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.
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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.)
Well, I arrived in Southern California last night in preparation for the big event to kick off tomorrow in Carlsbad (North San Diego County). And I was just in time for a huge cold front and mega amounts of rain! They even had snow down to 1500 feet in the mountains. Not exactly what the San Diego tourism board had in mind! And here PC Forum just relocated from Scottsdale this year, too. Oh, well, no matter. I’d always rather be here, and by Monday things are due to improve. (Plus it’s raining bigtime in Scottsdale, too, from the same storm.)
Here’s a little rundown on the things I’m looking forward to with this trip:
1) Blogging for my readers about what the buzz is at this very highly regarded conference.
2) Learning about new technologies and business models.
3) Finding out who’s funding what.
4) Taking in a packed conference agenda, with some particularly good sessions being these, in my opinion:
• Esther Dyson’s interview of Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and now CEO of Omidyar Network, which is funding both for-profits and non-profits, but believes profitable enterprises and efficient markets are often the best way to achieve social good.
• “Behavioral Targeting 2.0”: how four marketing and ad technology vendors, Compete, Grassroots, mSpoke, and Tacoda, are moving beyond spyware to get users actively involved in controlling their own data.
• “New Business Models: Power to the Edges”: featuring the CEOs of Brightcove, Salesforce.com, Augmentum, and Microsoft’s SVP of technical strategy.
• “Search: What Are You Gonna Do for an Encore?”: a look at what comes after search reaches its natural limits, including the two trends of personalization and verticalization, and featuring the CEO of Zillow, Google’s SVP of sales and bus dev, the CEO of Efficient Frontier, and Yahoo’s SVP of search.
• And the closing panel, “New Forms of Life”: how online community is actually changing life — wherein it’s heading toward no longer being “virtual,” but part of life, just like work and play. The panel includes the CEOs of LinkedIn and Facebook, along with a producer from Seriosity, a still-in-stealth company that’s out to apply gaming culture to work.
5) And, of course, meeting lots of interesting people — including interviewing some of the speakers and attendees. So far, I have Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove, Bill Day of WhenU, Michael Tanne of Wink, and Greg Pierson of iovation on my list. And I’m also hoping to chat with J.J. Allaire of Onfolio (just acquired by Microsoft)…Adam Bosworth of Google Health…Michael Arrington of edgeio…Steve Marder of Eurekster…Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn…somebody from the Omidyar Network…David Gilmour of Tacit Software’s pre-launch (and very cool sounding) Illumio startup…Bruce Francis of Salesforce.com…and others yet to be determined.
Stay tuned. I’ll be blogging live from PC Forum, and during breaks, etc, as I can. And please do email me if you have any suggestions relating to my coverage of PC Forum, questions you’d like me to ask, or whatever…
About Graeme
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