Recently in Web 2.0 Expo Category
A quick write-up of my notes from the Wednesday keynotes at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. I've already covered Suw Charman-Anderson's keynote about e-mail on The Social Enterprise.
Saul Kline, Index Ventures
Saul Kiline gave us a quick, harsh dose of reality. "The weather looks pretty terrible," he suggested. "The Valley is downbeat."
Startups are "fighting an imaginary war, with a product but no money or customers".
Good companies can be started in hard times. Microsoft and Apple started in the 75/76 depression. Even now, the Dow Jones is four times higher than when Apple and Microsoft were started. Most of the great tech companies started in downturns.
However, there is a market out there. The time we spend online has changed radically in the last few years. Social sites have more minutes per visitor then the big three, even if the Microsoft/Yahoo/Google trio are slightly ahead in total numbers.
And there's help: there are lots of free resources to help startups
BUT we are facing a recession. Capital will not be backing people with good PowerPoints, but people who know what they are doing. Angels will retreat and there will be a focus on professional investing.
Key advice:
- Don't panic
- Bootstrap like crazy
- Make products people want
- Cut your costs.
- Get to break even as soon as you can.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Expo Berlin: The Wednesday Keynotes.
Apologies for the lack of blogging here today - it's all been going to The Social Enterprise.
But I'm switching back to here for the gender issues seminar.
Stephanie Booth kicked off the session by getting the audience to think about situation in which they either had felt restricted by being a woman or, in the case of the men, had been glad that they weren't a woman because it would have been harder if they were. She also raised the issue of quotas.
Janet Parkinson presented some really interesting facts and figures about the gender bias in consumption and production of online services, which she did without slides, so I have nothing to crib the figures from. I'll get them from her later, hopefully. The main gist was that there are areas - like e-commerce, social networking and (to some extent) gaming, where women are a majority or a significant minority, while the producers of those sites are almost exclusively male. It seems to make simple commercial sense that more women be involved. Otherwise you run the risk of following the "make it pink" school of marketing to women, which is just patronising.
Lloyd, as the token male, raised a handful of ideas (as well as putting up pictures of what appears to be German testicle shampoo and a large gentleman in a small French Maid's outfit - which made me think of Janet's point about men marketing to women :) - to illustrate them)
Suw suggests that sometime the fact that some many of the most high profile bloggers are men means we get caught up in their linking patterns. Do we challenge our own networks for bias? Or to see if we're exposing ourselves to a range of opinions.
Ian raised the issues of events which are male or female dominated, and how male-dominated events can become off-putting to women. (Lloyd raised the issue of the sometimes les-than-rigourous hygiene amongst male geeks). The gender division possibilities of Geek Girl Dinners came up, but Lloyd pointed out that these are more female-friendly than female only, as men can attend if invited by a woman.
Other issues raised from the audience:
- The stalker aspect of some social sites can be off-putting
- Women not putting themselves forward for jobs even in environments that would seem to be female-orientated.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Expo Berlin: Gender Issues.
For those of you who are following my Web 2.0 Expo posts, they're not all on this blog. Yesterday, I kicked off a new blog for one of our titles, Computer Weekly, which looks at the implications of using social software in modern enterprises - or Enterprise 2.0, as many call it.
There are two posts up so far, a quick intro post, and one on Suw Charman-Anderson's talk on dealing with the productivity problems around e-mail.
Given that one of the big themes of the conference has been the need for Web 2.0 start-ups to look to enterprise for revenue, so expect plenty of other posts to follow...
Martin Varsavsky, a serial entrepreneur most recently with Fon, was challenged by Tim O'reilly to elaborate on a recent blog post when he criticised some of the doom and gloom coming out of silicon valley. His point, he reitereated, was not that people were wrong to declare doom, just that they are rather late to the party...
"There are times when markets are prepared to give entrepreneurs ridiculous money and times when their refusals are ridiculous," he said."Right now we wouldn't get the capital to start Fon," he said. The company had needed investment to make the hardware that was part of the initial offering. "When we realised money wasn't going to be available any more, I started to make the cuts," he continued.
Other highlights:
- There are distinct differences in national character which you need to take into account as you spread. The Germans use Fon to save money, the Japanese see it as an altruistic act.
- It's essential to have a great team supporting him. He has an inability to do just one thing.
- Sometimes, though, he just burns out and takes two year vacations - particularly after downturns. I believe the phrase "lucky git" applies.
- The concept of a salesman is really bad in Europe, but we all need to be one. Product design is the other part.
