Dan’s Blog (2.0)

So unfortunately I wasn’t able to get out a timely blog post on Le Web 3 last week. Others have said a lot already but I just thought I’d write a brief post on it. It was a really great event and Loic and team deserve massive kudos for putting it together so well. First I have to rave about the near-flawless execution. The food deserves special mention because it was fantastic. Of course - what did I expect? This is Paris, after all. The production of the event itself, especially on the main stage, was fantastic, with a camera crew and staff that kept scurrying around keeping everything running smoothly. There was a fleet of BMW cars, sponsored by BMW, taking speakers back and forth from the conference site to the hotel. Very nice touch. The conference site itself was laid out very nicely with a chill-out “networking” lounge (where local artists were also working to add a bit of color). There were the usual sponsor booths but lots of space. There were a lot of people at this event but it never felt crowded. It was well produced but also managed to maintain a good community feel - no mean feat.

The speaker line-up was really an all-star cast. I won’t go into too much detail here. I was lucky to be asked to participate on a panel on Mobile-Web convergence (chaired by Ouriel Ohayon) which was notable not only because I was on it, but because it was really well attended. I was a bit worried that the non-sexy name of the panel might put people off but we really packed the room - clearly an indicator that the mainstream “Web” community is eager to hear about mobile. We had a really good discussion on stage as well.

Apart from the panel thee was a lot of mobile interest at the event. French mobile widgets company Goojet won the start-up competition. Echovox’s Zong was out in force as a sponsor and David Marcus, Echovox’s CEO, was a great addition to the mobile panel. Of course, Nokia had a great presence there.

Other highlights?

Martin Varsavsky of Fon - a very entertaining speaker. Much more so than his appearance at Web 2 summit where he was incongruously sandwiched between Google and Verizon.

Jason Calacanis on why blog spam and paid search-engine “optimization” is destroying search in the same way that spam destroyed usenet. I especially enjoyed this presentation because it reinforced my view that trust and identity are going to have to play a role in the future of the Internet if it’s going to remain a useful medium.

Talking to Scott Beaumont and Prashant of Refresh Mobile and hearing about their experiences deploying Mippin. Sounds like things are going really well!

Tom Raftery’s talk on green data centers and power demand management - though it was slightly far a-field for a Web conference. :)

Getting a demo of Mobiluck, a mobile social network. They are doing a great Web-based UI and they “get” what mobile adds to the social networking game. Must do a post on them later.

Meeting Lisa Sounio, CEO of Dopplr. If you’re not on Dopplr, go there and join.

Hanging out with my good friend Rudy De Waele.

Running into Paul Walsh wearing Sam Sethi’s badge.

Unfortunately I missed Philippe Starck’s presentation which I regret because it sounds like it was really good.

Lots more I won’t go into here.

There were a few negatives. Shahram Izadi from Microsoft research presented the Microsoft surface concept but I felt like I didn’t really see anything new here. Janus Friis talked about Joost but I really didn’t feel that he presented it in as good a light as Mike Volpi did at Web 2.0 Summit. Also, he kind of brushed off Paul (BT) Downy’s question about the proprietary nature of Joost (vs. the Web) which I think was a shame. He might have said (as Volpi did) that they are working on a browser-based version.

The Wifi was a problem. Wifi is always a problem at these kinds of events because it’s so easy to underestimate need. At Mobile 2.0 we got Swisscom to come in and build out a custom Wlan which was great and nobody complained. We only had 300 people there though. Le Web 3 (where Swisscom also did the wireless lan) was about 1700 to 1800 people - different kind of scale. And how many of those people were using iPhones as well as laptops? Plenty.

Marc Canter had possibly left his lithium on the plane because he was even more rabid than usual. This had both positive (entertaining!) and negative (shut up and let someone else talk!) aspects.

So. All in all, it was a great way to spend two days. Great speakers. Great networking. Great city. Great work, Loic and team. Looking forward to next year!

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 0:10 under Web 2.0
Tags: leweb32007

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I have a confession. I have been a user of “My Yahoo!” since its original release. I was one of the early beta users when beta really meant beta. For some reason that I cannot comprehend, as more sophisticated personalized Web portals and more recently RSS aggregators have developed, I have stayed with the tried and true My Yahoo! - a site that has essentially not changed its look and feel since the last century.

Well watch out.

My Yahoo! is back in beta, and it’s about time. What’s new? First of all, there are some outrageous new styles on offer, like this Leopard-print (incongruously named “faux fur” - as a colleague pointed out, why do they have to call it “faux fur” when it’s on a computer?). Unfortunately, many of the styles on offer are not very readable, and readability of text is pretty important in an application like this. It also offers a reader pane built into the application so you can read full blog entries (for those that publish a full feed) right in My Yahoo! This, and the UI tweaks are probably the nicest features. The other bits, such as a page-dominating animated ad (see upper-left-hand-corner) I am finding a little hard to swallow.

