Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Great line up today.

We had a chap from Qantm speaking up the semantic web, virtualisation technologies, mashups and more. He was followed by the Faraday Media guys talking about APML, but more generally talking about some of the issues surrounding a Web 2.0 startup in Queensland. We had a great presentation by Nick Hodge on Mashups using PopFly, I have created some already - watch out for them on here soon. Silverlight got a background explanation and also some cool demos - mind you PopFly uses Silverlight also. We also had lunch hosted by Microsoft, and I scored a cool shirt. In the morning there were 2 web development companies presenting some information for graduates who may be looking for developer roles. Clearly Speedwell were a cutting edge design company  while JSA was far more of a design company, firmly ensconced  in flash technology.

Takeaways for me and Jethro.

• How can we move forward into R&D of new technologies (like Speedwell, while maintaining a stable development environment for staff and thereby protecting income streams for new developers?
• How can we utilise mashups like PopFly, and "new" social technologies like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr to the point where we can deliver stable applications to our clients. I can already see some examples of their use but they will require more tweaking first. We also need to be able to sell them to our clients, and equally important support the back end technology with our technical staff .

Both of these require investment: R&D requires time and software. Training requires investment in courses and non income generating staff time.