Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Web 2.0 (Page 5 of 9)

Tim O’Reilly Says Web 2.0 Ain’t Over

It was getting late — for me, anyway, having flown in from “back east” as they say here in Cal. But, before I faded, I managed to catch part the opening evening sessions of the Emerging Technology Conference on Monday evening. I joined it in progress, after a great dinner with fellow bloggers Steve Borsch and Marc Orchant at a place called Buster’s Longboard Bar, which was full of surfing decor and photos. I was lovin’ it. (And the shark fish tacos were excellent.) Timoreillyddavidson But I then managed to slip into Tim O’Reilly’s session called “O’Reilly Radar” and was glad I did, because he uncorked a great new definition of Web 2.0 … at least one I hadn’t heard yet.

“Web 2.0 is not over and out yet,” he said. And he went on to to describe what now distinguishes Web 2.0. This is O’Reilly’s definition:

“Systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”

I think that’s a great way to freshen up what’s become a bit of a tired term for many. Thank you, Tim! He went on to touch on a few companies that ostensibly fit this definition … or are poised to, anyway: Freebase, an open/shared structured database of the world’s knowledge … personal financial management site Wesabe (O’Reilly mentioned his firm is an investor) … and a stealthy investor market intelligence company called Mint.

“Web 2.0 is moving from consumer to mainstream business,” O’Reilly said. He ended his talk with a request of the audience: “Let us know when you see people having a lot of fun with technology. We want to know.” That’s a key reason so many people turn out for this event, I’ve decided — to learn what’s new and what’s fun. I think that’s great.

Speaking of which, Tim’s talk was followed by an absolutely fabulous magician act — actually, a “mathamagician” — named Art Benjamin. To say he wowed this largely developer crowd was an understatement. The guy was amazing, had lots of willing audience participants get up on stage, and got applause like you couldn’t believe. But, he was so good, he was making my brain ache. I was fading fast. So, off to the room I went, figuring I’d naturally be up way early and could blog then without falling asleep at my Powerbook. The first day’s sessions start in an hour or so.

Update: Forgot the photo credit. It was shot by Duncan Davidson and is from his Flickr set tagged “ETech.”

eTech: Magical Mystery Tour

I’m off on an adventure tomorrow morning, flying to San Diego again, this time for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, where I’ll be reporting for Conferenza and posting to this blog. I’m looking forward to running into some old friends, and to an exciting program. The “magic” theme this year should be fascinating, based on the descriptions of some sessions I’ve highlighted below.

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What technologies are “poised to blast off into the realm of magic?” O’Reilly asks, as it launches its sixth annual eTech event. [It will be the third one I’ve reported on, by the way.] The goal is to “balance pie-in-the-sky theorizing with practical, real-world information and conversation,” says the firm. The format consists of tutorials, breakout sessions, keynotes, and that most revered form of interaction — hallway conversations! — which “will hopefully spark enough unconventional thinking to change how you see your world.” Etechtheme400

The dates are Monday, March 26 through Thursday, March 29, and the venue is the Manchester Grand Hyatt right on the harbor in downtown San Diego. The promise, says O’Reilly, is for you to be able to learn which areas of technology have sufficiently advanced to the level of magic. So, I’m joining more than 1200 technologists, CTOs, hackers, researchers, thinkers, strategists, entrepreneurs, business developers, and VCs that are expected to participate in this year’s event. Grandhyatt I know from years past that the attendees at eTech are top notch — many leading developers, trendsetters, founders, and VCs (definitely a lot names you’d recognize). The strength of eTech, according to O’Reilly, is how it “taps into the creative spirit of all attendees, sparking provocative encounters and productive inspiration that continue long after the conference ends” — and I agree based on personal experience. In addition to the variety of sessions and extra-curricular activities, eTech has an exhibit hall featuring a focused group of about 14 exhibitors and sponsors.

eTech Sessions That Especially Sound Good
So, what are some the talks I’ve flagged out? On the first full day, Tuesday, I plan to catch as many of these as I can (some overlap each other, unfortunately):
• Building a “Web-Scale Computing” Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today’s Business (Amazon Web Services)
• Making Offline Web Applications a Reality (Zimbra)
• Movie Magic: Coming Soon to the Real World Near You (Apple Computer)
• Flickr for Office Docs – Content Syndication through ThinkFree Doc Exchange
• RSS Beyond Blogging – Connecting Applications With Feeds (nSoftware)
• Digital Disney: the Mainstreaming of Web 2.0
• Successful Open Communities on the Internet (Wikia)
• Extreme Productivity in the Enterprise: The User is the Developer is the User (BEA)
• The Myths of Innovation
• Virtualizing the Datacenter with Project Blackbox (Sun)

