Web 2.0 Expo Archive

The week of November 16-20th is going to be chock-full of exciting events all around NYC.  Some of the events are free, most are very low cost and some are very high cost.  Gary’s Guide has a list of all of the events for the week. If you are considering stopping by NYC, next week might be a perfect opportunity. Travelzoo is showing some NYC hotel deals and Better Bidding has some good results from Priceline auctions.

Here are a few of the events throughout the week:

• Wine 2.0 Expo – Nov. 18 – $45-125 – Webster Hall
• NY Entrepreneur Week - variety of events around Manhattan throughout the week – price varies based on startup stage or investor level
• Web 2.0 Expo – all week – Javits Center – prices vary depending on level of access from $845-1995 – Expo Pass is free
• Future of Web Design – Nov 17 – New World Stages – $395
• Drinks4Startups – November 18 – Free
• Interop – all week – Javits Center – prices vary depending on level of access from $845-2995 – Expo Pass is free
• Diggnation – watch the Diggnation show live – Nov 17 – free
• Brandhackers “Google AdPlanner for Social Media Presentation” - November 16 – free
• Social Media Mixologists Holiday Kickoff Mixer - Nov 17 – free
• WordCamp NYC – Baruch College, CUNY - Nov 13 – free

Send me any events you would like to add to the above list. I expect all of you to get out there – at a minimum take all the free expo passes and mingle. If you would like to meet – drop me a line. We can chat about your startup, my startup, the industry, the subway, etc.

Please note that CN is listed as a media sponsor of some of the events throughout the week.

We have a winner for the free full ticket to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco at the end of March. We are a media sponsor and were given a ticket to give away. Unlike the others who force you to tweet or say how great a product is, ours was a simple contact entry form. And boy did we receive entries — the most for any sweeps we’ve run!

With that said, the winner is:

Deanna R from Buffalo, New York

If for some reason Deanna cannot fulfill the duties of winner, then the alternate winner is Rajiv D from San Francisco. I will be in contact with Deanna shortly to confirm her attendance.

A few of you asked about covering the event as press for CN and I will follow up with ya’all in the coming week. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Only a few more days left to enter!

The Web 2.0 Expo will be held in San Francisco this year and is just a month away. CN is a media sponsor of the event and I was able to get the O’Reilly and TechWeb teams to give me one full conference pass to give away to a CN Reader. If you would like the pass, submit your information and on February 15, 2009 we will pick a winner.

If you would like to cover the event for CN, let me know as well. Check out our previous Web 2.0 Expo coverage.

Enter Here for the conference pass by sending in your contact info.

For months now I’ve been stressing the need to get offline. That is, the more we do online, the more there is a need to go offline and go outside. With Internet access coming to airplanes, is there anywhere that is a safe-zone? There’s no net access in most of the NYC subway but you can interact with your mobile device while underground. In the morning near my train station I see many people standing outside the station looking at their devices before they head down.

Last night at the Eluma party I hosted, I spoke about the slow moving trend to useful apps instead of more social networks or more ability to poke people. It just so happens that useful apps are ones that people will actually pay for and could do very well in the current economic market.

After my talk, several people noted that Tim O’Reilly noted something similar in his keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it so here are a few recaps on Drama 2.0, Profy and More Ramblings.

Last night I checked out one of my favorite bloggers, Jan Chipchase, who has an excellent essay titled, "A Little Switch With a Big Impact". The switch Jan refers to is the "airplane mode" switch on the iPhone. The switch basically turns off all of the wireless connectivity functions of the iPhone so you can utilize the offline functions while on a plane. It’s a must read essay.

Jan looks at the issues of disconnecting your mobile for a number of reasons. There’s the usual reason of going into flight, but there are many other reasons including wanting to be offline. Some turn on airplane mode to extend the iPhone 3G battery life. One of the more interesting parts of the essay looks at how mobile devices are used when they are offline and should developers be considering this as they build their apps.

Jan notes, "What can you do with a connected/communications device when it has no connectivity? Again we can turn to emerging markets to learn from the usage behaviours of pre-pay customers who have run out of credit – they continue to use the phone as a status symbol, a clock, games machine etc. The bottom line – never equate ownership of a connected device with use of its primary function particularly when use of the primary function costs money."

I leave you with this… NY-based Meetup has created a campaign named, "unplug your friends". While the campaign pushes the use of Meetup (they make money on going outside), the video below certainly hits home for many people.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC, I sat down with Spark Networks President and COO Gregory Liberman. We discussed the 30+ dating sites that make up Spark Networks. Here are my notes from our conversation which centered mostly around Jdate.

Spark Networks has 30+ dating sites and most of them are targeted towards a group. Gregory notes that people who are looking for serious relationships are seeking targeted networks. The three largest dating sites in their network are Jdate, BlackSingles and ChristianMingle. They believe that they are different because of the targeting, most of their competition tries to be all things to all people.

