EightBlack.

Let me take a moment to give you some perspective about the size of Moscone West, where Web 2.0 is being held.

For those people in Australia, it makes Jeff’s Shed look like a cloakroom. It’s 3 floors of enormous space and technology. Even people in Texas are heard muttering, “Goddam, this is a mighty big joint”

Or something like this.

After lunch, people started moving up to the main hall for the Keynote Address. Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Media Inc, the event organiser. Jeff Bezos from Amazon. John Battelle and a panel of more smart bastards. Should be great. And it was.

Now, I don’t now about you but when you walk into a conference room and you’re greeted by 6500 other smiling faces, you just cant help but be amazed. They essentially had a TV network operations centre running 6 screens that would shame an outdoor stadium.

First Up - Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media Inc,

The web is just getting started, ideas that drive web 2.0 are far bigger than anyone company. Convergence with mobile, auto, home, office.

The ability to harness collective intelligence - the power of the web. Step back. Think deeply. Where do the trendlines go? Where does the future lead us?

Next Up - Jeff Bezos, Founder Amazon.

Jeff spoke about something that took me a few minutes to understand. Okay, I’m a sales guy not a techno geek. I blamed the jetlag. But it slowly started to seep into my head. I thought “holy shit, have they really built this?”

And they have.

Sidebar: As soon as the Keynote was finished, I jumped on a conference call with our team in Melbourne and I told Ben about it. Ben is our Lead Programmer and one of the smartest guys I have ever met. He’s also 21. Which shits me. Anyway, as I was talking, doing my best to explain what it was that Amazon had built, Ben was already on the specific Amazon page and he was swearing. And he never swears.

This is it.

If you dont get it, dont worry. Show it to someone who understands IT and have them explain it to you.

Unedited notes: Jeff Bezos

Talking about web services - The need for the best quality infrastructure you can afford.

Peak day 920,847,345 S3 requests (putting or getting objects)
Peak second - 16,607 requests

The average person has no respect or regard for the infrastructure behind the Amazons of the world. And why should they?

Blue Origin - Jeff’s personal pursuit for space travel. When the team put video’s on S3, traffic spiked. S3 is the webservices arm of Amazon.

Realisation is that Amazon have carved out a new niche in the webservices space. Massive infrastructure that is affordable to the masses.

Amazon.com is 12 years old now. Its a consumer facing business.
SQS is the webservices business. Its not making money today but they are investing heavily.

Messaging. Storage. Compute.

All these companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon are all scrambling like mad and building out infrastructure as quickly as possible. Water and power are key drivers to Web 2.0’s growth (in the US anyway).

Hate being capacity constrained. Its not the right way to run a business.

Amazon retail business is doing well, large future market sizes. 10 million square feet of fulfilment space.

37Signals - Web 2.0 startup that Jeff is part of.

John Battelle was up next. Most of you know that I’m a big fan of Battelle. He wrote what is probably the most important book you could read about the online space and the implications for the future. The book - The Search. It’s such a good book that I give it to all our clients.

John is also one of the co-founders of Web 2.0, the founder of Battelle Media and Federated Media. Serial Entrepreneur and master penman.

His session was titled “Built to Last Or Built To Sell: Is There A Difference?”. His panel of speakers were terrific.

Jay Adelson, CEO, Digg/Revision3
Joe Kraus, Co-founder & CEO, JotSpot
Mena Trott, President, Six Apart

Unedited notes:
Jotspot - acquired by Google (Joe Kraus)
Six Apart - Mena
http://www.sixapart.com

Title of panel - Built to last or Built to Sell?
What is more important, control or success? Entrepreneurs have to ask this question when they start a company.
How you think about funding? Take less money - more options.

“Google is the oxygen now”…John Battelle

John - Jotspot, Google is a nerd paradise

Grant Skinner - Time Tracking application using Appollo by Adobe

Spock - Search engine for people

Summary:

This session defined the Web 2.0 phenomenon. The industry, and many people within it, are clearly on a mission. They have well and truly forgotton about the insanity around the first bubble and wont make the same mistakes twice.

Let me end this post here with something that John Battelle said that will be stuck in my overtired brain for a long, long time.

“Google IS the oxygen now…”

Rating: 10 out 10.

PS. Off to see John Battelle interview Eric Schmidt, CEO and Chairman of Google. This will be Schmidts first live appearance and interview since the DoubleClick announcement.

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