7 July 2008, by Karl Bunyan
The July Facebook developer garage for London is on Wednesday evening 
The July Facebook developer garage for London is on Wednesday evening. More details can be found on the Facebook event page but the running list currently looks like this:
- Ashley Ward CEO of European Leadership Forum gives essential advice for raising money for your Facebook App.
- Brad Rees and Jon Hill from Mediacells explore the future of mobile advertising on facebook apps
- Matthew ‘Chewy’ Trewhella from Google enlightens us a bit on OpenSocial 0.8
- Mat Clayton CEO of Wakari, developer of Become Rambo tells us about his new cross platform app for the upcoming film Hancock
- Joshua March from iNetwork marketing is back with part two of Tweaking your App
- Exciting news on a Formula One Application
The event is hosted by Sun Microsystems at 45, King William Street, London.
July 7, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Filed in: Sales & Marketing, Programming
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1 July 2008, by Karl Bunyan
Despite the fact that there seem to be a large number of developers in London the evidence appears to be that very few are building or aspiring to build big, revenue-generating applications.
Yesterday I attended the Social Media Business School here in London, both to learn from a few industry experts but also as a panellist to see what help and advice I could give to developers, agencies and others who were looking to operate within the social networking space. Despite good speakers who covered topics in more depth than I’ve encountered at other social media conferences, the event was quite underattended by the development community. This says a lot for where the focus of entrepreneurial social application development is: it really isn’t here in the UK capital. Despite the fact that there seem to be a large number of developers in London the evidence appears to be that very few are building or aspiring to build big, revenue-generating applications.
The reasons for this are hard to pinpoint. Facebook applications aren’t hard to develop so it’s certainly not a lack of technical or creative talent. Perhaps it may also have something to do with our slightly more conservative and less entrepreneurial nature (obviously a generalisation with many exceptions), but in the end I believe the primary reason is down to the commercial environment in the UK and its focus on London.
Whether the inhabitants of other major cities like it or not, London is very much the centre of new media activity over here as much as it is many other service sectors. Most major national and international companies have representation here, and the larger interactive agencies are here. As a result we have a concentration of developers here matched only by the concentration of employment opportunities. Alongside this, London is one of the most expensive cities in the world and, as a result, to live here you need to work and to earn. Salaries can be good but so are living costs and if a developer decided to quit their day job to launch a speculative venture then it wouldn’t be long before rent and other costs east into whatever financial buffer they may have.
Alongside this, to-date there have been few compelling stories of application developers making significant revenues (certainly outside of the top application in each genre), and as such the development of applications is a highly speculative venture that doesn’t appear to offer rewards commensurate with that level of risk. Given the choice, it makes a lot more sense for developers to continue working within interactive agencies and to develop social media applications within a known structure. As a monetisation strategy, being paid a daily wage is hard to argue against in such a high-cost environment.
I was struck by the difference in the types of developers at the recent Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) conference and those who attend the London Facebook Developer Garage. At GSP the focus was much more on developers with applications-as-businesses, with in-depth discussions about monetisation and analytics. The London Garage meetings are much more about applications for clients or existing businesses, whether those clients are interactive agencies working with brand names on campaigns or start-up websites hoping to leverage social graphs to give their own ventures an early-stage boost.
And that, I believe, is what characterises the London Facebook development community. Where there’s work for developers and plenty of brand clients looking to spread their message on social networks there really isn’t the same drive to try to create new businesses, especially where the models are unproven. In part, it’s not as much part of our culture to jump into unknown territories, but in the main the necessities of everyday life just makes other, safer, opportunities seem much more attractive. Until we see more evidence of fortunes being made through application development I can’t see that it’s either necessary to try to change that or realistic to expect that it will.
July 1, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Filed in: Business & Management, Sales & Marketing
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