Twitter Users Most Followed by the Web 2.0 Summit Crowd

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 7

I took the set of users^† who posted tweets containing the hashtag #w2s and determined who those users followed. Unlike the list of the most followed users in all of Twitter, the list isn't dominated by celebrities. (A few coders landed in the top 50.) Regular Radar readers will be familiar with many of the users listed below: over 20 of the top 50 are based in the SF Bay Area. Of the over 700 users I identified, a third follow Tim:

UPDATE: Pete Warden has been doing similar analysis to help conference organizers and attendees. He goes a step further and monitors conversations (one twitter user mentioning another user, and vice-versa). Here is Pete's network graph of the recent Web 2.0 Summit.

(†) Data for this post was pulled on 10/27/2009. Using the Twitter search API, I was able to identify 1,500 relevant tweets and over 700 unique users responsible for those tweets. Given that I likely omitted earlier tweets, the results are at best an approximation of the true top 50 list.

Web 2.0 Summit Starts Today

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 1

Last year at Web 2.0 Summit, one prominent tech executive responded to our focus on "Web meets World" -- the way web technology is being used to attack the world's problems -- by saying "I don't come to this conference to learn how to do good. I come to learn about trends that are going to affect my business."

As it turns out, the "Web meets World" theme was in fact exactly on point with the trends that were going to affect his business. What Fred Wilson calls "the golden triangle" of Web meets World trends -- mobile, social, and real-time -- are at the heart of many of the cutting edge non-profit activities we showed last year, and they are very much at the heart of the for-profit companies following hard on their heels.

I've written a much longer paper on this subject - Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, and I won't repeat that there. But that's the theory. The practice is how entrepreneurs are taking advantage of these disruptive trends, how big companies are responding, and what kind of infrastructure changes we'll need to support the future that is coming at us.

This year at the Web 2.0 Summit, we'll be hearing how real-time, social, and mobile play out in the strategy of Google, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, News Corp, AOL, Comcast, Nokia, and even GE, but we'll also be hearing from entrepreneurs, and yes, even some more innovative hackers who are helping birth the future away from the commercial limelight.

The official sessions are great, but it's the hallway conversations that can really set your mind off in a new direction. For example, at a pre-Summit event last night, I had a fascinating conversation with Marc Pincus of Zynga last night about his belief that the third great internet business model has arrived. Fortunately, you don't need to bump into Marc to hear what he thinks: he's speaking this afternoon at 4:15. He's put his ideas about social selling into practice, with 129 million users playing Zynga games each month, spending millions of dollars on virtual goods. But what's most fascinating is how Marc sees the potential to apply social gaming principles to all of e-commerce. His riff on how what's he's learned applies to Amazon (and anyone else selling on the web) is worth the price of admission to the Summit.

I hope to see you at the Summit. John Battelle and I kick off the show with opening remarks at 2 pm at the Westin Market Street in San Francisco.

A Conversation with Dr. Walter Scott of DigitalGlobe

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 0

Dr Walter Scott founded Digital Globe - a company you are likely not familiar with though you probably interact with their satellite imagery on a regular basis via Google Maps, Bing and others.


It is only recently that mapping technology and production has been driven by mainly commercial interests especially in the area of satellite imagery. With this commercialization corporations and media have access to information that was once considered closely guarded state property.

The potential for social good - from assessing and responding to natural disasters, to exposing political issues such as prisoner camps, to finding out where Richard Serra is keeping his massive sculptures… is enormous. In this discussion we cover DigitalGlobe's business, the state of commercial satellite imagery and the advantage of commercial vs. government ownership of GIS data.

Dr Scott will be delivering a HighOrder Bit at the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit.

Google Analytics for the Real World: A Conversation with Sharon Biggar of Path Intelligence

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 5

In preparation for the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit I am posting a few conversations with attendees that embody the Web Squared Theme.

Path Intelligence uses sensor technology to understand shopping behavior in retail spaces by detecting and tracking the RF signals from mobile phones.

As Sharon Biggar, co-founder, succinctly puts it - “we are like Google Analytics for the real world” giving offline retailers the same visibility on shopping behavior that online retail has enjoyed for years.

