Festival 404: first impressions

This weekend in Samara, the annual 404 festival was held, dedicated to Internet technologies and not only. I hasten to share my impression from the scene.

Festival 404 is held for the seventh time. The venue was the Holiday Inn Hotel in the historical center of Samara. The festival program is divided into two days and 9 thematic sections: Design Weekend, UX, Information Society, Marketing for Robots, Mobile Applications, Startups, Startups: Fail Conference, Technology, People Management. For me, the UX section, Mobile applications, Design Weekend were of the greatest interest, but first things first.

At the entrance we are met by a hare of no-fortune - the main character of the festival 404. In general, the festival had a very informal and friendly atmosphere.
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The opening of the festival began with the fact that Denis Kolesnikov (Kurazh-Bambey) greeted everyone with a cheerful “five days”. What has become a tradition of the festival.


Before everyone who came in the morning, a specially invited guest, Onotole, delivered a speech:



At the beginning of the presentation, Dmitry Karpov from the British Higher School of Design had technical difficulties with the presentation. Dmitry jerks off and philosophically argues that in this life you should always be prepared for surprises.




The first speaker from the Mobile Applications section, Ilya Birman, talks about Angstrom designing his application.




Meanwhile, Mikhail Zhashkov in the UX section is philosophizing on the subject of human-computer interaction. Mikhail demonstrated his reading, but rather distanced himself from the stated topic.

The very strange phrase “zero thickness interaction” is an attempt to unload the interface for the sake of reducing the entire user interaction experience with the interface. And this concept is quite controversial.




If you are bored or the reports tired you - you could always relax and play Tanks:




Damir Kiramov superbly described all aspects related to the development of interfaces for TV. This is how TV viewers look, in general, and, accordingly, the interface for them should be minimally “energy-consuming”.




The interface for smart TV is far from as simple as it seems. No wonder so many people are far from delighted with SmartTV. TV performs well one function - video output. Interfaces stuffed with small text are completely out of place here - people have to get up, come closer and read what exactly is written in the description of some program or film. Yes, and with trouble consoles - Koreans traditionally try to cram more buttons into them, which makes the consoles themselves difficult to master and use.

Damir for 3 years has developed a fundamentally new system for television with a 9-button remote and a personal approach to content consumption. In general, the report illustrates one of the important trends: 404fest is already far from just about the web.


Wasserman, along with Denis Kolesnikov (Kurazh-Bambey), talked about the fate of the world for 2 hours. Much of the story Onotole is interesting and informative, but there are things with which I would argue. Denis felt the audience very subtly and quite skillfully directed the dialogue in the right direction. In general, he did not let the listeners get bored, when Wasserman was already skidding.




By the way, each participant could vote for reports he liked with the help of a mobile application.

Aftepati in full swing, a lot of alcohol surrounded by pleasant company of interesting people:




Pokras Lampas gives us a calligraphy workshop:




The next morning I went for a 5-kilometer run along the Volga embankment, after which all the hangover disappeared like a hand. Alisher jogging from Odnoklassniki was organized, for which a special thanks to him.




The first report was Ivan Kozlov ( VaNcHeR ) from Aviasales, who gave an excellent account of the 10 reasons that led to the company's success. Note to many startups.




Tanya Bibikova from the Data Laboratory spoke very touchingly about her life path.

Lesha Ivanovsky spoke very incendiaryly. The stated theme of “12 stories about design” was more than fully disclosed. There were much more stories, though many of them are far from design. Mathematics, biology, psychology, even celestial mechanics are intertwined here. Lesha talks a lot about the role of chance, an excellent illustration of this is the story about spinach.

In the 19th century, the Swiss scientist Gustav von Bunge, transferring the results of his research from a piece of paper to a notebook, did not put a comma and added that there is not 3.5 milligrams of iron in spinach, but 35. But this is more than in all other products. In the end, everyone decided that spinach is very useful (spinach is really useful, but not so much), it entered into various aspects of the culture, mothers around the world fed spinach to children. And all because of one comma ...

In general, you can not tell everything. The conference was a success. 404 Fest was pleasantly surprised by the level of preparation, the quality of the material of the speakers and left an irresistible desire to return here next year.