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
Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle opened up to with an overview of the whole conference. These two definitely have done this before. They work well together. They really spiked my interest in the rest of the week.
Next is a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook. Mark was actually pretty funny. He came out in flip flop (a yuck for me, but when you are worth billions, what can i say), while the stuffy crowd slowly loosened their ties. Mark is not focusing on revenue, financing, and other business issues. When you are one of the webs darlings, it just comes easy.
Mark talked about the social graph that Facebook has created and how application that are being created to use the Facebook applications can use it. Facebook has become a huge platform recently for start up businesses. I semi have issues with these applications. Though some are great, If I get another “Vampire Bite” or get “Slapped” by someone else, I may start cutting people off. I use Facebook to find and keep in touch with old friends. It is slowly turning into an annoying spam engine. The one good thing is that is not sending me annoying emails all the time.
Mark kept saying “We’ll talk about this in 3 months” when asked about a Facebook Ad Network, I believe Facebook is going to be teaming up with Microsoft. This will be great for targeting people with ads that matter. Though I won’t be effected. I use AdBlock.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
The main conference is about to begin. We are all in the same grand ballroom. I felt like a crazed fan at a concert when they open the doors and everyone rushes in. I got there early and waited at the front door. I never been to an event like this. I was just early because I had nothing to do. When the doors opened, It seemed like a thousand people were pushing me from behind to get in. It stinks that some people have to watch from another room on monitors. This is an Invite only event. You think they would only invite enough people to fill the room and no more.
Just waiting for the speakers to start. Here is what I am in for.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
I decided to check out the discussion on the future of web fame, half because of the topic, half because it is the one conference room with working WiFi. The discussion is being hosted by Alan Citron, Kent Nichols, and Mike Beckett.
Mike Beckett explains how they produced LonelyGirl15 on YouTube and his new show Kate Modern in the UK. It is a very interesting idea. All the video posts are scripted, but posted at random times. The idea is to make people think that these characters are real and that you are getting inside their life. I always thought LonelyGirl was real until they revealed it. Still, even though it is all scripted, it definitely feels real.
Though most of the discussion focused on Mike, Kent Nichols, who developed “Ask a Ninja”, said Ask a Ninja is worth 7 figures in merchandise and advertising. Mike Beckett also talked about taking the LonelyGirl15 platform and focusing them in other countries. Kate Modern is the first one as it is based in the UK.
I find it amazing the money these guys are making on these ideas. What starts off as a YouTube sensation is making some good cash and is only going up.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
95% of the attendants of the Web 2.0 Summit are way over dressed. When did the web get so stuffy. Suits and Ties? It kind of makes me laugh that the presenters are young and hip, but most of the attendants are upper management trying to figure out this web 2.0 thing. I guess that is good to an extent. At least it will get them thinking on how to implement these new ideas on the web.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
Since I am moving into the SEO realm, I decided to hit up the talk about Search hosted by Jessie Stricchoiola and Jonah Stein from Alchemist Media.
If a users searched for the word “Boxer”, how many people are looking for boxing, or a dog, or even underwear. These are some issue with search and trying to display the correct result to the right person.
Jonah started the discussion by outlining SEO. He compared organic search to an Iceberg. Most of the work for SEO is unseen. It’s below the hood so to say. It is important to implement SEO from the beginning. And he went through some reasons why.
- Key word research
- Architecture
- Content Management
- Spiderablity
- AJAX can be problems
- Flash can be problems
- Canonically Deterministic
- Manage Content Syndication
Most of the discussion focused on the basics, though the team from Alchemist Media seems pretty knowledgeable on the topics.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
RSS Feeds