While human observation has been put in the service of retail analysis for a long time, using machine based sensing and computation is different in a few fundamental ways. First, the quantity and efficiency with which data is gathered simply wouldn’t be possible using human observers. Second, the data is based on unbiased observation of people in their habitat and avoids a lot of the errors built into any research that relies on self-disclosure (I wandered around Victoria’s Secret for half an hour - I think not.)

Using sensors to understand and optimize retail flow is a logical first commercial step. This type of technology gets more interesting when it gets applied to other problems. As Sharon describes in the podcast there are opportunities to deploy the same techniques of mobile sensing in areas as wide ranging as counter-terrorism (locating phones that have been stationary for a long period of time is a potential indicator of phones being used as detonators for roadside bombs) and emergency services (using these sensors to gauge attendance and large events and scale services accordingly).

Sharon will be participating at the Summit in the panel, Humans as Sensors.

Disclosure: O’Reilly Alphatech ventures is an investor in Path Intelligence.

Mary Meeker's Annual State of the Internet

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 4

Web 2.0 Summit High Order Bit -Mary_Meeker

Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker just took the stage at Web 2.0 Summit and is presenting her information-rich slides. I've put a copy up on Scribd for all to view. The video of her talk will be up shortly.

Over 300 iPhone Apps Use Location Look-Ups

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 7

According to Skyhook Wireless over 300 iPhone apps are location-aware as of October 3rd. According to Mobclix there are over 4,000 apps in circulation. If these numbers are correct this puts the location-aware percentage at under 10% -- far, far less than I would have suspected based on my own experience. There were 5.5 location-aware apps released per day in September. The location-aware apps 61% are paid (less than the 76% found in iPhone apps as a whole according to Mobclix).

The Social Networking, Local Search and Navigation Categories represent over 50% of the apps. Social Networking includes Twitter clients and friend finders like Whrrl and Pelago. Once Apple adds background location updating (I hope -- Radar post) I expect the Sports category to bloom with pedometers, life-trackers and faux-GPSs.

Skyhook knows this because all of those apps use their service to determine a location. They've been tracking the apps as they've come out. Skyhook cannot publicly reveal the number of look-ups from location apps, but it's a lot. Right now the look-ups are evenly split between using the iPhone's GPS, WiFI (Skyhook's WPS), and Hybrid (Skyhook's XPS product can use Wifi, celltowers and GPS for a faster, more accurate lookup).

Skyhook has been making this data available for a while. You can find more on their site. All slides courtesy of Skyhook and posted with permission (regardless of what the Confidential footer may say).

I'll be discussing location-aware apps with Skyhook Wireless CEO TEd Morgan (along with Greg Skibiski (Sense Networks), April Allderdice (MicroEnergy Credits), and Rich Miner (Google) ) at the Web 2.0 Summit. If you have any questions for them let me know in the comments.

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Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle discuss the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 0

Beginning on November 5th, 2008 a wide array of thought leaders and practitioners of Web 2.0 are converging on San Francisco to attend the 5th annual Web 2.0 Summit. This year's theme, "Web Meets World" reflects how much Web 2.0 has evolved over the past five years. I recorded an informal conversation with co-chairs Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle to discuss that theme, highlighted speakers and how to get invited to the Summit. Whether you plan on attending or not, the discussion provides insight into the state of Web 2.0 today.

Transcript Follows:

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Al Gore Joins Web 2.0 Summit Lineup

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 26

As I wrote last month in What Good is Collective Intelligence if it Doesn't Make Us Smarter?, at this year's Web 2.0 Summit, we're focusing on how what we've learned from the web over the past decade can be applied to solve the world's hard problems. That's why I'm really excited to see that John Battelle has persuaded Al Gore to join us.

One of those hard problems that requires all the intelligence we can throw at is global warming. And there's no one who deserves as much credit as Al Gore for getting it on our collective radar. Through persistence, vision, and hard work, and a real mastery of the new tools of global media, he made all of us pay attention. His work has been a textbook demonstration of the power of media to change the way people think.

