Chief Executive Monkey Stefan Fountain, Soocial

No picture of Chief Executive Monkey Stefan Fountain

Stefan is the Chief Monkey of Soocial, the solution to the growing problem and mess that is your address book.

Interface designer, software developer, rocker and night-time haka-performer Stefan Fountain brings a fresh singular focussed vision to the mouldy address book. His Soocial service provides a unified address book that connects all your devices, computers and web applications. It's a hassle-free way to keep your address book sane, safe and clean. Soocial aims to be an open address book platform for the web where anyone can plug into the capabilities provided by the service.

In addition to being the Chief Monkey of Soocial, Stefan is a regular speaker on topics ranging from mobility to network effects and from cloud computing to Knight Rider. Recently being asked as advisor to clueless multinationals that don't know how to react to the changing world where they no longer rule by default, he poses challenges and provides realistic constructive (and destructive) feedback.

Stefan is a half Dutch and half Kiwi internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has previously founded a successful internet agency (Eight Media - www.eight.nl) and an advertising agency (Total Experience - www.totalexperience.nl). Stefan holds a MSc in CS and is a published academic author with his work on Trust and Network Effects. Stefan loves creating simple interfaces, usable web applications, futuristic musings about spiritual journeys and crazy movies featuring David Hasselhoff (http://www.vimeo.com/834214).

Presentation: "What happens when David Hasselhoff meets the cloud"

Track: Web as a platform

Time: Wednesday 14:15 - 15:15

Location: Fleming Room

Abstract:

This talk has two distinct parts - feel free to leave or join half way through.

The first part shows a real world example of moving from a typical self-hosted hardware solution to having everything running on AWS. Stefan uses his company Soocial as an example - they recently moved their whole infrastructure to run on AWS.

The second part deals with the philosophical underlying movement of building software on the shoulders of giants, like Amazon. In a world that is constantly changing and evolving the true test of successful technology is that it should disappear. It should become so part of your daily use that you don't even realize you are using it. This is also valid for online services - Stefan shows how this is happening and how you can harnas this change to create the next generation of online services by working with not against this trend.