There's a Lot to Talk About

Last week we published a post titled Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action. That collection illustrates the diverse and important ways people are using real time on the web, from leveraging presence data to real-time reputation tracking and pushing financial data in banking. Sunlight Foundation's Jake Brewer said about that post today, "Congress should study this list."

There Are Incredible People Coming

People and companies from around the world are coming to the Summit. Here's a list of highlighted participants. You'll find the right people if you want to talk to big consumer vendors like Google, Yahoo and MySpace, enterprise startups like Atlassian and Kaazing or innovators like John Borthwick (BusinessWeek calls him "perhaps the real-time Web's key articulator"), Ted Roden of the NY Times R&D Lab and the artsy social network EnjoysThin.gs or serial-inventor Leah Culver.

Want to talk to people building key protocols? Google's Brett Slatikin is leading the development of Pubsubhubbub along with Brad Fitzpatrick, who insiders will tell you has been central to the birth of social networking, OpenID and a whole lot more. Both of them will be at the Summit.

There will be marketing people there, engineers, executives, independent innovators. It will be awesome.

The Agenda Will Be Created In Real Time

Convene an incredible group of people, frame the discussion and ask big important questions, then guide participants in building an agenda for the day to maximize the value of the event and minimize hot air. That's the recipe we're following, with the capable guidance of professional "unconference" facilitator Kaliya Hamlin. Kaliya has been facilitating events like this all around the world for almost 10 years.

Martin Källström, CEO of real-time blog and feed tracking service Twingly is bringing his team over from Sweden for the event. "Last year we happened across one of Kaliya Hamlin's unconference events," he told us. "We spent a couple of hours there and it was an amazing experience. I'm really looking forward to the real-time web summit. The unconference format is an amazing way for things to happen, it gets everyone to lower their defenses. By opening peoples' minds to 'this is about whatever we want it to be about', they look at how they can create value."

Or, as Google's Brett Slatkin said last week in referencing the format of the elite FooCamp events to explain the Real-Time Web Summit: "Foo-style [unconferencing is] always way better than talks. See ya there!"

Here are some of the questions that early bird registrants said they wanted to explore.

After the event, all participants will also receive a professionally-produced eBook documenting all the conversation sessions that happened, so you'll be able to get value from sessions you missed to go to another one.

Participants who purchase tickets will also receive a substantial discount on our forthcoming research report on the state of the real-time web market and directions it may go in the future, based on interviews with more than 40 companies building or using these tools.

So what are you waiting for? Go register now, before the current window of ticket pricing closes.

Photo of Kaliya Hamlin by Bill Johnston.