Posts tagged Summit
ReadWriteWeb’s 2WAY Summit: A Summary
Jun 17th
This week we successfully staged our latest event, the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit. A series of conversations mirroring the two-way nature of the Web, we welcomed speakers like danah boyd, Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis and Baratunde Thurston. We also introduced breakout sessions spotlighting specific issues and speed geeking demos by a host of intriguing companies and teams.
Now that the dust has settled, we’d like to offer you a chance to revisit the event or, if you were unable to attend, benefit from it anyway by reading and watching our coverage of the speakers and ideas that powered the gathering.
Speed geeking at the RWW 2WAY Summit
Fred Wilson on “Content Shifting”: How Our Multiple Devices & Platforms Change Our Media Consumption
Earlier this year, investor Fred Wilson observed this phenomenon that he called “content shifting,” the desire and (sometimes) the ability to shift content across a variety of Internet platforms to a variety of connected devices. At ReadWriteWeb’s 2Way Summit, Wilson gave a keynote on content shifting and how this is changing the way in which we consume media.
Wilson believes that content shifting will provide major opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs as it’s currently “still too hard to do this kind of thing.”
Andy Carvin Tweets the World: Building Networks and the Future of Journalism
The fundamental methods journalists use to find stories and engage with sources is changing. On the cusp of the media revolution is National Public Radio senior strategist Andy Carvin and his use of social media and crowd sourcing to tell the story of turmoil in the Middle East … from 5000 miles away.
Carvin used Twitter to build a network that now keeps him on top of the news that comes out of the Middle East and in doing so has shown the media industry a new way to be a reporter. The question becomes: is the future of the news industry tied to the technology or is technology an enabler to creating human networks that spread information?
Calacanis in conversation with Abraham Hyatt
Jason Calacanis: “Blogging Is Dead” & Why “Stupid People Shouldn’t Write”
“Blogging is largely dead.”
“There are a lot of stupid people out there … and stupid people shouldn’t write.”
“There needs to be a better system for tuning down the stupid people and tuning up the smart people.”
Serial entrepreneur and publisher Jason Calacanis has never been opposed to saying what is on his mind. In fact, it is the characteristic that has helped him rise to the top of the Internet publishing world. He sat down with our managing editor Abraham Hyatt onstage at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit on Monday and dished on his thoughts about the state of publishing, what Google’s Panda initiative is doing to websites and what Web 3.0 will be about.
Exploiting Social Media with The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston
Social media is supposed to empower users, giving them a platform to communicate more broadly. But as The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston points out, social media also provides an opportunity for some great humor and pranking.
From live hate-tweeting the premier of the Twilight movies to creating rallies in support of Foursquare mayorships, Thurston addressed some of the “case studies of ridiculousness” that plague – or bless – us online.
Dixon in conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick
Chris Dixon: Hunch, Taste Graphs & the Link Between Lettuce & Politics
During the 2008 Presidential campaign, John McCain accused Barack Obama of being “the guy who worries about the price of arugula,” a suggestion that Obama was an elitist. Many scoffed at the remark, but according to Hunch CEO and co-founder Chris Dixon, liberals do prefer arugula while conservatives opt for iceberg lettuce. The connection between lettuce preferences and political orientation is something that Hunch has uncovered through its taste graph and recommendation engine, something that Dixon describes as “the most sophisticated system ever built for predicting human preferences.”
Dixon sat down with our own Marshall Kirkpatrick to talk about how Hunch has built its taste graph and how this sort of recommendation engine may shape the future of a more personalized Web.
Foursquare’s Next Project: Surface More Mobile Location Data
In March, 16.7 million used location check-ins with services like Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla, with 75% coming via mobile phones. In the next year, Foursquare is going to focus on mobile innovation and how to use all the capabilities of the smartphone to surface data to give users more utility with location services.
Foursquare Head of Product Alex Rainert spoke with Dan Patterson from ABC News on the main stage at the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit and we live-streamed it. We’ll have the video of this event and others up on the site soon.
Flipboard Will Develop for the iPhone Next, No Android App in Sight
What is next for Flipboard? The startup is rapidly growing, hiring new employees and forging new partnerships with publishers to create dynamic new content platforms.
The next step is to make a jump off the iPad and start monetizing the company. These are easier goals to say than to do, but CEO Mike McCue and does not want to jump too far too fast. As such, do not expect to see an Android version anytime soon as the iPhone is the next platform in store for Flipboard. He spoke about these and other issues at the summit.
W3C Launches Community Groups to Help Create Web Standards
“We think of our stakeholders as everybody who uses the Web, which is a pretty big set,” W3C’s Jeff Jaffe told attendees at the 2Way Summit. “What it means to get started is that they get a little bit of infrastructure, some connectivity and so forth. We also give a little bit of coaching which leads them to the path of creating a standard.”
The consortium wants to eliminate groups creating their own individual standards that are incompatible with each other. The idea of community groups is to bring all stakeholders under one umbrella during the process of creating a standards.