That's Gore's continuing focus, with his role at Current TV. He's also joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner involved in cleantech investing.

When I first saw Gore talk about climate change at the TED conference in early 2006, everyone wanted to know what we could do about it. People are still struggling to answer that question, but it's clear that technology can play a large role: helping us to monitor and measure the rate of change in crucial environmental variables, creating feedback loops that change behavior at both macro-levels (like carbon markets) and personal levels (like home energy monitoring); creating green data centers and low-power devices; creating new forms of renewable energy generation or storage, new materials that require less energy to create; alternative fuels and vehicles. The list goes on and on. (Reminder: we're looking for innovative "web meets world"startups for the Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad.)

Of course, global warming is far from the only "web meets world" theme that we're exploring. The conference will cover everything from the latest trends on the web (the rediscovery of e-commerce as a business model, cloud computing, social networking, mobile applications, and the inevitable platform wars) to politics, global disease detection, personal genomics, private space industry, and even military infotech. Speakers I'm particularly excited to see, in addition to Vice President Gore, include Tony Hsieh (@zappos, for those of you who see him continually on twitter), Elon Musk (who's got to have the coolest portfolio of investments since retiring from PayPal, with SpaceX, SolarCity, Tesla Motors all under his wing), and Michael Pollan, who's completely changed the way many of us think about food. Check out the confirmed speaker list, but keep in mind that there are more yet to come as John and I firm up the program.

Suggestions for Web 2.0 Summit Charity Auction?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 2

At this year's Web 2.0 Summit, we're holding a charity auction as part of our "web meets world" focus.

From the press release:

The Web 2.0 Summit team will solicit donations, and donation ideas, from individuals and companies within the community and then choose the 10 most promising and unique offerings to auction after the conference dinner. Lance Armstrong, the seven time Tour de France winner and founder of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and livestrong.com, will donate an autographed bicycle that he signs on-stage during his interview with John Battelle. All proceeds from the event will benefit three charities, including witness.org, which uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations.

Members of the Web community can contribute to the success of the Web Meets World auction by joining the Web 2.0 Summit Facebook community and suggest which charities should benefit from the auction and what you would consider a priceless donation. Individuals or companies who would like to offer auction items should email auction@techweb.com.

We're looking for suggestions as well as donations. For example, what might O'Reilly donate that would bring a big price for the target charities? For example, how much would you donate to have us organize a mini-foo camp for a company, bringing together cool hackers in the company's area of interest? (But suggestions are best if you have some kind of angle on actually helping to make them happen.)

Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments as well as by email or facebook as outlined above.

For more details, see the Summit auction page.

What good is collective intelligence if it doesn't make us smarter?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 25

Two stories I read yesterday morning are worth sharing. The first, an editorial by science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg, was entitled The Death of Gallium, a meditation on the increasing scarcity of valuable elements like gallium, used in flat panel TVs and computer displays, which is estimated to be used up by 2017. Other less rare but equally important minerals are also expected to run out within decades. The other, a New York Times story entitled Asleep at the Spigot, is summarized well by its subtitle: "A thirst for oil comes back to haunt a nation of gas guzzlers." It's a short but poignant history of the many warnings and missed opportunities to change our gas guzzling habits during the seventies, eighties and nineties, when the eventual shortage was apparent, but the political will to make changes was lacking in the face of opposition from companies interested in maintaining the status quo, backed up by a short-sighted electorate.

These stories are a great way to highlight the focus of the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad. We've entitled the business plan competition "Web meets world," described as follows:

For Launch Pad 2008, the focus will be on startups in the fields of alternative energies, social entreprenuerialism, microfinance, developing economies, political action, renewable technologies, and the like. We'll be particularly interested in where these companies display significant cross over with the web, of course, but this will not be required.

This might seem like quite a departure for the Web 2.0 Summit, the conference that made its name by celebrating the revolution in the consumer internet caused by the move to the internet as platform, service based business models, and social media. Or is it? After all, I've argued all along that the real heart of Web 2.0 is the ability of networked applications to harness collective intelligence. Yes, you can harness collective intelligence to build amazing internet businesses, as the past five years have shown us.

