"web 2.0 summit" entries
'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by Princeton University – January 14-15
Marc Hedlund and I will be speaking at the 'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton on January 14-15. The sessions look very interesting and registration is free. Panel 1: Possession and ownership of data – In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored…
Web2Summit: Could Google Hit a $1T Market Cap?
This afternoon's panel of four Google Alumni ended with an audience question: Was it insane to consider that Google might reach a $1 trillion market cap? (It's now at about $150 $200 billion.) Or might that actually happen? I thought, "Ridiculous!" Several of the panelists, however, had a different take. While none said it was imminent or even likely, their…
Web2Summit: Pre-weekend Humor From the Senior Set
It's a young crowd at the Web 2.0 Summit. I'm in my mid-40s and I feel unconscionably old here. Safa Rashtchy ran a session this afternoon in which he interviewed a half-dozen Baby Boomers, the generation in this country with most of the money, the generation the developers here need to know more about. Most of the panelists have…
Web2Summit: Complexity + Tight Coupling = Catastrophe
Paul Kedrosky and Tim O’Reilly just talked about the “Quant Fund Meltdown” and how complex interactions between computer systems and people resulted in unprecedented hedge fund losses. I spend a lot of time thinking about risk and failure in complex systems, and I’ve found Charles Perrow’s “Catastrophic Potential” model to be very useful. It’s pretty straightforward…
Web2Summit: Opening Up the Social Graph
Brad Fitzpatrick and I just got off the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, where we talked about social networking love and hate. You'll see coverage elsewhere about what we said, though our slides can be found on SlideShare. Here, I'd like to take you behind the curtain and show how the talk came to be. But first, what I…
Web2Summit: Media Matters … Doesn't It?
The morning media panels at the Web 2.0 Summit haven't been as energetic or exciting as the technology panels (I'll add to the chorus: Dash seems very cool). Over the past three panels, AT&T Randall Stephenson waxed disingenuously about Net neutrality and other matters, executives from CBS Interactive and Comcast delivered the bullet points about how they intend to…
Web2Summit: Backstage with Rob Currie of Dash
Rob Currie and Mark Williamson of Dash, the internet-connected GPS, are on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit. They're explaining just what the benefits are of internet connection, how it transforms the GPS in-car experience: Traffic data is real time, routing paths are crowdsourced based on historical and current patterns. Searches for restaurants, hotels, etc. are live, not immediately…
Web2Summit: Make Life More Like Games
Game designer Jane McGonigal's session this morning had a thought-provoking twist: instead of thinking about how to make virtual reality more like real life, think about making real life more like games. Why? Because games, networked games specifically, work better than real life. McGonigal gave three reasons: 1) Games come with better instructions; you have a clear goal, and…
Web2Summit: Q&A With Danny Hillis
One of the afternoon sessions at the Web 2.0 Summit I'm most looking forward to is the "Semantic Web" panel, in part because it's a hot topic and in part because it's the lead topic in the most recent Release 2.0. We've long been interested in the diverse work of Danny Hillis, one of the people behind Metaweb and…
Web2Summit: Views from the rest of the world
During the "Edge: The Rest of the World" workshop Samih Toukan talked about buying a company from "A guy in Yemen, where DHL doesn't deliver, who didn't have a passport, who didn't have a bank-account, and who built a Web2.0 website with a over a million users." Samih is the CEO of Maktoob.com, an Arabic email community site which…