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Oct 8, 04:34 am: [Web 2.0] Day 3, part 2

• Kim Polese, SpikeSource
  • company that tests, supports and certifies open source products
• Joe Kraus, JotSpot
  • hosted wiki service—do-it-yourself publishing, moving into do-it-yourself apps. Moving from being able to non-technical people writing for the web (that will stay) into non-technical people being able to do apps on the web
• Conversation:
  • Kraus: can’t keep stuff in beta, need to actually charge on the stuff. Don’t focus on revenue too late. People want to feel rewarded and, without revenue, choose to feel rewarded by buzz.
  • Polese: learned that people already had their own stacks—hard to sell that. And that their companies needed support of existing stacks.
  • Kraus: keeping people together, able to see each other helps to create/maintain energy
  • Kraus: nothing inspires great people to work at a company more than working with great people

• John Kish, Wyse
  • talking about the growth of thin client computing in the 3rd world
  • challenge, with infrastructure investment, is to drive down the cost of the desktop. This isn’t just true in the enterprise but in a lot of other markets
  • on the thin-client, it is easier to troubleshoot, deploy applications and generally manage the devices.
  • security is also an issue; the lost laptop with a variety of sensitive information on it. Centralizing the data and providing access to it via hard drive-less computers can help prevent this problem (actual legislation making this illegal in Japan; HIPAA here is related)
  • (from slide) Bridging the Digital Divide with Thin Computing: – the first Rural Business Center (RBC) solution; – Technology, service and financial solutions that reduce inefficiencies and high cost of paper-based systems in rural India and world wide; – a low cost infrastructure; – easy to manage; secure, robust and reliable; – a blueprint with the intent to deploy across India and world wide.
  • problems in rural India: dusty, minimum of local technical resources
  • once access has been solved, what services need to be provided?
  • access to banks that do microfinance loans, educational institutions to provide literacy training online
  • essentially setting up ecosystems to support the local economy
  • Wyse’s press release on this
  • (it really is the kinds of services that are deployed over the Internet that makes this possible)

• Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra
  • open source client/server application for messaging and collaboration
  • demo’d ajax interface
  • it’s all about the browser
  • very slick demo
  • web services enabled platform so that you can write different clients

• Jim Lazone, Ask
  • 1.3 million feeds have at least 1 subscriber
  • 14,000 with 50 subscribers or more

• Sergey Brin
  • interesting—he took a underdog stance in comparison with Terry Semel and his quoted remarks from yesterday
  • search market share: delighted that so many people can use Google’s product; people come to Google because of the search experience, most important that’s why they stay

• Prosumer media with Mena Trott, SixApart, Mark Fletcher, Bloglines, Rich Skrenta, Topix
  • idea of prosumer media is creating a business that gets built by other people—the users create the value
  • asked them all the Google competition question. Not sure how valuable that is.
  • Trott: in the communications business

tagged: web2con, net2, conference, services