Web 2.0 conference
My favorite moment at the Web 2.0 conference was recorded on my other blog, but there's been plenty of good stuff being presented and discussed. Yesterday a bunch of companies launched their sites, and they all bear some investigation:
• Zvents built by Ethan Stock and team -- I met Ethan when he was working with a consulting company a few months ago, so I don't know how long they've been developing zvents. They had a really impressive "post to blog" event feature, which drew a lot of oohs and aahs from the audience.
• Real Travel is a company that associates a social network with contributions from travellers on their experiences: where to go, where to eat, how to get there.
• Rollyo was launched by Dave Pell, who made a lot of funny jokes and was generally very entertaining. It aggregates various sites into a "Searchroll" and searches just those. They did a superb job with the UED, and I'm impressed with their method of creating semi-celebrity "Searchrolls" to help people grok the product.
• Bunchball has built a social platform for play. Flash developers can put their games onto the platform, and generate revenue from them. I'm on the Board of Advisors with Andrew Anker and have a lot of confidence in these guys and their vision.
• Zimbra, and open source email client got a bunch of ooohs and ahhhs from the audience, as well as spontaneous bursts of applause. They demo'd an email that used the very best of all the web mashups: a date in an email would generate a pulldown menu of your calendar; an address, a map, and a Fedex tracking number the date, sender and status of the package. Phenomenal.
Today we've heard from Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo, Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Foundation, Jonathan Schwartz, CTO of Sun, and the list goes on. Mary Meeker is on now; she's showing us som fantastic stats. I want this deck.