His cousin was killed by Argentine Government, his family got refugee status in the States. Moved to Europe for a year 13 years ago. He is very happy here now. Europe is more fair and less brutal to certain citizens, especially the ones who don't have medical care. Spain feels like a civilised version of Argentine.
Downstairs in the Community lounge we're having a roundtable discussion with Tim O'Reilly and the organising team.
Is Web 2.0 dead?
"Everyone took it to be a version number. It wasn't," says O'Reilly
People said the web was dead in the dotcom bust. 2.0 was to indicate that it was. It's the shift to the network as the platform. It's getting bigger. It's penetrating more of our lives. It's moving from PCs to mobile devices.
O'Reilly looks at what the alpha geeks are doing - like playing with sensors in devices like the iPhone - and finds a foretaste of what's to come in them. Are phones going to drive social networks? What do location services mean for us? Mobile applications are going to blow us away.
Enterprise 2.0
Jennifer Pahlka: "Two thirds of attendees are from companies of 500 employees or more. It's not just about startups." No, it's about the fertile mixing of the two. How can these things be used in the real world.
Tim O'Reilly: "Lessons from Web 2.0 are going to become more important for Enterprise 2.0 in the lean times. How can we leverage the wisdom of crowds to remake old businesses."
Online to Offline
Lloyd Davis asked about how Web 2.0 will help people with their offline relationships.
Brady Forrest pointed to aka'aki from yesterday's Startup Ignite. As privacy controls grow, you can more usefully meet and make connections. O'Reilly pointed out that it's not just about people you know - and gave the examples of crowd-sourcing his daughter's holiday destination, or arranging a Tweetup in a strange city.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Expo Berlin: Blogger Round Table with Tim O'Reilly.
Boyd's thesis was this: blogs are an unequal power environment. The blogger has control. Commenters can leave comments, but usually can't edit them or remove them. The blogger more often gains reputation from the comment than the blogger does. The rise of Disqus and CoComment have been a response to that.In parallel, the rise of RSS means that fewer regular readers actually visit your blog, divorcing them from the commenting experience. The ability to recommend and share content through readers creates a further community of readers who are even more detached from the actual comments.
It's all about the collective action of a group of people who annotate and rate:
- Digg: human recommendation
- Techmeme: algorithmic analysis for linking behaviour of A-list bloggers.
Comments in these sites do not find their way back to the blogs. And the comments on blogs are all but invisible.
Now, "flow" apps, like Twitter or the Facebook status is a much more egalitarian environment. Boyd suggests that once you get used to these flow apps, it gets harder and harder to go back to blogs. Purely doing blogs/comments seems antiquated once you're used to the flow...
If the community all move to a flow service, you don't lose your friendships.
A second wave of defection. The first was the move from mainstream media to social media. The second wave takes us from blogs to the flow. We leave behind the feudal hierarchy of blog publishers into an environment where a blog post is just one more bit of content in the flow.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Expo Berlin: Better Social Media Plumbing.
Rapid pitches from a variety of start-ups. Equaly rapid notes follow:
Startup Ignite from Amazee on Vimeo.
Proposition: there's too much information to handle- Provides user personalisation and recommendation engine.
- Works on news to retail sites.
- It works cross-domain - content from the long-tail. OpenId to sign in.
- Plugin - doesn't need publisher co-operation (but they would like it).
- Always find your doppelganger - or someone different.
- Essentially it stalks your web travels, and suggests other places based on similar users.
Social network / community tools - Social action projects in first phase
- Getting idea out (magazine tools)
- Network (collab tools)
- Fundraising opps and voluntary support
- Amazee camp (/camp) - join 150 get free pro, online help desk. Not back office person, CEO doing it! Professor Project Pete weekly updates.
- Bucket - money!
- Cute vid:
Startup Ignite from Amazee on Vimeo.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Expo Berlin: Startup Ignite.
Hard on the heels of Tim O'Reilly's keynote came a conversation between O'Reilly and Yossi Vardi, tech entrepreneur and investor.
O'Reilly kicked off the session by asking Vardi what's the secret of his success? "Luck," came the reply.
He's a fan of the Pascal Wager idea from O'Reilly's talk: "If you do the right thing, it'll come back to you."
Two years ago he was approached by a guy with an idea for a collaborative tool. He asked if he did volunteering, and it turned out he did (at a local school). Yardi funded him. Eventually the entrepreneur asked Yardi why the volunteering makes the difference. Yardi thinks about it as a scholarship. If it fails, "I'm not an idiot, I gave them a scholarship." And you don't want to give scholarships to idiots...
