The LeWeb3 Conference kicked off yesterday morning in Paris and has just finished up this evening. Our host Loic Le Meur of Seesmic opened the event with much fanfare, flashing lights and European techno music. He acknowledged the criticisms of last years event, and promised that they learned from the feedback they received. The conference was split between 3 large buildings covering the keynotes and panels in one, a startup stage in another one, and a large comfortable networking space in another. This is one of the better conferences I have been to in recent years. Wifi worked for the most part, there was very healthy amount of new startups demoing, the VCs and angels were out in force, and the keynotes - although too relaxed and light at times - were mostly interesting and engaging. Pretty much 100% of the conference is going to be available for free to watch online soon here, so check out the videos if there is anything you would like to have seen. Here are a few of the highlights...

Image: cwmac

Janus Friis is a founder of Kazaa, Skype, Joost and Atomico Investments. He is not someone who regularly talks at these events so it was a rare treat to listen to someone of his caliber and experience. He talked about Kazaa's quick rise to fame and the years of litigation that followed. From there they went on to build Skype, an organization that quickly had hundreds of employees and eventually sold to ebay for $2.6b. With his new venture Joost just passing the 4 million user mark, he recalled a time when he was going to talk to TV stations about distributing their content and being told "Are you the guy from Kazaa? we have some people in our legal team that would like to talk to you first!" He is also now involved with a new investment firm called Atomico ventures. He is a master at building disruptive technologies and a very interesting person to listen to.

Evan Williams - Twitter

Evan's talk was one that I found to be particularly interesting. He asked the crowd to think about what new things could be created by stripping down and simplifying existing products, as opposed to building more feature rich ones. Twitter being the perfect example of this idea. A blogging platform with pretty much every useful feature removed! It is an interesting alternative approach for product development and one that I think is worth exploring for anyone building web apps today.

Marc Canter bringing social to software

Unfortunatly I missed this panel with Patrick Chanezon (Google), Tariq Krim (Netvibes), Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum), Susan Kish (European Energy Forum) and Marc Canter (Broadband Mechanics). But most people I talked to today said that it was one of the best discussions that happened. You can see a video of it here when they have it uploaded.

Interface design and user experience

I found Shadram Izadi's (from Microsoft) talk on interface design fascinating. He showed some videos of Microsoft Surface and a new product called Thinsight in action. These computers are focused on having more than one person using them at a time, and using your fingers and hands to interact with them. The Thinsight screen is so sensitive that you can use a fine paint brush to draw on it and it will pick up every stroke. You can see some videos of them in action here.

Startup Competition

This year at LeWeb3 there was a separate building dedicated to startup pitches. Over 30 startups went head to head in 7 minute presentations in front of a panel of judges. The winners were:

• Goojet - A mobile app that allows you to organize your phones pictures, RSS feeds, notes etc. through their website.
• PlyMedia - A cool widget for adding media layers on top of web video.
• g.ho.st - A web OS app.

Other startups of note that demoed their wares were: Erepublik, Split Games and Holistis. Saul Klein also brought along some of the seedcamp winners to demo (Kublax, BuilderSite).

Image: cwmac

NineMillion.org

Towards the end of today we had a short presentation from the childrens charity NineMillion.org. To raise awareness they are hoping to get 9 million small actions from people on the web. To help out you can just link to their site, create a video, or basically make any small action you can on your website or blog, to point back to their site. Just add the tag 'ninemillion' to any content you create. Its a worthy cause and you can find out more about here.

Conclusion

There were a lot more interesting discussions happening that I have not covered here. There was so much good stuff going on between the 3 buildings it was hard to sit down and focus on any one thing. Loic and Geraldine have turned LeWeb3 into a really great conference, possibly the best web conference of the year. Some of the keynotes and panels were a little too light and relaxed at times, but the startup action and networking really made up for it.

A good time was had by all at the Netvibes and Shopping.com party. Pretty much all of the web 2 'glitterati' were here in force [Ed: except for me of course]. I will definitely be coming back here next year. If you are interested in seeing some of the keynotes and panels, you will be able to get all of the video from here once it is published.

First up to the podium was Saul Klein from Index Ventures. Saul was also an angel investor in Last.fm, which was acquired this week. He opened with a talk on "why europe needs to seed the growth of it new startups". He showed us pictures from the humble beginnings of Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc. Young fresh faced guys standing in their basements and garages with little else than a computer and an idea. It was an attempt to draw a comparison to the many startup people here today at the show, and that all the good ideas on the web started from humble beginnings. Saul clearly stated that in Europe we have the talent pool, we have the infrastructure, we have the investment companies, we have success stories like bebo, netvibes, betfair, and joost and we have the big exits such as Skype, Last.fm and LastMinute. One thing he thinks we possibly lack is the ambition. Silicon Valley is an ecosystem that is primed for success. They are the world leader at commercializing "what's next" on the web. And they have that tight relationship between their universities, VCs and startups.

Next we heard from Jeff Clavier, who is a managing partner at SoftTech VC. Jeff talked for a while about the differences between investing in 2004 at the very early stages of the web 2 idea, compared to now. With rising costs, a somewhat flooded market in certain areas, and the difficulty in finding good staff for startups, it is becoming harder to invest these days. But there are still lots of opportunities, such as in online advertising, and a lot more new ideas to come. He singles out FaceBook as being the most exciting company since Google in his opinion. For the future of the web, he feels that its all going to be about deportalization and building new platforms; the blurring of online, offline and virtual worlds. He feels that personalization of services will reach a point of "total freakiness"(!), where automation is pushed to a new level and services are delivered to you as if they were built for just you.

Both Jeff and Saul repeated what is regularly said when VPs talk at these kind of events in Europe: Startups here need to think big, take risks and not be afraid of failure.

Silverlight and Apollo meet Marc Canter

Microsoft were on hand to give us a demonstration of the media capabilities of Silverlight. They showed a HD movie being sliced up, rearranged and played through Silverlight. Adobe got up next and showed a media player built on the Apollo platform. Marc Canter said after that he believed Silverlight could be the one to take on Adobe Flash and beat them. He charged Adobe with locking in users content throughout their range of products, from Flash to Acrobat. And if Microsoft open up Silverlight and let users grab applications and paste them into their own content then Silverlight will become a clear leader over flash. [Ed: for those of you not familiar with Marc's background, he co-founded Macromedia in the 80's, but then subsequently fell out with them.]

