live blogging – web 2.0 thursday keynotes

See table of contents for full list of web 2.0 expo posts

Last day of keynotes. I will clean up this post and add an index tonight.

Opening Remarks Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Media, Inc.), Sarah Milstein (TechWeb)

8/9 speakers today live in NY – shows web 2.0 has good NY presence (and that people who have to travel home prefer not to speak last day)

  • Her company doesn’t need an office. Work out of apartments, coffee shops, hotel lobbies and client sites.
  • No set business models. Can decide how want to make money.
  • What you are passionate about is always high on your job spec. Know what like to do and under what conditions (time, location, people). If you can design a job like that, it doesn’t feel like work. This makes you more competative and cost effective. This is the opposite of the 4 hour work week because assumes work is something is to be suffered.
  • She is a great speaker. Lots of passion and energy. Uses her whole body to make points and shows it is her essence.
What Computers Can Learn From Popsicle Sticks Nora Abousteit (BurdaStyle.com)
  • “The power of making”.
  • Key phrases: Passing on a skill. Sharing an experience. Reality escape. Original opem source movement. making tranformed he web. New companies exploded with tagging and web 2.0. Making grew online but decreased in the physical world.
  • Maker Faire got a slide – 100K makers gather
  • And i was wrong earlier in the week. Notes are rare but not unheard of at a keynote.
  • However, they were less obvious for this speaker.
  • New normal is personal tech progresses much faster thean enterprise tech
  • IT experts are no longer just in IT. Put training wheels on users.
  • Allow users to express how work best
  • Security inherently makes personal/enterprise tech different. Different risk levels and models. Goal: secure consumer tech
  • Google’s computing cost is such a driver that they put data centers near cheap electricity.
  • Cloud provides benefit if give ps you access to economy of scale.
  • IT needs to focus on differentiating company rather than logistics/operations
  • I haven’t heard the word crowdsourcing in a while.
  • Combining new tech and old/popular is more compelling because draws on what people liked the first time.
  • his project was having people recreate 15 seconds of video recreating the movie but funnier. He showed a minute of video. It was weird seeing the scene/characters change every 15 seconds butnot disconcerting.
  • Community sourcing because people working on shared goal. And ok that was lot of work for little rewarded.
  • First time online only production won an emmy
  • Starwarsuncut.com
Crowdsourcing the Brooklyn Museum Shelley Bernstein (Brooklyn Museum)
  • Improve user experience in the real world – signs, seats, readable labels, friendly floor staff, allow photos (not all shows, still trying to get artists to agree)
  • Visitors improve by leaving electonic comments to post on web and email to curators
  • Collection online with tagging and comments, give people cred for contributions
  • Book: Blink – split second decisions are powerful
  • Made activity online to see which like better and ask questions about it online.
  • Learned: some works universal, limiting time made complex images more favored, people liked images with labels/description/context
  • Common sense is implicit human intelligencd for navigating concrete everudat situations. We follow a ton of rules just to choose clothes and get to work without thinking about it.
  • The problem is using common sense for comolicated situations like politics.
  • We match “obvious” by choosing facts that match provided answer.
  • “everything is obvious once you know the answer”
  • Post hoc “explanations” are really stories. Tell us what happened, but not why. We are tempted to generalize the stories to make predictions.
  • In complex systems, history never really repeats in subtle but important ways.
  • policy, stategy and marketing can benefit from this now because we can measure social things.
  • Book: everything is obvious once you know the answer
How Are Brands Using Facebook Right Now? Michael Lazerow (Buddy Media)
  • Half of facebook users log in every day. More facebook likes/comments than google searches per month
  • 31% of all ad impressions in US are on Facebook – wow
  • What next: businesses reorg around people/connections
  • Must offer something of value – coupon, discount content, access

What’s next?

