While I’ve been doing the conference equivalent of a headless chicken
(running about, trying to remember who I’m supposed to meet next and where), the
following bits of news have come out:
Techcrunch20
Mike Arrington announced
his new conference with Jason Calacanis, Techcrunch20.
The format is twenty new startups from around the world will announce and demo
their products over a two day period – and they don’t pay for this privilege.
The conference is set for September 17-18, 2007 in San Francisco. The companies
will be selected by a panel of 20 experts.
Start Pages Busy
Two of the best personalized start page products, Netvibes and Pageflakes,
have both launched new features. Netvibes
Universe lets you create a Netvibes page featuring your favorite content and
widgets. This seems to be the beginning of mainstreaming the service, because
already more than a hundred ‘branded’ universes have been created, for leading
brands like CBS and popular music artists. More details here.
Pageflakes has also released a lot of great new features recently, under the
code name Flurry. Check out their
blog for more details. R/WW will be checking out both Netvibes and
Pageflakes new features in an upcoming post(s), once the Expo flurry has
subsided.
Expo Action
So far the Web 2.0 Expo has been very focused on explaining web 2.0 concepts
to developers and designers, so it’s different from previous web 2.0
conferences. I briefly met someone last night from a Canadian startup, who told
me that 7 of his company had made their way to expo to find out about web 2.0.
He wasn’t familiar with the web 2.0 world previously, so he said the Expo has
been very useful and practical. This is also the sense I got from the panel I
moderated yesterday, that it is a practical conference that is more focused on
showing the world how web 2.0 technologies can be used. More on this trend in
later posts today and tomorrow.
I’m off to the keynotes. If the Internet access is better than yesterday,
then I’ll report more soon.