Deborah Schultz from SixApart [Ed: correction: Deborah is no longer with 6A] was on just before lunch, focusing on our social relationships with the people around us, and that how they work are living examples of how these relationships should be conducted online.

Tariq Krim

After lunch Tariq from Netvibes came along to talk about what his vision of the future is. Of course its a widgetized future! Tariq said that our digital life is growing at an astronomical rate. Every day we have a growing list of many different websites that we go to, to get different data such as news and email. Sites like Netvibes are helping to aggregate that data in one location and therefore streamlining the process. He said that in future the web will eliminate the need for us to own applications. This of course is already happening with the likes of Gmail, Google Docs, Flickr and YouTube. All we need to think about is our data and who we choose to use to create, store and digest it.

Surprise guest by video link

Kevin Rose from Digg jumped onto the conference screen as the surprise guest for the event. He said that Digg are currently working on a big project and in the next 6 to 12 months there will be some changes on the site. They hope to provide a system whereby people can Digg just about anything, from restaurants, products, images and not just news and videos. With so many stories being submitted to Digg at the moment, they feel that it is getting harder for their users to find interesting articles that don't make it to the front page. They hope to look at what kind of stories you have previously dugg and suggest similar stories to you that they think you will like. This is in contrast to the current system of showing you stories that everyone likes. He was then unceremoniously dropped from our screen at this point, never to return!

Rod Beckstrom

Rod Beckstrom, co-author of the Spider and The Starfish, talked at length about the power of decentralized networks over centralized networks and drew comparisons between the Spanish and the Apache Indian, Napster and Kazaa, and of course the spider and the starfish. The analogy is an important one. Cut off a spider's head and he dies. Cut off a starfish's leg and he re-grows. He says decentralized business and networks will always win out. This is fascinating stuff. You need to read his book to get the full effect.

Startups Present

Here is a list of the companies that showcased their products in booths on the conference floor. Some of them also gave us demonstrations of their products on stage during the conference.

PutPlace - Find, Organise, Secure and Share your Digital Life
Widsets - Mobilize your web
Quintura - See & Find
CVwarehouse - Where candidates meet companies
Respectance - share your memories
Tractis - We mean real business
bliin - YourLIVE!
Wixi - All your media in one placeÖ Share it anywhere!
Zooof - The Family Network
Mailemotion - ideo mail communication web2.0
Wakoopa - Use it, track it, share it
Fleck - Web Democracy
Tipit.to - Like It? Tip It!
Heeii - Smart Surfing
Zyb - Bring mobile data to life!
Swoot - Giving internet a new face!
MobiLuck - People and places close to you
Twones - What you play is what you are
Mobiya - Next Generation Classifieds advertising

The Next Web conference has been an interesting show. There was a good mix of attendees from various corners of the web and a varied selection of speakers. There is a party later tonight for attendees so no doubt the drinks will flow and the networking will begin.

Pics by Marjolyn

What is it?

The OpenCoffee Club started as an attempt to establish recognized, open and regular meeting places where entrepreneurs can meet with investors in a totally informal setting. It is the brain child of Saul Klein, a venture partner at Index Ventures and a VP of Skype who is based in London. The goal of OpenCoffee, Saul told me, was "to create something that can be replicated anywhere else at little or no cost ... where entrepreneurs can meet and know people might be around for them to talk with."

The idea is simple. Events are arranged on a set date in a set location. Entrepreneurs and people interested in the industry come along to chat, discuss their ideas, and build relationships. VCs also come along and entrepreneurs have a chance to pitch their ideas to them - and discuss whether they might be interested in funding them etc. One success story I have heard of so far is Moveme.com which got the ball rolling on their funding at one of these events.

John Jennings, Simon Curran and Wannita Phanchana at Limerick OpenCoffee; pic by Irish Typepad

The main attraction for people who come along seems to be the relaxed atmosphere. It's a great way to meet other startups in your area and build new relationships. For VCs its a quick and easy way to meet with a group of local entrepreneurs and to get to see their products/ideas in action. For a lot of people the conference circuit has been the only outlet to network with potential investors and other startups face to face, but this can be an expensive game for people on tight budgets. The OpenCoffee Club is free for anyone interested to come along.

An Open Coffee Club in action in Munich

Where's the Fire?

The fire is everywhere and is spreading quickly. There are now 38 coffee clubs in various cities spread around the globe, and anyone can start one. Sam Sethi from the UK blog Vecosys told me last night: "Open Coffee Club is like speed dating for VCs and Entrepreneurs. VCs can come along and quickly meet lots of interesting startups and hear their ideas". Conor O Neil from new Irish startup LouderVoice recently wrote the following about his first visit to the OCC meetup in London on the 14th May: "The energy in the room was infectious and everyone was there to meet and talk and network... The attitude of everyone there seemed to be one of community. 'Oh you havenít met X? I'll introduce you' was a phrase I heard many times over."

From the point of view of the VCs, Johannes Ditterich from Target Partners told me: "Open Coffee Club institutionalizes and supports what is currently in the air in Europe already: The dawn of a culture of entrepreneurship with a new generation of founders and startups." And Nic Brisbourne from Esprit Capital Partners had this to say: "I make it a priority to get to OpenCoffee. I like going because it's a great place to pick up a feel for what is going on at ground level and because I get the chance to put something back by sharing thoughts with entrepreneurs who are just starting their companies."

Conclusion

Events like these should have an instant appeal to anyone in this business as a free and easy place to network and build community. Where will it go from here? Saul (OCC Founder) tells me that they are planning their first international OCC meeting next week in Amsterdam before the NextWeb conference. He also hopes that with the launch of thier site on Ning.com, many more people who don't have a OCC nearby can start to network online.

If you are interested in starting a OCC then you can get in touch with Saul Klein. I will be at the NextWeb Conference next week and hope to make it there on time for the first international Open Coffee Club, which is being billed as "500 cappuccino please!".

Have any R/WW readers been to an OCC event? If so we would love to hear about your experience in the comments.

A Web widget can be best described as a mini application that can add functionality to your web page, blog, social profile etc. If you find a widget that you like, you simply copy and paste some code and add it to the HTML of your web page. Photo galleries, news, videos, advertising, mp3 players and pregnancy countdown tickers! You name it, there is probably a widget that does it.

Give me an example!

