Ed: To finish up the coverage of the Web 2.0 Expo that we provided this week, I asked some of the Read/WriteWeb writers to give us their takeaways. Graeme Thickins, Sean Ammirati and Emre Sokullu list their thoughts below...See also my own Web 2.0 Expo Wrapup.
Web 2.0 Is Going Beyond the Consumer Market: There's no doubt these technologies will be increasingly applied within enterprises, and that's a good thing. The big vendors see this and were all over this venue - exhibiting, presenting, and otherwise.
The VC Investment Model for IT/Software Is Changing: Because new Web 2.0 ventures don't need much money to get going, the VC business is being somewhat disrupted. A new style of early-stage VC firm seems to be gaining. It's becoming obvious that the big funds don't fit in here. These days, a mere $250-750K is all that's needed to prove assumptions, one VC said. And angel investors are newly energized.
Just as it's become the
custom for Tim O'Reilly to open the Web 2.0 conference keynotes with a fireside chat with
Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and then later for John Battelle to interview a Google exec (it
used to be Sergey Brin, but now Eric Schmidt has taken over that task), it's becoming
Read/WriteWeb's custom to do a conference wrap-up post. Personally I do it mainly to get
my own thoughts in order, because these conferences are very hectic and so it's hard to
think at a macro level while you're in the 'eye of the storm'. In addition, some of the
Read/WriteWeb authors have done their own mini-wrapups.
So what was different about this web 2.0 conference? It was the 3rd Web 2.0 Conference run by CMP/O'Reilly Media that I've been to (I followed the 2004 Web 2.0 conference virtually). Check out my previous wrapups of the Web 2.0 Summit and the Web 2.0 Conference in 2005. The Web 2.0 Expo was the biggest of all 3, both in terms of the venue and the number of people attending - estimates ranged from 10-16k. It also had more of a developer focus, although there were plenty of business people too. More on that in a minute.
On Monday morning I attended a panel which included two case
studies from leading businesses built around open source software applications - Sugar CRM and MySQL AB. The case studies were presented by their
respective CEOs, John Roberts and Marten Mickos, and focused on the business model their
organizations have adopted.
The rest of the day, I found myself reflecting a lot on the presentation and then - as luck would have it - I ran into MySQL AB's Marten Mickos and Zack Urlocker (Executive VP of Products) at a happy hour that evening. I ended up talking to them about their business over a few beers and concluded that they are a great lesson for any website looking to scale audience.
Yesterday afternoon the Web 2.0 Expo included two
sessions on widgets. The first was a presentation by Dion Hinchcliffe, which provided an
Overview of Badges and
Widgets. Immediately following that session, two widget syndication companies
provided back to back presentations in a session called Using Widget Syndication
for Online Marketing and Measurement. While officially these sessions were part of
two separate conference tracks, by a show of hands approximately half of the attendees in
the sessions attended both of them. Graeme Thickins wrote a very good overview of the
second session for Read/WriteWeb. What follows are some of the key points from Dion's
presentation.
Dion opened by unpacking the fact that the web is becoming much more of what he characterizes as a DIY Phenomenon. This cultural change is what he credits as the driver for the popularity of widgets. Specifically the DIY ethos on the web has four components:
by Graeme Thickins
If you're in the online marketing game and are not yet hip to widgets, listen up. Two emerging Web 2.0 technology firms focused in this space have a message for you. Those companies are Widgetbox and ClearSpring, both of which presented in a session on Tuesday afternoon at Web 2.0 Expo that was billed as "Using Widget Syndication for Online Marketing and Measurement".
What is a widget? According to Ed Anuff, CEO and
cofounder of Widgetbox, it's a "small piece of dynamic content" on your web site, blog,
or social network page. Sometimes they're also called badges. An example of a widget is
the Flash-based Flickr badge shown to the right, which is one I use in the sidebar of my
blog.
Why would you want to have a widget strategy, asked Anuff? Because they're contextual and personalized, they're social, they're visual and interactive, and they're viral. "They let you take an experience and share it with others," he said. They allow for self-expression, they provide site enhancement, and they facilitate ads and commerce - for example, a shopping cart can be implemented in a widget.
There were two sessions today on User-Centric identity at Web 2.0 Expo. I attended the first one etitled “Implementing OpenID”, which was conducted by David Recordon of Verisign and Brian Ellin of JanRain. The session was well attended and it was surprising to see that more than 50% (according to a raised hand vote by David) of the users had heard of OpenID. This is testiment to the momentum OpenID has created in the industry. The session started with a brief summary of the benefits of OpenID :
Yesterday in the Web 2.0 Expo booths, I checked out Bungee Labs - an ambitious new on-demand, web-based development environment that enables developers to build and deploy web apps that utilize the large variety of APIs and web services out on the Internet. The platform is very broad, but if I had to boil it down to a core concept then the term "utility computing" is probably the one. Because ultimately Bungee Labs enables you to build and deploy a web app, but only pay for it when you yourself make money from the web app. In other words, as a developer and/or entrepreneur, you only ever pay Bungee Labs upon commercial deployment of the web app you've built.
