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 8 of 9)

What I’m Looking Forward to at PC Forum

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…

Tag:
Tag:

Blogland Goes Wild: Google Buys Writely

In a shot across the bow of Microsoft, Google announced yesterday it acquired Upstartle LLC, developers of the web word-processing application Writely. The announcement was first posted on the Official Google Blog, and soon hundreds more blog posts came online — as you can see when you search the topic at the Google Blog Search page. Who says three people and an idea can’t make a difference these days? I guess it’s just more proof this Web 2.0/AJAX world is for real, folks.

Read more about it on the Writely blog, and at the independent Inside Google blog. There’s also much media analysis of this one coming inline. Here are two, from Information Week and CBR Online. This one is definitely a shot heard ’round the Web 2.0 world….

ETech News Aggregator

I was hoping to make O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference this week in San Diego — at least to be able to drop in on the last day — but my schedule is now uncertain. Meantime, the best place I’ve found to get up to speed on what’s happening out there — well, a summary, in close to real time — is O’Reilly’s own continuously updated page: ETech Conference News. It’s written by O’Reilly’s self-described “PR gal” Suzanne Axtell. Nice job, Suzanne!

And there’s always the Atom feed, too.

ETech is the de rigeur geek-place-to-be this week, it seems. And thus you could read blogs on it all day and all of the night. Tons of bloggers there. I was telling someone earlier today, let’s hope the big one doesn’t hit San Diego this week, or we’ll lose most of the a-list and half the b…. 🙂

Meg Whitman Called: She Wants to Know What’s All This About Someone Killing Her Company

One word: Edgeio…or should I say EdgeIO…or edgeIO…or is it edgeio? [Seems to be upper and lowercase challenged.] But it’s all the rage in the blog-o-spherical world lately because somebody said it’s an “Ebay Killer.” No wonder Michael Arrington (the TechCrunch guy) didn’t return my email — he’s been, uh, a little busy lately? And no wonder he didn’t sit in on the presentations at DEMO, but just hung out in the press room. Now we know why! He’s hyping his new play, teamed up with old buddy Keith Teare from RealNames. You’ll remember that as a Web 1.0 company that was going to change everything, but … didn’t … quite … make … it.

Lots of talk out there about this one, and why or why not it will be the next big thing. Whatever, it’s really early-on at this point…. Though they plan to pitch the company formally at one of the next big, buzzy conferences: Esther Dyson’s PC Forum next month at LaCosta (Carlsbad, CA).

Tag:
Tag:
Tag:

‘How to Suck Up to a Blogger’ and ‘How to Almost Live on Blogging’

Two great posts I discovered on the state of blogging, and a killer article link at the end. The first I referred to earlier, but it’s worth a repeat mention: it’s Guy Kawasaki talking about who controls the buzz these days. Guess who that might be?

And the second is a Wired interview of Harold Davis, who writes the Googleplex blog. He also has a new book, “Google Advertising Tools” from O’Reilly [riveting title], which I’m reading right now and which you should buy — from my blog, of course! (It’s there in the righthand column.) That way, you can contribute to my “almost making a living” with this thing….in your own little, micropayment sorta way. 🙂

But I must say that Harold is a bit less rosy about bloggers supporting themselves than the picture painted by this excellent feature article just out in New York Magazine: Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom. Haven’t seen anything that gets into blogs making money quite like this piece…

« Older posts Newer posts »