I Survived the Web 2.0 Expo
April 19, 2007 Posted by Tara in : Humor, News, Opinion, Reviews , trackback,
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I arrived at Moscone West in San Francisco early on Monday so that I could get an amazing seat for my first session of the Web 2.0 Expo 2007. As soon as I got there, I headed to the check-in desk to pick up my badge. There, I was given my first indicator of how this experience was going to be. All the badges were color-coded - mine was yellow, meaning that I only paid $100 for access to a few sessions, the keynote speaker - Jeff Bezos! - and the Expo hall at large. Translation: All people in possession of yellow badges are the lowest form of life at the Web 2.0 Expo. One of the many rude staff members handed me my scarlet letter, I mean badge, with a grunt as I watched all of the blue and gray badge people get bags of free goodies and information while I am excluded.
Dejected, I traveled upstairs to get to that coveted “good seat” (or shall I say seat period, since those who did not get seats were forced to sprawl on the floor). I reached my destination - “Jump Start Your Startup,” which should have been named “Listen to Dan Roberts from Sun Microsystems drone on and on about Sun products that are too costly to deploy and have nothing to do with my startup.” It only took me about 3.5 minutes to realize I was going to get zero out of this session. I got up and headed over to “The Wonderful World of Wikis: Case Studies, Benefits, Dos and Don’ts†presented by Ken Lui (InfoGation, Holographix, HNC Software, Virage, and IPivot.) This session was really informative. Ken talked about the benefits of Wiki compared to Forums and Blogs and laid out some cost effective solutions for companies that wanted to use Wiki as part of their websites or for their intranet systems.
The next session was also very informative: “Profit from the Long Tail by Tapping the Invisible Crowd,†which was presented by Jack Jia (Baynote). This session discussed long tail economics and the notion of who is visiting your website that you are not able to track and what harnessing their interests can do for your company. He raised some interesting points - for most users visiting a website, it will take 6 mouse clicks to find the information they are looking for; a lot of those users will leave if they can’t find the information in the first 3 clicks. He then discussed some options for companies to harness the invisible crowd such as using navigation guides and observers that can track what people are looking at, not just what they’re buying.
After this session I moved on to the keynote speaker: Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com). Although Amazon.com has deployed some interesting web apps for bourgeoning companies, most of the information Jeff had went over my head as he spoke to the entire 15,000 person crowd as if we were all software engineers.
Finally, after 7 hours of weird experiences and semi-informative sessions, they opened the doors to the expo which basically turned into a free-for-all of techies trying to trample each other to get to the free promo products - ugly tech T-shirts and free beer (yes, there was free beer). People were for the most part rude and completely oblivious to my personal space. I only lasted 20 minutes before I had a near anxiety attack and had to leave.
Overall, my experience was mediocre at best. I suggest that next year they choose a locale that has more space to move around so that attendees can actually make contact with the companies they are interested in.
Cheers go to Jack Jia from Baynote for being super informative and passionate about his product and all of the companies that supplied the free tech and business publications (Revenue, Fastcompany.com, Information Week, Technology Review, Entrepreneur.com).
I now have enough reading material to keep me occupied for 2 weeks.
Jeers go to the Moscone West staff. They were rude, unsavory and generally incompetent. Jeers also go to the badge feudal system - I was definitely a serf.
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Comments»
Did you miss the Web 2.0 Open? It was the best part of the whole Expo! So many interesting discussions, so many cool people. Really, there was nothing useful at the Expo outside of the “Open.” More tech conferences should have ‘em.
Yes, I did not get to go because I was only there on Monday. Did they let yellow badgers in? What did you think about the panel with the CEO’s of Digg and 6 Apart?
The yellow badgers (and anyone without a badge) were welcome at the Web 2.0 Open.
I was pretty bored at the Digg/6 Apart panel; how many of us are really going have to worry about the “pressures” of a potential IPO? The experiences they shared just didn’t seem relevant to what the majority of people there would like to know.