Money:Tech program notes

Paul Kedrosky put up a long blog post about the final program for the Money:Tech Conference. I've been posting about some of the ideas that sparked the conference, but not that much about the conference content itself. If you've been following, you know that I think Web 2.0 companies can learn a lot about the future by studying Wall Street, as I have been doing. Meanwhile, Paul thinks that Wall Street can learn a lot by studying Web 2.0.

Rather than reiterating what he said, I'll just quote Paul:

The inaugural Money:Tech conference is approaching fast -- February 6th and 7th in New York at the Waldorf Astoria -- and the final program is now (mostly) in place! The conference is, of course, all about the confluence of Wall Street and Web 2.0.

And what does that mean? Well, new ways of Web-2.0-style collaborating are changing money and investing, with the zero-sum game of Wall Street changing in the process. At the same time market mashups with new sources of web-based data -- auctions! real estate! pricing! weather! -- are transforming the never-ending hunt for a money-making edge.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is pushing the bleeding edge in areas like realtime, database technology, and storage, while struggling to disentangle how new technologies are creating new market risks. As fast as new technologies transforming markets, we have new problems emerging, some of which, like last August's quant fund meltdown, that can be tracked directly to changing market technologies. Far from being separate, in other words, Wall Street and Web 2.0 are crashing together in a hurry -- with both having oodles to learn from one another.

. . .

Here are some key themes:

Social money. Money used to be considered zero sum. Now it's also about learning from your erstwhile competitors, sometimes even turning them into collaborators. Welcome to new examples in collective intelligence in markets.

Hacking Markets. Old-style financial data is like an over-exploited mine: plundered and bereft of utility. Future traders will be focused on fresh web data, from Ebay prices, to travel data, to real estate listings.

Blogs, Bloomberg, and the future of financial media. The fastest-growing and most influential business media is increasingly blogs. Could a blog network ever beat Bloomberg?

Realtime data and risk. Financial markets run on terabyte per second streams of data that must be processed in realtime. The effort is blowing up databases, changing visualization, and providing a peek into our collective future.

For more information, see Paul's complete blog post or the full conference schedule.