Sold out QCon kicks off in London: big data, mobile, cloud, HTML 5

QCon London has just started in London, and I’m interested to see that it is both bigger than last year and also sold out. I should not be surprised, because it is usually the best conference I attend all year, being vendor-neutral (though with an Agile bias), wide-ranging and always thought-provoking.

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A few more observations. One reason I attend is to watch industry trends, which are meaningful here because the agenda is driven by what currently concerns developers and software architects. Interesting then to see an entire track on cross-platform mobile, though one that is largely focused on HTML 5. In fact, mobile and cloud between them dominate here, with other tracks covering cloud architecture, big data, highly available systems, platform as a service, HTML 5 and JavaScript and more.

I also noticed that Abobe’s Christophe Coenraets is here this year as he was in 2011 – only this year he is talking not about Flex or AIR, but HTML, JavaScript and PhoneGap.