sass, core team member Chris Eppstein, to explore the newly evolving best practices of maintainable stylesheets that can only be done through the magic of Sass and Compass. This talk will assume basic familiarity with Sass.

Backbone.js is taking the web development world by storm, making it possible to build snappier, more interactive web apps with cleaner code and better tests in less time. This session will show you everything you need to know to get started with this powerful Javascript framework, to tame your complicated Ajax interaction and your jQuery spaghetti code. The session will also dive into the concerns, gotchas, and unique techniques you'll run into as you build web application using Backbone.js.

The Internet, and all of its remote working goodness, has eliminated the need to be geographically close to those you work for and with. What few realize is that geographical liberation is a double edged sword. The freedom to work from anywhere, with anyone, can make both teams and individuals more disposable. In this session Dan explores the day-to-day techniques that keep remote development teams working well together. He will also discuss how simple changes in communication can keep clients in other timezones impressed and continuing to want to work with you.

What is the point of using a symbol or icon if it doesn't communicate the correct information to your audience, or elicit the desired response from them? User comprehension is a critical aspect of symbol design, and allowing your users to be involved in the design process can help ensure your symbols are elegantly designed and deliver the correct information. In this session, Edward Boatman takes to the stage to lead the audience through the thinking behind the best use and design of icons and symbols, and the ways in which they can enhance the work that we produce.

PHP is the Web scripting language that powers about 30% of all the Web sites in the world including some of the largest ones we all use on a daily basis. PHP 5.3 was released in June 2009. Now, almost 3 years later PHP 5.4 is here. Come learn about the latest features and how they, along with a number of new extensions, will affect the Web over the next couple of years. Traits, closures, the array shortcut, and other new language syntaxes as well as event-driven and asynchronous programming, NoSQL, and Support Vector Machines (SVM) will be covered in this fast-moving session.

Touch gestures are sweeping away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices, and even from the next version of Windows. The challenge: gestures are invisible, without the visual cues offered by buttons and menus. As your touchscreen app sheds buttons, how do people figure out how to use the damn thing? Learn to lead your audience by the hand (and fingers) with practical techniques that make invisible gestures obvious. Designer Josh Clark mines a variety of surprising sources for interface inspiration and design patterns. Along the way, discover the subtle power of animation, why you should be playing lots more video games, and why a toddler is your best beta tester.

The current model of client services is terribly flawed. In the current model you worry about budgets, timelines, backlogs, slowdowns and resources. Most projects start with a contract that details potential negative events and outcomes which establishes a lack of trust between the parties involved. Most projects end when the budget depletes and the need for help still exists; even worse, it continues when the budget is gone and guilt or fear propels the strained relationship. Carl discusses the changes that will take place in the future as well as how to embrace these changes now.

It's time for front-end developers to break out of the code-monkey zoo. Today's web platform provides a myriad of technologies for animation, motion and dynamic content. With these tools, we web developers can evolve our craft from simply implementing visuals, into creating evocative and expressive experiences. Dave will discuss the fundamental techniques behind creative front-end development and how to sell this skill to your client.

Turning an idea into working code and getting it into the hands of users as quickly as possible is the key to building truly useful software. Heroku cofounder Adam Wiggins takes a look at some of the emerging techniques that will help you and your team move faster.

When learning a new creative skill, we often follow a progression: Imitation, repetition, and innovation. We learn by dissecting the work of others, building our own tools, and later adding our own uniqueness. We’ll apply that thinking to designing flexible interfaces in an HTML5 and CSS3 world, exploring the process of crafting your own markup and style pattern library. What lessons can we learn from breaking websites into micro frameworks? What happens to these patterns under varying browsing conditions? Dan will share how patterns have helped him build bulletproof websites.