Fluent 2012: Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer, "Web vs. Apps"

Apple's iPhone SDK has been the largest disruption to software development since the Web, sparking the creation in a few short years of the largest medium for consumer engagement in the world, eclipsing the Web, movies, and even television. While some prophesy that in the coming years mobile apps will be replaced by the web, in today's reality a number of high profile start-ups are bypassing the web entirely to reach their audience exclusively via apps. Join Ben and Dion as they discuss the role of the web in the mobile present and explore developer issues as we head into the post-PC era.

Ben Galbraith

Walmart.com

Ben Galbraith, together with his long-time friend Dion Almaer, forms one-half of the dynamic "Ben and Dion" duo that founded Ajaxian.com, headed Developer Tools at Mozilla, ran Developer Relations at Palm and is now running mobile architecture and engineering at Walmart.com after being acquired along with their start-up team in early 2011. Ben's been writing code since he was six and starting businesses since he was ten; he's written books, given hundreds of award-winning presentations world-wide, produced a few technical conferences, sold three companies, and has held CEO, CIO, CTO, and Software Architect positions in the medical, publishing, media, consumer electronics, advertising, software and internet industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and six children.

Dion Almaer

Walmart.com

Dion Almaer is a technologist who loves to code and build. He and his long time partner-in-crime Ben Galbraith recently brought their team to Walmart to power the mobile engineering efforts. He enjoys sharing his passion for software production across various communities, including a new property called FunctionSource.com.

Dion has been writing Web applications since it took over from Gopher. He has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, has published many articles, a book, and of course covers life the universe and everything on his blog.

He has been called a human aggregator, and you can see that in full force if you follow him on Twitter.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[otakucode]

The web is going to suffer a serious crisis eventually, and anyone who gives it some thought should be able to realize this. With the web and cloud-based solutions, you not only hand over all of your personal data to be stored in a hacker-friendly centralized location and be mined for advertising purposes, but you also guarantee platform lock-in, limits on what the app can do, piss-poor multitasking handled by a browser, and a guarantee the app will be "upgraded" until unrecognizable andunusable

[Joshua Myhre]

I feel "something" will win over web and mobile. I am certainly not trying to sound preachy what so ever, but mobile is a fashion where web is a necessity. Totally mobile frenzy geek here and registered Apple iOS developer, but when it comes to reality and not "niche" fantasy, the web is where the focus is when it comes to Cloud. My iPhone's have come and gone, paying top dollar and buying ideas at $0.99 a download, but when it comes down to it my laptop wins, mobile was a 4 year Cool period I

[traximpact]

Wow, you just have to love the 'hangers on' slide piece. Beautiful

[Александр Ли]

interesting and informative - this is a very rare combination of ...