Web 2.0 Expo and Conference

This was the second year for the Web 2.0 Expo and Conference and the event was held from April 22 - 25, 2008 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

The size of this event was larger compared to last year’s, about 10,000 attendees and 150 exhibitors, a growth of about 25%.

O’Reilly will be holding this conference in New York in September, 2008, and in Berlin in October, 2008 and another one in Tokyo this year.

Some past exhibitors like ThinkFree (a Korean company trying to compete with Google in the online office application space) was no longer present in this event, reflecting perhaps the slight decline in interest in this field. Another participant from last year that did not show up this year was Spock, a specialized search engine company.

Previous exhibitors like Adobe (for Apollo, a mash-up tool) , Webex (for Webex Connect, an SaaS platform), Zoho (Google docs similar product), Amazon Web Services (storage, computer grid, etc.) came again but seemed to have garnered less excitement on their activities.

General outsourcing services provider from China and India came to exhibit as well as specialized outsourcing services providers focusing on Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s). The RIA application providers include U.S., India and Eastern European companies.

Microsoft’s booth was highlighting Silverlight, a tool for developers to create Rich Internet Applications.

Nokia had a large booth trying to draw in Web2.0 application developers to help Nokia develop new mobile applicationa. Unfortunately, the only new device shown was an experimental Internet tablet, which was nowhere compared to Apple’s iPhone’s appeal.

Six Apart, one of last year’s new startup “launchpad” companies, was present again. But their booth did not seem to attract as much attention as last year.

The most interesting exhibitor in the group was probably Springnote, a Korean company invested by NCSoft, a successful large Korean online gaming company.

Springnote offers a new online notepad application for people to do simple and quick collaborative work using notepads that one can embed different kinds of files.

One unique feature is every page in the notepad is a webpage with a separate URL and each page can be edited or shared separately.

An Intel employee looking at this product at the booth said he thinks the Springnote application is ideal for developers from different locations to collaborate together.

For a slide show of this event, go to:

 http://www.slide.com/r/nEiCypoBzD9WrlgUc3EpiQrfd8FaYqek?previous_view=lt_embedded_url