Web 2.0 Summit, Day Two

Notes from Day the Second:

• Most of the talks targeted CEOs with little understanding of technology: giving them nuggets of info about their products (“Google gadgets are cool and we can advertise that way!”; “Cisco has a community platform!”) to bring back to their teams, plus finance/investment deep dives, like Mary Meeker’s obscenely interesting presentation on market growth. By all accounts, this isn’t the audience that the Web 2.0 Summit started with.
• The Launchpad Event showed six companies at various stages of startupitude:
  • TripIt, which is a cool feature but not a company (and I knew about it and still didn’t use it for this trip)
  • Spiceworks, providing hosted IT for SMBs, an awesome market and I hope they succeed
  • Realius, a fantasy real estate game which took a wrong turn on their way to TechCrunch40
  • g.ho.st, a fantasy operating system in the cloud, a science project with an awesome pedigree, pretending that Amazon Affiliates is a business model
  • Click Forensics, a click fraud company that didn’t differentiate itself from the N other companies in the same space
  • Cleverset, winning Best in Show – a Seattle company rocks the Bay! – providing hosted personalization for web companies that don’t have the scale or skill to build their own solutions

  I thought the idea of having a VC panel discussing each company was a great idea – I would have loved to hear a deep dive from people who hear pitches all day long – but unfortunately time constraints meant two short comments per presentation.

• I expected the Web Bowl, an event where ahead-of-time-selected luminaries answer questions in a College Bowl-style format, would be somewhat interesting, if a bit ego-massaging: I didn’t expect it to be so chaotic, and remembered again that writing trivia questions is hard. Over and over again, the panels missed unanswerable or uninteresting questions, and there wasn’t really any control of the event.

Plus meeting friends old and making friends new. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Web 2.0 – it’s full of suits!