Day 1
The WEB2.0 conference has started!
It seems that every year more and more people attend - I guess there are about 4 .000 people here from over the whole globe gathered to discuss new ideas and trends in Internet. What strikes me first is that everybody has an iphone, 80% a macbook and almost half of the attendees an iPad (!).
Mobile computing being one of the main topics of course. (Raven Zachary had a nice view on this: the nineties was about desktop computing, the last decade about laptop computing and now starting in 2010 we really set of with mobile computing.) Actually Apple is one of the first mobile device companies. We quickly learn in conversations that consensus is that work is laptop, home and travel is iPad.
There's been a lot of discussion lately about the future of browsing (more about that later this week) and I am convinced that the days of naturalness of using a browser to access data are gone. We are using more and more apps already and other forms to unlock data will emerge.
Christian Crumlish made a case for allowing users to play with the information / website we give them. The curation of datafeeds of twitter / facebook / foursquare etc. So more then a retweet or a facebook liking.
Next to that the computer gives us a sort of "mask" to hide our identity in the world. We can takethat idea a step further a give people a whole new identity? :-)
It was also the day we heard of the petabyte age ( that is a 1000 terrabyte). When will we have a petabyte drive at home? 3 years?
This conference is all about the Web as a platform with social and geo analysis, real time. We will hear a lot more about that the coming days.
Microsoft Dallas labs showed some very interesting concepts like odata which immediately gave me all kinds of new business ideas.
