Grip is live with their systems built on the Lift web framework.  Grip is a financial decision support tool that enables financial institutions of all sizes to brand and offer an app that provides the most sought after mobile services. It aggregates consumers' balance and transaction data from unlimited number of domestic financial institutions into a single, up-to-the-minute collective view, empowering them to understand their money flow simply and without clutter. With no core integration, no set-up fee, no annual fee and no minimum user agreement, Grip simply cost the financial institution .99 cents per active user, per month.

It's very exciting to see more companies basing their business on Lift... especially companies from Iowa.

I'm very excited to announce the Scala Lift Off London 2011 on October 13th and 14th at Skills Matter in London!

The theme for this year's show is: Different ∙ Real ∙ Awesome

Scala and Lift are fundamentally different approaches to language and web framework. Scala and Lift are used in real projects and lead to real, measurable success.  Scala and Lift lead to awesome results and awesome happiness on the part of developers.  This year's Scala Lift Off will celebrate how Scala and Lift are Different ∙ Real ∙ Awesome.

Scala and Lift provide a different and better way to build complex, real-time, scalable, concurrent systems.

Wicked exciting to me is that Jon Pretty has agreed to do a keynote and discuss the Rapture Platform as a Service offering that his company has been building.  Jon has been in the Scala community for longer than I have and helped me learn Scala.  Rapture's different approach to PaaS is informed by Scala.  Rapture's benefits are real and measurable.  But most importantly, Rapture's holistic approach is awesome (don't believe me, come see for yourself.)

I will be giving a keynote, my first in the 4th year of Scala Lift Offs.  I'll explore the history and trajectory of Scala and Lift through the lens of, you guessed it, Different ∙ Real ∙ Awesome.

This year's Scala Lift Off will be a blend of open spaces and prepared presentations.

The morning will include two tracks, one Lift focused and one Scala-oriented.  I'm working with Andy Hicks and Kevin Wright to find awesome presentations for the two tracks.  If you're interested in presenting, please ping me, Andy or Kevin.

The afternoon will be an open space format.  This will allow attendees to ask for or offer presentations and generally leads to excellent discussions.  Sometimes, the discussions are a few people and sometimes they are among dozens or more.  Skills Matter's facilities have a ton of great spaces that enable small to large groups to engage in terrific dialogs.

If you're a member of the European Scala or Lift communities, the Scala Lift Off London offers you an excellent opportunity to meet and interact with the folks you've been working with for years on mailing lists.  The Scala Lift Off also gives you a chance to share your experiences with Scala and/or Lift as well as influence the direction of the language as well as the libraries, tools, and frameworks in the Scala ecosystem.

If you're interested in learning more about Scala or Lift, the Scala Lift Off is the ideal place to ask questions and get them answered by a wide variety of real-world users as well as language and framework designers.  If you're in sports better, trading/financial services, social media, or other industries that focus on real-time, big-data, Scala and/or Lift offer you differences worth learning about.  See why the likes of Twitter, Foursquare, The Guardian, and others have found real business-changing awesomeness in the differences that Scala and/or Lift offer.

Space at the conference is limited and the Scala Lift Off London was full last year.  Purchase your tickets today.  Watch this blog for updates and more agenda items as they become available.

I'm doing a three day course September 14-16 at Skills Matter in London.

The first day of the course will be the standard Simply Lift stuff... basically it's getting started with Lift.

The next two days, though, I hope will be magic.  The idea of spending a couple of days face-to-face, hands-to-keyboard with a small number of people is very exciting to me.

One of the greatest joys for me is to work with people as they learn Lift and see how they approach problem solving.  While the Lift mailing list is a great place to watch how people approach Lift, there's no substitute for doing it face to face with the high bandwidth communications channel called reality.

I am looking forward to working with a small group of people to learn what challenges they face building web apps and how they can use Lift as it stands today to make that process easier.  But more importantly, how we can improve Lift to meet the challenges of our end users.

So, if you join me, you will learn Lift, get lots of one-on-one time with me, and I promise to add features to Lift in real time to make your web app building easier and better.

I am really looking forward to it!