ReadWriteWeb

A large group of international tech rock stars are at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich today and friend of RWW Martin Källström of pre-launch search startup Twingly sent us a rough transcript of a particularly interesting panel this morning.

In this discussion, titled Humans Disrupting Algorithms, WIkipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks about his new search engine Wikia Search, Jason Calacanis talks about his human-powered search service Mahalo and there's cameos by Google bigwig Marissa Meyer and international man of mystery Michael Arrington. Wikia Search and Mahalo are taking very different approaches to search. It was an interesting enough conversation that I read it from start to finish and thought readers here might want to as well.

The third batch of tickets for the Crunchies startup awards ceremony and party are available now for purchase. The event is a collaboration between ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch and it will be held on January 18 at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. The ceremony starts at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by a party, which is open to all.

Tickets are $40, and $10 from each ticket will be contributed to the American Heart Association.

This week the Defrag Conference was held in Denver, with the theme of 'The Implicit Web'. It was a great event and lots of big ideas were discussed. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to share the five big themes I walked away thinking about after Defrag; and my current take on each of the five big themes.

Note that Charles Knight live blogged most of the Defrag conference at AltSearchEngines. So if you want the play-by-play, I'd encourage you to check out his posts.

The Semantic Conference was held last week in San Jose. I went along to check it out. In the keynotes, Oracle's Robert Shimp noted that the attendance has never been so great and remarked that this as a clear proof that the semantics industry is growing at a tremendous pace. Half of the attendees were from high-tech startups that we've never (or barely) heard of. But we will probably hear of them in a few years! The other half were from huge organizations like NASA, Department of Defense, US Air Force, Stanford University, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Ford Motors, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Google and Walmart. In other words, the audience was very diverse.

Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. David also covered the Future of Web Apps event [1, 2] in London this week. Photos from Route79, via Flickr.

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.

Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. This is David's account of the second and final day of the Future Of Web Apps 2007 conference in London.

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. 

Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. This is David's account of the first day of the FOWA conference in London. Photos in this post are by donkeyontheedge (I hope he doesn't mind me using them).

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.