The first full day of a conference can be a bit tiring and this year’s Web 2.0 proves no different. The site: The Argent Hotel
in San Francisco. The focus: the social impact and opportunity the
“second coming” of the web provides. The venue is small, the meeting
rooms are packed and it’s all you can do to find a spot on a couch to
grab a quick drink and check some email.
There were two sessions I made sure to attend, so let’s focus on these.
The first was Strategic blogging: "avoiding death by opinion," which was
lead by Shawna Swanson and Matt Kesner of Fenwick and West LLP.
This was a legal discussion/counsel session focused on when employees
and companies blog, what are the ramifications? This was all legal talk, all the
time. I would have liked to have seen a legal expert teamed up with a
‘blogging expert’ or community member, to give it a wider perspective.
Was it important? Yes. Am I glad I went? Yes. Can I better counsel
nerve-racked companies? Absolutely. Was it the most interesting? No way.
Fast forward to the afternoon’s LaunchPad Workshop, hosted by John Battelle
himself. The concept here is simple and absolute. Pick 12 companies
barely old enough to buy a beer, give each six minutes to present who
they are and how they impact Web 2.0, and turn them loose. There was
standing room only for the workshop and it was hot as hell in the room
but well worth the sweat.
A Voce client, Flock,
was presenting and the guys did a fine job. The company, for all intent
and purposes, is launching at the event and you can read more about
them here. But I think the star of the show was Zimbra. CEO and Co-founder Satish Dharmaraj
gave an outstanding demo. The key here with Zimbra is innovation
applied to something stagnant, email. Also, see Firefox! Zimbra’s goal
is to develop email, calendar, contacts, and other communications
technologies through an open source based community development effort.
This is a company I would LOVE to work with and they seem on the
cutting edge. Simply, as you view emails you have access to your
calendar via pop-up windows that show availability. Also, let’s say an
email is tracking a FedEx package. As you scroll across “FedEx” in the
body of the email, a pop up window shows you the tracking number and
location of the package in real-time. So much cooler than “standard”
email applications.
So all-in-all it was a cool first day. I saw lots of innovation from
companies pushing the social web forward and intently focused on making
it easier for people to push and pull, publish and customize
information from the web, instead of just viewing it.
– Colin Crook
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