An Interview with Shashank Tiwari of Flex Camp Wall Street Part I

Hello everyone and welcome to this Flex Authority Interview with Shashank Tiwari, the organizer of Flex Camp, which is taking place November 16 and 17th in New York.

This year the Flex Camp Wall Street is a two-day event. What made you decide to expand it to two days?

We've had a few camps in the last couple of years, between Chicago and New York, and the one consistent feedback we got was that the camp was too short. It was good fun and people learned a lot of stuff, but they wanted more. The only way to do that was to expand it to more than one day and try out a two-day pattern. We tried out a two-day format in Chicago also earlier this year when we had that Flash Camp, and it worked fine, so I said, "Let me bring the same model to New York as well, and I hope it will be interesting to the people who attend."

How is this unique from other Flex Camps?

If you notice, this camp is Flex Camp Wall Street, and we've renamed it one more time to Flex/Flash Camp Wall Street. We are trying to imply that there is certainly a focus on the Wall Street firms, which is one of the largest bunch of employers in New York, and even though the economy is down, they still have some of the most interesting applications being built out using Flex and related technologies. When we say this camp is different, I don't mean to imply that there is no room for people who are not doing financial applications, or for people who are in New York and doing other exciting stuff, but there will certainly be a marginal bias towards Wall Street and towards Financial applications. That's how [we chose] the name and that's the bias.

So when you get presentations for this, do you specifically look for applications that are financially focused?

Last year we were very strict about it... I put down a very strict set of guidelines saying if anyone was presenting, it better be a topic that is extremely pertinent to financial applications and nothing else. This year I have relaxed the rule a bit, for a couple of reasons. One, I think financial service corporations and banks are also getting a little adventurous with Flex/Flash applications and trying out new things, so they might also benefit from looking at new applications beyond what they always build. Second, there is a ton of interesting stuff that has happened between last year and this year that may not necessarily be relevant to financial applications right away, but certainly has a place going forward. To cut a long story short, many speakers will be speaking about topics that are relevant to the financial services sector, but at the same time, you will also see a lot of cool, interesting stuff that is just exciting from a Flex framework or Flash platform standpoint.

So you're trying to push the envelope with what you show?

I'm really hoping so and I'm looking for feedback, and finally the event itself will show whether that was a good idea or not. I'm really looking forward to trying out a few things and making sure that this is a useful event for the community and for the big number of Flash platform developers we have in New York.

I see that you're holding this year's event during the week, on a Monday and Tuesday. Why not on a weekend?

That's an interesting question. I had requests from a bunch of people, especially speakers and people who were going to actually come all the way to New York just for the event: Keep it around the weekend but not on the weekend. Perhaps they wanted the weekend to do other things and enjoy New York. That's one side of the story.

So Flex/Flash Camp Wall Street is very good for New York tourism? [laughs] Do you have a lot of out-of-town speakers this year?

[Laughs] I do have a bunch of them, for sure... a significant number. Yes, maybe it will be good for tourism. At the same time, I've realized that when it comes to weekend events in NY, especially if it's a technical event — some people have reservations because that's their only family time or personal time, and they don't want to compromise on that. So I thought, maybe Monday and Tuesday — we'll try it out. Of course some firms may not want to send their employees on a paid day to sit through the conference. But we've reduced the fee, and made it more affordable, so we hope that it gets compromised, one way or the other.

I saw the fee was $49.00. Is that for both days or one day?

It's for both days... so it's a shock for quite a few people.

That's very low.

Last year, we charged $100 for a single day. That's why some people called me up to make sure they got that right. Some even exclaimed, "Is this a typo?" And the answer is yes, it's deliberate, it's $49 for both days.

How did you get such a low cost?

We are getting some help from Adobe and a few other sponsors, who are chipping in. We are also looking to chip in and match up, if we fall short. The intent was that money should not become the deciding factor and prevent you from attending this event. I understand that $200 versus $49 is not a massive difference, but psychologically it's easier to go for a $49 event than for a $200 event.

Yes, especially now... I think you're right.

Absolutely.

Let's go to Flex and New York. What has the job market been in Flex? Have you seen an upswing or downswing in Flex jobs?

It's been tremendous. It's very exciting. Two or three years back, Flex was almost an unknown technology, with just one or two organizations experimenting with it, as far as New York was concerned. Today, we have every single organization with at least one Flex-related application, which is amazing. This includes most of the big guys in the financial services world. You probably have heard of Morgan Stanley's big Flex application. I do know that JP Morgan, Moody's, Bloomberg, Bank of America and many others are using the technology. Each one of them has had at least some significant application built using Flex/AIR.

Besides the financial services world, there's the media/entertainment segment — the likes of ESPN, HBO, Time — who have also built a ton of big Flex applications.

Besides these two big chunks, there have been a bunch of interesting startups who have also contributed to the space and built a lot of interesting Flex applications.

Putting all of that together, I think the market for the Flex and the Flash platform as an application development techonology has been great. It's been very encouraging, and it's surprising that in bad economic times, the market is still bullish for these technologies.