But what good is collective intelligence if it doesn't make us smarter?

In an era of looming scarcities, economic disruption, and the possibility of catastrophic ecological change, it's time for us all to wake up, to take our new "superpowers" seriously, and to use them to solve problems that really matter.

The potential is huge. In recent months, I've seen fascinating startups for earth monitoring, carbon markets, energy efficiency of electronic devices, and home energy management. There are lots of projects for open government and responsive politics, which in an ideal world should have commercial potential. There are world-changing opportunities in collaborative scientific research, early detection of infectious disease outbreaks, personalized medicine, resource discovery, new materials, you name it.

That's why we've titled this edition of the Web 2.0 Summit The Opportunity of Limits. As John Battelle wrote so eloquently on the Summit web site:

In the first four years of the Web 2.0 Summit, we've focused on our industry's challenges and opportunities, highlighting in particular the business models and leaders driving the Internet economy. But as we pondered the theme for this year, one clear signal has emerged: our conversation is no longer just about the Web. Now is the time to ask how the Web—its technologies, its values, and its culture—might be tapped to address the world's most pressing limits. Or put another way—and in the true spirit of the Internet entrepreneur—its most pressing opportunities.

As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web's greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we're expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.

Increasingly, the leaders of the Internet economy are turning their attention to the world outside our industry. And conversely, the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions. At the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, we'll endeavor to bring these groups together.

In short, we're looking for great startups to introduce to the world in the Web 2.0 Summit launchpad in San Francisco in November. Here's how it works: You start by filling out the application form (by no later than September 10.) If you catch our attention, you'll be contacted to provide a pitch to our panel of VCs, who will consider your presentation as if for funding. Six to eight finalists will appear on stage at the conference, with audience voting for additional feedback.

The full list of participating VCs will be announced shortly, but will include both internet and cleantech VCs. So far we've confirmed Chris Albinson of Panorama Capital, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, and Mike Goguen of Sequoia Capital.

'Computing in the Cloud' workshop hosted by Princeton University - January 14-15

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 1

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 on the end user's computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users own this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider's data center improve security or endanger it?

• Joel Reidenberg, (home page), Professor of Law, Fordham University
• Timothy B. Lee, blogger at Technology Liberation Front and adjunct scholar, Cato Institute
• Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center

Panel 2: Security and risk in the cloud - How does the move to centralized services affect the security and reliability of users interactions with technology? What new threats are likely to emerge? How might provider behavior, user behavior, or government policy need to change in response to those threats? How does the open source ethos work in a cloud computing environment?

• Marc Hedlund, founder and chief product officer, Wesabe.com
• Mihai Christodorescu (home page), researcher at IBM TJ Watson Research Center
• Benjamin Mako Hill researcher at MIT Media Lab and Free Software Foundation

Panel 3: Civics in the cloud - How and where can cloud computing best improve public knowledge and engagement in political issues? What has been achieved so far? What is possible in the long run? What moves by private actors, and what policy changes, might do the most to harness the power of cloud computing for civic engagement?

• Josh Tauberer (home page), founder of Govtrack.us
• Andrew Page, associate director, MAPLight.org
• John Wonderlich, Program Director, Sunlight Foundation

Panel 4: What’s next? What new services might develop, and how will today’s services evolve? How well will cloud computing be likely to serve users, companies, investors, government, and the public over the longer run? Which social and policy problems will get worse due to cloud computing, and which will get better?

• Andrea LaPaugh (home page) Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University
• Reihan Salam The Atlantic Monthtly
• Jesse Robbins O'Reilly Radar

Updated on 1/21/08. Here is the the video of my panel:

Web2Summit: Could Google Hit a $1T Market Cap?

by Sarah Milstein | comments: 14

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 earnest answers indicated that they had thought through and discussed those numbers at Google.

Would that question get serious play at any other company on the planet?

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web20, web2summit

Web2Summit: Pre-weekend Humor From the Senior Set

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 5

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 adult children. The implicit message to the audience was, "Hello -- you have to create something your parents can use."

