San Francisco is a cold and windy place this year. Even though O’Reilly’s European conference got canceled, attendance here is visibly reduced. There are fewer booths, fewer attendees, the parties offer a little more room to breathe than a year ago. We were still technically in a recession last year, a year of record attendances, but that was before we figured it out ourselves and helped tell the world (and our customers) about it.
But what the event lost in numbers, it more than made up for in content. The Web 2.0 Expo this year is all about business. Gone are the underwear gnomes, the flower children, and the googly-eyed hopefuls holding in diffident shame (or convoluted PR) the idea of wanting to make money. People come here with a revenue strategy, not to find one. They want to shorten the prototyping cycles, discover the customer sets offering them the deeper revenue streams, achieve visibility, deliver faster, and lower costs. Even the old euphemisms are gone: “Monetization”, the ultimate after-thought, dissipated in thin air and is barely heard of any more. Money is not in the mind last, it is clearly there ahead, as a way to sustain one’s primary dreams and ambitions of offering the best value out there. People here say what they want to say with pride: “I want to do good” and “I want to make money.”
Quirky Twitter is a business tool, and it now wants to work on Scala rather than Rails. Agile is being reworked. Vendors are here offering SDKs, not promises: eBay and PayPal offering a share of their revenue stream; Palm Pre is courting mobile devs; Windows Mobile Marketplace offering a 70% revenue share in 28 countries from the start. Mozilla is offering new, better cost-efficient ways to build software. “If you want to rebuild this economy”, they say, “we want to be partners”. The VCs are still holding court. People come up with products and services that they can reliably offer their users in sustainable ways.
I like that.
I think this is the best year so far.
Comments
Heri April 02, 2009
Louis-Eric April 02, 2009
What changed this year are the proportions.
The ratio of hard business to pie-in-the-sky has changed dramatically this year; you can tell by the type of attendees as well. Behind the jeans-and-shirts are quite a few business analysts sent by Fortune 500s and large consultancies to see where this is going and who they can do business with.
Louis-Eric April 02, 2009
The only thing that really changed, as far as focus is concerned, is what’s on people’s minds and how they choose what to invest their attention into. The needs are more immediate now that money is (or seems) scarcer, the focus is on cost-saving ops and clouds, investment projections of existing properties into the mobile space, effective team management, and of course revenue generation; things that will make the next few quarters better.
Heri April 02, 2009
Heri
… and I do hope people in “web2.0″ get to think more thanks to conferences like this (might be a good thing, after Techcrunch and all other events celebrated mashups and other gadgets for years)
Montreal Tech Watch April 02, 2009
Web 2.0 Expo: Making Money http://tinyurl.com/c9847p
Stephane Lagrange April 02, 2009
RT @mtw: Web 2.0 Expo: Making Money http://tinyurl.com/c9847p
Fred Brunel April 02, 2009
I had the same experience at SXSW this year, attendance was clearly reduced.
Even if it was a great place to be (to meet people), the content was not as good as Web 2.0 Expo.
Hubert April 02, 2009
Reading: “Montreal Tech Watch » Web 2.0 Expo: Making Money” (http://twitthis.com/k2ph9s)