The two-minute pitches from the startups that will present this afternoon were great. Lots of enthusiasm and great business concepts. Hard to pick a favorite, but I like the sound of Illumio a lot — a project of Tacit Software, just coming out of stealth here today. “It lets users search each other, search your networks, for what these people know, what they have, and who they know,” said David Gilmour, CEO. He also told me yesterday afternoon that the public beta kicks off with us here. The product will be free initially. He said Illumio is “a Web 2.0 way” to extend his company’s proven collaboration software for large organizations. The CEOs of the five Gallery company (exhibitors) also made me want to get over and spend time with them as well, esp imeem and Bity Browser. Already saw Riya at Demo, and they’ll be a hit here, too, I’m sure.
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The first two sessions here on Monday morning, says Esther Dyson, are “question panels,” not answers panels. Read: big, big topics. In the first panel, three startups — Opinity, Root Markets, and Trusted ID — talked about how they can help users actually control their own data, taking that power from the 
institutions that now have it. But a big takeaway is that all this won’t happen soon. Scott Mitic of TrustedID says he’s personally heard people at these big institutions say that “will happen over my dead body.” But, he says, “the system is broken…when three credit bureaus are selling your info for fraudulent proposes, even though they don’t mean to…and when it’s costing consumers tens of billions of dollars a year… someone must stand up for the consumer.” Opinity will have you pay (indirectly) for a profile it manages, while Root Markets will actually pay you for your data.
The first speaker was Barry Schwartz, psychology professor from Swarthmore College, and author or “The Paradox of Choice,” a book we all got in our conference bag. (One guy who asked a question later said he’s already read it.) Basically, I’ll give you what I got out of his talk and the psycho-babble — I mean discussion — that followed. The Internet gives us too many choices. Check. How can Internet businesses help us? Help narrow our choices. Check. That’s what all the community services, for shopping, tagging, sharing, etc, actually do: as Esther says, filter or constrain our choices, without us having to be be involved in every silly little choice. Check. Therefore community is good, vertical search is good. Check.
Rock on Web 2.0.
(I took a bunch of photos, and I’d share a one or two here, but I can’t decide. No, actually, the Bluetooth in my RAZR phone won’t power on. Hmm, did I make the wrong phone choice?)
Esther just had me take a look at her photos on Flickr — taken here at LaCosta as well as last week at Etech. So I said I’d post them — here they are. Note the street bums demoing at Etech…gotta love that.
I’m sitting here now in the registration area, just outside the Grand Ballroom, where the first session fires up at in an hour or so. The sun came out full-on on my drive south from San Clemente late this morning, so the weather turned out to be quite nice here at LaCosta (but still cool). People started trickling in about noon, but now they’re filing in more heavily. Many folks, of course, just flew in today, from all over, so they’re just now getting checked into the hotel. Here are some shots I grabbed with my cell phone while I strolled around to check out this sprawling resort a bit. (Excuse the quality of the pix, but I forgot my big camera – duh.) In the first shot, of the registration desk, that’s Daphe Kis, Publisher of Release 1.0 on the right. I also chatted with Esther Dyson, who was greeting many people personally and seems as calm as can be. (Comes with experience, I guess, from doing this conference so many years.) Talking to other attendees here, I already get the idea that PC Forum has a very loyal following, year after year.
(Just click on the photos to make them larger.)
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