Except for one thing. Hulu is co-owned by NBC and News Corp, 2 companies with zero heart and zero soul. So when Google comes along and offers them a wad of cash - they’ll have to consider it.
It’s not like there’s a 23 year old at the helm.
They raised $100 million out of the gate, and the management team looks like a poster ad for Harvard University.
Pity that we can’t view the content here in Australia. Hulu’s licensing pact only applies to the USA at present.
Mark Cuban is a smart bastard. His blog post makes sense.
For a video on Mark, here’s the footage of him at Blogworld last year in Vegas. Clearly one of the highlights of the event.
Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL and in this presentation, he talks about the scale behind AOL’s instant messaging platform (AIM).
Didn’t think a messaging platform could detect patterns on broadcast television? Then think again.
AIM is one of those underestimated technologies that keeps on growing and with over 14 million users, now commands the number 3 position in the global messaging market.
This session was presented by Steve Pearman, one of Tom Anderson’s top deputies (he’s currently SVP of Product Strategy).
Anderson is one of the co-founders of the social networking juggernaut, along with Chris DeWolfe.
Pearman rattles off some amazing numbers. Like 117 million unique users in March 08, 100 billion rows of data which can be mined anyway they like (not a typo, it reads “billions”), 85 gigs of bandwith, 50 million messages a day and so on.
Son of a bitch, that’s big.
If ever you needed a real live example of what scale means on the internet, then MySpace is it.
O’Reilly Media, as a major publishing group, clearly has a “roster” of preferred speakers - who incidentally, have their books published by O’Reilly Publishing.
Makes sense.
Clay Shirky is one smart dude.
His presentation to the core audience of Web 2.0 was one of the stronger ones. Shirky is well regarded as a writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.
And anyone who begins a speech talking about alcohol is alright by me!. More on Clay at his website here and here.
From the speaker profile section of the Web 2.0 Expo website.
As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products.
Baker was born and raised in Berkeley, California, receiving her BA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law. Her law career included working for Sun Microsystems and Netscape. She has also sat on the board of the Open Source Applications Foundation.
Baker has been the general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999, helping shape the license under which Netscape’s source code was released. In 2003, she became president and founder of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. In 2005, Baker led the creation of Mozilla Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Baker served as as CEO of the corporation until January 2008, when Mozilla’s rapid growth encouraged her to shift her focus back to the scope and mission of the project. As Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Baker continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents.
TIME Magazine profiled Baker under “Scientists and Thinkers” in its 2005 TIME 100. She has also appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show” and “CNN Global Office” to discuss open source software and the Firefox phenomenon.
This session proved so popular last year, that the event organisers ran it again this year.
Essentially, budding young start-ups get 5 minutes each to present to the audience and to a panel of hardened venture capitalists. The audience then gets to decide the best pitch after each presentation.
Moderated by John Battelle and Brady Forrest, the session attracted big numbers and was held in the main ballroom of Moscone West.
At this year’s Launch Pad, 6 finalists presented their case.
To be honest, I didn’t get all of them but the one I liked best (along with the rest of the audience) was a company called Triggit, which is all about “website monetization made simple”. As soon as the guys from Triggit demonstrated their application using “drag and drop”, the audience had their “ah-hah” moment.
Battelle and Forrest did a good job of keeping the pace of the whole thing.
My takeaway from all of this. If you’ve only got 5 minutes to present to 500 people and a judging panel, people won’t remember your slides.
They will however, remember your marketing - and the guys from Triggit just happened to be wearing very loud red shirts with their logo emblazoned on the front. True, their product was simple to understand and their website straight to the point.
Charlene Li from Forrester interviews Max Levchin from Slide at the first Keynote of the Expo.
I only recently learned who Max was - which is probably the way he likes it. Fame and fortune came his way with the creation of PayPal and he gracefully exited PayPal with US$1.5 billon of eBay’s money.
Most entrepreneurs in the room breathed a collective sigh of relief when Max recounted the 4 failed start-ups and an obliterated credit history before finding success with PayPal.
He’s clearly excited about the future of Slide. Who wouldn’t be given the mass exposure their applications receive within Facebook. According tho the Slide website they reach 144 million global viewers each and every month and have 30% of the US internet audience. (Slide make those zany applications like Funwall and Superpoke).
