Morgan Webb from G4, Tripp Hawkins of Digital Chocolate, and Robert Kotick of Activision talked about gaming. Home consoles rival that of the movie business these days. Gaming in general between web, console, mobile, and now gadgets is a colossal movement.
Tripp made a bold statement, “Mobile Web is Web 3.0”. Tripp also said there are over 3 billion people with cell phones and 1 billion of those people are “looking to hook-up”. if there is an app that can help the people’s social life, it is potentially a 100 billion dollar business.
Morgan asked about in game advertising and whether it is just for added profit or helps offset production. Robert Kotick thinks both. Games are trying to out do each other by brining in big talent, high production, and a bunch of developers.
Tripp explains the difference between Casual Gamers and Hardcore Gamers. Causal gamers care less about graphics and would prefer the games to be more social. Hardcore gamers want to feel like they are in the Matrix.
The shift away from solitary gaming is increasing. 80% of gamers play games by themselves. With online gaming and services like XBOX Live and Consoles like the Wii are promoting social causal and hardcore gaming.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
John Battelle talks with Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of Imaging and Printing at HP, about printing and he stated that there is 2 things to do on the web, View it or Print it. There are over half a billion HP printers sold from HP so far. Vyomesh talked about how the shift from printing from MS applications to printing the web has been about an 80% shift. There has been a big focus on photo’s these days. Vyomesh thinks sharing photos on cell phones is not too personal and people prefer to have photo’s in hands. Whether it is printed in the home or though a service like HP’s Snapfish.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
Naill Kennedy organized the Widget Summit this year came to talk to us about widgets. He went over some technologies such as XML, JSON, and RSS. Naill also showed some Advertising Mashups with Nissan and Google Maps. There is no one major widget provider. Google, NetVibes (personal homepages), Yahoo, MSN, Vista, Mac, blog sidebars, etc.. Now there are also Mobile widgets. This is where I can see widgets taking a big leap.
Bill Tancer from Hitwise talked to about Predictive Power of Web 2.0 Data. He went over the “Rogers Adoption Curve”. Today with Web 2.0 the adoption curve has been massively shortened. Hitwise can pinpoint what early adopters are doing on the web and predict which site are going to become hot and which are not. You can learn more on www.ilovedata.com.
Jeff Huber, the SVP of Engineering from Google, talked about the programable web. He focused on Gadgets. Since January, 2006 there are over 20,000 gadgets that are in the Google Ecosystem and spread over 100,000 sites. He stated what RSS has done for Content, Gadgets are doing for applications. It’s the aggregation of application. The top 125 total Google Gadgets are 50% of all gadget Traffic.
Posted on: October 18th, 2007
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
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