We’re beginning to post audio from the Web 2.0 Summit on the Conversations page. New podcasts are scheduled to arrive weekly, so visit often.
November 2006 Archives
Web 2.0 Summit
“Developers at the Web 2.0 conference are offering web users an escape from the hassle of remembering usernames and passwords across multiple web sites,” observes Evan Prodromou in this LinuxWorld.com article that was picked up by NetworkWorld.
Where 2.0
Do you have ground breaking ideas about location aware technology–amazing location systems, open source hacks, untapped geodata, the next killer app to roll off the lab bench–and want to share them? Do you run a company developing new mapping products and services, or mashing up old ones? If so, we want you to present at the 2007 Where 2.0 Conference, happening May 29-20 in San Jose, California. Proposals are due January 5, 2007–visit the website to submit a proposal and share your ideas about what would make Where 2.0 a must-attend event.
Web 2.0 Summit
Over on LinuxWorld.com, Evan Prodromou writes:
Web services, software-as-a-service, and per-node, per-hour rent-a-grid computing are meeting in the middle. Web sites, companies with server software roots, and open source developers are converging on new ideas for business IT that blur the lines between APIs, services and software products.
Michael Liedtke writes: Although conditions haven’t returned to the feverish levels of the dot-com boom, the Internet’s business atmosphere is clearly heating up.
The latest symptoms of the escalating exuberance bubbled up this week at an elite gathering called the Web 2.0 Summit — a 3-year-old event billed as a mere conference until the organizers renamed it this year to underscore its exclusive status.
Dan Farber writes: Nick Carr was at this best synthesizing the week that was-the Web 2.0 Summit-and he wasn’t even there. I agree with other bloggers, commentators, writers, reporters, pundits, podcasters, vloggers, journalists and user generated content creators who said that the Web 2.0 Summit, which I covered extensively, didn’t produce any great revelations or a great step forward for the global Web. It was more about scraping money off the table as the money-VCs, IAC, Fox Interactive, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others-were auditioning startups in the hallways and in private rooms.
Ross Mayfield writes: John Markoff writes in the NY Times that Web 3.0 is coming.
Apparently he missed my post last week, for There is no Web 3.0. The funny thing about my summation last year (Web 2.0 is Made of People!) is the web has always been that way — and always will. At first glance, John seems to think the next web is made of machines.
Adam Lashinsky writes: Despite lofty predictions for MySpace and YouTube, almost no one in the current Web wave is making money - except Google. That could be a good thing for investors, argues Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky.
For a couple of years now, Internet-industry cognoscenti have cringed at the expression “Web 2.0″. It’s one of those catch-all phrases that started with a fairly specific definition (more on that in a bit) but has mushroomed into meaning essentially anything the person who evokes it wants it to mean.
What became clear at the loftily renamed Web 2.0 Summit, held last week at a posh hotel in San Francisco, is that the frothiness of Web 1.0 has returned and that Web 2.0 really is all about “the Google” and how everyone else relates to it.
Search upstart challenges Googlewith help from international array of investors.
Hakia said it has raised $11 million in its first phase of funding from a panoply of investors scattered across the globe who were attracted by the company’s semantic search technology, which the upstart aims to make superior to Google’s search engine.
The company is currently beta testing the search engine at its web site and previewed it at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week.
Forbes’ Adam Lashinsky writes:It’s time for Silicon Valley to accept the same laws that govern the rest of American business, says Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky.
A key tenet of life in Silicon Valley is that the technology industry is different from other businesses.
Employee compensation in the stock option culture is different. Accounting typically follows its own set of rules. Performance metrics that businesspeople elsewhere wouldn’t recognize are coin of the realm here. It’s an obnoxious attitude that nevertheless undoubtedly fuels a good deal of the tech industry’s outsized success.
This distinct form of exceptionalism was on display at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco during a particularly illuminating panel discussion, “The Pirate and the Suit.” It featured DJ-mashup artist Eric Kleptone, who created the wildly popular “A Night at the Hip Hopera,” and David Munns, vice chairman of EMI Music.