Spark Networks runs over 800 singles events a year. Revenue comes from subscriptions and advertising. Jdate subscriptions begin at $39/month and for those browsing the site, advertising is displayed. Gregory noted that ads are displayed to subscribers as well but said "most" of these ads are house ads promoting events and other services. I wonder if any Web 2.0 startups could get away with charging a subscription fee and displaying any advertising at all.

Spark Networks is a public company and reported second quarter 2008 revenue of $15 million with a net income of $1.6 million.

As for success rates, 60 Jdate subscribers a day report back to Spark Networks that they found their soulmate on Jdate.

I asked about comparisons to PlentyOfFish and eHarmony. Gregory said that PlentyOfFish actually drives traffic to sites in his network because of the ad model they employ. As for eHarmony, Gregory believes not everyone wants to fill out a 350 question survey. Jdate allows members to search and utilizes a basic survey to help align members.

In terms of what’s new on their network of sites, Gregory shared two new premium features. The first is an option to highlight your profile in search results. This works similar to highlighting an auction on eBay or a job listing on Indeed. The other update is featured profile. This allows members to push their profile to people they want to meet on search results. Let’s assume you are looking for a 30 year old woman with 2 children but she is looking for a 20 year old man with no children. Using this new option, you could force your profile into her search results basically saying "hey look at me, I want you!". On Jdate, this feature is $10/month.

The online singles market continues to be a huge moneymaker for Spark Networks and the other sites in the market. As long as people want to find that special someone, there will always be someone willing to pay to find that person.

A big part of what I do professionally is focused on thinking about how to improve the usefulness of the web. Tied into that is the additional question of how to empower developers to create more useful applications.

Much of this exploration has lead me to believe that the most powerful “pregnant” web concept is the simple idea that the web should be a web of objects, and should become less a web of text or pages. Indeed the web has been moving in that direction, but the road map has not been entirely clear.

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C have pioneered the broad outlines of the concept of objectifying the web with the ideas embodied in the W3C semantic web specifications for RDF, OWL, and SPARQL technologies. But in truth, most developers have no idea what the term the “semantic web” means and are totally unfamiliar with RDF, OWL and SPARQL.

Despite the fact that the officially proposed terminology and methodologies have not quite taken hold, the idea of “objects not pages” most definitely has. Application developers are creating APIs to allow people to access their data objects, and other application developers are using those APIs to consume data objects. And because the need is so great, when developers do not make their data objects easily accessible, other applications are going as far as scraping web pages, in effect manually objectifying source sites.

And so, while the most common term for the idea of “objects not pages” has been the “semantic web”, I would really like to get everyone around the lesser known but more encompassing term, Web 3.0.

I know the idea of glomming onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon rubs some people the wrong way, but we need a “big tent” term to describe stuff that is so important, and the truth is the word “semantic web” just doesn’t cut it. In fact, in my informal surveys, it almost universally turns people off.

But terminology aside, the concepts here are really important and are building momentum. We must, as a developer/entrepreneur community begin to focus on best practices for this object-oriented web, and to discuss its broader implications. The emerging mashups and semantic applications are compelling, but they are just the beginning. Facebook and its social graph is really the first major Web 3.0 application, so make no mistake, these ideas are powerful.

Because I believe this is such an important mission, and because I strongly believe it needs more shepherding, I have committed to doing my part to move these ideas forward. I am co-chairing the Jupiter Web 3.0 Conference Series, which launches in Santa Clara next month. My co-chair is Dan Grigorovici who writes lots of interesting stuff on this space at web3beat.

The Web 3.0 Conference is the first in what will be a regular series that we hope will become *the* gathering ground for talking about how we can, should, and will approach these next generation issues. And indeed since I have been thinking a lot about these issues I will be writing a lot about them in the next few weeks.

Particularly if you are in the Bay Area, but really no matter where you are, if you want to get a view into where the next generation of the web is going and how you can leverage it, this will be the place to be. But whether you come to the conference or not, I am hoping to spark a discussion about moving the ball forward. Needless to say I have my own ideas, which I will be sharing, both in person at the conference and on these pages in the next few weeks, but this should be a multi-way discussion. If you blog about this issue and let me know I will link to you in upcoming posts, and I will try to respond as well.

Let the Web 3.0 Era begin!

Web 3.0 Conference, October 16th & 17th, Santa Clara, CA

At the Web 2.0 Expo, I met with Sightix VP Ari Gottesmann. Ari took me through a demo of their social search application which integrates into blogs and social networks. Currently Sightix finds connections within a network but they are working towards exposing connections across multiple networks.

Check out other Sightix reviews on Alt Search Engines and Webware. Here’s Ari explaining how Sightix works when trying to find models like Bar Rafaeli: