Web 2.0 Expo 2007

I have had a very full day. My backpack is full too, stuffed with free XL oversized t-shirts. (How come all the booths run out of L size so quickly?)

Internet connection throughout the day was not good. It was spotty at best. I got booted out from Wifi a few times -and had to close my laptop in frustration – forcing me back to the session at hand. No prize for guess if the talk was boring when I was doing this.

Nevertheless, there were a few gems I managed to catch.

First up during the Keynote was Swivel – the startup that is trying to visualize unprocessed data in a more meaningful way. He took boring UN published data in book form and grabbed other numbers from alternate sources to generate interesting and comparative graphs. As a result, he could relate, say, bankruptcy rate in the US with the decreasing savings of households. I think this will be interesting to businesses, governments and organisations that need data mining. It is really a very interesting industry.

Talking about data, Hitwise’s GM Bill Tancer gave a fascinating talk, showing some of the deep data that he harvested from his company’s service. Yelp seems to be up and coming, in terms of popularity. The blogging trends presented by David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, are also very interesting. He says a lot of people are blogging during work hours, and the Japanese are the most avid bloggers in the world. Disclaimer: the former doesn’t necessarily relate to the latter. I took shots of all the slides to take home for further analysis.

The climax of the Keynote today belonged to the interview with Eric Schmidt. I have got to take my hats off to John Battelle. He asked some killer questions. Battelle really dug in as Schmidt was probed if Google Apps is in direct competition with MS Office, and why would Google buy up a company that chase after ads that ask users to ‘hit the monkey’? (For those who doesn’t know, Google bought over DoubleClick just last week.) My overall take from Schmidt is that Google is pursuing markets on three areas: collaboration, local ads and mobile. Schmidt seems to be a very nice, mild mannered guy — and Battelle is probably the most qualified interviewer for Google. He is now my favourite talk-show host, if he does ever make it to TV land. I really enjoyed the chat.

The sessions I attended ranged from average to very good. I chose the following:

• Case Study: Digging into the Technology Behind the Development of Digg. Tim Byrne, one of the senior engineers, shed light on how Digg began its humble beginnings with just $2K, and through the power of the word-of-mouth and a no me-too mentality, rose from a hosted service company to one that now powers 100+ LAMP servers. Digg looked at market examples like Slashdot, and saw the potential in under-represented news. As a result, they decided to ‘fill the injustice’, so to speak. It was a really inspiring story.
• Moving from 1.0 to 2.0 Philosophies and Structures for Change. The room was overflowing for this panel talk. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who wants to understand what really is the mindset change behind web 2.0. I think what’s more important is to know how to influence the people I work with or work for the philosophies behind web 2.0, for it is really a paradigm shift from web 1.0 mindset.
• Rich with Reach. I wanted to learn more about Adobe Apollo, but was a little disappointed that there was not much in this session that I already not know. I got some useful sites that I will monitor for great upcoming Apollo apps, like RocketSlides and Buzzword.
• Mission Possible: A Web 2.0 company with a Revenue Model. John Witchell, CTO of Prosper, could be a stand-up comedian in his own right. He dished out funny anecdotes but at the same time made his point clearly. He admitted that he was doing quite a bit of ’sermonizing’, but I thought he justified it by making some really good and poignant points. Web 2.0 is really not about the technology, Witchell stressed, it’s about the people. And to make his point, he showed slides of empty YouTube and Yelp sites. Thanks John, my eyes were opened. I think I understand what Web 2.0 really is all about now.