Even as a long time, user I was about to give up and move to Google Reader, Netvibes or Pageflakes. The new release is keeping my attention. I’ll definitely give it a spin around the block, but I’m thinking that what they’ve delivered, feature-wise, may be too little too late.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 21:33 under Web 2.0
Tags: yahoo!

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The Web 2.0 Summit had an awful lot of content that didn’t really have much to do with … well … the Web. Besides the whole 700mhz spectrum issue, there was an awful lot of empasis on green tech. Now - I know green is cool. I have no issues with green stuff. However, it doesn’t seem to me there is much overlap between green tech and Web 2.0 — or rather if there is it wasn’t being explored at the Web 2.0 Summit. Was this tendency towards scope creep because there wasn’t enough to talk about at Web 2.0? I don’t think so. For example, the program could have tried to tackle the thorny issues around privacy and social networks, made even more accute by the proliferation of location-aware systems. There are about a hundred topics like this that should have been delved into in more detail. Instead what we got was a very uneven program with some really good bits and some material that frankly seemed more like advertorial. For example, the panel on the future of TV featured a very long presentation and demo by the CEO of Current.tv. Mike Volpi from Joost seemed a bit bemused by the whole thing and as much as said “well - I’m here to talk, not to demo Joost.” The conversation that ensued was quite interesting but could have gone more in-depth and featured more players as well (how about Daniel Graf from Kyte.tv)? In short, I wanted more debate, less pitch.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 20:08 under Web 2.0
Tags: web2.0, web2summit

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I started the week with Mobile 2.0. Rudy De Waele and Mike Rowehl posted great summaries of that event with lots of links to coverage all over the Web which I won’t replicate here. Suffice to say: it was a great day. My one complaint was that I don’t think we served the developer community very well. Next time, we may need to expand the event into multiple tracks and get some real developer interest topics going.

As for the Web 2.0 conference which is just closing down today, it has been a mixed bag, but on balance I actually think it was better than last year. Lots of the conference has been focusing on APIs and the whole “Web as a platform” concept, which I think is a key area of innovation in the Web. We’re already seeing how efforts like Amazon Web Services and Facebook’s APIs are creating waves of innovation and that’s only accelerating.

I found Facebook’s announcement on allowing users to export their data particularly interesting. Openness like this will be the trend for social networks moving forward and Facebook has clearly decided to be a part of this disruption. Devil is in the details, of course.

Of course, the mobile content at the summit has been very superficial and disappointing. The panel on mobile social media could have been interesting but it was a little too much Nokia-focused (how could it not be as it was sponsored and organized by Nokia and featured Anssi as a panelist). It still could have been interesting but the panelists had to spend too much time explaining the mobile social space so we couldn’t really get into the meaty issues.

Another low-light was the “conversation” about the 700mhz auction between Verizon Wireless (Thomas J. Tauke) and Google (Ram Shriram). Martin Varsavsky from FON was incongruously placed into this conversation as well but really this was an argument between Google and Verizon. (As a sidebar, what FON is doing is really really cool, and I am especially excited about their partnership with BT, which Martin unfortunately was not able to get into in any detail.) The problem with the 700mhz discussion is that Google is trying to frame this as them championing the little guy (”no blocks, no locks” is their mantra) and Verizon is trying to frame the discussion as their crusade against government intervention and regulation. This might seem like a big story in the States but from an international perspective, I am scratching my head a bit. I don’t think the spectrum auction has anything to do with open access (which is an inevitable trend). The whole thing seems to be about control and money — it’s a crass power-play by Google into the carrier space. Which is cool, but call a spade a spade.

Anyway, I’m now sitting in probably the most interesting session of the event, stuck in at the tail end named “The Semantic Edge.” (Presumably Tim O’Reilly couldn’t stand to name it “Semantic Web” which is what it’s about). What’s exciting about this panel is that we are hearing about cool new technology available now that is leveraging the semantic Web. Twine is a semantic application just coming out of stealth that ties together information from other sites and social networks. Very cool. Freebase (interesting choice of names) provides a semantic search which can provide impressively deep information using a combination of natural language processing and semantics. This is easily the most interesting stuff that’s been presented at Web 2.0. Taptu (who came out of stealth at Mobile 2.0 on monday) should be up there as well as they are actually using some of the same technologies to enable a remarkably better mobile search experience.

Another side-bar: it’s very good to hear people talking about the importance of W3C semantic Web standards as an interoperable glue between these semantic platforms.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:49 under Web 2.0, mobile 2.0
Tags: fon, freebase, Google, mobile2.0, mobile2event, MobileWeb, semanticweb, taptu, twine, W3C, web2summit

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From this picture, the turn-out for my talk might look pretty small. And it was. But I was actually impressed that this many people managed to find the room which was tucked up away from the main conference. In general, this feels like an event that should be a lot bigger than it is. I can’t help but feel that this is due to the extremely high ticket price. On the positive side, there are some real developers here and real exciting stuff being presented, such as the Laszlo presentation on the use of their toolkit to build mobile Web apps. The participants that are here are here to learn and are asking good questions as well. One delegate commented that many of the presentations were little more than sales pitches. After sitting through some of them (especially from Adobe and Microsoft) I have to agree.