Young people who know what they're doing, consumer-focused application on the web or mobile. Focused, nimble and nice guys. And he wants them to be very talented.
Apparently, Yossi's entrepreneurial skill comes from his home culture - a Jewish mother who always compared him and his brother unfavourably with his cousins.
O'Reilly asked him about the current breed of entrepreneur's attitude to funding, pointing out that he started his company with $500.
"We've lost the art of bootstrapping, which is unfortunate," said Vardi. far,s take money, but web start-ups not necessarily. He wouldn't go as far as to suggest that you ignore venture capital, but he strongly suggests that you examine their record before taking their money.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Expo Berlin: Yossi Vardi.
First on stage were hosts Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media and Jennifer Pahlka of TechWeb. The hosts admitted that last year's venue wasn't up to scratch, and that they hoped this one would be better.
Brady, in particular, thanked everyone for coming during this crunch time. He suggested that lightweight web apps like the ones discussed at this conference would be more important in harsh economic times.
And so, Tim O'Reilly takes the stage...
So, is Web 2.0 Web 2.Over, as Dan Lyons suggested in a recent column?
Of course not, but "we need to think about where we're going".
Cheap, easy venture capital isn't there, so some start-ups may survive by being very basic in their operating costs - like sleeping under the desk. "Me too" startups will fail.
We're not in an investment bubble, but a reality bubble. We're in harsh times with financial, environmental and political crises all around us. "And our best and brightest are working on things like this..." (He shows us a Throw a Sheep Facebook app and iBeer for the iPhone. Sure, GPS and the like will make fantastic applications, but still...
Discipline in business for things like this - it's called scenario planning.
Worst case, middle, best. Reality was so much worse than they predicted in the case of oil drilling equipment in the 80s. A loophole was closed and the marlet went to hell.
So you need to get companies thinking about extreme examples.
Robust strategy 1: Work on stuff that matters! We need innovate thinking, rather than yet another social network.
Pascal's Wager: if you believe in God and you're worried about going to hell, you'll live a good life. If there's no God, you've lived a good life. It's a better bet. The modern version is assume the worst, and we'll make better choices.
- witness.org - providing recording equipment to people documenting human rights abuses.
- Using Google Earth to track illegal deforestation in Brazil
- Biblioburro - carries books around the area he came from.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Expo Berlin: Opening Keynote.
There's a sixgroups.com community for the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, which has a great stream of aggregated content from the show:
Hmm. Web 2.0 Expo is not getting off to a great start, workshop-wise. I've just been turned away from the Usability session on the basis that "it's full". The other workshops I've attended have been standing room only. Someone appears to have made a serious miscalculation on needed room sizes for these workshops.
Between this and lunch, I'm rather worried about how they're going to managed the next couple days - which are planned to be even more busy.
Good:
- WiFi access
- Venue is roomy and easy to navigate, and very well lit
- Lots of chance encounters in the corridors
- Great media centre with power sockets
Bad:
- WiFi upload speeds. Connectivity is good. Getting pictures up is slow, and I don't even want to think about video.
- Lunch. They ran out of both starters and desserts very quickly in the lunchtime serving:
(I might be being a little churlish. That's a decent lunch right there, and one course is probably better for my waistline.)
After a fairly drawn-out journey (I always forget how darn slow air travel can be if you're starting in London, especially if I don't fly for six months or more), I'm in Berlin, for two purposes. First of all, I'll be attending and blogging the Web 2.0 Expo here (as one of their premier bloggers, no less). And I'm looking forward to that.
However, I'm also using this as a springboard for a new project within the day job, which I'll fill you guys in on tomorrow. In the meantime, here's some Berlin scenes I grabbed with my Flip Mino earlier:
Arrival in Berlin from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.
So far, so good. The taxi drivers are far more competent that their Parisian counterparts (the first taxi driver I used in Paris for Le Web last year took me to the wrong part of the city...), the city looks beautiful in the autumn sunshine and I'm only 10 minutes walk from the conference venue. But what about the hotel?
However, I'm also using this as a springboard for a new project within the day job, which I'll fill you guys in on tomorrow. In the meantime, here's some Berlin scenes I grabbed with my Flip Mino earlier:
Arrival in Berlin from Adam Tinworth on Vimeo.
So far, so good. The taxi drivers are far more competent that their Parisian counterparts (the first taxi driver I used in Paris for Le Web last year took me to the wrong part of the city...), the city looks beautiful in the autumn sunshine and I'm only 10 minutes walk from the conference venue. But what about the hotel?
Continue reading One Man in Berlin.
