Web 2.0 Expo – The Power of Less
May 5th, 2009
During the first week in April, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. As always, these conferences are exciting, eye-opening and thought provoking.
As one might expect, attendance was down a little from previous years, but still a very good showing. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘The Power of Less’ and focused on identifying the essentials and eliminating the unnecessary. In keeping with that theme, here is just a small sample of the thoughts, ideas, learning, etc. that I came away with:
- Mobile and location are coming fast. For example, point a mobile phone’s camera towards an historic building and it can pull up the wikipedia entry
- Companies that use the web as the platform are the ones that thrive, even in downturns
- If you learn from your users, then increased usage will increase performance. For example, Google’s speech recognition learns from each user.
- The amount of Data on the Internet continues to increase, discovering the hidden meanings is part of the future of the Internet
- Data isn’t only coming from people typing on a keyboard. Data sensors are adding intelligence.
- Build a simple system and let it evolve
- Create more value than you capture
As always, if anyone is interested in a deeper discussion, email, call or tweet me.
