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Saturday Oct 20, 2007

Web 2.0 Summit 2007


This week, the Web 2.0 Summit 2007 in San Francisco represented my 1 year anniversary of working in/on/around Web 2.0.  

I've been working on a variety of internet and web projects since 1994, but Web 2.0 became a key term in my life a little more than 1 year ago.

Last year, presentations were about emerging online apps that can bring entertainment, productivity, or organization to my life.  The energy was high.  Sessions were crowded.  Parties were fun.  Professional networking was working.

This year, the content was light.  Check out the presentations. Very little new or innovative applications were highlighted.  Energy was medium.  The crowd was still professionally networking, but were interested in each other a little differently.

It wasn't for lack of trying, though.  John B. tried his best to get speakers to disclose new or edgy information.  I guess we have become accustomed to getting daily and hourly updates via newsfeeds and microblogs about all the latest news and rumors.  So there isn't much chance to be the "first on the scene".

Lot's of discussion of the "platform" ala Facebook and MySpace.

This space is evidently maturing (Rupert Murdoch was the dinner speaker).  It doesn't seem to be about what is happening on the web - but how - and how to make [more] money.

Unlike web 2.0 Expo conferences (which are more technical, hands-on, tutorial, TOI, emerging), the Summit is much smaller, invite-only forum for high level business drivers.

Overall, still a good event for web companies and a few entities of the business ecosystem (VC's, media, etc)

Last year, I think there were 3-5 Sun employees attending for info and making contacts.  This year, I think I'm the only returning Sun person, but we brought along at least 5 other employees attending as well as an exhibitor booth, sponsored lunch, and a technical session.  I personally had great conversations with just about anyone I talked to.  Each conversation was 10-30 minutes long discussing what each of us does in the web 2.0 area.  Many of the people I talked to were very interested to learn more and we will follow up with each one.  They were all happy to hear that Sun has several efforts underway to regain a leadership position in web infrastructure technology and products.  Some expect and are waiting for Sun to provide certain services for them to build or enhance their own service.  Currently Sun has several things to consider when building web apps or architecting infrastructure for them.  Over the next few weeks, I'll provide  details on each one.

Sun has come a long way in the last year or two for web scale computing.  I pulled together a list.  I bet you can find something in my list that is interesting to your web project.  If not, let me know.  Which one is YOUR favorite?

  • High performance and efficiency - Using multithreading at the chip level, the UltraSparc T1 and T2 based products http://www.sun.com/coolthreads use innovative design for consolidation (10:1 ratio); and low power/cooling for sustainable computing.  Integrated with open source, no cost virtualization technology, enabling over 2,500 isolated domains per rack.
  • X64 products based on AMD and Intel architectures - http://sun.com/servers.  Density - many are half the size than competing products
  • Free Software for Web, Proxy, Identity, SOA, J2EE http://sun.com/software - multithreaded to take full advantage of Solaris and T1/T2 systems, but are also offered for Linux and Windows.  Community support is available through monitored forums. Commercial support is available through licensed or subscription.


Posted at 04:04AM Oct 20, 2007 by Stephen Staso in General  | 

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