Matthew Creamer writes:If the term Web 2.0 means anything at all to major media companies, it’s that having a potent way to get video content in front of consumers-and pull in a growing pile of ad bucks-will determine the winners from the losers. Last week’s Web 2.0 Summit, probably the highest-profile annual gathering of media and tech bigs, demonstrated that the answer to a single question determines a media company’s worth to Wall Street and advertisers: Does its digital strategy include a way to distribute both copyrighted and user-generated clips? The haves: Google and News Corp. The have-nots: pretty much the rest of ‘em, from Yahoo to the New York Times Co.
John Markoff writes:From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.
Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.
For one evening, at least, it felt like the good old days again.For those around for the first bubble, this week’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco felt awfully familiar. A big name rock act, hipster god Lou Reed, was brought in Wednesday night to serenade blue-shirted, cell phone packing dweebs.
Big name tech companies like Intel competed with old media powerhouses such as The New York Times to show their Web 2.0 credentials.
In a week of second, and third, acts Web 2.0 impresario John Batelle, publisher of the late, lamented, Industry Standard was most impressive, presiding, once again, over a week of sheer effervescence.
Constance Loizos and Elise Ackerman write:For the 1,000 attendees at the third Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, there was ample opportunity to network, nosh, check out new startups and mingle with some of the biggest names in the technology industry.
Yet this year’s conference was perhaps most notable for its high-profile speakers, which included Ross Levinsohn, CEO of Fox Interactive; Ram Shriram, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent angels — he was Google’s first investor; and Roger McNamee, a prominent investor and cofounder of Elevation Partners.
Dan Fost channels Herb Caen at Web 2.0: I have been to the mountaintop. I have learned the secrets of the Palace.
OK, I have been to the Web 2.0 Summit, a highly hyped Internet conference. I have overheard a few things at the Sheraton Palace Hotel. I will share them with you, three-dot style.
Alan Sipress writesIf you’re the man who replaced Bill Gates, you’re sure to inherit a certain mystique and engender intense interest both inside Microsoft and out. But since Ray Ozzie took over as the company’s chief software architect this year, he has studiously maintained a low public profile that has fueled curiosity even further.
Ozzie broke his silence this week at the “Web 2.0 Summit” in San Francisco, where he appeared on stage to be interviewed by conference chairman John Battelle of Federated Media.
Forbes’ Rachel Rosmarinhas posted several entries on the Forbes blog during the Web 2.0 Summit…The Palace Hotel is crammed full of ambitious tech geeks, all jockeying for a bit of WiFi bandwidth, a rare power outlet or the chance to pitch their startup to a captive listener. Space, laptop juice and attention spans, are oversold. Tim O’Reilly, one of the founder’s of this conference, says he had to turn away 5,000 eager attendees. He invited them all to a new conference in April, and renamed this one the Web 2.0 summit, today.
Martin LaMonica writes: With Microsoft’s Vista and Office 2007 released to manufacturing, the software giant is preparing to adapt the products for the Web-dominated era, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Wednesday.
Ozzie spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit here, where he said the company overall is making a transition to designing software that takes advantage of the PC–as it has historically done–as well as online services.
“Now we are at an interesting juncture with Vista and Office (2007) done,” Ozzie said during an on-stage interview with conference organizer John Battelle.
Dan Farber writes:Yahoo co-founder David Filo, who rarely gets in front of a conference crowd, chatted with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit, aided by Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo vice president of product strategy. Filo is the product focused half of the founding duo. The other founder, Jerry Yang, focuses on the business issues.
You would think after 12 years in the saddle and with billions of dollars in their accounts, the motivation to keep at it would diminish for the founders, but Filo said that the opportunity that lies ahead keeps him motivated, as well as being part of the “revolution.”
Evan Prodromou writes: The Web’s business and technology elite convened for O’Reilly and Associates’ third annual Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel last week. Started in 2004, the meeting lends its name to what some call a movement and others an ignorable wave of marketing hype…Is Web 2.0 relevant for open source developers, users, and IT managers? Although it may seem like just so much marketing fluff, Web 2.0 does have meaning for open source creators and users as well as IT decision-makers.
Posts Michael Arrington:
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has been talking about their web services business unit a lot lately. Moments after he left the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit last week I was able to speak to him about three of their most recent web service offerings: Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This is a short podcast but you get a glimpse of how important this new business line is to Amazon’s future.
“Social news aggregator Digg.com was able to spotlight Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation faster than machine-operated Google News,” writes Kate Greene
Less than 10 minutes after the news of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation hit the wires last week, the information was visible to hundreds of thousands of people via the homepage of Digg.com, a social news aggregation site that relies on readers to submit and promote interesting news stories.
