Fixing the mobile web at Beyond Tellerand

The last few days I spent in sunny Duesseldorf attending the Beyond Tellerand conference, organised by my good friend and partner in 8-bit crimes, Marc Thiele.

I’ve been saying for quite a while that the success and quality of a conference is incredibly linked to the enthusiasm of the organisers and with Beyond Tellerand, you hit the jack-pot, both as a speaker and attendee. I could wax poetic about how great the conference, how diverse the talks and how funky the location were but my colleague Marco Zehe did a much better job in his conference write-up. Suffice to say, I really enjoyed it and consider Beyond Tellerand one of the best conferences in Europe at the moment. I especially like the intelligent decision not to bother with catering but bring people into an area with lots of restaurants and give them a longer break instead. All in all, the schedule had lots of great breaks to network and there was no sense of rush at all.

I was scared and also very honoured to give the opening keynote on the second day, with my task being to wake the crowd up after the party the night before and to set the tone for the rest of the day.

In my keynote Fixing the Mobile Web, I explained that I am worried that we lack passion for quality in our craft and instead follow a breakneck speed race of releasing more and more and quicker instead. I also pointed out how we got a lot of promises of what HTML5 would mean for us and got let down by the platforms that waved the flag the most and called Flash dead. I then explained how FirefoxOS wants to bridge that gap and fulfill these promises whilst being the first impression millions of new users will get of the web with our work being the first things they use.

I recorded a screencast of the talk with some audio issues, but it still should give you a good idea of what was going on until the organisers release the high-quality video.

After the talk, I also sat down with the German web magazine t3n to record a quick video on my talk and the impressions of the conference (in German). The video is here.

Furthermore there will be a German recording I did with the Workingdraft podcast once they edited it which goes into more detail about FirefoxOS and my presentation.

All in all I want to thank everybody involved. The people who came to see and talk to us, all the other speakers who did a great job, the organisers and sponsors and the crew of the location. It was fun and it will come back soon, so check out Beyond Tellerand.