Sessions at Future Insights Live 2012 on Friday 4th May

Tony Hsieh (Zappos CEO) and Zach Ware (Zappos Campus Project Manager and VegasTechFund General Partner) will discuss how Zappos and the $350 million Downtown Project (www.downtownproject.com) are helping accelerate community, learning, and serendipity in downtown Vegas to generate productivity, innovation, and happiness.

For years, we've been telling designers: the web is not print. You can't have pixel-perfect layouts. You can't determine how your site will look in every browser, on every platform, on every device. We taught designers to cede control, think in systems, embrace web standards. So why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will "live" on a web page? Why do we give in when they demand a WYSIWYG text editor that works "just like Microsoft Word"? Worst of all, why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? What worked for the desktop web simply won't work for mobile. As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow has to keep up. In this session, Karen will talk about how we have to adapt to creating more flexible content.

Over the recent past, there has been an explosion of data of all kinds. Businesses have evolved and have started to take advantage of all this data to better interact with customers, plan products, advertise etc. This talk explores some of the trends that are being seen in this new world of data driven business, in light of case studies in verticals like e-commerce and retail.

With wide consumer adoption of services like Google Apps, Facebook, Dropbox, and countless other web-based applications, it seems that the cloud is ready for prime time. Having said that, there are problems with the cloud in its current form, many of which are better solved in a traditional desktop paradigm. These problems relate to search, workflow automization and customization, and interoperability between applications. There are efforts in the works to solve these problems. Modern web-browsers are rethinking how someone traverses and organizes their web-based applications. Standards like OAuth allow for application interoperability. In turn, services like Greplin, IfTTT, and Attachments.me can begin building a better platform for the cloud. In this session we look at the short-comings of the cloud in its current form, examine current efforts to address these problems, and present a vision of what things might look like in the very near future.

You've made your web site fit a 320px screen, but you had a hunch there was more to this whole mobile thing than that. And now you're thinking about geolocation, social design, photo uploading, NFC and augmented reality. Wait, what? CSS3 didn't prepare you for this. The web is getting whole load more exciting, and mobile's at the vanguard. The boundaries between browser and device, device and user - as well as between users and their friends - are where many of its unexplored opportunities lie. Let's talk about what works, what doesn't, what should, and what will - and discuss the real possibilities and opportunities that standardized device and network APIs can offer. Our hopes and dreams for a rich, contextual, social web will depend on them.

The web will never be the same! Each year the web feels like it hits critical mass and then it does it all over again. This session will dig into how to best engage with an ever changing web and how to connect with the new web. From responsive web design to changing our process.

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

While current smartphones have made it easy for us to communicate with each other, the focus on apps has diluted the channels through which we communicate, complicating how we connect. What if we think about communications, taking photos, and using location services from the ground up to be social? How can we help people share and tell their stories better if we designed our apps with social in mind first? In this session, we will demo how we can make the current generation of smartphones be social by default. As mobile platforms remain fragmented, building out great native experiences that behave this way will get harder. This talk will also go over practical approaches on how to create these experiences that we are anticipating, as well as how mobile apps and experiences will change as cars, TVs and other objects in your life become connected devices.

Twilio opens up the black box of Telecom for developers, making it incredibly easy to build apps that can communicate via voice or sms. However, due to the nature of Telecom, this imposes very strict availability constraints and can affect how fast Twilio can ship code to production as every change can affect uptime. Learn how Twilio solves this problem by following a set of engineering principles to build fault tolerant and highly available services in the cloud.

Social networking and social media have infiltrated almost all aspects of our personal lives. Now companies are starting to provide similar tools for use at work. Come to this session to learn about how social software is moving beyond just sharing status updates, links and files to being a critical component of business processes that help employees Get Work Done.

The cloud is transforming the way entrepreneurs launch web apps, allowing developers and designers to launch fast and iterate with a small team. Peter S Magnusson, Engineering Director will explore Google's vision for the next generation of cloud computing and how Google is helping developers launch the next big thing.