There have been a lot of very successful widgets to date. Here is a sample:

MyBlogLog is a widget that allows you to see other bloggers on the MyBlogLog network, as they visit your site. You can see it in action on the right hand side of this post. It has been a huge success for its creators and was acquired by Yahoo for a rumored $12 million in January.

Google Adsense has made a lot of money for website owners since its inception. It is probably the most widely distributed widget around. You can sign up for an Adsense account and relevant adverts are shown where you place the widget on your site. You then get a share of the revenue generated with Google. Whole sites and services exist today on the web that are solely funded by their share of revenue from displaying the Adsense widget. Estimated value? Billions!

The FeedBurner widget shows you how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed. It doesn't have much use and is not very accurate in a lot of cases. But that little number it displays is still one of the biggest bragging rights available to a successful blogger, in spite of those bloggers who game the system.

Image slideshow widgets from slide.com

Widget Platforms

If you are planning on building a widget or getting one for your site, there are a number of great websites to get you started. All of the following have vast directories of widgets to choose from and will help you distribute, track and monitor your widget should you choose to build one.

Snipperoo is just getting going at the moment, but already they have a directory of over 3,000 widgets to choose from and a very flexible method of delivering your widget. Ivan Pope (Snipperoo founder) also runs an excellent blog which discusses all things widgets.

Spring Widgets is a platform put together by Fox interactive. They don't have a big selection of widgets at the moment, but their list is growing day by day. They only support flash widgets, but they have a cool desktop runtime that you can download. It allows you to grab any Spring Widget from the web and use it on your desktop. What's really interesting about Spring Widgets is that they are owned by Fox, which also owns MySpace. With MySpace kicking off so much third party content from their site lately, I foresee them making Spring Widgets the only way to put a widget onto MySpace - which will help them control the flow of content through the site.

ClearSpring has just served their 3 billionth widget as of this month. Impressive stuff. They have a nice clean interface for deploying your widget and offer some really cool tracking metrics.

WidgetBox also has a big collection of widgets to choose from for your site. They also provide some nice reports on your widget usage. Users can grab widgets they like from any site that has a widgetbox widget and pop it into their own sidebar or Netvibes/Pageflakes page, for example.

Mobile Widgets

Nokia's new platform Widsets is a great example of what can be done with mobile widgets. You simply download their free software to your mobile and choose from a host of widgets. Once you hook your phone up with them, you can log into their site at any time and choose which widgets you want - and it pushes them out to your phone. This is a really great service. I was easily able to create a custom Read/WriteWeb widget for my phone in minutes, using their studio.

Heres a YouTube video Widget of Kaj from Widsets explaining how it all works

Widget Commerce

Of course widgets have been in use in the world of advertising for a long time. Companies like DoubleClick have used javascript widgets to deliver their adverts to sites for years. The modern day king of the commerce widget is of course the Google Adsense widget. Here are a few other players in the market:

Auction Ads allows you to display live eBay auctions on your site, with a share of eBay affiliate fees coming your way.

Tumri lets their users create customized widgets to promote products on their site from a range of partners; such as Overstock, Shop.com, and Walmart. Revenue is then shared out between the website owner and Tumri.

Nooked is a newcomer to the market. They are just beginning to roll out their feed commerce widgets across a network of partner blogs. They are one to watch for the future. [disclosure: Read/WriteWeb's editor Richard MacManus is an advisor to Nooked]

HomePage Sites

Sites like Pageflakes, Netvibes, Your Minis, iGoogle and My Yahoo allow you to choose from many different widgets (including email, news, weather) and build your own homepage for your browser.

Conclusion

I have only touched on what's happening in the world of widgets in this post. Widgets are literally everywhere these days, in all shapes and sizes. For the moment widgets are the new black, but they also come with their own inherent problems - such as scale. For example if someone with 100,000 visitors a day places your widget on their site, essentially you as the widget maker inherit that traffic. That's a good thing, but you need to be prepared to take the load. Slow loading widgets often cause problems on their host websites.

Another issue is one of style; some sites are becoming increasingly clogged with widgets that have no relation to each other - in terms of form or design. So the page as a whole can end up looking like a car crash.

But to finish on a positive note, widgets add a lot of functionality to your site. Functionality that you can pick and choose as you wish. They also add potential revenue streams for you, which is always a good thing.

What is a Wiki and where did they come from?

A Wiki can be described as a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change its content. The invention of the Wiki is credited to a guy called Ward Cunningham, who in 1994 developed a site called WikiWikiWeb. It was/is a place to collect information on people, projects and patterns in software development.

What can a Wiki be used for?

The most successful Wiki to date is the all encompassing, encyclopedic mammoth that is Wikipedia. We all know it, most of us love it (some of us don't) - but the fact remains it is one of the most visited destinations on the web. I did some looking around for other big Wikis and have come up with a few examples:

CookBookWiki is a cooking wiki with over 30,000 recipes and cooking related articles. Their mission is to document every culinary tradition of the world.

Memory Alpha is a wiki that gathers information on the fictional universe of Star Trek! The shear volume of Star Trek related information on this site is unfathomable. The English version of the site has over 24,000 articles - with a lot of those available in 13 different languages. If I was a Star Trek fan, I would think it was pretty damn cool.

A good source of what other Wikis there are out there, can be found at WikiIndex - which is essentially a Wiki about Wikis!

The weird and wonderful Wiki of Memory Alpha

What can I use a Wiki for?

Ok so up to now we have seen some examples of Wikis in use in the real world, but what benefit can a Wiki be to you as an individual or a company? Many wikis in use today are private and outside of the public eye. More and more companies are using a Wiki as collaborative software. They are a great way to maintain internal documentation; all of your staff can contribute and edit documents as need be. A Wiki could even be used to replace large chunks of your otherwise static intranet.

For example, in the company where I work we have discussed using a Wiki to build up a collection of support documentation for the software we build. At the moment we just have a pile of static articles that are updated from time to time by a handful of people in the company. If we were to use a Wiki, anyone in our office could easily edit these articles regularly and therefore keep a far more up to date store of information.

On an individual level, WetPaint (for example) is used by people to build Wikis on just everything. Current examples include wikis on smart phones, dogs, Celtic FC, Q phones, book lists, XBox 360, cancer, and Lost. So if you have got something you are passionate about and want to build up a publicly accessible and editable resource, then WetPaint just might be the solution for you.

