More Thoughts On Web 2.0 Expo
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.
Graeme Thickins' Takeaways
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.
We Are Not a Market: One of the best quotes I heard at this event was by one of this new brand of VCs, Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital: "The TechCrunch audience and this group here is not a market (for a startup). Success in this group might be necessary, but it's not sufficient. The real world doesn't understand this stuff."
Marketing Is Rising: And one of the next best quotes I heard was in that same panel, from VC Jeff Clavier of SoftTech: "We need to start seeing real money spent on marketing." The signs are good. Everywhere at Web 2.0 Expo, I saw evidence that a large part of the conversation, and in fact the event's program, was about marketing. Kudos to the producers for that!
SEO Is Rising: A corollary to the above is that SEO, far from declining as one noted blogger/entrepreneur posited recently, is becoming a major focus in the marketing world - hand-in-hand with skills in social media. This is the new sandbox for marketers; and that is exciting. Widgets are emerging as well - another important and related marketing medium.
Another Reason Not to Get Cocky: Lest we think that we as Internet users are so much in control today, consider this: there are only one billion PC users, while two billion people worldwide use mobile phones. The Web is far from universal yet and certainly it will be some time before the advances that we call Web 2.0 become widely used worldwide - on desktops, $100 laptops, cell phones, or whatever. Maybe next year's Expo should be in China or India?
Offline Web Apps Are a Next Big Thing: The demo of Apollo, by Kevin Lynch of Adobe, was awesome - even though it is still in alpha. And Etelos, another event sponsor, had a great way to position their new offline offering: "Apps on a Plane." Who wouldn't like that?
Geeks Are Not Good Presenters: Please, conference producers everywhere - get your presenters and panelists ready to go up on stage in a big room. And, for that matter, the marketers and CEOs too. The vast majority of the presenters I heard were sadly lacking in presentation and communication skills. I guess there's a reason why conferences like DEMO work hard on this. Take a lesson. [Ed: I presume Graeme didn't mean me in the Hybrid Design panel.... hmmm, ok maybe he did!]
Sean Ammirati: What's going to beat Google?
Dave Hornik had an interesting post this week, discussing how the venue of an event shapes the things attendees take away. At the scale of this conference (I heard 16,000 attendees?), a lot of the value comes from networking interactions. The show didn’t disappoint, I arrived with a stack of cards an inch thick and they were gone in a day.
In all of these interactions, one theme almost never failed to come up --- how Google related to their project or company. The humor wasn’t lost on the audience when John asked Eric Schmidt about the antitrust concerns that Microsoft and AT&T have raised and Eric joked “Wait, Microsoft has concerns…” [about anti-trust]. Yet, joking aside, it is obvious that Google is the 800-pound guerilla now. That said, I’m confident that just like with Microsoft and IBM before, there are vulnerabilities to Google’s business model. It will just take another entrepreneurial company or project to leverage an unanticipated paradigm shift and reveal those weaknesses. Therefore, the thought I left the Expo with is … what’s that concept? Only time will tell, but there is a good likelihood the founders were walking the halls at Moscone West this week!
Emre Sokullu's Thoughts
Web 2.0 Expo was excellent for networking and meeting great people. The two technologies that impressed me most were:
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I like this format of the blog for things likes expos. The insight of three web 2.0 fanatics on one page, very nice.
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Two comments:
1)The AlwaysOn Conferences have always had back channel texting during the presentations. Ignite didn't do this quite as well, because the screens were hard to see from the back. But it's a great feature, because it calls out bad presenters and big egos.
2)Geeks DON'T have good presentation skills, and they do need them. As part of our accelerator's training for entrepreneur's we try to provide it for ten weeks -- EVERY WEEK! It isn't easy; most people fear public speaking worse than death :-)
Re: We are not a market.
As I walked around the expo floor I found myself thinking "everyone is making an attempt to capture this space, but the space is only captured by things we haven't yet seen." It is near impossible to apply traditional marketing to this space because, by definition I think, "we" all determine what is being marketed - collectively - simultaneously - quickly.
Did anyone find it interesting that the big names were not there because they were too small in terms of 'staff' yet we we all use them more than the companies who WERE there?
Example: how about booths for twitter, mediawiki, wordpress, sixapart, etc. ?
Richard, I'm sure your panel was the exception! :-) I missed it, since I wasn't able to get to the event on Monday morning till a couple of hours after that. I'm sure that you, being an editor, know how to plan a panel discussion and ask good questions. Many of the moderators I saw, or individual speakers for that matter, didn't plan well. Nothing beats preparation, then presenting with some projection and energy. Too many presentations were skimpy on content, hard to understand, or were just plain winging it.
This Web 2.0 conference was one the best I did attend to. I went there with the objective to get a good idea of which Web 2.0 technologies can be implemented in a Bank (my employer). This objective was completely fullfilled as I enjoyed many talks on data mashups (swivel, dapper) , widgets (clearspring, widgetbox), corporate blogs (cisco) , communities and so on.
Of course, the *immaturity* of Web 2.0 can be felt as we had almost no *lessons learned* from the trenches (except from Cisco blogs) and a lot of *you could do this you could do that*.
But I nevertheless felt the same energy and passion that we felt back in 1996-1997 when we saw the emergence of what we can call Web 1.0.
One not-so-funny point: the Ignite presentation of a lady on a community of teenagers building K'Nex guns in the context of Virginia Tech shooting... I didn't really know what to conclude whether she was tremendously courageous or unconscious.
Any, I got back home with a great desire to work with Web 2.0 technologies and to see them implemented in a banking context.
We are not a market.
Very important and very true. The truth comes out when a product is in place and in use by the *other guys*. Web 2 Expo is frequently by many who are early adopters (almost by definition). As a collective, we aim to learn from one another to come up with compelling products to the masses.