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.
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.
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.
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.
I hung out in the bloggers lounge, which was a lot more interesting a place than the actual press room. And it was almost as if the bloggers were more welcome than the mainstream press. In the blogging room, there were always dozens of people present. They served wine and beer as well as snacks. Bloggers could take a break playing with a Nintendo Wii or get a massage from a couple of professional masseuses. But nobody slept there, since everybody had to get out for the parties. I did, however, see a guy snoring away in the mainstream press room. The blogging room was also a place where it was easy to get pitched. It was easy to see that "data portability" was a trend.
I heard pitches from Dropio, which allows you to set up a "drop site" on the Internet where you can stash as much as 100 megabytes worth of stuff. The sites can expire, much like the Mission Impossible secret-agent tapes that self destruct in the TV shows/Tom Cruise movies. The company has just eight people in New York and it raised a $3.9 million first round from RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham.
Fifth Generation Systems guys, who were unveiling a social networking virtual kitchen sink called Zude. Like with Dropio, you can use Zude to stuff all sorts of digital assets into this space for free. But in Zude's case, your stuff doesn't disappear.
You can toss your Facebook, MySpace and Friendster pages into it just by dragging and dropping. Once those pages are in a Zude folder, you can mash them up. You can minimize the size of the pages and click upon them to enlarge them. You can toss in YouTube videos and the Zude folder will keep the links to the original video. Then you can direct your friends to your mash-up. The Roslyn Heights, N.Y. company has 22 employees and raised more than $10 million in two rounds.
Disney.com, Intel, Microsoft, and others. Mixed with them were the smallest of Web 2.0 start-ups, like Yoono, a social networking management and media-sharing tool. And there were even investment oriented companies such as Steve Perlman's Rearden, which incubates new technologies until they can be spun out as Rearden-funded start-ups. (We'll post a Q&A with him soon).
Mash Maker tool was funny. The company was giving away a Nintendo Wii game console. But there are no Intel chips in that device. I asked the Intel rep what was the deal. He said they tried to get an Apple TV, which does have an Intel chip, but they couldn't get it. Hence, the Wii. I suppose that Intel has to get people to come to its booth. But you would think they would give away a gaming PC, so they could at least support the PC Gaming Alliance rather than the Wii, which might one day kill off PC gaming and all of those computers with Intel chips inside them. But what's one Wii?
Digital Media party next week. The line took an agonizing 20 minutes to get in the door, though a lot of well-dressed VIPs were being escorted right inside without waiting. I guess you had to know somebody important. I had to listen to the homeless guy sing songs to all of us and watch the paparazzi point and shoot. Inside, they really knew how to party like it was 1999.
Live Mesh, as a platform to bridge desktop applications with cloud-based server apps. But Microsoft evangelist Michael Lehman was able to enlighten me on the Kool-Aid of Live Mesh. Yes, there was at least one geek at Web 2.0.
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Google's outlook on spam, and Fake Steve Jobs' view of the world. Fake Steve (also known as Forbes magazines' Dan Lyons) was of course the most entertaining speaker of the morning. He worried about getting Twitter mobbed during his speech, but he said he thought better of it. After all, he said, now that he runs pictures on his site like the one on the left of Yahoo's Jerry Yang and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, his reputation as a real journalist is seriously shot already.
