As Web 2.0 Summit 2008 event (Nov 5-7,2008) is well over,we thought about doing an overall brush-up of the event.Here is a quick round-up of all that was worth noting at this tech event.
Max Levchin(Slide) started a discussion on “The Platform Advantage” at the Web 2.0 Summit. Participants included Vic Gundotra(Google),David Treadwell(Microsoft),Elliot Schrage(Facebook) and Amit Kapur(MySpace).
The talk initiated with a basic outlook of ‘Platform’,going deeper afterwards.Amit pointed that “A platform has to create an ecosystem that includes a core base of users, tools to build applications, and an advertising network to monetize the platform“
New York Magazine’s John Heilemann lead a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit on “The Web and Politics.”. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom,Arianna Huffington and Joe Trippi also joined the panel.The meat of the talk was Obama’s digital strategies and role of internet and social media in his victory over McCain.They compared the “Web” factor of 2008 elections with the “TV” factor of 1960 elections(John F. Kennedy).
There was also a startup contest where Goodguide won the public voting after every participant’s presentation in front of LIVE audience.
When Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang was invited on the stage,there were herd of questions ready to be thrown at him. He clearly denied,being regretful at any of his past decisions and talked about company’s further strategies which were sort of “same old words”.He indicated that he is more than willing for a Microsoft acquisition but kept silence over acquiring AOL.
In Web 2.0 Summit,Cloud computing was definitely one of the prominent buzzwords,specially after Microsoft’s recent entry(Azure) in this sector.
Then there were top guys from Warner and MySpace Music talking about “The Future of Music”.As per the discussion,there will not be one revenue channel that will replace CD revenues.It will take a whole series of business models.Even download revenue won’t be the most important revenue source in the coming years.
When Mark Zuckerberg came on the stage,he was asked about Facebook’s unjustified valuation.He defended it by saying that they cracked the best possible deal with Microsoft.Then Mark talked about Facebook Connect and confirmed that anyone can apply to join the platform.He also said that they aren’t going public,atleast for a few years.