Greetings from very chilly San Francisco where the 2nd edition of the SF Web 2.0 Expo, organized by O’Reilly and Techweb, is going strong. Yesterday was the kick-off to the geeky celebration of all things surrounding social computing, with a full-day of seminars and demos for those willing to shell out a few extra bucks. Attendees could choose from a whopping 14 3-hour workshops during the day. The most promising of the morning track was a presentation by Vanessa Fox (the lady who organized and promoted Google Webmaster Central) and Nathan Buggia (Program Manager for Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center) on “SEO-friendly web application design”: tons of tips and techniques to help search engines crawl, understand and index web applications and applets, as well as a list of dangerous pitfalls to avoid. There are pages and pages of great ideas taken out of this workshop, and you can get it all for free off of the private website janeandrobot.com (an already very valuable resource to be further enriched in the near future based on workshop participant questions).
The afternoon seminar was a promising one on making innovation happen on time. The fact that it was presented by an ex-Microsoftie is somewhat ironic (as it would be if the topic had covered bug-free code or open-source), but Scott Berkun has clearly learned from the depths of the trenches and came up with a toolbox of ideas and concepts useful for firing up innovative thought processes in teams larger than an entrepreneur and a few dedicated buddies (if you lead Facebook or a corporate MIS dev team, this one was for you; for startups the material beyond idea generation was academic). The “on time” part was a trifle thin on details (it was delivered in the last 20 minutes) and basically summed up to three ideas: account for weekends and natural downtimes when planning schedules, cut features before you get late on delivery instead of after, and build in a scheduling/design/experimentation dry-run stage before the start of any project to see how your expectations about tasks and times gel together.
The evening entertainment was an eye-opener. Held in Jamie Zawinski’s technodive-ish DNA Lounge, Ignite SF was a fast-paced Demo-like presentation platform where selected speakers could come and entertain the audience for 5 minutes on a topic of their choice; they were awarded 20 slides of presentation and usually not enough time to cover them all. Topics ranged from startups’ relationships to user commentary (metblogs.com), one lady’s particular love for giant Cloverdale-like monsters, Salim Ismail‘s experiment with explaining startup growth through Pirsig-like metaphysics, Christian Crumlish‘s hilarious take on social anti-patterns (the bit on how to send automated friend-plea rejection notices from social networks was priceless), an exploration of the open SMS-accessible digital signage around DNA lounge, and a few oddball speeches on successful interviews, the leveraging of your user base, and search engine optimization. The event was a bit like StartUpCamp but with more presenters and no experts, a lot less presentation time than at BarCamp, and a whole lot of hecklers droned out by the chatty crowd whose discussions were lighted up by the variety of topics at hand. This is great way to get to know local techies and entrepreneurs through a wide variety of quirky angles. It is also very fun — we should have this back home.
Louis-Eric Simard is a local tech entrepreneur and an occasional contributor to Montreal Tech Watch who will cover the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco as well as follow-up articles on the Montreal companies presenting at the National Association of Broadcasters show held in Las Vegas last week. He is an International Business graduate of the John Molson School of Business.