While current smartphones have made it easy for us to communicate with each other, the focus on apps has diluted the channels through which we communicate, complicating how we connect. What if we think about communications, taking photos, and using location services from the ground up to be social? How can we help people share and tell their stories better if we designed our apps with social in mind first? In this session, we will demo how we can make the current generation of smartphones be social by default. As mobile platforms remain fragmented, building out great native experiences that behave this way will get harder. This talk will also go over practical approaches on how to create these experiences that we are anticipating, as well as how mobile apps and experiences will change as cars, TVs and other objects in your life become connected devices.

Yosi admits to having the worst luck ever when selling companies and actually claims to screw most deals for the weirdest reasons you can come up with. In this funny, lighthearted session, Yosi is going to share those experiences in full, including names, dates and most important numbers!

Websites are all about content. People can access your content many different ways and formats with mobile devices, iPads, phones, etc. The questions are: how can we maintain control over the display of our content and keep our brand consistent? How can we try to provide the best user experience on any platform? Enter Responsive Web Design. Many experts are not leaning on one static design but on structured content that adapts to its given environment. In this talk, we are going to take a look at responsive web design techniques out there including: progressive enhancement, flexible grids, media queries, flexible images & video, & other methods of implementation.

There's a better web out there and it's hiding behind your data. We spend countless resources on weeks of A/B testing. We constantly ask ourselves what is "good" design. How can we create a better UX and overall, more user interactions and conversions? In this talk George will share insights on the methodology of aggregating data to deliver real-time approaches on the best ways to deliver content. Learn how to aggregate your data to increase user interactions and conversions while minimizing the risk, cost, and overall time spent. There is a better web out there, let's find it together.

Server-side JavaScript? On Windows Azure? Has hell frozen over? Learn about how Azure is quickly turning into an open cloud platform that supports a variety of runtimes: .NET, Java, PHP, and even Node.js! In this session, we will show how to build exciting realtime apps in JavaScript, and how to run them in the cloud. We will take advantage of features such as storage, caches, and queues to make our app scale without a hitch. We will also share the team's plans for future Windows Azure improvements and give you a chance to voice your opinion.

Building on a cloud infrastructure, such as AWS, offers huge benefits to an early-stage startup: You can start with minimal costs; at the same time, you can take solace in the fact that you're building on an infrastructure that will grow with your company. Having said this, the 'cloud' is not a trivial paradigm to develop on top of. A good philosophy is this, "anything that can go wrong will go wrong". We have certainly found this to be the case, in our first year of developing on AWS: servers will disappear and/or become unresponsive; network IO and, in turn, EBS drives have inconsistent performance characteristics; AWS occasionally goes down. There are steps that can be taken to minimize these risks. They're really no different than the steps that should be taken to minimize risk in any software application: have backups of all data; know the risks involved with where you choose to store your data; prepare for any node in your system disappearing; unit-test thoroughly. In this session, I look back on our experiences using AWS to bootstrap a data-heavy startup with some very real technical challenges.

Google offers a wealth of options to enable developers and businesses to store, analyze and leverage their data using Google’s infrastructure and technology. This session will focus on how Google products like App Engine, Cloud Storage and Big Query can give you simple, reliable and effective tools to leverage the power of data.

Whether you're born with the chemical imbalance (or develop the masochistic tendencies later in life), every entrepreneur knows one thing: You don't give up. Exploring his failures and successes, twists and turns, options and decisions, Ben will offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to build in the 21st century.

Wordament is an addictive and successful massively multi-player word finding game currently running on Windows Phone and Windows 8. For the first 10 months, we struggled to support the ever-growing scale on a cloud platform with no scale guarantees. In January, we seemlessly migrated our mobile app to Windows Azure with hundreds of concurrent players at 3:00 AM. We've never looked back and the transition was super smooth. This talk will focus on the considerations of designing a mobile app for the cloud, the challenges of scaling up, the value of having documented performance targets, and the value of "cloud-powering your rich client mobile apps." In the process we will talk about the things we like and dislike about Google AppEngine and Windows Azure, and explain how we've plugged the couple of missing features in Windows Azure during the port.