Where can I get a Wiki?

Ok so you want to build a Wiki, where do you go? Well you have 2 options: you can get a hold of some Wiki software and host it yourself, or you can use one of the many hosted solutions out there. Here are a few examples of each:

Hosted Solutions

PB Wiki by most accounts seem to be the biggest consumer wiki farm currently in operation. They have a feature packed system for you to use for free.

Wik.is is another popular free hosted solution. They have some great ideas on their front page for what you can use your free wiki for, so if your looking for inspiration...

WetPaint is a free hosted wiki solution that is ad supported. It targets non-technical internet users who want to collaborate online.

JotSpot is worth a mention. It was bought by Google last November and has been closed to new users ever since. However seeing as it's Google's entry to the world of Wikis, it is probably one to watch for the future.

Central Desktop's primary focus is building simple tools for small teams and workgroups. With plenty of features and packages starting from $25/month, it looks like a good option if you just want to see what a wiki can offer your company - without having to invest too much money or resources.

Update: Wikia is a wiki hosting service founded by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Founder) and Angela Beesley. Wikia particularly targets communities, both those established offline and those with a purely online following. It is free of charge for readers and editors.

Software Solutions

MediaWiki is the mother of them all. Why? Well for a start it's free, and secondly it powers Wikipedia - so you can't get more of a thumbs up than that.

Bit Weaver is an open source content management system based upon TikiWiki. The base installation is bare, with nothing more than a theme switcher and user management system. Additional functionality is added by add-on packages.

SocialText is an enterprise wiki and weblog. It is available as a hosted service or a hardware appliance. Pricing is a bit sketchy on their website. When you go to the pricing page they just have a link saying "Contact Our Sales Team For Pricing". When you see that, you know its going to be dear ;-)

Atlassian is a probably the leading wiki provider for enterprises, in terms of its sales. It also has a new product called Confluence Hosted, so it has both software and hosted versions. [Note: Atlassian is a recent R/WW sponsor]

I have no doubt missed loads of great services and sites to power your future Wiki, so for more information on options for building one, check out the Wiki Matrix. They offer a free online comparison tool that details over 100 different wiki solutions.

Conclusion

The future looks bright for the Wiki. As more advanced Wiki solutions are built, they are becoming more and more blurred from the original Wiki DNA. They are evolving. 

In some ways, social networks are Wikis - where anyone can edit their own section of content. Indeed the Internet as a whole is one big Wiki, with various restrictions. Then again, a Wiki is like small version of the Internet when you control the content. 

Overall, if you want a place for people (staff, fellow enthusiasts, etc) to share, collect and maintain data relating to a topic - then a Wiki might just save you a lot of hassle.

Today Google, Microsoft, Intel, Dell and IBM all have various european head quarters in Ireland. With a population of over 5 million north and south, we are considered in some circles to be the largest exporter of software in the world. We have no shortage of bigco investment and job creation in Ireland, but what's happening in the indigenous startup scene?

The old timers

Pigsback.com has been running since 2000 and is endeared to the hearts of a large number of internet users in Ireland (and the UK as of last year). In their own words, it's an 'online club of consumers and brands'. You sign up for an account and then receive targeted offers, competitions and surveys from the Pigsback network of advertisers. As you interact with these events you build up 'piggy points', which you can exchange for goods and services.

Pigsback works, simply because the 'piggy points' you collect are really worth something. In little time you can build up enough for a free CD or a discounted holiday, for example. Their advertiser network includes Ford, EBay, Nestle, and Betfair to name but a few.

StatCounter provides web tracking services for millions of websites around the world. Similar to Google Analytics, but around a lot longer, you can sign up for free and start tracking immediately. They also have paid accounts which include more reports and options.

StatCounter is one of the few websites around with a pagerank of 10. They have more back links to their site than anyone else on the web, apart from Google.com!

The new guys

AllFreeCalls is more of a mobile/telco play, but worthy of inclusion all the same. On their website they provide you with details of how to make international calls from the US, Ireland and the UK for the price of a local call. They are able to do this by exploiting various loopholes in legislation governing the way money is divided between bigger telcos.

I don't think they are up and running in the US at the moment, due to a confrontation with AT&T - which is claiming that Allfreecalls cost them almost $2 million in subsidies for one month alone!

Nooked have been in the RSS marketing business now for a while, but they recently announced a forthcoming product codenamed 'feedshop' - which is all about "Really Simple Shopping (RSS)". They are also about to launch a new widget marketing service, which will allow e-tailers to advertise their products through nooked's network of blogs, widget partners and social networks. It's all part of their strategy for a feedcommerce platform. 

Nooked was listed just this week as a RedHerring 100 Europe winner and a company to watch in 2007. Expect to hear a lot more from them very soon. 

[disclosure: R/WW editor Richard MacManus is an advisor to nooked]

Pixenate is a handy free online photo editor. No accounts necessary, just upload your photo and start editing. It's ad supported, AJAX based and runs smoothly. But the free version of pixenate you see on their website is just a demonstration of a customizable and rebrandable white label version of the application, that you can buy for use on your own website. They even have a widgetized version that you can add to your site or blog and let your users edit photos there and then.

They claim over 100,000 visitors/month to the site and will also be providing a YahooUI-based theme in a forthcoming release.

PutPlace.com is still in private beta at the moment, but it looks like it could be a winner. They have raised a six figure sum from angel investors, to build an online application to help manage your digital media. We all have many different files scattered across our mobiles, pcs, laptops and various other gadgets. Putplace gives all of your files a 'digital fingerprint' and helps you to manage and locate them. You can also publish your files to flickr, youtube and a host of other media sharing services.

You can also share your files between sites, so for instance with one click you can pull all your photos off flickr and publish them to your photobucket account. And of course all of these files can be backed up on PutPlace secure server, in case you lose them. Their public beta is coming in April, so keep an eye out.

Loudervoice.com.... I will let their CEO explain this one to you: "LouderVoice harnesses the distributed expertise in blogs to provide quality rated reviews for us all instead of spam, product placements and search results noise. Our site enables bloggers to publish structured reviews to their blogs and in turn aggregates structured multi-lingual review content from those blogs. Users can search for reviews, rate them, relate them and collect them in ways that are useful to themselves and others."

They are currently in private beta and hope to launch in April. I have seen this app and it's pretty cool. If they get traction, it could be big.