  • car as an app? Car knows where you are and when stop. [four square like]. [NYers don’t have cars. Phones are more universal here]
  • Ask friends for advice from dressing room before buy clothes

This is “social commerce”

A New Dimension for Google Maps Brian McClendon And Evan Parker (Google)
  • google Earth downloaded 1 bikkion times as of last week
  • Google maps – first map site to use ajax
  • On android, uses open gl to make 3d maps
  • Today announcing 3d maps on desktop without a plugin
  • Click try it now in bottom left corner
  • Now every line of frame in every frame drawn with gl
  • Smooth zooming
  • Labels fade in and out smoothly as zoom
  • See 3d skyscrapers as zoom in and move around – cool!
  • Showed zooming into collesium in rome – really does look like seeing from a plane
  • If keep zooming in switches to street view
  • Showed the High Line park in 3d
  • Works in chrome and firefox 8 beta. More coming
The Internet Baratunde Thurston (The Onion)
  • He wrote a book based on a stray thought that became a meme on twitter (#howtobeblack)
  • #livewriting let people watch while wrote the end and went better than expected
  • And nice to end with humor

live blogging web 2.0 expo – wednesday keynotes

See table of contents for full list of web 2.0 expo posts

Opening Remarks Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Media, Inc.), Sarah Milstein (TechWeb)

The Online Animal Economy: Examining the Cute Kitty Video Patrick Davison (WhatWeKnowSoFar/MemeFactory)

  • Talking about cats. How could this be bad? The title of this talk is one chapter in a book the author is writing and the talk is about the author went about writing it.
  • The videos got laughter unsurprisingly. It isn’t just kittys. I liked the dog riding a turtle.
  • The theory is this is about human-animal interaction being funny being more public/tv and cute being more private/youtube. Theory was wrong. Most youtube videos were exotic animals, violent animals, funny, cute and sexual. Kitties dominate the cute category. Including baby panda as a kitty. New media gets wisdom and weird stuff from crowd.

The Five Laws of Engagement Siobhan Quinn (foursquare)

  1. We seek comfort in relationships, surrounds us with a community – anonymous communities still count (like postsecret where anonymously submit secret via postcard)
  2. We are all unique and have something to say; give us tools to express ourselves – blog, comments
  3. We need to feel important, use rewards to make us feel special – use exclusivity to do so (like invite mechanism for gmail invites) or competition or reputation
  4. We are hypnotized by beauty, give us something pretty to look at
  5. We are captivated by the unknown, captivate curiousity -a monkey will try to solve a puzzle just because it is there – use surprise (different prize for different checkins) or organization (visual chaos) or teasing (7 habits book has teaser in title)

Las Vegas represents these 5 laws in a physical place. The reason people feel bad after is the 5 laws exploit us rather than using to make better people/community. Reward people or inspire them.
Note: Four Square launched feature today with ios 5 location feature so can push info about places pass by. [I don’t use four square for privacy reasons, new feature sounds like another level of creepyness]

CMO = chief marketing officer
IBM did a study and learned:

  • Expecting more complexity over time
  • Think need to focus on delivering vslue to empowered customers, foster lasting connections and capture value/measure results

Talk was somewhat dry, but if you want to read the study: www.ibm.com/cmostudt

Sex, Lies, and Data Mining R. Luke DuBois (Polytechnic Institute of NYU)

  • Speaker uses data to make portraits. Data changing too fast, getting dizzy.
  • See eye charts with words presidents used at lukedubois.com – same idea as tag clouds
  • Registered on 21 dating sites in every zip code to gather data on profiled. Then overlaid key traits on map of US. NYC # 1 word is “now”. By contrast to most cities which have a noun.
  • See online at perfect.lukedubois.com
  • People have more confidence in online info than info from a sales clerk
  • Now you can borrow an item to where once
  • There are a lot of fashion tyoe websites out there. Similarly for using platforms like youtube for fashion
  • While computation power is increasing, human attention capacity is about the same or decreasing.
  • A computer is mostky i/o and less cpu/memory parts
  • Instead of cheap laptops, we have more types of devices with chips -phones, tablets, car security remote, credit cards, etc
  • Competition drives diverification because add different features
  • Mouse and keyboard succesful for human scale device. Similarly, touch best for small devices. [not for typing on an ipad]
  • Motion remotes good for large screens
  • Productivity mostly happens on human scale devices and others are for consumption
  • Mouse and keyboard not going away; just becoming smaller portion of devices. True for other i/o devices even brain based input. The myth is one i/o device for everything.
  • Currently in era of specialization.

I really liked this keynote!

VC Perspective Joanne Wilson, Mo Koyfman (Spark Capital)

This one is more about the next thing – startup showcase than a keynote. The judges of that eben are covering how they will judge startups before people leave. Like that one of them commented the couch isn’t on the stage.