According to Digg founder Kevin Rose, the Rumsfeld news was submitted to Digg three minutes after the Associated Press released it; four minutes later, the story had acquired enough “diggs” to jump to the front page of the site. The speed at which the Rumsfeld news–a quick read at only two sentences–was promoted to the front page of Digg “broke a record,” said Rose last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
Michael Calore took a lot of Monkey Bites out of the Web 2.0 Summit:
The Radar Team picked up on a few more signals at the Web 2.0 Summit:
Richard McManus has written a thoughtful summary of this year’s Summit:
It’s the end of a hectic week of conference-going for your R/WW correspondent - and so time for a wrap-up of my thoughts on the Web 2.0 Summit. Firstly, my overriding feeling is that this year’s conference was a lot different from last year’s. It was still a great conference, but in a different way - perhaps reflected in the name change to Summit (a more business-sounding title).
Lynne Johnson, with some help from Scott Kirsner, has posted a number of pieces from the Summit, covering social networking, Google, collaboration, video, Lou Reed’s appearance, and more.
Falguni Buhta filed a trio of pieces from the event:
Red Herring editors also posted a Week in Review piece that summarized some thoughts on the Summit, including the comment: “…John Batelle, publisher of the late, lamented, Industry Standard was most impressive, presiding, once again, over a week of sheer effervescence.”
Thomas Claburn wrote an article on how “Vendors look for ways to achieve user lock-in in a world of open networks, open source software, and open APIs.”
Among the many buzzwords associated with the Web 2.0 hype, none has quite the cachet as “open.” Yet no idea is more profoundly troubling to the companies trying to build profitable Internet businesses.
“The challenge we have in the Web 2.0 world is to invent new kinds of lock-in,” said Marc Canter, CEO of Broadband Mechanics, speaking at a session of the Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday.
In an interview with InformationWeek’s Thomas Claburn, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos “dishes the dirt on IT ‘muck,’ talks about selling IT services by the sip, e-commerce, the advantages of VoIP, and why he’s interested in space travel.”
Peter Spande has also blogged some quick thoughts on the Web 2.0 Summit.
An article from Jefferson Graham:
Yahoo (YHOO) on Thursday previewed a new tool that wraps instant messaging into its hugely popular e-mail program. Launching in early 2007, the feature will enable Yahoo members to see their mail contacts online and instant-message them directly from Yahoo Mail. It “makes e-mail a more social experience,” says Yahoo Senior Vice President Brad Garlinghouse. Yahoo unveiled the tool at the Web 2.0 conference here.
And a blog from Kevin Maney, “What I learned at Web 2.0, Day One.”
The Summit was “a chance to mingle with giants in tech,” write Elise Ackerman, Constance Loizos and Michelle Quinn:
For the 1,000 people gathered at the third Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, there was ample opportunity to network, nosh, check out new start-ups and mingle with some of the biggest names in the technology industry.
Michael Calore has posted this article on one of the Launch Pad sponsors, In the Chair:
In the cacophony of mashups, widgets and collaboration tools demoed at the third annual Web 2.0 Summit here, one rang out as the biggest crowd pleaser: a musical instrument instruction web app with a golden ear and infinite patience.
Michael also blogged some highlights from Kevin Rose’s talk over on Monkey Bites.
From the Marketplace entry: “A weeklong conference looking at the future of the Internet wraps up today. It’s all about monetizing the Web, Rachel Dornhelm reports.”
Justin Ewers writes:
Call it the Grand Summit of the Internet Digiterati. Or a geekfest worthy of Star Trek. The Web2.0 conference in San Francisco is an annual gathering of those hardy souls in Silicon Valley-and beyond-who are still hanging on to the notion that the dot-com era wasn’t just a flash in the pan.
A post from The Post’s Alan Sipress:
Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., outlined his ambitious strategy for selling online storage and computing power before a crowd of entrepreneurs gathered here Wednesday for the Internet industry’s marquee conference and annual pep rally.
Editor in chief Harry McCracken has posted several entries:
- At Web 2.0 Conference
- Ray Ozzie at Web 2.0: Vista, Office, Etc.
- Yahoo Mail’s New Built-In Instant Messaging
- More Web 2.0: Microsoft’s Amazing Photosynth
I’m sitting in a ballroom at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, where the Web 2.0 Summit began today. If interesting stuff going on on the Internet has an epicenter, it’s this event.
