Typical of San Francisco, and what it costs to live here; on the way from the parking structure to the conference, a homeless person asked me "if I could spare $1000?" My response (and this was early in the morning) was "what do I look like a venture capitalist!" I followed up with "if you have a compelling elevator pitch and a good social networking application, my partners would love to talk with you." That got a puzzled look from the homeless person, and I walked on to Web 2.0.

[More:]

My conversation with the homeless person reminded me a bit of the talk I heard later that day with Mike Arrington asking a bunch of venture capitalists if their model for funding start-ups was broken because lots of companies today took a lot less to start? The answer was maybe, depending on the venture capitalist. So nothing really new from that panel, except a few wise cracks from Dave Hornik (author of the Venture blog) but then wise cracks are always expected from Hornik.

Listening to Blogs

I did go to to an interesting session by Umbria, a Market Research firm that seems to focus on Web 2.0, who had a bunch of great stories about what to do and not to do in getting product feedback on the wild and wooly web. Howard Kushansky, the founder and CEO of Umbria noted that 1 out of 3 people above 30 and 1 out of 2 people under 30 were actively engaged on the web. Additionally 75% did not trust marketing, yet 92% did trust word of mouth for product buying decisions.

The Growth of Blogs

Everyone knows there are millions of blogs, and they are all not just teenagers expressing their angst on MySpace. In 2004 there were 7 million blogs (mine being one of them), today there are 71 million, but unfortunately only a few hundred thousand of those blogs (probably not including mine) are tracked for these statistics. He talked about blog spam, which when we started the collaboration blog was a big problem. Howard also gave a number of examples about how getting customer feedback today is very different on everything from greeting cards to organic food. He finished with "do's and don'ts" including don't do stealth marketing (you will always get caught), and don't get into a flame war with someone who says something bad on your blog (a troll). He also recommended looking at " Word of Mouth Marketing Association" for a more extensive list of do' and don't.

Designing for Community

I also saw a small part of a talk on this topic from Mike Beltzner, a phenomenologist from Mozilla. The net, net of his talk with online communities was to "Listen, Lead and Play."

Bungee Labs

I then had a briefing with Bungee Labs, based in Salt Lake they offer a broad development platform that lets the developer drag and drop different objects and features to help put together an online (read SaaS) application. Bungee and Coghead seem to both have interesting offerings in this space.

Social Dragon

Social Dragon is a social media solution that offers an ad network (like Google) but gives you more control over what ads show up on what pages. It looked like they were in the very early stages of beta development and showed me some mock ups of what pages would look like. I look forward to seeing the tool when it is available in production.

Nexo

Nexo was the most interesting briefing of the day. A couple from Palo Alto had started this with just some angel funding and they announced it at the end of January at the Demo conference. Nexo.com, is still free, no advertizing and is a web site that allows you to share files, photos, do group management, has security, and most of all, I was assured, it was easy to use. So I asked my friend Karen Herzog who run's the non-profile Sophiasgarden.org to take a look at it and see if it was usable to her. Since the Nexo folks said that they had gotten good traction with non-profits, educational groups, and also religious groups.

I asked if it was easy to create a site, and to upload a lot of files to get a group site started. Nexo does not support WebDav, but does allow you to pick multiple files or pictures to upload. The tool is built in HTML and Java and offers a rich interface that is customizable. They do offer templates to start (not CSS) but do offer a number of tools to help with customization. In all they will offer 30 modules including a feed reader, e-mail notification (kind of like Yahoo Groups but better thought out), Polling (even for people who are not part of the group). They currently have about 10,000 users, and are looking to add other modules that might be more useful to the enterprise like workflow, etc.

Denodo Technologies

My last briefing of the day. Whew! These guys do data mashups. Denodo they are from Spain and just got a CEO and new office in Palo Alto. This is another Web 2.0 middleware play. However, this one has been active in Europe and has lots of customers. Their typical sale is about $130k, but they also offer a $10k subscription on the low end. They support the integration of structured data, web data and unstructured data (e-mail, documents, etc.) and this 80 person company currently has about 60 clients.

The Mob Scene

The show floor then opened around 4:00 and was a mob scene. After getting acosted by friends and acquaintances for about a half hour I shoved my way through the crowds for a short while and then left. Tuseday looks to be an even busier day with a few presentations to go to (SMB applications), SEO Trends, and Dave Hornik's Viral Marketing talk) along with 8 briefings. So more on that in tomorrow's blog.

Collaboration 2.0 Presentation

If you want to see my brief presentation on Collaboration 2.0 (live) today at 1:30 PDT from the Yugma booth on the Web 2.0 Expo show floor (a 15 minute presentation) click on this link:

https://www.yugma.com/app/loading.php?user=&collsession=109912993&role=4

Meeting ID: 109-912-993
Meeting Date: 17-April-2007
Meeting Time: 01:30 pm (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada); Tijuana
Duration: 30 Minutes
Telephone Conference Bridge Number: +1-218-486-3889 Access Code: 109912993

Vendors I am being briefed by today include:
Near-Time
DreamFactory
Kapow Technologies
Cambrian House
LongJump
Yguma
e-touch wiki
Zoho