Then, on Wednesday, we start getting heavier into that magic thing:

• The Coming Age of Magic (ThingM) – Excerpt: “The desktop metaphor is dead … Interaction design is significantly trailing the capabilities of the technology because of how difficult it is to explain what all this new stuff does … The desktop metaphor was useful for twenty years as a way to structure and explain information-processing technology. I propose “magic” as a metaphor for structuring interactions with embedded information processing technology …”

• The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life (Danah Boyd) – Excerpt: “While the ‘radical’ practices of young people and the organizational fetishes of technologists are certainly a curiosity to be examined, the real shift is happening in the lives of everyday people without an ounce of reflexivity …”

• Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication – Excerpt: “Today, the re-emergence of craft is part of the DIY movement that is discovering new tools for personal fabrication.

And here’s my vote for best named session:
• Scalability: Set Amazon’s Servers on Fire, Not Yours (SmugMug) – Excerpt: “With companies like SmugMug, Flickr, and YouTube growing by leaps and bounds, storage is a vital but expensive ingredient. Building, scaling, and managing large storage installations is cash — and labor –intensive. Amazon provides a simple API that exposes their internal storage architecture at utility prices. Suddenly, anything is possible. Unlimited, always-on storage everywhere in the world.”

• Sufficiently Advanced Magic (MIT Media Lab) – Excerpt: “…magicians and scientists often play on the same borders of the unknown. Magicians, however, do not have to kowtow to the constraints of reality as technologists do … If technology is man’s search to express control over his environment, scientists should look to magicians for inspiration and guidance as to what has engaged people for millennia … they continue to be successful by adapting their techniques and presentations in order to affect people profoundly.”

• Engaging with Web 2.0 Outside the Browser (Adobe) – Excerpt: “Web 2.0 is more than a social networking phenomenon. It’s a renaissance in web development … Rich Internet applications (RIAs), which break out from the traditional page-based web paradigm and currently run in the web browser, will soon be able to run on the desktop, both on and offline, with the ability to access local data and use web services to present an integrated and unique user experience … best practices and techniques that leverage existing web development skills to build and deploy Web 2.0 applications that bridge the Web and desktop … a new application model for content delivery and collaboration … how HTML, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash are coming together in a new project, code-named Apollo.”

• Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web (Yahoo!) – Excerpt: “Developers can use Pipes to combine data sources and user input into mashups without having to write code.”

• Web Scale Computing (Amazon Web Services) – Excerpt: “Web 2.0 business models are about competing on ideas, not on resources. Yet over 70% of most startup development effort goes into undifferentiated “heavy lifting”! … Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business … 200,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.”

• Ajax Unplugged: Architecture and Tips for Taking Your Applications Offline (Zimbra) – Excerpt: “Looking back, 2006 may have been the year of Ajax … But despite its game-changing hype, Ajax is limited in its usefulness, it only helps people when connected to the Web. Surprisingly enough, people want access to their applications even when they aren’t connected to the Internet …”

And…drum roll…my vote for the funnest sounding session at eTech:
• 1/2 Baked (panel: 500 Hats, Feedburner, First Round Capital, August Capital) – Excerpt: “Half-Baked Dot Com is a participatory exercise in entrepreneurial improv theatre conducted by five teams of startup addicts and judged by an estranged panel of venture capitalists…or several crackpots and D-list bloggers, whomever shows up first … Half-Baked is the latest Web 2.0 craze that’s sweeping the un-conference circuit. Show up early and bring your A-game if you’d like to participate, otherwise bring your camera to record the heinous crime perpetrated on an audience who paid good money to attend this event.”

Finally, on Thursday, I’m seeing several more sessions that I’d like to catch — if I can hang around that long before hittin’ the waves:
• Apollo: Bringing Rich Internet Applications to the Desktop (Adobe)
• Silicon is Invading Medicine (Andy Kessler)
• Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems (Yahoo!)
• Web 20-20: Architectural Patterns and Models for the New Internet (Adobe)
• Your Web App as a Text Adventure (Stikkit)
• Web Feed Workflows – Getting the Right Information, to the Right People at the Right Time (Attensa)

Let me know your thoughts about the sessions above, questions you’d like answered, etc. Watch for my blog posts and Flickr pix, too. And, by all means, if you’ll be at eTech yourself, please look me up!

