404 Festival: First Impressions

This weekend Samara hosted the annual 404 festival dedicated to Internet technologies and not only. I hasten to share my experience from the place of the event.

The 404 festival is being held for the seventh time. The venue was the Holiday Inn in the historic 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 most interest, but first things first.

At the entrance we are greeted by a hare of fate - the main character of the festival 404. In general, the festival had a very informal and friendly atmosphere.




The opening of the festival began with the fact that Denis Kolesnikov (Kurazh-Bambey) greeted everyone with a fun “five”. What has become a tradition of the festival.


Before everyone who came in the morning, a specially invited guest spoke - Onotole:



At the beginning of the speech, Dmitry Karpov from the British Higher School of Design had technical difficulties with the presentation. Dmitry laughs off and philosophically argues that in this life you always need to be prepared for the unexpected.




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




Meanwhile, Mikhail Zhashkov in the UX section philosophizes on the topic of human-computer interaction. Michael showed his well-readness, but quite distanced himself from the stated topic.

The strange phrase “interaction of zero thickness” itself is an attempt to offload the interface in order to reduce the entire experience of user interaction with the interface. And this concept is pretty controversial.




If you are bored or tired of reports, you could always relax and play Tanki:




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




The interface for a smart TV is far from being as simple as it sounds. Not without reason, so many people are far from enthusiastic about SmartTV. The TV performs one function well - video output. The interfaces stuffed with small text are out of place here - people have to get up, come closer and read what exactly is written in the description of a program or movie. And trouble with the remote controls - Koreans traditionally try to cram more buttons in them, which makes the remote controls themselves difficult to learn and use.

For 3 years Damir has developed a fundamentally new system for television with a 9-button remote control 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, together with Denis Kolesnikov (Kurazh-Bambey), talked about the fate of the world for 2 hours. Much of Onotole's story is interesting and informative, but there are things with which I would argue. Denis, on the other hand, very subtly felt the audience and rather skillfully directed the dialogue in the right direction. In general, I did not let the listeners get bored when Wasserman was already drifting.




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

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




Pokras Lampas gives us a calligraphy master class:




The next morning I went for a 5-kilometer run along the Volga embankment, after which all the hangover vanished. Organized a run by Alisher from Odnoklassniki, for which special thanks to him.




The first report was Ivan Kozlov ( VaNcHeR ) from Aviasales, who spoke perfectly about the 10 reasons that led to the success of the company. Note to many startups.




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

Very enthusiastic spoke Lesha Ivanovsky. The declared theme of “12 stories about design” was more than fully disclosed. There were much more stories, though many of them are far from design. Here mathematics, biology, psychology, even celestial mechanics are interwoven. Alex speaks a lot about the role of chance, a wonderful illustration of this is the story of spinach.

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

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