Ramine Darabiha, product manager, Angry Birds Magic
Angry Birds Coming Soon Everywhere (Literally)
Just when you thought Angry Birds had spread to every possible platform – iOS, Android, Facebook, Chrome – the game-maker Rovio is took the stage at the summit to make a new announcement, one that will take Angry Birds to a whole new place. In fact, Angry Birds will soon be everywhere. Quite literally.
With this new aspect, Angry Birds Magic, which will be rolling out in the coming weeks, the wildly successful puzzle game will become connected to the physical world.
Speed Geeking at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit
The RWW 2WAY Summit was not a pitch event, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great opportunity for tech companies to showcase their products. So we invited a group of startups and established companies to present at our conference, a continuation of what’s become a tradition at ReadWriteWeb’s tech events: Speed Geeking.
Rather than taking turns on stage going through slides and talking about a product, speed geeking has startups presenting simultaneously. Audience members circulated from table to table, watching demos – not PowerPoints. The tech companies had five minutes to give their presentations and answer questions, and then a whistle was blown (or in this case, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick shouted “Time’s up”) and people migrated to another table. It was an interesting way for participants to see demos in a more casual (yet very high energy) situation. And it was a chance for companies to answer questions and get feedback from a wide range of tech enthusiasts.
As News Goes From Print to Pixels, The Onion Thrives
As many print media outlets continue to struggle to find their place in an increasingly digital ecosystem, the satirical newspaper The Onion has managed to not only make the most the Web and social media, but also continue to expand into new markets and new media.
A team of Onion staffers walked summit attendees through the publication’s history, from its fictitious beginnings in 1756 all the way to its modern experimentation with social media and its expansion into broadcast.
Our fantastic geekunteers: don’t stop believin’!
What I Learned From Our 2WAY Summit (Parts One and Two)
Our new Business Channels Editor David Strom, and a presenter on real-time communications at the summit, reflected on what he’d learned there of value to enterprise.
“One thing is pretty clear to me,” he noted. “Running a modern corporate Web site isn’t getting any easier. It isn’t just keeping up with the latest HTML5 tags and what features Microsoft and Mozilla are adding to their latest browsers (although both are worth tracking) – it is maintaining a complex ecosystem of a myriad of software tools, updating your corporate policies as new technologies take over the marketplace, finding people with the right skill mix and personalities to leverage new social media. Oh, and also understanding how the Web has infiltrated just about everything that we do these days.”
Miscellaneous
Take a gander at our Managing Editor Abraham Hyatt’s photogallery of the summit.
Speakers and attendees also took a host of photos during their time at the summit.
Here’s a link to the #rww2way Twitter stream.
Stay tuned for more coverage of the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit. We have yet to sift through the tremendous amount of conversation, ideas, revelations and warnings we heard from our guests, panelists and participants.
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What I Learned From Our 2WAY Summit, Part 2
Jun 16th
This is the second half of my thoughts about what enterprise IT folks need to takeaway from attending and speaking at our 2WAY conference this past week. You can find part 1 here.
I’ll cover some of the breakout sessions on the second day as well as additional thoughts gleamed from the keynote presentations.
My session on real-time communications
I was asked to lead a panel session on examining the effects and implications of real-time communications on Web technologies, and what this means for corporate Web developers who are trying to incorporate more interactive and immersive experiences in their Web sites. I brought four representatives together for the panel that spanned a wide variety of technologies:
- Ian Small, the CEO of Tokbox Inc., which enables group video chat apps on a website,
- Theresa Szczurek, the CEO of Radish Systems, which sells ChoiceView, an iPhone/iPad app that enables real-time communications to call center agents,
- Danielle Morrill, the VP of Marketing forTwilio Inc., which has a series of Web services to enable voice and texting interaction using a variety of programming languages and tools
- Evan Schreiber, the VP, Content Strategy and
Acquisition of 5 Min Media, a leading how-to video repository and syndicator that is now part of AOL.
We had a very spirited discussion and lots of audience questions on how each of these tools is setup and deployed by a typical customer. What I found interesting is that there is no single video or “call me now” HTML tag – the process of incorporating these kinds of content is fraught with complexity and individual use cases varies widely. There is also no consensus on whether asynchronous or synchronous, true real-time interaction is best – the circumstances will dictate one or the other – but clearly we are headed towards a more complex Web page and that audio/video is going to be playing an increasing important part there.
I have the impact of video’s stickiness first hand: I have been syndicating my own video how-to content for the past several years using YouTube and a dozen other video sharing sites, including 5Min, and have found that 5Min is doing something right: next to YouTube, my channel there accounts for the largest viewership and continues to grow week by week. (I don’t receive any funds from 5Min, just to be clear what our relationship is.)
Each of the four vendors has their own series of programming interfaces and open standards, some of which are better documented than others. And each has a very different business model too: some give away freely all sorts of information in the hopes that their interface will be adopted and charge big bucks for corporate implementations (like Radish), while others (like Twilio) charge a few pennies per text or calling minute in the hopes that they will make it up on volume purchases. 5Min makes its money on ad clicks, which works for them because they have figured out how to wrap and embed ads in appropriate places inside the hosted videos. What this means is that there is a lot of room for innovation and potential success in this particular marketplace as things get sorted out.
