So this is the continuation of my Day One wrap-up. I think I will try and finish this and then do Day Two tomorrow. I’m still on North Carolina time so I’m already tired. I’m also missing my wife, Michelle, and three sons, Russell, Ian, and Connor a whole heck of alot. That has nothing to do with Web 2.0 but it bears mentioning.

Data on the Move continued…

In my last post (well, the one before the picture) I had just started to talk about the a workshop I attended called “Data on Move” hosted by AT&T. There were four panelists who all talked about the concept of data-mining on the internet and how this is the future of the web. What they were all getting at was the idea of using user data to better predict what the the user is trying to do and thus serve the user better. One of the panelists, Usami Fayed, the “Chief Data Officer” of Yahoo said that the web is “interactive medium on a massive scale.” He then went on to say that most companies only pay “lip service” to the interactive part and still consider the web to be a one-way “publishing” medium.

Launchpad

The last workshop I attended was probably my favorite of the conference. Thirteen companies had six minutes each to launch or announce their new Web 2.0 products along with a demo. It was crazy! I’ve never heard such fast talking and seen screens move by so quickly in my life. All of the demos were fantastic but the real standouts in my opinion were Zimbra, RealTravel, Flock, and Rollyo. Zimbra is an online, Ajax-powered office collaboration suite. As the demonstrator moved through the demo, showing contact info that popped up when a person was rolled over or calendar info that appeared when a date was rolled over, the audience (including me) oohed and aahed in appreciation. It was easily the most popular demo of the workshop. I won’t go through all of the demo but here is a link that covers this workshop pretty well.

Welcoming Seminar and Dinner

So finally, after all the workshops were over, the entire 850 or so attendees of the conference gathered in the main ballroom for a welcoming message by the conference chairs, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly. Then we were treated to an interesting conversation with Barry Diller of IAC/InterActiveCorp and previously Paramount, Fox, and the QVC Channel who among other things explained the purchase of AskJeeves. He also demonstrated that he didn’t like being called a mogul (when John Battelle suggested he was one) whether it referred to internet or media (as in “internet mogul”). Following that were several more speakers the most fascinating of whom was Bran Ferren of Applied Minds (and previously with Disney as one of the original Imagineers). He basically talked on a higher plane of existence than about 90% of the audience (including me) but was fascinating nevertheless.

Dinner (hosted by MSN Search) came next and along with it a conversation on stage with Ray Ozzie, Gary Flake and Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft. Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle kept trying to get them to admit that Microsoft was about ready to acquire AOL but they pulled the old “no comment” trick.

Me and the guy from Microsoft

Later in the evening, during Google’s cocktail reception, I had an opportunity to talk to Gary Flake who is new to Microsoft and was previously with Yahoo and Overture. He’s a fascinating guy and very smart (Ph.D smart). We agreed to disagree on the issue of open source and he admitted that he is a “fan” of Red Hat (or at least the software). I left the him wishing that Micheal Tiemann had been by my side. I would have paid to listen to that conversation.

So yesterday was a pretty full day. Today was not quite as hectic but alot happened. I’ll do a wrap-up for it tomorrow. Stay tuned…