The Buildup to DEMO Intensifies

Well, it’s 24 hours and counting till the opening of DEMO ’07 tomorrow morning, and the bits are flying. (By the way, here’s the event schedule.) The blogs are lighting up, traffic tripled to yours truly yesterday, and the pre-announcement news releases are starting to hit my in-box. The first was from BUZ Interactive, which has designed a way to send personalized voicemails, mixed with music, to any mobile phone on the planet without having the phone ring. More news just arrived from ThePort.com, which has gone live with the download for its Blerts desktop RSS alerter (Windows only for now). [A quirk about some of the companies on the alphabetical DEMO presenters list — their service or product name is not what they’re listed under, so don’t look under “B”.]

Over at TechCrunch, I’m not surprised to see a post on Splashcast, a cool new Flash player to embed your channels on a website, since it’s where TechCrunch contributor Marshall Kirkpatrick has been working. (Though he, of course, did not write this post — Nick Gonzalez did.) Turns out Marshall has been blogging at the SplashCast web site for some time.

Meanwhile, Pete Cashmore at Mashable did a great post last night called Social Networking at DEMO – Standards Higher than Usual? It’s an excellent rundown of what we can expect in this category over the next two days at the conference.

Who will win the coveted DEMOgod awards? That we’ll learn at the closing media-panel dinner on Thursday evening. The panel will be moderated by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, and will include Victoria Barret, associate editor of Forbes, Larry Magid, tech columnist and CBS News contributor, and Laetitia Mailhes, correspondent for Les Échos. For some insight into the DEMOgod phenomenon, check out a blog post from my old Conferenza colleague, Gary Bolles, about the recent Churchill Club event in San Francisco. I also note that Conferenza is now running some breathless blogging by Sam Perry out in chilly NYC at the AlwaysOn Media conference, which overlaps with DEMO.

More from the desert soon….

‘MinneDemo 2’ Was One Hot Ticket!

Hot, as in…could you find a parking place? Then could you get in the door? And could you believe the freaking great weather outside? For those of you not in Minnesota, we’ve been basking in 45-50 degree temps of late, haven’t seen a snowfall yet (and it’s mid-December!), and we actually had a light rain/mist goin’ on outside Monday evening for this second MinneDemo event. I had to pinch myself to believe I wasn’t in San Francisco! And the scene, a high-energy gathering of Internet entrepreneurs and developers, made it even more reminiscent of the City by the Bay, back in days of….well, you know.

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But, hell no, this is no bubble! Web 2.0 is different, folks. And this group is great evidence of that. It proves that smart developers can live and work anywhere they want….even in now-subtropical Minnesota [if this is global warming, bring it on, baby!]. And the new, open tools and platforms of the Web 2.0 era let them build their stuff quickly while they stay right where they prefer to live. It’s hard convincing Minnesota folks to leave. Something about quality of life, snow (hah!), lakes, fishing, hunting, the local music scene, the culture, and, doggone it…“Minnesota Nice” in general.

What’s interesting, too, about this new breed of startups is that they don’t need much to bootstrap and get their businesses going and up on the Web. Rapid development platforms like Ruby On Rails help a lot in that regard [and I’m hearing we have an excellent community of those developers here]. The hope of these entrepreneurs, of course, is that word will spread “virally” about their new sites…kind of the comeback of the age-old ‘build-a-better-mousetrap’ concept. But they’re smart enough to realize they don’t need to be hunting down big VC dollars for these businesses — they wouldn’t know what to do with such money, anyway. They understand, however, that angel funding is a good fit for their needs. [And, yes, there were definitely some angels present! Of course, not a single VC showed, but my radar is picking up that this will change soon.] Think of our local Web 2.0 phenomenon as a kind of giant caldron of experimentation: build ’em fast and get ’em up on the Web! Then, hey, if people like ’em, they just might catch on and turn into real businesses….

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[Note: The event, by the way, was held at at the Arcadia Cafe at Franklin and Nicollet. Photos shown are courtesy of Minneapolis’ own Jamie Thingelstad, VP/CTO of Dow Jones Online. He and his crew run all the awesome sites of this global leader from right here! Yes, 110 people downtown, in the original MarketWatch offices. Jamie is also affiliated with one of the sponsors, Road Sign Math. The photos, in order, are of the bar, organizer-extraordinaire Dan Grigsby, the demo room, and Mike O’Connor getting ready to pitch.]

