O'Reilly recently convened the Web 2.0 Conference and Expo in San Francisco. I registered for the expo (a few pictures), attended a couple of sponsored sessions, and came away with two significant things: 1) I'm not missing much yet, and 2) a laser etching on my laptop (thanks Instructables!).
First off, the expo floor wasn't all that crowded so it was easy to make my way around. Secondly, I wasn't attending as an "enterprise" representative, which made my journey more strategic. Many of the booths on the expo floor were touting ways to "mash up" legacy systems to create new forms of data (e.g., reports previously unavailable) or to be the next "social" apps hosting platforms (e.g., hosting the corporate wiki). [Related post]
Here are my notes from crawling the expo floor. Note that I'm only commenting on a few of the companies that struck me. I missed a few, and avoided others. Such was my timeframe for this event.
- Springnote: online wiki-like notebook, uses OpenID.
- Rackspace: enterprise hosting provider. I was already familiar with them. Thanks for the pen.
- Blist: (pronounced BList, not B-list) I checked them out a while ago following their launch at DEMO. Intriguing database service, but s. l. o. w. I asked about this, and was assured that they've addressed their performance issues, and have added international characters and sharing capabilities. I need to check them out again.
- Camwii: Interesting screen-sharing app. Best described in their video. Good: lets me share the part of the screen that I want (via a "looking glass" frame), lets me see what my shared partners see (feedback loop), and can be "private labeled" for customized use (1:1 or 1:many). Questionable: is 100% flash, which means it works on most computers but is tied to Adobe proprietary format. Also uses your phone number as ID. Now that becomes a database with a good key value.
- Truvico: one of several companies that provided continuous data analysis (words, statistics, what's happening on your site).
- Amusing side note: someone cut the lights on the expo floor for a few minutes (1:40pm). Something eerie about the whole space going dark. This happened on top of what many booths were reporting (and I was witnessing): s-l-o-w network access. Holy cow.
- Magnify360: a "behavioral targeting platform," which was explained as real-time behavioral programming. This is about "targeting" and "personalizing" to "increase conversion rates." I feel better already knowing that my every need is anticipated and provided for.
- Kapow: two things: buzz phrase kings (see photos above), and really, really expensive.
- ConfIdent: Weirdly, I didn't learn what ConfIdent was about, and couldn't really tell from their website either. What I did see was Vidoop: a system of gaining access to a site by using picture passwords. This was interesting. Passwords were determined by a set of images. The images are random-ish, but they fall into categories like food, travel, space, etc. I somehow would choose or have, let's say, 3 categories so I would choose the 3 pics out of 9 shown that correspond to my categories. Vidoop is also an OpenID platform/service.
- Nokia: Nokia was one of the big sites on the floor. I went to the table/area designated as "Advertising" to find out what that meant. Nokia has partnerships with various vendors (no surprise) like Sprint. Nokia claims to be carrier and handset agnostic. They act as advertising middlemen, gathering all of the demographic data from Sprint that helps them target your desired audience. Let's say you want to reach all of the moms, ages 24-35, living in a particular area and having a specific income. No problem, Nokia can serve that group. This was one conversation that made me want to wash my hands and face afterwards. No sign of a cluetrain at this station. Better not be on the tracks when Nokia comes through.
- Etelos: a platform for application deployment. They had several partners and clients represented in their booth.
- Spinscape: a hosted mind mapping tool (similar to The Brain?) that's web driven, collaborative, extensible with Google Apps and Gadgets. This thing can "auto-discover" everything on your hard drive. In collaborative mode, you can have nodes and assign roles and responsibilities for various levels of collaboration.
That was a first pass at the expo floor. Next I ran to catch the OpenID sponsored session.
OpenID is promoted as a bridge to sharing. It's being engineered for adoption at an ID layer. Question about open sourcing, noted that it works well with Novell and others. Why relevant, why only authenticating? OpenID has been around for three years, OpenAuth is brand new and needs to focus on what it can enable: integrating contacts. Concerns expressed about it being hard to grasp. Challenge: user experience not optimal.
I asked about how this is taking back control of our IDs when each silo has its data and can gather additional intelligence about us by partnering with other data silos. The answer was largely about the inability to get any hosted service site to delete info on request (once you register, it's their data). Yeah, we know. Then how is it that openID will help me "manage" my identity?
The question remains. Back to the expo floor.
- Photobucket: claims they are the world's largest repository of photos, video and more. (Somewhat similar to Flickr, which is limited to photos.) Photobucket has facility for doing minor photo editing. They do not have a search capability to find CC-licensed resources. Bummer. The best thing about Flickr is an unrelated site, compfight.
- Topix: a "top 20 news site." (huh?) Shows news that's local to you, as they determine where you are. You can also change locations of course. Extensive news forums, and users can edit stuff. They also offer commercial feeds.
- Yugma: collaborative desktop sharing with chat, conference calls. Java, subscription basis.
- Sprout: a web-based authoring platform for creating widgets: layers of stuff with links and functions. Can do limited mash-ups. Interesting: no sign-up necessary to create. This actually looked like it could be fun, but my old computer didn't want to work at any reasonable speed with sprout's programming.
At this point, the expo hall closed. We were all shuffled out. Many of us went to see O'Reilly's keynote and the talks that followed. I have notes, but on re-read, they're pretty boring.
Clay Shirkey was the reason I stayed. My notes fail in light of his post of that talk.
That was a great way to end Day One.
As for day two, nothing really struck me. The sponsored session on "Creating a Social Network, It's Easy" seemed to be more about hiring the group than learning how. Afterwards I went to the women's networking event. I wasn't already part of the small leaning-together cliques and didn't find a conversational way in. So much for networking.
Labels: IDmanagement, ownership, relationships, self-determination, social web, web 2.0
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