As day three of the Web 2.0 conference proceeds, I'm hearing a number of interesting conversations. Some are part of the official conversations on stage and many of them are between sessions, over lunch or over the plethora of drinks being poured. Regardless of the conversation, there are a number of recurring topics that I'd like to touch on.
The first conversation I'd like to mention focuses on the cost of creating new start-ups. Compared to the 90's, hardware has become cheap, open source software is (nearly) free and the only major cost to starting a company are people. I've heard this bantered about a number of times and coupled with the comments that VCs are investing a lot less money per company into new companies this makes much sense. This also dovetails into the "less is more" conversation. Joe Kraus also attributed outsourcing and search engine marketing as factors that drive down costs of starting a new company.
Another conversation that transported me straight back to 1999 focuses on business models. I was hoping to never hear the phrase "We haven't figured out the business model yet" ever again. Silly talk like this was IMHO largely responsible for the last Internet bubble. Yet, I'm hearing this talk again -- why did you start a company when you didn't have a clue how you plan to make money? I guess there is always the acquisition strategy and some people here clearly act as if this is their primary business model. Well, I guess the buzz is back in the valley -- for better or for worse.
Joe Kraus, during the Web 2.0 alumni discussion talked about his mistakes in the last year. He feels that his new company JotSpot stayed in beta for too long and that his team internally underwent a culture shift. People were looking for validation in the wrong areas and consequently the wrong metrics were being watched. Joe suggests to skip the beta step and go straight into general release and focus on generating revenue right away. While I welcome the straight talk about focusing on revenue, I still think the prolonged beta (as Google has a habit of doing with its projects) is a good way to telling your customer that you may not have figured out all the angles just yet -- some areas of the project may still have sharp edges. Given that, I don't think that doing a beta and focusing on revenue right away are necessarily mutually exclusive -- I suppose that internal culture can be managed in other ways.
Data is the next intel inside. I strongly believe in this -- if the open source revolution shook the foundations of the tech market, open data platforms are going to have a much farther reaching influence. In order to use and generate data you don't need to be a programmer as you do in the open source space. Data can be consumed and created by everyone and harnessing data from many people into a cohesive and useful body of data will yield a new generation of applications that we can even imagine yet. Wikipedia, collaborative filtering and geospatial annotations are really just the tip of the iceberg.
AJAX is getting a lot of talk here at Web 2.0 -- however, most of the talk focuses on the various type of mapping mash ups. A few people showed various office type applications running in the browser, but so far no real Microsoft Office killers are on the horizon. While AJAX is the hot topic at the moment it seems that the true calling of AJAX hasn't arrived yet. I think people's imaginations have been awakened, but it will take some time for the real killer AJAX applications to come out. Given what I am seeing today I'm excited to see what is next for AJAX.
These are are just some of the recurring topics here at Web 2.0 -- but now its time to jump back in and catch the closing of the conference. More later...
If you're at Web 2.0, what recurring conversations are you hearing?
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