Some Other Interesting Apps

PollDaddy.com, which I developed, has been around for 6 months now. You can create a free poll and place it as a widget on your website, blog, mySpace etc. Disclosure: it's also where I work, so please feel free to drop by if you need a poll for your site. Also note that Read/WriteWeb uses our service.

zinadoo.com lets you create a free mobile site with their online flash based editor. You can create pages, add text and pictures. This will be a very handy tool for people who just want to get some kind of presence online for mobile visitors to their site. Zinadoo creators Nubiq are also about to launch a mobile site search, discovery and personalisation engine called Mobiseer, where users can search, tag and bookmark their favourite mobile sites.

MySay.com is still in private beta but should be coming online any day now. It's a sort of social networking app, but through the phone. Once your friends are in, you can all keep in touch, hearing each other's updates and stories, jokes or whatever - on the phone, on the web, or through the mySay desktop widget. It's social communication using your phone, with no need to download any software - just use your voice! Should be interesting to see how they get on.

Conclusion

Ireland is a happening place. There have been a lot of big success stories, such as a few of the 'old timers' we have mentioned here. But there is also a healthy environment of innovation amongst younger startups. I would like to thank Fergus Burns from Nooked for helping me put this article together. Fergus is also the administrator of web2ireland.org, a blog where you can track the progress of many of the companies mentioned in this article.

This post is part of Read/WriteWeb's continuing coverage of international Web markets. Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia and Latvia.

With a Photobucket account, you can upload and share your photos and videos - and blast them out to just about anywhere on the web, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, eBay, Blogger. Founded in 2003, they claim to have 38 million registered users, over 17 million visitors per month, and serve out a whooping 3 billion media clips per day. According to Alexa, they have just recently overtaken Flickr in terms of traffic. Photobucket is free to use, but a pro account gives you some extras - such as 5 gigs of space and unlimited bandwidth for just $25 per year. And now, Adobe Remix is a pro account extra too...

Adobe Remix

The Adobe Remix feature in Photobucket is a flash application that was built with Flex and runs very smoothly. You can take video clips and pictures that you have uploaded to your Photobucket account and drag them onto the Remix time line, add captions, borders, transitions and effects. You can even add an audio track to your movie, by choosing from a large selection of tracks provided by Pump Audio. You can't upload your own music at the moment, but this may change in time.

The end result is a single movie that you can post on your blog, MySpace etc - or just download for your own amusement. The only obvious feature that's missing is sound effects. Otherwise Adobe Remix is an excellent tool for manipulating video or photos. It is a relatively simple application, but runs well and is very easy to use. 

Online Photoshop coming soon...

Looking forward, it's going to be very interesting to see what Adobe brings out this year. The company plans to announce more partnerships soon and these free services will probably be driven by advertising. What's more, they will be used as promotional tools - to lure users to upgrade to Adobe's desktop suites. If Remix is a taste of what's to come from Adobe, then the future looks bright for those who don't currently have access to their products.

Content Labels and Search Thresher

Segala is at the forefront of promoting Content Labels, which are RDF-based files that contain metadata about trust. Segala developed Search Thresher, a Firefox plug-in for examining Content Labels in search results. It only works on your Google results and only a handful of sites use Content Labels, but Search Thresher is really just a stopgap to demonstrate how Content Labels might actually work if widely adopted. If Content Labels are adopted, Segala hopes to become a major player in verifying these - which would be a very lucrative business. Segala helped to create the original charter and is co-author of the final report with ICRA. 

Content Labels are now moving onto a full recommendation track within the W3C, so it is a promising technology. Content Labels will be proposed as a replacement for PICS, a W3C spec which enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content.

The image above shows how results from Google look with the SearchThresher plug-in installed. There are only a dozen or so sites out there with content labels at the moment.

Accessibility Testing

In addition to pushing Content Labels and the issue of trust, Segala also provides a range of accessibility services. For US $690 Segala will carry out a benchmark evaluation report, which involves testing your website across different browsers and platforms. They will then advise you on what adjustments you need to make to your site in order to comply with regulations and policies such as the DDA in the UK and Section 508 in the US. You can also get a full compliance audit from Segala, which will help ensure your site conforms to WCAG.

Segala also tests your mobile applications and mobile websites. They will be able to provide you with a W3C mobileOK Trustmark certificate when they become available later in 2007. 

This accessibility testing all revolves around trust. By displaying the Segala-Certified Trustmark on your website, you are giving a clear sign that your site is independently verified for accessibility. According to Segala, browsers and search engines that can detect the trustmark are able to highlight your site in search results - thus improving user trust and potential ranking for your site. However I'm not sure what, if any, major search engines will actually improve your 'site ranking' based on this trustmark - but maybe I'm wrong.

Agencies, developers, usability consultant, and product owners can join Segala's certified partner programme so they can offer their own clients accessibility products and services, including the Segala Accessibility Trustmark.

Conclusion

Web accessibility is an important issue for developers and webmasters to consider. With more and more people accessing the internet through mobiles devices, screen readers and raft of new browsers, websites that are not accessible are losing out on potential users, clients, and customers. 

Last year the UN conducted a survey of 100 regularly used websites across 20 different countries, called 'The United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility' - a grand title indeed. They set out to determine how accessible these sites were for people with disabilities. Unfortunately the results were not so grand: only 3 websites out of the 100 chosen were confirmed to have the basic standards of accessibility. 

From a legal point of view, there is also something to consider for larger companies. Take for example the National Federation for the Blind, which last year filed a suit against Target.com, citing several issues - including the fact that the site requires the use of a mouse to make purchases.

Segala is a profitable company with a healthy balance sheet. They provide a very useful service for website owners who have not focused their attention on accessibility in the past, but who want to make up for lost ground. In their drive for Content Label adoption, Segala wants to be the VeriSign of this business and become an authority on site certification. 

As for any developers out there, I would love to hear your comments on how important you think the issue of web accessibility is?

I went down to the Mashup event in London tonight, which was organized by Vecosys and eTribes. The topic of conversation for the night was: "What's next, Web3.0? - The coming semantic web". The panel consisted of Paul Walsh from Segala, Mark Birbeck from X-Port Ltd, Tony Fish, and Sam Sethi - who took the role of chair for the night. Sam started by talking about where the semantic web movement was at the moment and the emergence of Microformats. He showed us some examples of sites that are using formats like HCard and HCalendar. For those of you who are not familiar with Microfomats, a good example is a site called worldcupkickoff.com. They used the HCalender format to help users bookmark the dates of games in the World Cup, in their own calendar applications. Microformats are only supported in the browser at the moment through the use of third party browser plugins, but it seems almost certain at this stage that Firefox 3 is going to support them natively.

