O'Reilly and TechWeb's Web 2.0 Summit, probably the biggest and most influential web technology event of the year from a business perspective, is about to start in San Francisco and for the first time - anyone can watch the speakers live on stage, for free.

See the live video player embedded below and watch this space for coverage of the first few speakers: Tim O'Reilly, John Battelle and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. With a line-up like that for the first hour, there's sure to be fireworks.