I spent four days this week at the Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco. Here is a summary of the scene, including photos and my impressions of the show.
I attended the RockYou/Clearspring/Mixercast reception on Tuesday night at Bong Su, a trendy new Vietnamese restaurant. Three companies sponsored the party and so it made the Web 2.0 froth seem a little less excessive, since they can split the bill. There I met RockYou founder Lance Tokuda and enjoyed some fancy fried rice.
On Wednesday, Tim O’Reilly, the head of show organizer O’Reilly, kicked off the conference with a plea for innovation even in the midst of tough economic times.
“If you follow the headlines, you might as well stay home,” O’Reilly (left) said as he opened the speeches on Wednesday. He praised the Internet as the ultimate platform and its ability to create a revolution in human augmentation. That means that, with the web at our fingertips, we won’t have to remember much. He also told the Web 2.0 denizens to harness the collective intelligence of the web. He suggested we rise above the level of the single device and think about making software work across everything.
Go after the hard problems, he implored. “Do you think we’re really done yet?” We’re at the beginning, he said. And he cited a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Man Watching,” which O’Reilly said he read to his father on his death bed. It’s about how you can grow by being defeated by those who are greater than you are.
That led to the conversation with wunderkind Max Levchin, the CEO of Slide, an event which we used to introduce our live blogging. Eric Eldon caught up with Levchin afterward for a Q&A. The talk inevitably led to “how do you make money?” question that every Web 2.0 company has to grapple with. Levchin made a rare admission for a CEO. He said he was “extremely uncomfortable” being in front of the crowd and was happy that all he could see out there in the audience was a bunch of bright lights. You see, CEOs are just like the rest of us. Except they have a lot more zeroes in their checkbooks.
I was back bright and early the next morning to listen to John Battelle try to get Marc Andreessen to talk trash about Microsoft. But Andreessen (at left in image) was fairly diplomatic, saying only that he was happy there were “counter weights” to Microsoft such as Google. He was happy, he said, that the original ideas of the Netscape Navigator have survived (like the “back” button on browsers) and that something of Netscape lives on in Mozilla’s Firefox browser. He, like Levchin, has a company, the social networking platform Ning, in the $500 million valuation club. If Ning keeps going, it could become Andreessen’s third big start-up home run.