Mark Birbeck was first up and talked about his own products XPort and SideWinder. SideWinder is a platform that allows you to use web-based technologies such as JavaScript etc. on the desktop. You can put web applications in a wrapper and run them on the desktop. I'm not sure I really see the value of this product, but I don't think that he had enough time to explain its merits. Xport is a XForms processor... I wont go into XForms, but it's a technology that I'm watching closely, as it affects some of the things I work on myself.

Content Labels Format

Paul Walsh was on next, pushing the Content Labels format. His ideas generated most of the conversation for the night. Content Labels allow you to describe content on your website. You link to a Content Label in the HTML of your web pages, which is an RDF file that describes the content of your page. This is meta data and it serves a very similar purpose to the HTML meta tags of old. The difference with Content Labels is that you can have them certified. 

So the idea is that lets say you have a website that talks a lot about football, has no adult content, is child safe and is in French. You can then create a Content Label describing all of these features, then you submit it to be certified. A third party authority will come along for a very small fee and make sure your content label is accurate, in relation to your site's content. The clear advantage of this is that, if it is widely adopted, we will for the first time have meta data relating to web content that is verified and can be trusted to a certain extent. Search engines can then use this to help rank sites, browsers can show only child-safe websites to children, french sites to french speaking people and so on and so forth. I talked with Paul about Content Labels for a long time after the show and I realize I have not mentioned a lot of the other possible uses and functionality of Content Labels, but I'm still trying to fully understand it myself.

Paul Walsh at Etribes Mashup; Photo by Route79

As with microformats, at the moment content labels are only visible by way of a third party browser plugin for FireFox, called Search Thresher. There are no plans to implement this into any major browser releases in the near future, but people are taking note of this technology. The W3C are about to accept it as a standard and Microsoft has shown an interest in a plugin for IE. 

There were a lot of questions from the audience and a lot of people didn't feel that Microformats and Content Labels had anything to do with the semantic web. One interesting point that was raised is that these technologies only help make content on the web machine readable, but they don't make it machine understandable - which is what web semantics is all about. But in my opinion, the semantic web is a long way off yet and we can't make content machine understandable without first making it machine readable. It's going to be a long road, but I think these technologies are important stepping stones along the way - albeit very early ones. I like Content Labels and I hope to implement them on my own site.

Summary

Tony Fish talked last and, as far as I could tell, he disagreed with the importance of the semantic web. However I didn't understand what his points were, as his talk seemed a bit obscure.

I really enjoyed this mashup event, because instead of the speakers dictating to a mostly silent audience, the speakers were pretty much under the spotlight of the audience's scrutiny. Sam and Mike told me afterwards that a video of the event will be up on YouTube soon. If you're in London or near a Mashup again, go along - it's a very good experience.

Ed: Thanks again to David for covering the Web events in London this week. I've certainly enjoyed reading David's reports and so I'd like to 'open the floor' for other guest bloggers to do this - i.e. provide reports of web conferences and events, from anywhere in the world. Please email me on readwriteweb@gmail.com if you'd like to help keep R/WW readers informed of web events.

Adobe

Today started with Mark Anders, Adobe's senior principal scientist. Mark previously had worked on the Microsoft .NET project from it inception until 2003. He gave a good technical demonstration of Flex and then created an application on the fly, to search for photos on Flickr. He also showed off an online photo editing site called picnik, which was built with Flex. 

In other Adobe news, Actionscript 3 - which ships with the Flash 9 plugin - has some impressive improvements and now runs at up to 10 times faster than AS 2.0 in some circumstances. Going forward Adobe's Tamarin (a.k.a. JavaScript 2), which was donated last year to the Mozilla project of the same name, will now be shipped with FireFox 4 - which is 2 versions away.

The future of the web browser

Chris Wilson from Microsoft, who has worked on Internet Expolorer from version 3 up, was here to talk about the future of the web browser. He looked back at the days when Outlook Web Access was one of the most advanced web apps around and was using AJAX before it was even called AJAX. He talked about the rebirth of the semantic web movement with RSS, microformats, and tagging. He ultimately talked at length about IE 7 and the importance of security, standards support and more. 

Pic: Li==703

I am a web developer and I spend most of my time trying to work within browser limitations. But I don't buy the idea that IE 7 is a progressive browser. It has taken about 6 years for them to release a new version - and there is nothing revolutionary about it. They fixed all of the IE 6 bugs and added a list of modern features, that we had already seen in FireFox. Yes IE 7 is at last a good stable browser from Microsoft, which has addressed the security issues that had plagued IE 5 and 6, along with the problems with lack of standards compliance, but I don't think they deserve a pat on the back for that. 

Lunchtime Panel Discussion

Pic: Larsz

The following people were involved in the panel:

• Mike Butcher (Chair) - Vecosys.com
• Tariq Krim - NetVibes
• Chris Messina - Citizen Agency
• Dave Nicholson - Zopa
• Colin Donald - Futurescape
• Richard Moross - Moo
• Max Jenning - eMomentum

The lunchtime discussion was based on the topic: "European start-up culture - playing catch up to the US". It was a fairly brief and humorous discussion between the audience and the panel members about this hot topic. The thoughts of the panel included Ryan Carson voicing the need for some kind of bigco sponsored incubation centers, with access to lawyers and business advisors to help foster new businesses. Mike Arrington bluntly stated that people here need to stop talking about doing it and just do it. Mike Butcher felt that the UK and Ireland has a very talented pool of creative people in this industry, but there are structural and cultural barriers to over come. 

The rest of the panel talked about the problems with access to seed capital and the fact that there have been some very successful companies in Europe, such as Skype, who should be an inspiration to local startups here. There were some good questions from the audience, but there was just not enough time to discuss this topic. George Bush was dragged into it, Arrington called for the BBC to be dissolved and Tariq Krim was accused of using his position to chat up girls in Silicon Valley! A good show though overall.

