Ed: To finish up the coverage of the Web 2.0 Expo that we provided this week, I asked some
of the Read/WriteWeb writers to give us their takeaways. Graeme Thickins, Sean Ammirati
and Emre Sokullu list their thoughts below…See also my own Web 2.0 Expo Wrapup.
Graeme Thickins’ Takeaways
Web 2.0 Is Going Beyond the Consumer Market: There’s no doubt these
technologies will be increasingly applied within enterprises, and that’s a good thing.
The big vendors see this and were all over this venue – exhibiting, presenting, and
otherwise.
The VC Investment Model for IT/Software Is Changing: Because new Web 2.0
ventures don’t need much money to get going, the VC business is being somewhat disrupted.
A new style of early-stage VC firm seems to be gaining. It’s becoming obvious that the
big funds don’t fit in here. These days, a mere $250-750K is all that’s needed to prove
assumptions, one VC said. And angel investors are newly energized.
We Are Not a Market: One of the best quotes I heard at this event was by one of
this new brand of VCs, Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital: “The TechCrunch audience and
this group here is not a market (for a startup). Success in this group might be
necessary, but it’s not sufficient. The real world doesn’t understand this stuff.”
Marketing Is Rising: And one of the next best quotes I heard was in that same
panel, from VC Jeff Clavier of SoftTech: “We need to start seeing real money spent on
marketing.” The signs are good. Everywhere at Web 2.0 Expo, I saw evidence that a large
part of the conversation, and in fact the event’s program, was about marketing. Kudos to
the producers for that!
SEO Is Rising: A corollary to the above is that SEO, far from declining as one
noted blogger/entrepreneur posited recently, is becoming a major focus in the marketing
world – hand-in-hand with skills in social media. This is the new sandbox for marketers;
and that is exciting. Widgets are emerging as well – another important and related
marketing medium.
Another Reason Not to Get Cocky: Lest we think that we as Internet users are so
much in control today, consider this: there are only one billion PC users, while two
billion people worldwide use mobile phones. The Web is far from universal yet and
certainly it will be some time before the advances that we call Web 2.0 become widely
used worldwide – on desktops, $100 laptops, cell phones, or whatever. Maybe next year’s
Expo should be in China or India?
Offline Web Apps Are a Next Big Thing: The demo of Apollo, by Kevin Lynch of
Adobe, was awesome – even though it is still in alpha. And Etelos, another event sponsor,
had a great way to position their new offline offering: “Apps on a Plane.” Who wouldn’t
like that?
Geeks Are Not Good Presenters: Please, conference producers everywhere – get
your presenters and panelists ready to go up on stage in a big room. And, for that
matter, the marketers and CEOs too. The vast majority of the presenters I heard were
sadly lacking in presentation and communication skills. I guess there’s a reason why
conferences like DEMO work hard on this. Take a lesson. [Ed: I presume Graeme
didn’t mean me in the Hybrid Design panel…. hmmm, ok maybe he did!]
Sean Ammirati: What’s going to beat Google?
Dave Hornik had an interesting post this
week, discussing how the venue of an event shapes the things attendees take away. At the
scale of this conference (I heard 16,000 attendees?), a lot of the value comes from
networking interactions. The show didn’t disappoint, I arrived with a stack of
cards an inch thick and they were gone in a day.
In all of these interactions, one theme almost never failed to come up — how
Google related to their project or company. The humor wasn’t lost on the
audience when John asked Eric Schmidt about the antitrust concerns that Microsoft and
AT&T have raised and Eric joked “Wait, Microsoft has
concerns…” [about anti-trust]. Yet, joking aside, it is obvious that Google
is the 800-pound guerilla now. That said, I’m confident that just like with
Microsoft and IBM before, there are vulnerabilities to Google’s business model. It
will just take another entrepreneurial company or project to leverage an unanticipated
paradigm shift and reveal those weaknesses. Therefore, the thought I left the Expo with
is … what’s that concept? Only time will tell, but there is a good
likelihood the founders were walking the halls at Moscone West this week!
Emre Sokullu’s Thoughts
Web 2.0 Expo was excellent for networking and meeting great people. The two
technologies that impressed me most were:
