Philippe claims Viacom has created fragmentation and continues it by releasing all John Stewart video from the Daily Show that will searchable and viewable to everyone. They plan on cross linking content with shows like Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert.
He talked a little about his law suite on Google and the blatant copyright infringement. He felt that Google was making money off of Viacom content without compensation. Viacom has made deals with Joost which a good revenue system was implemented in the very begin.
When asked about the Viacom loss to Newscorp for MySpace and if Viacom is looking to invest in Facebook, Philippe said that Viacom looks to make widgets for all social networks and to work with them all.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
Dan Scheinman of Cisco talked to us about why Cisco is partnering and purchasing web 2.0 properties. He said he feels a little like PC guy. Web 2.0 is has pretty cool term and what they can do. Cisco talks about scalability, convergence, and so forth. Cisco, through Linksys, helps home users connect to the web through their routers. They feel networking is a big part of web 2.0.
Dan announced EOS, an open software platform for creating and managing a community-based entertainment experience. Nascar and the NHL are using this technology.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
Tim O’Reilly had a conversation with Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay. Meg stated that eBay has made more changes on the site over the last 3 months then they have done over the last 3 years. This is in response to an eBay slow down in transactions.
They then talked about the future of PayPal. Meg stated that the purchase of Pay Pal was one of the best acquisitions ever in the tech industry. Paypal is looking into not only being you financial information on the web, but possibly used as an identity and reputation system. Maybe use PayPal to log into sites or post on blogs and have your posts weighted based on your reputation. Pretty interesting.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
The day started off with Steve Balmer. Steve gave a general talk on what Microsoft was doing well and what they needed to do better. Then Steve professed his loves for “Developers” without the dance.
There was a lot of talk about the partnership between Microsoft and Facebook, mostly on the ad platform. Steve then brought out Dan Fernandez to do a demo of Silverlight. As of today, Dan let everyone know, as of today Popfly is officially in open beta. He went through a demo of popfly, It seems like it will be a popular app for all the people on MySpace and Facebook. Seems that most of the apps in Popfly are pretty basic. You may be able to easily build these apps, but it runs Silverlight which most people don’t even know about.
Steve was asked about online office competition such as Google Docs and Zimbra. Steve then talked about how there are a lot of good competitors, but none of them do what MS Office does. I agree. Office is very powerful tool, though a little bloated.
When asked about Search, Steve went into a funny rant about it’s like little Johnny who is only 3, is being forced to play Basketball against the 12 year olds. But one day Little Johnny will grow up and Dunk on the older kids. Though he was talking about search, John (the host) stated “I think your talking about the Zune”. The crowd erupted in laughter. Steve Balmer is definitely fun to watch.
When asked about the purchase of my company aQuantive. He mostly focused on Atlas and Drive PM and their ad network. He didn’t have much to say about AA|RF. He also talked about MS buying almost 50 more companies in the next 5 years. It will be interesting to see how things go.
Steve talked about the Advertising Platform. Currently ads are server on context. This is that the user is looking at now. He feels advertising will move into more of a behavior platform. What are the users tendencies and behavior patterns and deliver ads to them that way.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
The conference has set up an pretty nice Microsoft Popfly Silverlight App. It combines Twitter, Technorati, and Flicker to gather all the chatter thats is going on while at the conference. Check it out at http://www.poply.ms/users/team/web2summit.small.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
Nokia was the main sponsor for the after party. I got a closer look at the Nokia N810 and really have mixed feelings. I was wrong earlier when I said it was computer / PDA / Cell Phone. There is no phone. I also said it would give the iPhone a run for it;s money. Well since it is not a phone at all, it can’t. And that is where my issue is. I mini WiFi computer seems cool, but to me, it seemed like a larger screen iPod touch with 1/8th the memory. It does run linux and a mozilla driven browser. It does also support third party developers and that is one thing the iPhone and iPod Touch don’t do yet. But they will. The Nokia N810 misses it’s mark I think. The memory is to small to be an MP3 Player and Wifi is not prevalent enough to be a good mini computer. The software is tight and the product felt great, but I want to connect to the internet from anywhere. And to do that, I need cellular service.