The Mobile Web

At last some talk of the mobile world came in the form of Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone. The first thing he did was to find out, by way of the raising of audience hands, who used their mobile to access the web regularly. This showed that most people in the room here use a mobile device to access the web on a regular basis, and that most had even done so in the past 24 hours. A very interesting fact that is obvious when you read it, but very interesting at the same time, is that there are up to 4 times more mobile devices in use around the world that have web access, than there are computer and laptops with web access. These numbers are confirmation of just how big this space really is. In the UK vodafone data shows that the biggest destinations for web users are Hotmail, BBC News and then Google. He talked at length about the need for more adoption of standards by mobile developers. Vodafone has a best practices list that they advise everyone to follow:

- Design for one web
- Rely on web standards
- Stay away from known hazards
- Be cautious of device limitations
- Optimize navigation
- Check graphics and colors
- Keep it small
- Use the network sparingly
- Help and guide user input
- Think of users on the move

He also stressed the importance of thematic consistency for your content, across mobile and more traditional browsers, to ensure a comfortable user experience. For more info on best practices, check out: http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI /BPWG/techs/

NetVibes Announcement

Tariq Krim from Netvibes made a quick announcement about their new universal widget API.  You will now be able to develop a widget for Netvibes and it will work across a whole host of other platforms, such as google desktop etc. You can see a preview of it here next week: http://eco.netvibes.com/uwa. He also mentioned that they are going to support OpenID in the near future.

NYTimes.com

Khoi Vinh, design director for the New York Times, said that "the future is going to be awesome!" He talked about the problems they had in coming to terms with using the web as an effective outlet for their content, and interestingly how they tried to use the same templates in terms of content and layout where ever possible, both in the print and online versions. They understood that it was important to open up a dialogue with their readers, obviously learning from the power of the blogosphere in communicating with their readers in this way. 

NYTimes has some cool new community applications to enhance the user experience. MyTimes is a sort of start page app that you can use to pick and choose the kind of content from their site that you want to see. TimesFile is a bookmarking system for creating your own archive of stories you like. Integrating one click sharing with digg, newsvine etc. has helped to generate more and more readers. 

Vinh also talked about the problems that many sites have to deal with in displaying 'counter-quality sources' - such as high def video and quality photographs from a digital SLR, right down to YouTube quality video and images taken on camera phones etc.

Opining on OpenID

Simon Willision was here to help promote the OpenID standard, and he talked very passionately about it. He also talked extremely fast, so please excuse me if I have noted anything incorrectly here. With a number of high profile sites recently announcing support for OpenID, such as AOL and Digg, it is a topic that is really beginning to come out of the shadows and into the realm of wide spread adoption. [Ed: see Read/WriteWeb's current poll for more on this topic] 

Simon started by addressing the all important question of: "what problem does it solve?" Well its simple, if it takes off - all of us will just have one ID and password to log in and out of all of our accounts. Keeping track of all your account information is a nightmare, if you have a very bad memory like I have. I'm not going to go into too much detail about how OpenID works, but what sets it apart from similar systems is that it goes a long way to solving one big stumbling block people have with this concept - would you trust one company with managing your identity? With OpenID anyone can manage your identity, it's up to you to choose that provider. Once you do choose a provider, which at the moment could be live journal for example, all you have to do is log into that OpenID account once and then you can go to any site that supports OpenID, enter your ID and password, and your details will be confirmed against your provider. That's it, one login for all of your sites. 

One great concept of OpenID is that you can create multiple personas on the one ID. You create a persona that you want to submit to a particular site, and another one that you want to submit to a different type of site. So I might choose to make up a fake name to use on my AOL account and not hand over very much address information, while at the same time I might choose to give far more accurate data over to my Digg account, through a different persona attached to my OpenID.

In Simon's own words, the things that "suck" about OpenID are various issues surrounding phishing and security, but I'm sure most of these can be overcome. One interesting benefit of OpenID is that when a user comments on a blog, he/she can be added to a whitelist as a trusted user. When a user or bot enters spam into a blog comment, they can be added to a blacklist. These lists can then be shared amongst bloggers through various yet to be invented systems, which would help identify the good users from the bad. I think it's very clear from this simple example, that the idea of rating users based on their behavior, and this then being shared between applications, would help streamline a lot of avenues on the web. One downside I see with a third party holding your info, is that they will be able to track your activity across the web with very little effort - but you do get to choose your own provider that you trust and so you are not locked into any particular one. But the stakes are higher with OpenID, if it's adopted, because any security breach of the data would be disastrous. Get someone's OpenID details and you get access to all of their sites.

Summary

The Future of Web Apps conference came to a close today. They are hosting a day of workshops tomorrow, which should be very informative. I talked with conference organizer Ryan Carson for a while today and he said that the next FOWA was going to take place in the US in September; and again in London this time next year. If you are near one in the future, I would definitely advise you to go along. It is good value for money and is small enough that you get to meet a lot of the people speaking, to talk with them further on a one to one basis. As with any conference like this, there are also ample opportunities to network. I for one have enjoyed the past few days.

Ed: Thanks so much to David for summarizing the two days for those of us who couldn't attend.

Photo credits: donkeyontheedge [1, 2] and carl_gaywood

The Future Of Web Apps 2007 kicked off in London today with a host of speakers from various startups, bigcos, media outlets and associated businesses. Hosted by Ryan Carson of Carson Systems, the event is covering what various successful web companies are currently doing, why they are successful, and where they are headed. 

Mike Arrington: The Future of Start-Ups and Web Companies

With a lack of Wifi access, most speakers have had a very attentive audience. First up on the podium this morning was Michael Arrington from TechCrunch. Arrington first apologized for the closure of TechCrunch UK. He hopes the site will be up and running again soon (and talking to him after the show, he hinted that he had found a new blogger to take over this role). He dealt with a few big issues that web companies are facing today. Firstly, bubble 2.0 - are we in a bubble? He pointed out that last year in the US, TechCrunch covered $600 million of VC money that had been invested into new startups; while on the other hand, for example, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. So that deal alone was bigger than the total invested in startups that year. His point was that the money being put in by investors is a lot less that the money being put in by existing companies. Instead of being in a bubble, we have not yet seen the peak of what's happening in this new web 2.0 era. He said there are still a lot more big applications, as important as Digg, Flickr, YouTube etc, waiting to come online. He also felt that the new Adobe platform Apollo is going to be big news and will help bridge the gap between the web and desktop. Adobe is a sponsor of this event and were on hand in the reception area, showing off some slick looking applications written in Apollo. However they shied away from questions regarding the ever-changing launch date.

