EightBlack.

Ok, I’m a bit behind with posting. Man, there’s a lot going on. Here’s a quick snapshot and I’ll elaborate in more detail later.

Straight after Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Marissa Mayer from Google gave us an overview on Google Health. This brief session was disappointing - and I’m a big fan of Google as readers will know. I’m also totally convinced that Marissa is a great presenter (and apparently not a harder worker you will find within Google). However, this wasn’t her best day.

Anssi Vanjoki from Nokia was up next. He was one cool customer and a serious heavy weight within Nokia (Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multi-Media). There’s something about the finnish accent that enables you to listen to them all day.

In many respects, Nokia had to be given ample opportunity to pitch their product and their company, given that they were the Platinum sponsor of the Web 2.0 event. Vanjoki talked about the mobile phone needing to be “context aware”. Can you imagine that Nokia have shipped over 1 billion phones already. In typical Nordic understatement, Vanjoki regarded this massive number as only just the beginning…

Next Evan Williams, the founder and CEO of Twitter. I don’t quite get this mini social networking phenomenan yet, but I reckon it’s here to stay.
Questions he posed to the audience, “What can we add to make something better?” and “What can we take away to create something new?”
Twitter in many ways, is a blogging app.

Evan is ex Google, worked on Blogger. Very smart. Very unassuming. Key message: “What can you create by taking something away?”

Mike Moritz, Sequoia Capital (and Mike was one of the early investors in Google, along with John Doerr) and a Google Board Member for many years. Key quote, when talking about the search behemoth.

“I wish that every company that we had been involved with had made the mistakes that Google had…”

When asked “What makes them great?”.

He responded with…”The leaders of the company worry all the time – and this is one of the great things about the company. This is not a complacent group of people. They never rest”.

Quotes I’ll remember and use for a while…

“We’re going online because that’s where our customers are…” Philippe Dauman, CEO, Viacom

“The Platform race is over. The internet has already won”. Jeff Huber, VP Engineering, Google.

More to come as soon as I dissect everything. One thing I have noticed since the start of the year, the corporate giants are starting to wake up to the internet and Web 2.0. Nokia, HP, Viacom, NBC, and a whole host of other Fortune 500 companies are all here. And apparently, all now listening.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 8:31 am and is filed under Google, Social Networking, Twitter, Web 2.0. 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.