Didn’t get a chance to join the 5,000 people that attended Web 2.0 Expo? I did, and here’s a rundown of some of the cool and not-so-cool stuff I saw.
- Cool – Dapper. This is a tool to pull in any non-open data into any kind of application. In the demo I saw, the CEO, Eran Shir, created a data interface to his LinkedIn profile and then created a widget to browse all his contacts in his LinkedIn profile. Dapper has been around for a while, but it was the first time I saw it.
- Not-so-cool – Jeff Bezos. He spoke at the keynote address on Monday night and it was a friggin’ advertisement for his Amazon S3 hosting and application running service. He better have paid dearly to do that keynote. There were THOUSANDS of people in Moscone West to listen to an advertisement. BTW, I’ve never attended a keynote that was any good. Millionaires and billionaires stay millionaires and billionaires by NOT revealing anything of any value in front of thousands of people.
- Cool – Bungee Labs. The company announced a complete Web-based tool and service called Bungee Connect. This is a development environment for creating Web apps that is fully on the Web. There’s nothing to install, even for the coder! Development is free. Beta testing is free. Once you go commercial with your application/service is when you start paying for it. And you only start paying once you start drawing a critical audience. Dana Gardner has a nice writeup of the tool/service.
- Not-so-cool – Not being prepared. There is nothing more pathetic than seeing a booth set up with no demo or a crippled demo. The “not being prepared” title goes to Fatdoor. They had computers set up in their booth showing their homepage that just said, “Launching Soon.” Click the link and you’ll see. When I asked the rep what Fatdoor was he just said, “Community around location,” but he had nothing to show. Yet for some reason he was all excited. Yes, because he’s seen it. I haven’t. Show me a mockup or something.
The “crippled demo” title goes to Sharade which is a cool service that lets you scan the barcodes of your CDs, DVDs, books, and other products and put them up on a virtual shelf. What’s really cool about it is that you can scan the products in using your webcam, yet they didn’t have a demo to show off that capability. They said they couldn’t do it with a Mac camera, but that they could do it with a Logitech camera. Why no Logitech camera then? They had a Dell computer set up in their demo station. Their answer was, “Oh, come back tomorrow and we’ll have it.” Guess what? I’m NOT COMING BACK TOMORROW. I’m here now. You spent a fortune for this booth. Go and run to Best Buy and purchase another webcam for $100. Pathetic. - Cool – Ustream.tv. Free live streaming of video to the Internet. Just set up an account and start streaming a live event. Robert Scoble had a baseball hat on with a camera and was streaming some video through Ustream. He had about 50 people watching at the time. You can also record your live streams.
- Cool – Octopz. An online environment for collaboration with rich media. While I’m not a big fan of the Web 2.0 trend of pulling vowels out of words and replacing an “s” with a “z” I was impressed with this service. Simply pulls up image and video viewers and you can annotate creative for editing. Full live collaboration with IM, VoIP, whiteboarding, and videoconferencing, PLUS asynchronous collaboration through version tracking of annotations.
- Not-so-cool – The “What is Web 2.0?” conversation – I’ve had enough of that. It’s not funny. It’s not a situation of those “in the know” are clued in. And no, I didn’t think the t-shirts that said “Web 2.0 is _________” were clever either. I’ve decided I’m going to use mine as a rag to check my oil.