So I was in the “iPhone” track of this conference. However, my message was “it’s not all about the iPhone - develop for one Web.” This message was well received. I was expecting the room to be filled with iPhone devotees. On the contrary. People seemed very receptive to this message.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 0:34 under Mobile Web, Web 2.0
Tags: ajaxworld, mobileajax, MobileWeb

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So while I was kicking around in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island last week, I was delighted to have been able to meet up with my good friend (and Mobile Monday London Irregular) Margaret Gold. Turns out Margaret was in town for the weekend for her parents’ anniversary. It was a true “Jaiku moment” - a completely unplanned meet-up that only happened because I had written about my itinerary on Jaiku. Now, social networking services can often result in serendipitous events in the real world, but the mobile-focused nature of Jaiku (the fact, in this case, that I could keep a continuous Jaiku thread going through my trip using only my Nokia N73) and the tendency of mobile social services to focus on location and proximity tend to accentuate this feature. There’s also a lesson to learn about privacy here. In the past, it’s been quite taboo to reval publicly that you’re going to be away from home (someone might break into your house!) But social media like Jaiku (or Facebook or whatever) changes our perception of what information should be private and public. In this case, disclosing private information into the public sphere led to a meeting with a good friend and some good discussion. Was that worth the potential risk of disclosing this private information? I think it was.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 13:25 under Web 2.0, mobile 2.0
Tags: jaiku, PEI

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I just got a message from a contact on LinkedIn informing me that they would no longer be using LinkedIn and if I wanted to “network” with them then I would have to move over to Facebook. The reasons given were that Facebook allows you to expose more “personality” and that it also allows you to integrate applications (such as Twitter). Now. I have been using LinkedIn for a while now and I have had some very good experiences with it. I have also spent a great deal of time building up my network there and taking great pains to do so in a meaningful way. I like LinkedIn. One of the reasons I like it is because it’s built for professionals. I never get asked by LinkedIn if I “hooked up” with someone or whether I met someone on a “study abroad program.”  The second reason I like LinkedIn is that it doesn’t have pictures. This encourages people to behave professionally there and not treat their profile page like a graffiti wall. Both these factors are to Facebook’s detriment, in my opinion. Why do we all suddenly feel the need to bahave like college students again? Am I the only one out there who frankly didn’t like college that much and was glad to be done with it?

On the point of openness, though, my friend definitely has a point. LinkedIn really needs APIs, including the ability to get at your data using FOAF or other open protocols. In fact, if Facebook and LinkedIn both supported FOAF, you would be able to choose which service best suited you and then build your network picking friends/colleagues from either service (or any other FOAF-based service). Imagine this: you build up your network on Bebo, then when you go to college you transfer everything over to Facebook and when you become an old codger like me you can graduate to LinkedIn. Why can’t we all just get along?

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 14:46 under Identity, Web 2.0
Tags: Facebook, FOAF, LinkedIn

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Just came across this news item this morning. Very interesting news, I think. I saw these guys present at Future of Web Apps and I have to say it’s a great application of “user generated content” — in this case, user generated metadata - and “leveraging collective intelligence.” It’s also a good news for the UK startup scene.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 8:53 under London, Web 2.0
Tags: last.fm

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The Mobile Discussion
Originally uploaded by R.J. Friedlander.

While I’m posting images from San Francisco week, here’s me at the Web 2.0 panel (”The Mobile Discussion”) with Om Malik and Ansi Vanjoki from Nokia. I’m saying “this is the future calling” right after Anssi talked about running Bittorrent on his N93. Om’s thinking “Why do I always get stuck with the weird ones?”

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 23:45 under Web 2.0
Tags: gigaom, mobile2.0, Nokia, web2.0, web2summit

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Don’t worry, I am not trying to define another “2.0ism.” However, I attended an event earlier in the week at which the term Enterprise 2.0 was defined by a speaker, but the definition he gave stuck me as more like “Intranets 1.0″ — that is, knowledge management tools applied to the enterprise space. Yes — corporates have been trying to get better about knowledge management for years — why is Enterprise 2.0 any different?  It strikes me that Enterprise 2.0 will actually be tools and applications that run on the Web and are made available to knowledge workers through the browser. These applications will enable all kinds of knowledge sharing and office automation but totally free to the corporate and funded by ads. This model totally undercuts the traditional IT software / services providers and empowers the workforce to self-organize and use the tools that best fit their unit / group / activity. Of course, savvy knowledge workers are already doing this — using IM to conduct business against corporate IT policies, or using Google docs & spreadsheets to collaborate between different office locations. When these applications really do become as powerful as their desktop and enterprise-network-bound equivalents and when CIOs and CFOs wake up to this fact that and realize the whole corporate IT and enterprise applications ecosystem has suddenly become irrelevant, that will be Enterprise 2.0. Just my €.02.

Filed by Daniel Appelquist at 14:08 under Technology, Web 2.0

2 Comments