Well, it's definite. I shall be in Germany for the first time in my life this time next week. I blew some BA loyalty miles on a flight to Berlin and booked myself into a hotel a short stroll from the Web 2.0 Expo conference centre. Oh, and blocked out my diary.
If you're still wavering about attending, you can check out the Web 2.0 Expo Blog for running updates about what's happening at the show (and doesn't the venue look lovely?), and the main site has an updated list of events around the show, including a number of unofficial ones.
And, of course, there's the opportunity to meet me. :-) Leave a comment or drop me an e-mail if you'd like to touch base while I'm there. I'll be in Berlin from mid-afternoon on Monday the 20th.
And if you've just made a last minute decision to go (rather than a last minute decision to actually book things, like me....), remember that you can bag a 35% discount by registering using the code webeu08gr9.
If you're still wavering about attending, you can check out the Web 2.0 Expo Blog for running updates about what's happening at the show (and doesn't the venue look lovely?), and the main site has an updated list of events around the show, including a number of unofficial ones.
And, of course, there's the opportunity to meet me. :-) Leave a comment or drop me an e-mail if you'd like to touch base while I'm there. I'll be in Berlin from mid-afternoon on Monday the 20th. And if you've just made a last minute decision to go (rather than a last minute decision to actually book things, like me....), remember that you can bag a 35% discount by registering using the code webeu08gr9.
Many publishing businesses are heavily involved with the events business too, and I find the growing use of the web to support conferences before they occur increasingly fascinating. In a blog post earlier in the week, Janetti Chon outline the online initiatives they're using to support Web 2.0 Expo Berlin this year.
There's a social network for the event at Crowdvine. I first saw these springing up for conferences last year, and they're a really excellent way of identifying in advance contacts who will be at the event. Here's my profile in the network.
There's a whole series of satellite events around the conference (not unlike the ones you see at our party conferences in the UK, I suppose), including a BarCamp, which are being gathered together under the banner of Berlin Web Week.
And then there's the blogger outreach programme, of which I am a part. That's why I have a handy-dandy discount code for Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, that you can use to save 35% off the registration price. Just use the code webeu08gr9 when you register. I'd really like to get some blogger outreach going with some of RBI's events, so I'm finding my participation in the programme an educational experience...
Here's a question that could do with answering: why would a journalist like myself be interested in Web 2.0 Expo Berlin which is, after all, a rather techie-focused affair? Well, fundementally, I want to get a heads-up on the coming tools and technologies that could change the way we do journalism - and quite possibly improve it. The show's content is still in flux, but these are the sessions I have my eyes on:Collaboration Techniques that Really Work
Horribly early in the morning, but I'm interested to plunder this session for ways of improving the inforamtion flow within teams of journalists.
Better Media plumbing for the Social Web
Really looking forward to this one. Blogs are still, at best, web 1.5, and publishing companies all too easily shove them back to being Web 1.0. Some ideas about how to push them forward into a truly social web experience will be really useful.
Continue reading Web 2.0 Expo Berlin for Journalists.
Yesterday afternoon, in a meeting about social media and one of our titles, a journalist suggested that maybe online communities could have a strong offline component. It was one of those occasions when I had to resist the urge to go "well, d'uh". Despite the mainstream media's obsession with "virtual" relationships not being real relationships, I've always found that relationships formed online rapidly go offline, and vice-versa.
Thus, the webby conference scene is something I love, both for the chance to catch up with old contacts and meet new ones. Oh, and for the conference content, of course. Last year I had to miss the Web 2.0 Expo in Germany, because of Mum's chemo therapy. This year I'm free to go, and will be heading over to Berlin for some serious networking and some juicy brain meats from the programme.
Web 2.0 Expo Berlin Discount
If you're interested in attending, the organisers have provided me (and some other bloggers) with a discount code that gets you 35% off the entry price. Just register online and use the code webeu08gr9 to get some Euros off, which is pretty damn useful in these credit crunched times...
Thus, the webby conference scene is something I love, both for the chance to catch up with old contacts and meet new ones. Oh, and for the conference content, of course. Last year I had to miss the Web 2.0 Expo in Germany, because of Mum's chemo therapy. This year I'm free to go, and will be heading over to Berlin for some serious networking and some juicy brain meats from the programme.
Web 2.0 Expo Berlin Discount
If you're interested in attending, the organisers have provided me (and some other bloggers) with a discount code that gets you 35% off the entry price. Just register online and use the code webeu08gr9 to get some Euros off, which is pretty damn useful in these credit crunched times...