Eventful week for Microsoft–on Monday, it announced that it had released Office 2007 to manufacturing, and today’s it’s saying the same for Windows Vista.
I’m back for the last day of the Web 2.0 Summit, and one of the first sessions this morning spotlights Yahoo.
Gary Flake of Microsoft’s Live Labs is onstage demonstrating what is without question the coolest thing I’ve seen so far at Web 2.0: a photo viewer called Photosynth.
Master podcaster Daniel Steinberg has started to post audio from the Summit, brought to you by the Intel Software Network and Intel Software Partner Program:
- Lou Reed at Web 2.0
- Launch Pad at Web 2.0
Day two of the Web 2.0 Summit 2006 began with conversations with Jeff Bezos and Bruce Chizen followed by a debate on Net Neutrality between Vint Cerf and Robert Pepper. GoDaddy’s Bob Parsons gave the audience advice on running a company. Performer Lou Reed capped off the day with an after dinner set.
Before the start of Web 2.0 Summit 2006, 13 companies announced new products at the Launch Pad. We take a quick look at some of them in this report from the show.
More podcasts of the Summit will be available starting November 15.
Martin LaMonica writes: Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit here Wednesday to publicly launch Ning.com, which lets people build Web sites for online socializing.
The company has been operating for more than a year, but waited until the conference to reveal details on its product. Bianchini, who is CEO, gave a demonstration in the afternoon after technical glitches marred the first attempt.
She showed that Ning allows people to create socially oriented Web sites without having to write code. People are presented with choices, such as who to share the site with and what kind of look it will have.
Ning has built templates for hosting discussions and sharing music, photos and videos. The site is set up so people can retain their own branding–a logo can appear in a video player, for example.
“What’s different about Ning from other services is that we give you your own video site like YouTube, or social-networking site like MySpace,” she said. “But unlike being a page in somebody else’s service, it’s yours. You get to choose what it’s about.”
In December, Ning plans to launch an upgrade that will let people more easily customize their social-networking sites, she said.
Andreessen, best known as a Netscape co-founder, said Ning is betting that more and more people will want to create social-networking sites of their own. He added that the site is fully programmable by developers.
“Our basic theory is that as people get more sophisticated and used to social networks, they are going to want a lot more flexibility and a lot more customization,” Andreessen said. “We’re making a big bet that there will be a lot more social networks over the next couple of years.”
Web 2.0 Conference/Summit regular Mike Liedtke writes: Although conditions haven’t returned to the feverish levels of the dot-com boom, the Internet’s business atmosphere is clearly heating up.
The latest symptoms of the escalating exuberance bubbled up this week at an elite gathering called the Web 2.0 Summit — a 3-year-old event billed as a mere conference until the organizers renamed it this year to underscore its exclusive status.
The San Francisco shindig attracted so many movers and shakers that more than 250 Internet entrepreneurs jostled for a chance to show off their Web sites at a 90-minute session devoted to startups. The demand for on-stage presentations more than quadrupled from last year.
An advisory board winnowed this year’s field of applicants to 13 lucky startups who paid $10,000 apiece to take center stage before a packed room of venture capitalists, reporters, bloggers and Internet cognoscenti.
Each demonstration was limited to five minutes, a constraint that required some presenters to wrap things up before they had a chance to show off all their whiz-bang technology.
“It’s a little nerve-racking, but it’s very exciting,” said Nicole Morris, who highlighted 3B.net, a London-based startup that provides tools to construct three-dimensional settings around Web pages.
The audience could have been even bigger. More than 5,000 people wanted to attend this year’s three-day event, but the organizers — O’Reilly Media and CMP Technology — capped the attendance at 1,000.
Seeking to make the most of her opportunity, Morris ended her five-minute pitch by reaching out to venture capitalists — a group of financiers that is becoming more aggressive about pursuing investment opportunities.
Through the first nine months of this year, venture capitalists had invested $455 million in Web startups, more than doubling the amount from the same time last year, according to research firm Dow Jones VentureOne.
Other summit presenters like Palo Alto-based Sharpcast.com, which already has raised more than $13.5 million in venture capital, seemed more interested in creating a buzz that would lure more users to their Web sites.
