April 2007 Archives

Web 2.0 Expo - Wednesday, April 18, 2007, Afternoon Sessions

Well this is it for this conference. After the afternoon sessions it's done. I'll post my notes on these sessions and then I'll write up a wrap-up of the conference.

The first session of the afternoon was "Web 2.0: Show me the Money" by Jeremy Liew, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners

I'm contacting Jeremy to get a copy of his presentation as it was full of useful data. Once I get it I'll post it here.

- Pointed out 2 of the primary ways to make money are media sites and ecommerce sites and compared private vs public ventures for needed revenue, traffic for breakeven etc.

- Online startup costs are low. This is something I know about having launched a few successful businesses for very little upfront costs.

- If you're having a third party build your online business for as little as 20K allowing you cheap entry into the market.

Advertising RPM (Revenue per thousand pages):
- One example with $5 CPM and $2.8 million needed in revenue for break even, then you need 50 million pageviews per month
- Technorati 12 million pageviews per month (Comscore - underepresents monthly reach, but still useful)
- Some ecommerce sites to look at: allheart.com, hats.com, fileaves.com doing $7 million in sales
- Newegg $1.3 billion in revenue, Zappos $271 in revenue projected for 2007

Some of the above might be confusing but once I get the presentation online the picture will get clearer.

Web 2.0 Expo - Wednesday, April 18, 2007, Morning Sessions

The morning was highlighted by a conversation moderated by John Battelle with Jeff Weiner, Executive Vice President, Network Division, Yahoo! Inc.

I missed this keynote but the key piece of information to come from the conversation between John and Jeff is that Yahoo and Microsoft have more in common, meaning Google as their chief rival and that perhaps Yahoo is more open to some form of shall we say, friendship between the two.

While I missed the keynote this morning I did go to the only session before lunch.

1. Business Mashups for Fun and Profit. This session featured the following three speakers; Adam Gross, Vice President of Developer Marketing, salesforce.com, Stefan Andreasen, Founder and CTO, Kapow Technologies, and Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery.

Each had about 10 minutes to talk and two of the three stuck with the theme while the other used it as a sales pitch for their product. It was followed by a Q&A.

Web 2.0 Expo - Tuesday, April 17, 2007 Afternoon Sessions

This afternoon I went to a couple of sessions.

1. An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The Fast Rise of Viral Web Parts by Dion Hinchcliffe, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Hinchcliffe & Company

Before I get into the notes for this talk, a couple of observations. The buzz word widgets can mean
many things. For instance in this talk there was no mention of Konfabulator, now owned by Yahoo, which popularized widgets several years ago nor mention of Apple's Dashboard widgets which built upon Konfabulator.

In fact the speaker defined widgets as applications embedded on web sites. This is confusing especially if you've used Yahoo's Konfabulator or Apple's Dashboard which run on top of your desktop. Gadgets being offered by Microsoft or Google can run either on the desktop or on web pages.

Regardless of how you define these widgets, gadgets etc. the point is the viral aspect of them in getting your content, data out there. And all of them are proliferating.

Web 2.0 Expo - Tuesday, April 17, 2007 Morning Sessions

I skipped the first session as some other work came but I did go to the morning keynotes. And
they certainly were interesting. Here's some of my more relevant notes;

1. State of the Web 2.0: Measuring the Participatory Web - Bill Tancer - Hitwise (ilovedata.com - His personal blog)

- Wikipedia traffic is huge and growing. Participatory sites, social networking exploding
- Percentage of Participation: YouTube 0.16% (uploaded videos), Flickr 0.2% (uploading pictures), Wikipedia 5.9% (editing an entry)
- Wikipedia 35+ do most of the editing
- YouTube 18-24 underepresented in uploaders
- Mostly male audience, Wikiperdia 60/40, YouTube 75/25
- The next 2.0 winner as told by Hitwise: 3 segments: money and brains, young digerati, Boehemian Mix
- Hot Sites: Yelp, Stumbleupon, Veoh, WeeWorld, imeem,
- Hyper adoption curve, in 6 weeks YouTube overtook Google and Yahoo

In the afternoon there I attended one session and then the keynotes.

Session 1: Tagging that Works, Thomas Vander Wal, InfoCloud Solutions, Inc.

For the last two years tagging has become hot, hot, hot. I'll go into more with my post for Tuesday's keynotes which had a lot of stats. For now let's focus on what it is, how it's used etc. Oh and one note for those who love tagging, SpaceRef will be using tagging on some of it's sites soon. (Breaking news for anyone who cares.)

Described - Simple data/metadata externally applied to an object
- Used for sorting
- a hook for aggregating
- provides identifier and/or description
- personal markers