The lack of technical acumen across the panel, at least when compared to the alpha geeks in the audience, made the crowd laugh, sometimes sweetly, sometimes with condescension. It was, at times, like watching an embarrassing YouTube video onstage. (We'll get to one of those soon, don't worry.)

Several members of the Radar team furiously typed their favorite quotes from the panel. And, as a Friday afternoon gift to our readers, we'll share them with you, in part because we never knew that Craigslist was such a useful parenting tool:

"I am so much more educated because of Craigslist. I learned things that I never thought I would learn."
"I look at Craigslist every day. I look for jobs for my son, for my daughter."
"You can find anything on Craigslist, even a wife for my son"
"The ads, they pop up, I wanna get rid of 'em."
"You look for a medication and you wind up on a photo-renting website."
"I love eBay. I can start out looking for electronics and wind up looking at jewelry. There are things on there I didn't realize are for sale."
"I would like a checkbox that would let me specify no-ads for the whole Internet."

Wanna see two of the panelists? OK.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web20, web2summit

Web2Summit: Complexity + Tight Coupling = Catastrophe

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 4

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...

strong>Update: Paul Kedrosky likes Charles Perrow too.

Technorati Tags: failurehappens, operations, web2.0, web20, web2summit

Web2Summit: Opening Up the Social Graph

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 4

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 hope will be the news: Today I announced a new service for developers that is a key piece of infrastructure that will help to open the social graph. Keeping track of friends online is not easy to do. You might let a service import your GMail address book today, but a week from that, the information is out of date. The Six Apart Relationship Update Stream is an endless feed of social relationship data, designed for Web services to be able to send and receive information when changes to social relationships on their service occur. This is a developer platform, not something for regular users. It launches today, streaming real-time public changes from LiveJournal and Ma.gnolia, averaging around hundreds of changes per minute, with updates from Hi5, GetSatisfaction, SmugMug, Plaxo, and Vox coming soon. (Disclosure: LiveJournal and Vox are owned by Six Apart, my employer.) This means that when I add a friend on LiveJournal, the feed I see on FriendFeed could be updated in real-time to start showing events from them as well.

As I've written in the past, people are tired of signing up for a new service and having to find, invite, and wait for their friends all over again. Brad tells a great, and very true, story about how when he signed up for Dopplr (a social travel website), he realized he'd had enough. Dopplr is a great example of a service that starts with one great feature; sharing with your friends where you are and what trips you're taking. It grew virally this year, spreading rapidly through the London and San Francisco geek worlds. Around the time of FooCamp, it had reached a critical mass of technologists all sharing Brad's frustration of having to find and invite their friends all over again in order for Dopplr to be really useful to them.

There is the argument to be made that sites like Dopplr should be nothing more than a Facebook application. I would strongly disagree, given the announcement of the upcoming MySpace platform. Companies such as RockYou and Slide -- the two top producing companies of Facebook applications -- will have to either choose a platform or write their applications to run on each. If I were a betting man, I would doubt that MySpace will be the last platform either, considering moves already made in this space by LinkedIn. Wasn't this a problem Java tried to solve many years ago? Instead, I would agree with what Jeff Huber said yesterday, "A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform."

How can we all make this happen?

In many cases, opening the social graph is not just about standards and data formats. Just as OpenID has helped to allow identity portability between services, OAuth will make it easier for all of our applications and services online to talk to each other. Opening the social graph is also not about all or nothing, rather giving people choice and control over their information, their profiles, their relationships in a manner which has to protect and benefit your users as well.

As Brad and I were working on our presentation, the evolution of names quickly came to mind. If you remember your Gaelic, Brad's last-name "Fitzpatrick" means "son of Patrick". "fitz," in essence, provides a way to disambiguate all the different Brads. Online, we've had the same concept since 1972: "brad@danga.com." Why is this related? Many services today don't let users add context to their profiles which can cross services. To any Facebook application, I'm nothing more than "24400320," which doesn't help connect my profile into the entire social graph. This is quite different than LiveJournal, which gives users privacy settings to choose to share things such as their email address and instant messenger screen-names--all shared using Microformats. Privacy is extremely important -- but if I would like to link my profiles on various services, why should I be prohibited from doing so?

