EightBlack.

Those who know me, know I spend more my fair share of time travelling. This however, was a bit of a quest (ok, it sounds a bit corny, but its true).

For me, the last 4 days at Moscone West defined the future (ie the next 12 months of the web). Only a fool would try to predict any further than that.

The picture above is just one of many. Head on over to Flickr if you want more.

The thing that gets me is this though. When we arrived, in the conference pack was a large stack of papers with a lonely staple holding it all together. Must have been 30 pages at least. I’ll check when I get home. On closer inspection, it contained the names, email addresses, company information and contact numbers for EVERY attendee (the ones who opted in anyway).

I actually went throught the entire list. Found about 20 Aussies - and not one from a recognisable company, other than a private family printing company who were recently acquired by News Corp. There were a heap of people from Europe, more than enough from the UK (ok, maybe only 1 one or 2, but you tell me, 1 to 2 drunk Brits is more than enough…)

A contingent of folks from large Japanese multi-nationals, a smattering of Koreans, Israeli’s, South Africans, Danes etc.

But here’s the thing. Where was corporate?

By that I mean, where were the so called leading digital agencies, the ones who are supposed to be breaking new ground with their holisitic approaches, where was GE, HP, the airlines, the hotels, the car companies, where was WPP, where was Nestle, where were all the pharmaceuticals?

And where were the Telcos?

Maybe they think they know it all. Obviously.

Web 2.0 Expo is considered THE event. The actual main event, Web 2.0 Summit, held in October this year has an invitiation only policy.

It was abundantly obvious that this event, a collection of some of the brightest, most innovative and above all, fearless stakeholders of where the web is heading, was setting the future direction of the entire industry.

More importantly, the guys that impressed me most, were the ones who werent conformists. They were big risk takers and just 5 minutes of conversation left you in no doubt that they had a seriously hard core vision about their business and the gap it filled.

Folks like Ted Shelton (Personal Bee/Technorati), Gabe Rivera (TechMeme), Rich Skrenta (Topix), Oliver Muoto (vflyer), Jeff Bezos and the S3 project, Eric Schmidt from Google, companies such as Twitter and Joost. Just a handful of small and large players who for 4 days, considered themselves equal.

The trends to watch. Social Networking is no longer a passing fad. Big and small companies need to get their heads around this space very, very quickly. Same goes for blogging. Cisco has 10 of them. Enough said. My view is that a company’s blog will become far more important than their main website.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.