I had the pleasure to attend the Front-Trends 2010 Conference in Warsaw, Poland and give a talk about webOS. This was my first talk ever at a conference; based on feedback it was received quite well, although i managed to make some people fall asleep 
webOS is not very well known in Poland, the current devices are not available there. It was interesting to show the audience that while the rest of the industry is moving towards web-based Apps, webOS had those from the beginning and it’s especially easy for web-developers to get into webOS development. I hopefully inspired many people in Poland to give webOS a try and compare it to other platforms; be it for “native” webOS applications or working with phonegap and other tools to have cross-platform webapps.
Seeing talks given by big names like Douglas Crockford (who’s talk i already enjoyed in Berlin at JSConf), Tantek Celik, Peter-Paul Koch and others i learned a lot how to present successfully and how to engage your audience. Most engaging talk for me was Jan Lehnardt’s “Peer to Peer Web and Why you should care”; while i was most inspired by Peter-Paul’s Koch “JSON over SMS”. It was great to meet so many new faces in the speaker community as well as in the developer community. For me conferences are always inspiring in terms of content but also how many new connections you can make.
Palm sent me some Palm Pre Plus Phones to give away during the conference, unfortunately they got stuck in customs so i had to cancel my planned hands-on webOS development workshop. I ended up raffling off four webOS development books and two devices (who will be sent to the lucky winners after they finally arrive in Poland).
My Talk “you know webOS”
We’ve seen the rise of web apps, written in HTML/CSS/Javascript, running on top of WebKit. Palm’s webOS treats web apps as first citizens, even the built-in apps are built that way. We’ll take a closer look at what webOS is and how to develop web apps for it. If you are a web developer, you’ll feel right at home with webOS.
Link to the Presentation: http://www.thinmachine.ch/presentations/ft2010/
If you attended my talk, please rate it and give feedback: http://speakerrate.com/talks/4879-you-know-webos
Resources:
Palm Developer Portal: http://developer.palm.com
My multi-part webOS SDK Development Tutorial: http://mobile.tutsplus.com
Community webOS Documentation Wiki: http://webos101.com
WebOS-Internals WIKI: http://www.webos-internals.org
I didn’t fall asleep, but I honestly expected something more. I was wating for some real and cool examples, not only for plain code and explanations. But, as you said, it was your first speech, wasn’t it? So don’t worry about negative opinions, i believe you were quite nervous and this is understandable. And i’m watiting for your next speech about webOS
yes, it was my first speech at a conference
with feedback like yours i now know how to make it better next time! I originally planned a hands-on development workshop on the second day, but i had to cancel that because the Palm devices got stuck at customs.