Max strikes me as still the sort of guy who doesn’t really know what all the fuss is about, is clearly uncomfortable about the fame and attention and simply wants to get on with his quiet world domination plans.
My poor MacBook Air is struggling under the weight of video content from yesterday. That along with my jet-lag and I’m running behind.
Anyway, coming shortly is the Keynote from Day One with Tim O’Reilly (founder of the Web 2.0 Conference Series) and an interview with Charlene Li (from Forrester) and Max Levchin from PayPal fortune and now the driving force behind Slide.
I thought Max’s session was great. Especially the part about him failing miserably at the first 4 start-ups (before he hit pay dirt with PayPal) and ruining his credit history. I doubt though he’ll need anyone else’s money anytime soon though.
Standby for the videos. It will be up on Blip.tv soon and posted here shortly.
Coming later today will be Marc Andreessen with John Battelle, Mitchell Brown from Mozilla and Jonathan Zittrain from Oxford University.
I actually can’t do Alister Cameron any sort of justice with this post summary because I’m not a technical junkie. I managed to watch the entire video, but as soon as Alister started talking about tagging, semantic query, CSS, Sandbox etc, I drifted off to somewhere calmer in my own mind and found myself thinking about Jessica Alba, coconut oil and a secluded beach in Tahiti.
Or something like that.
I’m actually going to ask Ben, our resident geek to comment on Alister’s session later today. Ben was the one behind the camera.
So, while I’m not technically inclined and not a credible witness, one thing I am confident of is my ability to pick passionate, smart people. This is Alister. He was in his element. And you can easily tell that he’s passionate about design, passionate about finding a better way of doing things on the web (from a technical perspective) and smart enough to build his own plugin for Wordpress - called “Classy Body”.
He’s a self confessed “code-junkie”, a “best practices junkie” and to him, “coding matters”.
He knows his stuff. If you were a corporate person watching this video or meeting Alister, you could be confident that you’ve found your man, in terms of 100% technical competence. And I’m sure if Alister was presenting to a non-technical audience, he would be easily able to explain things in simple english.
As I said, I’ll ask Ben to weigh in below in the first comment section with his thoughts. You can find out more about Alister at his sitehere and the Classy body plugin Alister refers to in the clip is here.
And keywords that are important to this discussion and post are (Tagging, Semantic Query, Classy Body, Yahoo User Interface Library, Grid/Font/Reset, Wordpress Themes, Sandpress).
Bottom line is this - Alister is a hard core blogger. His own blog is living proof. The thing is packed to the roof with content about the niches he plays in. He has focus and is a smart marketer. If you’re a techie, watch the entire clip. If you’re not, make your techie watch the clip and take notes.
I actually missed this session, so I only have the video footage to rely on (like many of you). A 7 year old was waiting for me at home to make sure all the Dads at our place had enough beer to drink while 30 kids wrecked our back yard celebrating his birthday.
I’ve been wanting to meet Darren for a while now and we quickly bumped into each other outside the Wordcamp Melbourne venue (as I was leaving and he was arriving).
Darren’s main site - ProBlogger is considered the number 1 blog in Australia, according to Blogpond - the “semi-official” monitor of blog rankings on our shores. Actually, Meg has done a terrific job with this - and will admit the pitfalls of the way Blogpond ranks who makes the Top 100 and who doesn’t. No system is perfect, and until a better way of blog measurement is found (and agreed on), then most people are simply happy to see their blog make the list.
I don’t think Darren cares where he sits on the list. Well, that maybe not quite true. But, once you visit ProBlogger and his Digital Photography School blog, you’ll quickly realise that he’s a hard core publisher. Content is first rate, the monetisation efforts are optimised without being intrusive and he generates a lot of “interraction” within his community - sometimes generating comments in the 300-400 range. This is normally left to the likes of Mark Cuban et al.
Darren is a pro. He’s a part of the B5 Media group, a publisher of many blogs, a well respected and well liked entity within the blogging community and a good example of how, if you really want to make a full time living from blogging, you should go about it.
I know James Farmer was grateful for Darren’s appearance at Wordcamp. As was I. And it’s good to see that in Melbourne, we have 2 of the blog community’s leading blog authorities in Darren Rowse and Alex Shiels.
And Aviansh points us to a in depth approach about how to measure the success of your blog here. You can see the entire video of Avinash’s presentation from Blogworld by following this link.
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