As Jimmy Guterman wrote yesterday on Radar, "Either social networks will keep their walls up to force individuals to choose, or they will open up in the hope that they'll get the customer even if their competitor does, too. History suggests it'll be the former followed by the latter. For those sick of maintaining multiple profiles, let's hope the players work through the cycles quickly." I hope that these walled gardens will join us in placing users back in charge of their data and in opening the social graph.

Technorati Tags: oauth, web2.0, web20, web2summit

Web2Summit: Media Matters ... Doesn't It?

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 1

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 retain their incumbent advantage, and representatives from upstarts Current and Joost talked about how they were bringing aspects of the passive experience of television to the interactive platform of the Net. (Both Current and Joost have interesting interactive features, of course, but those services are more about aggregating audiences than creators.)

This is a conference about innovation. Over the past few days, we've heard from disruptors, some with wild ideas that have paid off, some with wild ideas that might pay off. But when it comes to media, an area in which you'd expect rebels and crazies to congregate, the stage this morning was full of people looking backward far more than forward. I'll want my Internet to be more like a television right around the time I'll want my word processor to be more like a manual typewriter.

Technorati Tags: innovation, web2.0, web20, web2summit

Web2Summit: Backstage with Rob Currie of Dash

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 5

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:

1. Traffic data is real time, routing paths are crowdsourced based on historical and current patterns.
2. Searches for restaurants, hotels, etc. are live, not immediately out of date.
3. The Dash can pull data from internet mashups (Platial gets a shout-out) and even sites like upcoming.org: find me jazz music tonight close to where I am.

But perhaps even wilder: I'm driving through a neighborhood, and wonder how much the houses cost. Zillow data comes right in. Or build a custom RSS feed of real estate open houses on Craigslist, send the feed to the dash, and have a built in routing list. They've already got a great set of demo mashups (or perhaps we can call them "dashups." I expect to see a lot more.

There are three types of search: specific locations (Starbucks), types of locations (coffee), and, surprisingly, specific products. During the beta period, they were surprised to find things like "ipod" in their top 50 searches.

From the applause, it was clear that everyone in the audience was as impressed as I was. In fact, as they came off, I turned to John and said, "Do we waste them now and take their demo units, or wait till they're available in a couple of months." This is the most drool-worthy device since the iPhone.

(There's more information about the Dash in a post from Brady last month.)

Backstage, while Rob and Mark were waiting to go on, the conversation was even more interesting. It's easy to think about this as "a GPS." But when I asked about the hardware, and discovered that it was based on openmoko, the open source linux-based phone infrastructure, my ears really perked up. At bottom, this is a PHONE, and that tells us something very interesting about the future of the phone, with more and more devices with phone functionality that don't actually look or act like phones. It's also a full linux computer. Let your imagination be the guide.

This gives me a whole other perspective on openmoko. I had seen a couple of openmoko phone prototypes, and I thought, these are never going to get the fit and finish of commercial phones. But wow, does the Dash highlight the power of open source, allowing for innovation that you'd never expect.

"This is a sit-back, 65-mile an hour phone," Rob said. It uses wifi to download updated data when you pull into your garage, but on the road, its internet connectivity is GPRS. Even more interesting, once there are enough Dash-enabled cars on the road, it uses mesh connectivity between them to improve the routing and traffic data.

And all that data is being collected.

The Dash highlights one of the major themes I outlined in my opening to the conference, namely that web 2.0 applications are increasingly going to be enabled by sensors, rather than just people typing on keyboards. The Dash shows us how much smarter a device can be when it always knows where it is, and when it can pull in existing data based on that knowledge. But it also shows us how that data can be aggregated to create new value. This is a trend to watch: collective intelligence applications are getting eyes, ears, and a sense of location. This is truly transformative. You ain't seen nothing yet.