Community Building

Next up was Edwin Aoki, a chief architect with AOL, who went through the importance of building user trust in your products, and protecting their privacy and personal identities. This seemed like more of a confidence-building exercise for AOL, given their data leak last year. He also pointed out that email is still the biggest destination on the web, and not community sites such as MySpace. 

Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency followed on that theme of community building and its importance for any startup who wants to build up a large user/customer base. She talked about the importance of company founders and developers alike continuing to have a role in customer support, in order to build confidence with your user base.

Simon Wardly from Fotango gave a colourful and humorous talk about the importance of commoditizing the web, finishing with a pitch for his own product Zimki - which launched last year. Zimki is part Ning, part Amazon EC2. It's a Javascript-based platform where developers can contribute application functionality to an already large collection of Zimki modules, and then build applications from them. Zimki will host your application and you pay for storage and computing power. It seems quite reasonably priced and they are going open source it this year. But most developers I have talked to here said that as with Ning, if they are building a big application, they are much more comfortable building it themselves - and are not interested in building on these types of platforms. Time will tell if Zimki can remove the need for coders from the process of building online applications.

Ben Holmes: Getting VC Money

Best of the day up to this point was Ben Holmes from Index Ventures, who gave a fascinating and honest talk about the process involved in startups getting VC money. According to Ben, the thing that VC's are looking for, more so than people with good ideas, are people who are passionate about their ideas and can sell them. They also look for people who have excellent development teams who can execute their ideas. Index Ventures have invested in the past in Skype, Betfair, Last.fm and more recently in Netvibes. Their portfolio of past investments makes for good reading. According to Ben, when looking for VC money, the average startup can expect to have to swallow the following hard requirements:

1.) You will have to give up an average of between 20% to 35% of your ownership

2.) VC representation on your board

3.) Liquidation option for worst case scenario

4.) Participation rights

5.) Reverse Vesting (If you leave your company earlier than an agreed time your 65% to 80% ownership can be cut significantly)

6.) Certain control, and veto rights

7.) option pool

One thing that might be a big issue for a lot of startup founders is that a lot of VCs will not let you sell until such a point that they feel that you have peaked in terms of your company performance. So if you get an offer one year later of a few million, that might make you a rich happy retiree, they are probably going to make you hold out a lot longer and for a lot more money. The pre-requisites for getting VC funding are simple: you need to have a unique product or concept; you need to have an excellent development team; and your idea needs to have a large potential market. It was interesting to note that Ben also gave a list of reasons why you should not get VC funding:

1.) You will probably miss out on the option of any small exit opportunity, which in a lot of cases could be very lucrative personally;

2.) You will be bound to a minimum of 3+ years of hard work building your idea up;

3.) You will lose the opportunity to run a lifestyle business.

In the end, if you have a great product then you need to focus on your business and not on fundraising. You need to build up the PR of your company and get your name out there. VC's spend most of their time looking around for new companies to invest in, so if you get your name out there and people like your product, then the VC's will come to you - guaranteed. If you decide to take VC investment, its important to find a group that is interested in your product, do not have any competing products on their books, and are willing to help you with recruitment, business development, and exit strategies, and not just funding you.

Last.fm, Thinkfree, Google Sketchup

Matthew Ogle and Anil-Bawa-Cavia from Last.fm gave an overview of their company history, from its humble origins on a rooftop patio somewhere in London to their more comfortable offices of today. They claim that 15 million tracks are listed every day on the site, with a total of 6 billion items listed from day one. This is a huge amount of data and they talked about how they scaled their systems to cope with this.

Tj Kang from Thinkfree was next on, promoting their online office suite - which is free to use and I have been told is quite good. They also have an API for bloggers and website owners to convert their Microsoft Office files to a MSO free format, by passing their documents through the Thinkfree API and getting a flash or HTML document on the other end, that is delivered to the web user.

Jason Chuck from Google went through some of the features of Google Sketchup and showed some nice examples of user generated content.

Werner Vogels: Emergent Design

Werner Vogels, Vice President and CTO of Amazon, talked about emergent design and becoming more flexible with how your service or application will serve its users in the future. He placed a lot of importance on knowing your required resources; when you need them; being able to use them when you need to; and not pay for them when you're not using them. All of this of course ties in nicely with Amazons S3 storage and EC2 cloud computing products. He gave the example of Smugmug.com, who were spending $40,000/month on hosting, but after switching to S3 saved almost $500,000 dollars in the first 7 months.

Quotations Book, Soocial.com

Quotations Book is a new site that is launching in the coming weeks. From what I gather, it's a search engine for quotes. You can place a quote widget on your site, and..... well if you like quotes, I guess you will like this site.

Soocial.com is a new site (not launched yet) that brings together all of your contacts on your blackberry, mobile phone, laptop, and PC. With a Soocial account, when you add a new contact to your list from, lets say an email, that same contact or .vcf info will be added to the contact list on your phone and all of your other devices. Their goal is to remove all of the syncing problems involved in managing contact lists across multiple devices.

Kevin Rose, Digg

The last speaker of the day was Kevin Rose from Digg. He gave an interesting insight into the history of the company and what goes on behind the scenes. He talked about enabling Digg users who regularly digg the same stories and are nearby geographically, to hook up and become friends. He also wants Digg to start showing you stories based on what you have digged in the past.

Kevin announced plans for a Digg API that you can use to create a Digg swarm, that tracks Digg data relating to your own website - which you can then use for your own purposes. He also announced support for OpenID on Digg in the near future (add that to Microsoft's and AOL's support for OpenID!).

Conclusion, Day 1 of FOWA

In the end there was nothing new announced here today, it was more of a big discussion about current products and current news.

Whether or not startups should focus on a business plan or not, was debated again and again. Mike Arrington said yes; Tara Hunt said no; Ben Holmes said yes, but not too much.

Everyone is pushing Adobe Apollo, there is lots of talk about attention data, and everyone we heard speaking today talked about the importance of building community for your users and shaping your application based on their feedback.

No mention of mobile technologies, semantic web, or web OS. Maybe I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but those things are the future of web apps after all! More news tomorrow...

Ed: Big ups to David Lenehan for this thorough report. Looking forward to his report on Day 2 of the Future Of Web Apps conference.