Still other entrepreneurs on the summit’s stage might have been trying to follow the example of JotSpot and Upstartle, two Silicon Valley startups that presented at Web 2.0’s two previous gatherings. Google Inc., already home to hundreds of millionaire employees, bought both of those companies for undisclosed sums this year.
David Needle writes: The second day of the Web 2.0 Summit featured some of the Internet’s heaviest hitters talking strategy, new products and how to compete with search king Google, one of several sponsors of the event.
“There is immense opportunity in the core space that they are in that I’m surprised we haven’t branched into,” said Microsoft’s Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie.
Ozzie mentioned advances in the refinement of search and making it more contextual as areas ripe for innovation.
But he also ticked off many of Microsoft’s advantages, particularly it’s enormous user base that includes close to a half a billion Office users. “I don’t have to acquire companies, all I have to show is we get it and deliver the value they want to use it.”
He also disputed Google’s belief espoused yesterday by CEO Eric Schmidt, that most software is moving to an online or hosted model.
“I don’t see that it’s the right thing to do, to take the PC functionality and put it up on the Web. I think you have to look at what the Web is really good at like sharing scenarios and getting quickly in and out,” said Ozzie.
“The PC is really, really flexible, with a fast UI regardless of connection speed.” He also said that the PC is a better tool for users to embed emerging data types, including multimedia, that would be limited by bandwidth constraints online.
In an earlier panel, Steve Berkowitz, the Microsoft executive in charge of business development for its online services, said there is plenty of opportunity to compete with Google. That view was echoed by fellow panelist Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Ask.com. (Ironically, Berkowitz is a former CEO of Ask.com).
“So much in search needs to be improved,” said Lanzone. He said Ask.com was broadening its appeal by focusing on improvements to specific search areas, such as images, video and maps.
He also claimed Ask.com’s singular focus on search and easily understood brand helps it compete against portal sites like Yahoo. “If you’re a portal with a 3D this and checkout that, it’s a very jumbled thing to say what the brand stands for.”
Berkowitz said he expects more graphical user interfaces and personalization will make the search experience better.
“A lot will come down to how you enter the Internet,” said Berkowitz. By better understanding its community of users and adding relevant features and links, Berkowitz said Microsoft will be able to keep more of its users from leaving to Google and other sites.
He also conceded Microsoft’s new Live online effort “isn’t where I want it to be.”
He said Microsoft’s goal is to make Live a complete online service that can be readily accessed by a wide range of devices from desktop to mobile and provide more than search, but a range of services. “In the future, search will always be central to the property.”
That Ning Thing
Social networks like MySpace are a huge trend that got plenty of attention at the Web 2.0 Summit. Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, is also co-founder of a new service called Ning, that adds a lot more customization to the social networks.
Gina Bianchini, the other co-founder of Ning, shared the stage with Andreesen and ran through a quick demo, setting up a social Web application in a few minutes.
“We give you the ability to set up your own video site like YouTube, or a site like Facebook, but unlike a page in someone else’s service, it’s yours - you decide the appearance and how to customize it,” said Bianchini. Video, audio and photos can be imported from your computer or other sites.
You can also decide on whether the sites you create will be public or private.
In December, Ning plans to bring an upgrade online that will integrate access to multimedia types from within Ning rather than having to retrieve them from other sites.
“We think Facebook and YouTube are fantastic, but they are one size fits all,” said Andreessen. “It reminds me of AOL and Prodigy in the ’90s. It wasn’t until we had fragmentation, specialization and customization when the Web gained traction.
Andreessen said Ning is making a big bet that “as people get more used to social networking they want more flexibility. It’s a really important step to unlock the creativity people have.”
Verne at the Chronicle writes: All things Internet were the topic at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, where technology luminaries including Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen spoke Wednesday.
And while big names draw crowds, for most attendees this annual meeting of digital media entrepreneurs is an opportunity to keep up to date with the latest in the technology industry, schmooze and strike business deals.
What’s hot is easy to find out. Just listen in on a few conversations and you’re bound to hear ample discussion of Google and its pending acquisition of video-sharing Web site YouTube. MySpace, the popular social networking site, was also a big talker. Startups at the conference are focusing on a wide range of business models, including search, online video and social networking
Bezos’ talk focused not on book-selling, Amazon’s primary business, but the more technical and less known side of the company: offering its data and services to software developers.
Bruce Chizen, ch