The other sponsors had rooms all around. Level 3 had an interview couch set up and were conducting interviews with anyone interested in being interviewed. Etelos has a live Jazz Trio playing. They sounded good and it was a nice atmosphere. WebEx had a bad room. It was pretty boring and they were serving Appletini’s. It just wasn’t my style. The one sponsor that had it going on and everyone seemed to flock to was Microsoft. Microsoft had 2 XBox’s, with 4 controllers each, set up with Halo 3. They also had a bunch of goodies they were giving out. Flash Drives, Water Bottles, and Gooey Balls were just a few. They had a nice bar and also were serving Mini Doughnuts that were cooked right there in front of you. Microsoft also had some screens with their web apps like Live Search up on them. They had a DJ that wasn’t bad, but wasn’t my type of music. He used vinyl. Me being an ex-dj myself, I respect DJ that don’t use CD’s or MP3’s. Vinyl is where a real DJ is at.
Well I am back in the room now and about to upload a bunch of photos to my Flickr account. Check them out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jefflouella. I got Steve Balmer first thing in the morning. I can’t wait for that.
I also apologize for all mis-typing. I am typing as I go and not really checking things out. So if my grammar ain’t good, that be the reason.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
After the plethora of talks, there was a sponsor happy hour. I met some interesting people and had a long discussion with the News Gator team. We talked about News Gator’s enterprise services and widgets. I am a user of Feed Demon and found there internal portals that integrates with Sharepoint 2007 pretty amazing.
The big end to the day of speeches is a talk with News Corps CEO Rupert Murdoch and MySpace’s Chris DeWolfe. I’m not a huge MySpace fan. I hate that I get so much spam from my inactive account and when I use it, the site is slow and annoying. Chris announced that they are opening up the platform to application developers. They will have a sandbox environment for a select group of beta testers.
MySpace bought a company called SDC and is using them to enhance the advertising network in MySpace to make it more targeted. They are breaking people down into thousands of marketing types such as “People who like horror films”.
When aked what Rupert will do to improve the Wall Street Journal. He answered:
- Improve It
- Add International News
- Add Arts, Culture, Entertainment
He also said he expects to kill the New York Times. He also said the new Fox Business Channel is superior to CNBC and the exact phase used was “Because CNBC Sucks”. CNBC only has 300k views. I am sure Murdoch has a point and everything he does seem to make a ton of money. It’s a shame that an Aussie knows more about American Culture than any other media company.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
Evan Williams, the Co-founder of Twitter talks about some things they learned over the last year running Twitter.com. He based it on constraints and how to keep things simple. He like to ask “What can we take away to create something new”. For those that don’t know, Evan created Blogger. Twitter utilizes SMS and messages are limited to 140 characters with no formating. Twitter has a very successful API and there are now hundreds of apps that use the twitter it. What other sites use constraints. FotoLog lets you upload 1 photo a day. YouTube only allows 2 minutes or 10mb of video. Google, takes away most graphics and minimized design.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
Tim O’Reilly brought out Bruce Chizen, the CEO of Adobe. Adobe is a huge player in the Web. Most sites are designed with either Photoshop or Fireworks. Flash is the defacto vehicle for video streaming on YouTube and MySpace. He stated that “Adobe enables Web 2.0”. Adobe bought Buzzword to compete against Google Docs and the Future Microsoft Online Office. It is using Adobe Air (the old Apollo) and can run without the web or you can use the online limited version when not on you own machine.
Bruce talked about Photoshop Express, the future advertising based online version of photoshop. It will give people the ability to do basic photo editing. This will help offset the cpu and ram usage on client machines.
Bruce talked about MS Silverlight and Microsoft’s messily 3% total coverage compared to 99% of all computers have Flash. He then brought up Microsoft used flash on the Halo 3 promo sites and not Silverlight. Microsoft themselves can’t use their own products since it has such little market share.
Adobe is heading to service network based products. Bruce predicts that the software will be a pay service and not advertising based. Professionals don’t want to be smothered with ads while working.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
Marrisa Mayer of Google was next. She is now running Google Health. She started off with a top ten list of what you might think Google Health is going to be. If I could type faster I would have gotten it all. I hope I can get the presentation later to post it. More people go to Google to search first over WebMD. Google is working to digitize people’s heath records to make them portable. They plan on having things like your health history and xrays available in your hands. When you go to a new doctor, you can just send them over to the doctor from your cell phone, Seems awesome in that aspect. Then again, they need to scan in all my record.
Anssi Vanjoki from Nokia came out next to show Nokia’s next product. Any Nokia N series phone is Nokia’s version of the computer. He projects that in the next 5 years there will be 400 million pocket computers. He said Nokia’s OS OVI is open for development. He then showed off the new Nokia N810. It is a nice mini computer / pda / cellphone. It has a slide out keyboard and runs Linux on the Maemo platform. It also has GPS built in it. Nokia is the largest phone maker in the world and this device may give the iPhone a run for it’s money.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
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