Mind over Matters: Rumbles of my mind.. Echo in this blog..

WebInnovation is the name of the two day conference that is being held in bangalore today and tomorrow at the Grand Ashok hotel. It is supposed to be a web 2.0 conference where different companies come and talk about the latest web technologies that they are coming up with.

 The conference registration had already begun when we reached the place at around 8:45 am. It was a good turn out at that time considering that it was a cold lazy tuesday morning. We had to stand in a long queue to get our registrations done. (There was no online payment for the conference and the credit card machine was not working when we went to pay the money.. hmmm). By the time we had our registrations done and went inside the conference hall, the opening key note session had already started and there was a briefing going on about what to expect about the conference and what the conference was all about. Some cool facts were stated over here.. More than half the crowd present (more than 700) were non-bangaloreans and there were also people who had come out of India to attend this conference.

Forenoon Session
 

There was a panel discussion to start up with. Five dignitaries were present on the stage and each one of them had to define in their own terms what web 2.0 was. Considering that all five of them were highly placed in their own companies, each one of them managed to let out their own lengthy explanations of web 2.0. There were some questions asked in this short panel discussion as to what the revenue model of most web 2.0 companies was and how some of the more successful companies were making money from web 2.0 applications. (Amazon was quoted as a long time winner from the web 2.0 model.)

Some other interesting points mentioned over here is that, the online advertising market in India was (understandably) quite low.  Singapore was one of the major Asian economies to have good online advertising revenue. The broadband penetration in India was also pretty low which was preventing from creating strong online communities.

Web 2.0 Principles
------------------- 

This was given by Jaspreet, Country Manager, MSN India. Some of tghe web 2.0 characteristics that he mentioned was:

- user generated content v/s published content
- Contextual data
- Social networking
- interactive and personalized applications
- Ad funded business model

Some of the points that he mentioned was that even though India continued to be a growing market and there was a large consumer consumption boom, the present online advertising market is pretty pathetic. The global players would continue to do well in services whereas the local players would win in content.(because of the local knowledge and language barriers). He also mentioned an interesting thing that local search would fail in India because, local search is done differently over here (pan shops, road side enquires) as opposed to online queries in westernized world.

The mobile market was a super important one as there is a large potential waiting to be tapped over there. But one had yet to come up with a good killer application for that.

There was still al LOT of scope for online market in India and broad band penetration. The next big thing on web will be advertsing.

 Web 2.i

 The next presentation to take place was from Mohit, Times Internet. He gave a good and brief presentation on how the internet was going to evolve in future in India. There would be more "personalzied" web pages and that mobile was the next "IN" thing to take a look at.

Rich Internet Applications

This was given by Naresh Gupta from Adobe. He talked about the latest trends on the online web space.

- The customer expectations from a web site has changed. He now expects more dynamic and interesting content.
- Explosion in digital content. There is personal publishing and multiple devices.
- The user experience has to be same in multiple devices that the customer uses. (laptop, desktop, mobiles).

He also gave a brief overview of how Adobe has been trying to keep up with the technology advancements by enabling users to publish their content and how Adobe is adapting to web 2.0. There was also a talk on RIA (Rich Internet Applications)

- Rich Controls
- Separation of data and UI
- Use of client side power to deliver rich UI
 - Mashups and custom user interfaces.

He also gave a small talk about Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and what it aimed to do.

Software as a service

This was given by Bhaskar, CTO, Sify Ltd.

The talk was on SaaS and how the business world was adapting to it. There seems to be a lot of existing vendors who provide SaaS. The advantage of this methodology was that since the software was accessed over the network (web), it freed the customer from onsite support hassles. There were also problems with SaaS such as customization, robustness, reliability, integration capability, security, viability of service providers..

The next level of SaaS could be Edge computing, cloud computing, utility computing and Infrastructure as a service. (network.com)

Powered by users 

This was given by John Thrall, VP
Network division, Yahoo. He gave a talk on some of the strategies for
building social software.

- Know your base

- Adopt flexible plans

- Minimized development cycle

Some of the strategies to be followed were

- Don't silo your team

- React quickly to user needs

- React quickly to user behavior

- Beware of vocal minority

- All community members are not created equal. Serve super class through flexibility

- Engineer an online persona users can invest in

- Create a system that rewards good behavior

- If a community grows, anticipate the needs for like minded people to have some privacy

- Build a flexible system

- Use agile development techniques.

The speech was really interesting and informative

Lunch

Very nice.. But long queues for soups, main course and
desserts. More counters would have definetely helped. Since the
organizers knew the number of people coming for the event, could not
they have come up with a strategy for minimizing the waiting time? It
was really frustrating to line up like beggars waiting for food to be
served.

POST LUNCH SESSION 

Nothing much to speak about .

Microsoft gave a wonderful demo of their silverlight framework. It had the audience share of "wow"s.

There
was intel next to talk about code optimization and provide some tips on
code optimization and some idea as to what Intel's software was doing
to optimize code

Adobe again gave a very good demo on "AIR" and its functionalities.

This
session was mostly the sponsor's session with each one of them trying
to advertise their framework to the developers present. Hopefuly, Sun's
JavaFX would also prove as a competitive product to Adobe Flex and
Microsoft's Silverlight. Infact, if flex has a very good integration
with netbeans, i think that it would be a very big plus, considering
that Adobe's FlexBuilder and Microsoft's .net 2008 are not free
products.

More on webinnovation tomorrow!