(It seems to me that there's a real possibility too that the Dash could eventually use this data to compete with data suppliers like Navteq, just bought by Nokia for $8.1 billion. The question is whether they'll contribute this data to open data projects like openstreetmap, or use it to build their own proprietary value. Meanwhile, after GPS device maker TomTom bought TeleAtlas, they made clear that they'd be using data from the TomTom to update TeleAtlas routes. Nokia hasn't announced any deal with Garmin, TomTom's main competitor, but it's hard to imagine that they won't be thinking similar thoughts.)

This one is going to be an early IPO or acquisition, methinks.

Update: One more thing that I forgot to mention. The Dash will let drivers let other Dash users know if there's a cop in the area! Rob said they ran this by the CHP, and they didn't mind at all, as long as they didn't pinpoint the exact location. Anything that causes people to slow down is good, they figure.

Technorati Tags: dash, geo, openmoko, tag, web2.0, web20, web2summit

Web2Summit: Make Life More Like Games

by Sarah Milstein | comments: 8

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 other people share information on how to succeed. 2) Games give you better feedback on your performance in the form of scores and ratings, plus they provide an audience that's tuned into your success. 3) Games offer better community: everybody's agreed to same rules and narrative, and you share a heroic sense of purpose.

If you take those lessons and apply them elsewhere, McGonigal suggested, you can capture the attention of a "huge new market of non-gamers."

Her existing examples included:

* Hybrid cars, which give you great visual feedback on your performance.
* Chore Wars, a site that offers experience points (a common gaming reward) for completing household tasks.
* Serios, enterprise software designed around virtual currency: when you send an email asking somebody to do something, you assign a virtual dollar level to it. Over time, employees wind up with great visual feedback about who's spending and receiving attention/currency.
* Cruel 2 B Kind, a game for mobile phones, designed by McGonigal, that assigns you interactions with other people in public spaces.

Got any other examples of game/life crossovers?

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web20, web2summit

Web2Summit: Q&A With Danny Hillis

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 0

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 its Semantic Web project Freebase. We spoke recently to him. Here are a couple of highlights from our conversation:

How has Freebase changed your ideas about the Semantic Web?

The personal surprise has been how much energy is coming from commerce, not science. Everyone else -- that is, everyone who isn't a scientist like me -- would have known that. Data sharing is what scientists do for a living. Scientists tend to have narrow communities with which they share data. The data sharing problem for them is easier than it is for the general public. Film information, restaurant information: all that is shared with a much wider community than, say, proteomics information. That's the shift for me. It presents a bigger, more interesting problem.

How do you know when something needs to be organized and something needs to be free-form?

It's not a binary question. It's more about where along the spectrum you want to be for different kinds of data. And there are issues related to those tradeoffs. How quickly can you get started? The Semantic Web offers a powerful, general-purpose set of tools. There are so many things you can do, so many ways you can organize. There are an embarrassment of options. Databases in general require an awful lot of thought up front. A committee decides the schema, and it's inflexible after that. Most relational databases you design up front and live with the consequences. You have to devote energy to getting around the decisions you made up front. Free text dominated on the Internet. There was no database, just text. The center of what's happening on the web is something between the two. Until recently, the only pattern was hyperlinks. Google mined that and accomplished a fantastic amount with that. Google showed how much help a little structure could bring to navigating things. Now Metaweb and others are seeing ways to bring in more structure, but not as much as a relational database where we have to agree before we get started. Tagging is one step away from a total non-structure. It's an intermediate step.

We'll hear more from Hillis and his colleagues/competitors this afternoon.

Technorati Tags: metaweb, freebase, SemanticWeb, web2.0, web20, web2summit

Web2Summit: Views from the rest of the world

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 1

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 claims to have over 4 million users, and the site he acquired was "sh3bwah". He discussed a number of challenges and "opportunities that we have never seen before" in the Arabic-speaking world.

His most striking examples were of internet access enabling women to overcome barriers to equality. He said that women are starting small businesses from their homes, using the web to interact. Similarly, internet personals sites are starting to change the marriage culture by enabling people to meet in advance online.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, web20, web2summit