Simply Shankar

Keynote session was pretty interesting – the hosts were pretty dull and seemed very nervous to be in front of a large crowd (3k people was the number thrown around).

The launchpad portion had a couple of interesting products – Vidoop (Name 2.0 sucks!) is easily the coolest idea I’ve seen in a while – very innovative approach to solving the single sign-on problem and Tellme’s updated local information product with a visual map/voice navigation capability also seems pretty slick and useful.

There was a panel discussion around Mobile 2.0 – very revealing for me – did not realize we are in the middle of a rapid convergence of mobile networks with the internet. This should bring some real change and excitement to the mobile scene.

There was a somewhat bizzare higher order bit presentation by a guy from Sun – he rambled on and on about an organization called Architecture for Humanity – while the organization seems really cool and is doing some very great things – I for one did not get the point of his presentation at the conference – seemed incoherent and pointless …

Bill Tancer from Hitwise and David Sifry from Technorati presented a lot of very interesting data on trends on the Internet. A couple of datapoints that were extremely unique and interesting – stats on writers vs readers in the “participatory web” and the demographics of writers and readers. No surprise that writers are much smaller than readers – turns out to be < 1% for sites like YouTube and Flickr and around 5% for Wikipedia. What is really surprising is that a vast majority of readers are under 35 and a vast majority of writers are over 35 (don’t remember the exact numbers and can’t seem to easily locate the foils – another aspect of crappy conference organization – no well defined process for foils). As Bill put it very well, it is the older generation educating the younger ones.

John Battelle did an excellent job of interviewing Eric Schmidt. Although I must say I was a bit disappointed he did not ask why Google shut down access to its SOAP API for search …

Highlight of the afternoon was a very lively and humorous session by David Hornik on viral marketing. His slide format was very interesting – just a single thought on each slide (sometimes just one word). Should try it sometime in the future. Wonder if there is a cool name for this format …

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 5:23 am and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.