Minnedemo2

Net-net: anybody who’s anybody in the local developer community was at this schmoozefest, either to demo their wares (there were six companies/projects pitching), watch their peers demo, or just catch up with their fellow developer friends, advisors, potential employees/employers, look for contract talent, angel connections, etc, etc…. I saw and heard all that and more. I was in awe being around so many smart people. We have one really, really great developer community here, folks! Some of my best friends are developers, and I’m very happy to say that. Get to know ’em. This is where this state’s next generation of company-building and wealth generation will come from!

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So, who’s behind organizing this MinneDemo thing? It rose up out of a grass-roots, open-source movement called BarCamp, which is actually (and fittingly) a global phenomenon. Three local developers named Dan Grigsby, Luke Franci, and Ben Edwards decided about a year ago that our local community could be a great “chapter” if someone would just get it started. Well, they seized the moment! …and actually have put in a ton of work into throwing the three events so far. [BarCamp MN and then two MinneDemos.] We salute you guys! And they had no problem finding sponsors — in fact, I hear their list is almost over-subscribed already. For this event, the sponsors were ipHouse, Mosquito Mole Multiworks, Kinetic Data, Road Sign Math, and New Counsel. [Thanks, guys! Smart marketing dollars invested.]

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This second MinneDemo easily drew 180 people, which was double the first one! [That was held at a smaller venue in Uptown in September.] Not only was this one a happening, fun networking event, there was a lot of stimulating discussion going on Monday night — I can attest. As well as seeing a lot of old friends, developers and others alike — Tom Kieffer, Rob Metcalf, Jeff Pester, Mike O’Connor, John Roberts, Derek Peterson, Tom VonKuster, and several more — I met some really interesting new friends, including [the ones I got cards from, at least]: Ben Moore of Curbly (great tagline this social network has: “Love Where You Live”)….Dan Carroll of imp (that stands for “Intelligent Media Platform” and, interestingly, it’s a company that sort of grew out of the Utne Reader)….John Sandberg of Kinetic Data (one of the sponsors linked above)….and Katharine Grayson, the new technology beat reporter for our local weekly The Business Journal. She was nice enough to bring along a photographer, after I alerted their managing editor, Mark Reilly, to the event. [Note: Buy next week’s issue — lots more about our local tech community there.]

So, you get the point by now: the Minnesota Internet startup and business community is a-hummin’!! I know you’ll be hearing more from many people in this group. And I’ll continue bringing as much of it to you as I can…

Nothin’ “mini” about Minne-sota!

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It’s Pah-ty Time!

That’s not only my favorite line from my favorite cut of Big Audio Dynamite, but it’s my favorite call to action at this time of year! And here, friends, are three of the coolest places to be in Minneapolis in the next week. The first, unfortunately, is by invitation only…a customer-appreciation kinda gig for the great design/UI firm, FactorUE, tomorrow night, Friday, December 8. But maybe you know someone who can get you in….or just show up at the Foundation Nightclub downtown about the time it’s wrapping up at 9:00, when things will continue raging, I’m sure. The cool thing is that two of FactorUE’s designers are DJs, too!

Factorueevite

The second local event I’ll be catching, on Monday the 11th, is the holiday gathering of our great local community of developers and entrepreneurs, playfully called MinneDemo. [It’s the local chapter of a loosely affiliated global network called Bar Camp.] Go onto that MinneDemo link (it’s a wiki page) and sign up if you’d like to attend — unless the list has already gone beyond the capacity of the larger club where it’s being held this time. Dan Grigsby and friends have done a great job organizing and planning these gigs, which are catching on like wildfire. Actually, this one is half-serious, too — a separate room is devoted to a program of five or so brief demos by aspiring entrepreneurs or new startups.

Minnedemoholiday

The third event on my agenda is next Wednesday the 13th — the annual holiday bash of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association, which has a reputation for being a really fun party. This year, it’s at the brand-new locale of the Guthrie Theater, so I thought I’d check it out, and catch up with some old friends. It’s free for members or $20 for non-members, and you can read more about it and register right here.

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Okay, I must be getting to sound more and more like the Michael Arrington of Minnesota here 🙂 …. [except I don’t throw parties at my own house]. But, if you’re a player in our local IT/Internet/Web 2.0 community, you should be showing up at one of these events, at least! I’m looking forward to all of ’em. See ya there….

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