To find out more about the system, I spoke yesterday to CEO Martin Plaehn and VP Community Alex Barnett. Bungeeconnect is the name of the actual development platform and its most striking feature, at least to me, was that it easily allows developers to utilize hundreds of APIs - from the likes of Google, Amazon, eBay and others. The web apps that result are cross-platform (running on Windows, Mac, Linux; as well as all the main browsers), so all up it is a very inclusive system in terms of web services and the underplying PC/browser platforms. The following diagram shows the high level concept:
Schmidt starts off by announcing a presentation feature for Docs & Spreadsheets. John Battelle points out that this completes the Office suite, so he asks is it now a competitor to MS? Schmidt says no, because it doesn't have the same or all of MS Office's functionality. He says Google D&S is a collaborative, web 2.0 framework - very different to MS Office according to Schmidt. He talks about the transition to a web-based computing framework, which their product is a good example of (for R/WW readers, aka the Web Office!). John persists - nevertheless it is a competitor to MS, he says (to crowd applause). Schmidt persists with his line of not answering that question, saying that D&S will enable people to use productivity products on the web, which he says they will use for different reasons - such as sharing and collaborative features. Schmidt calls this a web 2.0 shift in thinking for productivity.
The talk shifts to DoubleClick. John says that DC was in the past seen by Google as the type of advertising (banners etc) that was oppositie to Google (CPC text links). So what's changed? Schmidt says that Google has since decided to offer a full scale set of advertising - not just text ads. So they acquired YouTube, started doing TV and radio advertising, and more. Now Google is looking to offer a single way to do all types of advertising. Since 2004, he says DC has become more targeted and offers better support tools (for publishers etc). So he says combining this with Google's technology will make "the math work" for them, in terms of the $3B price they paid for it. He finishes by saying that Google's technology does the best job of targeting, so if you marry that with DC's people and tools, that's how they came up with the $3B price tag.
Bill Tancer from Hitwise and Dafe Sifry from Technorati are on stage now, discussing data about the participatory web. The first slide from Bill shows a 668% growth in web 2.0 over the last year, based on the top participatory sites combined (in US), like Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. The next chart is similar, showing just visits to Wikipedia. It outnumbers visits to 1.0 encyclopedia website Encarta over 3400 to 1. The photo category is showing particularly big growth, in terms of web 2.0 sites over web 1.0 sites (flickr vs ofoto for example).
Next Bill looks at participators vs viewers. Some 'visits to media upload' ratios: 0.16% for YouTube, 0.2% Flickr, 4.59% Wikipedia (entry edits). Dave Sifry notes that the creation percentage - I guess I'd call it the read/write ratio! - is certainly a lot lower than the old 80/20 rule. Bill drills down into the participatory figures, which shows for Wikipedia that older users are much more likely to be participatory (35-55) whereas the younger users are the viewers. However for YouTube it is the 25-54 yr olds that upload videos - however note that Hitwise doesn't track <18. The gender breakdown shows that 76% of users are male on YouTube, but a 60/40 male/female split for wikipedia.
Bill shows stats that show that YouTube went from zero to dominant market leader in just 6 weeks! It passed Yahoo and Google video search in 3 and 6 weeks respectively. Also during the 6 week early adopter phase, there were key segments over-represented: 'money and brains', 'young digerati', and 'bohemian mix'. Bill then showed some great stats about up and coming companies Hitwise has identified. Yelp is one of those poised to gain traction, along with stumbleupon and veoh. WeeWorld, Imeem and Pixo were also mentioned.
While I've been doing the conference equivalent of a headless chicken (running about, trying to remember who I'm supposed to meet next and where), the following bits of news have come out:
Mike Arrington announced his new conference with Jason Calacanis, Techcrunch20. The format is twenty new startups from around the world will announce and demo their products over a two day period - and they don't pay for this privilege. The conference is set for September 17-18, 2007 in San Francisco. The companies will be selected by a panel of 20 experts.
Two of the best personalized start page products, Netvibes and Pageflakes, have both launched new features. Netvibes Universe lets you create a Netvibes page featuring your favorite content and widgets. This seems to be the beginning of mainstreaming the service, because already more than a hundred 'branded' universes have been created, for leading brands like CBS and popular music artists. More details here. Pageflakes has also released a lot of great new features recently, under the code name Flurry. Check out their blog for more details. R/WW will be checking out both Netvibes and Pageflakes new features in an upcoming post(s), once the Expo flurry has subsided.
So far the Web 2.0 Expo has been very focused on explaining web 2.0 concepts to developers and designers, so it's different from previous web 2.0 conferences. I briefly met someone last night from a Canadian startup, who told me that 7 of his company had made their way to expo to find out about web 2.0. He wasn't familiar with the web 2.0 world previously, so he said the Expo has been very useful and practical. This is also the sense I got from the panel I moderated yesterday, that it is a practical conference that is more focused on showing the world how web 2.0 technologies can be used. More on this trend in later posts today and tomorrow.
I'm off to the keynotes. If the Internet access is better than yesterday, then I'll report more soon.
