By Julie Blaustein, archived from 2009
Its the 3rd day of the Web 2.0 Expo. You would think the scene would start to chill but instead the momentum has picked up. Its more crowded, there are great keynotes and so many great sessions, its a major head ache to choose which session to attend; not the worst problem to encounter at an expo of course. The Expo was packed, especially when the booths turned into bars with free alcohol for the Expo web crawl. Numerous languages were spoken due to the many international attendees and many vendors hailed from other countries. The folks from Ghost, from Palestine and Israel, provide a Global Hosted Operating System. This is a Virtual Computer (VC) service that includes a personal desktop, files and applications, available from any browser or mobile phone. Even more fascinating than their technology is the fact that they are a collaboration of an Israeli and Palestinian team, working together and backed by Benchmark despite the differences in their countries.
He attended Launch Pad where 5 start up companies competed through real time voting to win the approval of the audience. It was moderated by John Batelle of Federated Media. It was great to have the founder of not only Wired Magazine but the Standard as the moderator, but other than introducing each company, he sadly did not contribute much to the conversation. There were luckily three great judges though; Marshall Kirkpatrick of the popular blog, ReadWriteWeb, Matt Marshall of VentureBeat and Anand Iyer of Microsoft who asked great questions and kept the presenters on their feet.
It was an entertaining way to spend part of the afternoon. There was 80 Legs, a web scale application that provides crawlers to look at databases, search engines and other things on the Internet with lots of pages. It could potentially save companies millions by avoiding expensive data centers with their solution. Bantam Networks provides an online workspace for businesses. Its dashboard provides updates and features that integrates a number of social media components such as LinkedIn, Twitter and more to come. DubMeNow seeks to shift the process of exchanging business cards via paper to instead via one’s mobile phone through applications such as the iPhone and the Blackberry. Or through SMS text, anyone can can use their technology. ZeaLog provides ways for one to track and measure goals through the apps that they build for the site. The most popular apps track one’s weight or sit ups. Sponsorship is based on the community, so not surprisingly you will find lots of ads for weight loss. And, finally there is Nitobi who has been around for 1o years, but just last year launched PhoneGap which is behind their success. They were chosen as the overall WINNER. They are also a darling of open source allowing anyone to develop apps to run on a number of devices including the iPhone, Nokia, Android and the Palm pre. They plan to monetize by providing tools to build, host and test in the Cloud. After the session I tried to decied where to go next. Go to my Flickr page to see the many more options at the Web 2.0 Expo.