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.