I recently attended Future of Web Apps (FOWA) in Las Vegas put on by Carsonified, a company that specializes in training and conferences to connect web designers and developers. Their other events include Future of Web Design, Chirp and Think Vitamin Online Conferences. I would highly recommend this conference to anybody interested in exploring the world of web apps. This conference was eye-opening, enlightening, educational and inspiring.

Session topics ranged from the cloud, geolocation, APIs, designing your business, getting in touch with angel investors, HTML5, big data, big databases and social networks. Here are a handful of sessions I attended that I won’t forget.

Add Location to Your Next Application

This was a full-day workshop where Schuyler Erle of SimpleGeo walked us through everything a developer needs to know to add a custom geo-location installation into your website. We were showed custom plug-ins, a free map-tile service and several places to get free data to use for geo-location applications. This was an amazing workshop that revealed new thinking and technologies I hadn’t thought to investigate on my own. By the end of the workshop, we learned how to create our own map tile server, which was way beyond what I expected to get out of this workshop.

What Happens When Business Meets the Real-Time Web

Tony Haile provided insight into the importance of real-time data and how to use it. Haile is the General Manager for Chartbeat, which is owned by Betaworks. He walked us through how other companies are using real-time data to help them provide users with better information and more clicks for the company. He also provided insight into how you should use real-time data if you currently do not.

LBS: Location-Based Salad

This was a short — but great — session. We were introduced to everything it takes to create a proper system to determine a user’s location. I learned about a few services, like Quova, that enables you to extend the current functionality of your location-based apps to provide users with useful information. This was a perfect discussion for anyone thinking about incorporating location-based data into  a website or web app.

HOWTO: Securing Your Ecosystem

This was a very informative talk given by Raffi Krikorian of Twitter. He went into different problems Twitter has run into over the years and the decisions they made to enhance the security of Twitter users. He focused on the future of web app security, what to expect from OAuth2, and how it is going to be improve security for everyone on the internet. It was very interesting to see how large companies like Twitter handle security issues for massive applications.

A Web of Apps

Todd Simpson, from Mozilla, gave an in-depth talk about where Mozilla thinks the world of web apps is headed. Mozilla has uncovered some big pitfalls surrounding web apps and solutions that make using web apps easier. For instance, they are moving forward with the idea that users do not need to register for every new app they use. The thinking behind the idea is that there should be a universal place to register for web apps and a centralized means of user authentication. This place is called browserid.org. Mozilla has also produced a way for web apps to communicate with one another even if the apps weren’t built by the same people. Features such as these will increase the functionality and the usefulness of web apps and could very well make them more desirable than desktop apps.

We're all searching for new ways to get to the top of search results. Microformats are simple conventions used on websites that help define and describe certain types of information. Google calls them rich snippets. Microformats work by applying certain CSS classes to HTML tags, which provides context for the information delivered to search engines.

Since microformats use familiar technologies, the learning curve is low and essentially no changes need to be made to your design or layout to get started. Microformats have a handful of specifications defined that are already being used by search engines to index content — anything from people and organizations to events and recipes. 

Here are some examples...

Let's say you're looking for restaurants and you search for "bar-b-que austin tx". A normal search result in Google will look like this: 

But if we applied microformats to the information like Yelp does, then a user would be presented with a search result similar to this: 

The technique used here is to let search engines know this is a review of a place. By using certain tags provided by a specification, we enable the search engine to know the place review, all of its information, plus its rating. The same thing can be done with recipes:  

Who is using it? 

Google just launched a "Recipe View," a recipe search engine. Facebook is using the hCalendar and hCard microformats on all of their events. By using microformats on your information, you give yourself a better chance of getting your information into search results.

Usage of mobile devices has increased dramatically over the years. Smartphones have become the accessory you never leave home without. Which is why it's no surprise web-based email is on the decline and mobile email is up by 36 percent in 2010, according to comScore. With more and more sites formatted for mobile devices and smartphone adoption on the rise, where are the mobile emails? 

I started looking into this to determine what it would take to create mobile emails. I quickly found that it isn't as easy as we would hope. The problem is that you do not know if the user is going to be on a mobile device when they view the email. So I started playing around with using media queries, the new technology that allows us to format web pages for mobile browsers without rebuilding the entire site. 

During my research I found that it is a useable solution, but only on the iPhone. By default we know that email clients ignore any styles that are not inline style. But the iPhone does not. This means we can take a normal email and add some CSS magic to it to make it more readable and usable on an iPhone. 

Here's an example of a Springbox email in Outlook: 

Here's the email after adding some CSS directly targeting iPhones: 

We can also use this technique to load empty images into the background to track if the user is opening the email on an iPhone or iPad. I think the more we use this technology, the sooner all mobile devices will come around and add support for it. 

We recently launched the Sweet Leaf Sweet Spot contest — and a few interesting technologies went with it. We wanted users to enter the contest through Twitter or a form on the website, and vote for their favorite entries using either tweets or likes to determine the prize winner.

We used the Twitter API to both find new entries and count votes. OAuth allowed us to securely communicate with Twitter and tweet to users to let them know their entry was received. Pretty quickly, we ran into a small problem: hitting the limit that Twitter has for calls to the API. To solve this we white-listed our application with Twitter so we could make as many calls per hour as we needed.

Twitter @Anywhere was used to allow users to tweet a vote directly from the contest website. The @Anywhere feature allowed us to work smoothly with both the Twitter API and OAuth to increase voting functionality and usability.

Finally, we used Facebook Like functionality so users could vote by liking an entry in Facebook. The Open Graph API allowed us to retrieve the number of likes each respective entry received and count them as part of that entry’s overall score.

All in all, a little extra effort for us adds up to many easy ways for users to participate.

As the power and proliferation of mobile devices increases, mobile applications are increasingly an effective and easy way for companies to extend their services or products to existing customers — and obtain new ones.

iPhone apps are often the first thing people think of when talking about mobile applications, but there are numerous other options. And, as the power of these other options increase, it becomes just as a good idea to make apps for other devices as it is to make an application for the iPhone.

Let’s say you have a website that provides a service. Instead of producing an iPhone app, it might be better to develop a mobile web app, an application that runs in a mobile browser. A mobile web app would reach almost every mobile device because almost all mobile devices have a browser to access the internet. And with most mobile browsers being just as powerful — if not more powerful than desktop browsers — it’s very easy to make a version of your web app into a mobile app.

Technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and SQLite simplify the process. Yes, many mobile browsers have database support built in, so you can store and retrieve data using JavaScript. Frameworks such as jQuery make it very easy to create powerful, more streamlined mobile apps.

Android mobile devices are increasing in popularity because virtually every cell phone carrier offers an Android-powered smartphone. Tools such as Appcelerator make it easy to create Android apps in no time. Plus, the Android Market has no wait time to have your app ready for users to download.

Up to this point, I’ve only mentioned smartphones. They’re only part of the mobile device equation. The next time you’re thinking about a mobile app, consider some devices such as:

• PSP
• Amazon Kindle (yes, you can now create apps for the Kindle)
• iPad
• iPod Touch
• Zune HD
• Tablet PCs