Archive for August, 2008

Ribbit at Flashforward: The Crowd Goes Wild

Friday, August 29th, 2008 | located in Conferences/Events, Platform | No Comments »

Flashforward isn’t your ordinary conference…and that the crowd at last week’s show agreed that Ribbit isn’t your ordinary platform.

Flashforward 2008 followed on the heels of 360|Flex, a key conference for developers who work with Adobe Flex. Team Ribbit made a big showing at 360|Flex, hosting the full-house Summer Spawn developer workshop and gaining great accolades for their presence at the show.

But Flashforward took it to a whole new level. Calling on Flash developers to “Ignite Your Passion,” Flashforward brought Ribbit’s Director of Developer Platform Charles Freedman to center stage, asking him to share Ribbit with a packed house of 800 designers and developers—people from household-name enterprises to highly-focused design and development boutiques.

Here’s Chuck on stage at Flashforward.

You can see Chuck’s slides from the presentation here.

One thing this diverse crowd had in common was its excitement about Ribbit. Chuck’s show update sounded more like news from a concert tour than a tech conference. A throng of Flash programmers waited offstage for him, pressing close as he exited the speaker room and swapping questions, contact information, ideas—all with a vision for what Ribbit could bring to their business.

From using banner ads to spark customer call-ins to new ways of bringing sales reps closer to Web offers, the Flash crowd caught the Ribbit magic and saw the reasons to put our platform into action in their development work. Things like minimizing the steps between Web activity and call center conversations, direct response to banners, and other ways of engaging customers in connecting with offers seemed to pull developers right in our direction.

Another highlight from the show came when the Flashforward organizers asked Chuck to lead a lunchtime workshop. The competition for this crowd’s time was stiff: beautiful San Francisco weather and a great venue (Nob Hill) for sightseeing, along with several other workshop opportunities.

Ribbit packed the house, attracting a full 10% of conference participants to a crowded meeting room, filling it to the point where those who didn’t arrive early had to be turned away. We’re sorry that we couldn’t go hands-on with everyone, but we’ll remember the interest as we plan for future events.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about how Ribbit works, these videos from our recent Spawn developer workshop break it down into easy steps.

Tags: flashforward Chuckstar developer platform, Ribbit