(I should mention that there are lots of other voice and video add-on technologies, including tinychat.com and clickdesk.com. Feel free to share your favorites in our comments.)
Clearly, one place that all of these technologies will play a bigger role is in customer support. None of us wants to wait on hold on the phone or navigate a complex voice response menu system when we need to get a problem resolved, and having images sent to us directly (as with Radish) or able to chat with a representative (as with Twilio or Tokbox) will help improve the customer experience and perhaps win over a customer for life. Tokbox’s Small mentioned his real-time video application was reassuring to customers who wanted to see their representative and understand that the agent was engaged in fixing their problem and not just typing to a dozen other users in distress.
And also clear to me at least is that these technologies will enable all sorts of new kinds of applications that we could never have anticipated, such as GroupMe.com that was built on top of Twilio: the service sets up private groups that can receive text messages on their phones, or to start instant conference calls.
Thanks to a wonderful panel. So the key takeaways here are to start thinking carefully about how you can use video to enhance your Web content and ways that you can tell your story with short videos. And if you have a customer support department, look at some of these technologies to see how you can improve things.
How to become a social media consultant
At another session, I thought that UStrategy’s Ravit Lichtenberg had some very thoughtful things to say about how corporations should be using social media — she does a lot of work for HP and Salesforce.com. She mentioned that Old Spice’s revenue jumped 120% in April, claiming that this was due to integrating social media into their overall marketing. But it might be hard to prove any causality.
What I really liked about her talk was her idea of going through a cycle of trying, learning, applying, personalizing and then innovating any particular social media strategy. But the key is being able to go back to the trying phase and cycling through all of them again and again until you understand what works for your particular corporate context, and not just get stuck on the “trying” phase and abandoning the project altogether. “Social media is not just an experiment,” she said. “There are complex processes and procedures you need to put in place to make it happen – including training and updating skill sets, and providing common goals and solving real pain points so the project can be deployed across the company and contribute to the bottom line.”
Key takeaway: Don’t be afraid to experiment, but don’t be afraid to implement either. As Yoda said,do or do not, there is no try.
Some other random thoughts not worth their own subhead
At the conference, we also heard from Jeff Jaffe, the head of the W3C how they are working on a bazillion Internet standards, and perhaps some of them will come to fruition in our lifetime to actually have an impact on enterprise Web development in the coming years. They have no small task having gotten their start when we were all debating what HTML tag would be most appropriate for a particular action. Now they have to deal with a truly knotty multi-dimensional problem to handle mobile, social, and video enhancements to our websites. No one in the semiconductor space wants to wait 10 years for a spec to be defined before they can build a chip for it. How true.
JP Rangaswami, chief scientist of Salesforce.com, mentioned this post by Kathy Sierra that caught my attention:
“why are so many so convinced that [insert favorite buzzword] is the answer vs. just making a product that helps people kick ass in a way they find meaningful? The real pixie dust is when you ask yourself, “how can I help my users get more comments on THEIR blog?”
Hold that thought. Take something that NYC VC Fred Wilson spoke about: the difference between content that is free, and content that is freely available for other apps to consume it. Now here’s the takeaway: This difference is worth spending some time thinking over. How can your content be used by other’s apps, and how can you enhance their apps and help your partners succeed? Therein lies success for corporate developers.
As you can see, there is a lot that I picked up from the conference – it had a rich tapestry of themes and memes for corporate Web developers and IT folks in general. Do take some time to go to our site and review some of the video recordings of the keynotes if you are interested in hearing and seeing the speakers directly.
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Meet the Speed Geeks from Today’s RWW 2WAY Summit
Jun 14th
The RWW 2WAY Summit is not a pitch event, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great opportunity for tech companies to showcase their products. So today we invited a group of startups and established companies to present at our conference, a continuation of what’s become a tradition at ReadWriteWeb’s tech events: Speed Geeking.
Rather than taking turns on stage going through slides and talking about a product, speed geeking has startups presenting simultaneously. Audience members circulate from table to table, watching demos – not PowerPoints. The tech companies have five minutes to give their presentations and answer questions, and then a whistle is blown (or in this case, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick shouts “Time’s up”) and people migrate to another table. It’s an interesting way for participants to see demos in a more casual (yet very high energy) situation. And it’s a chance for companies to answer questions and get feedback from a wide range of tech enthusiasts.
The following companies showed off their wares today:
OpenStudy: OpenStudy is building the largest online study group in the world. Students are able to join OpenStudy and – 24/7 – find others who are working in similar subject areas. Students can ask each other questions and help each other with studying and homework. Last month alone, some 25,000 math questions were asked on the site, the majority of which were answered by other students within 5 minutes.
SecretSocial: SecretSocial is an on-demand and ephemeral social network that offers privacy for its participants. Conversations on SecretSocial last only 15 minutes to one week. Then the data is erased from the system. SecretSocial wants to create an alternative place for conversations online that avoid the “endless data trail” that we leave behind.
Crowd Scanner: Crowd Scanner provides an interesting way to meet people at various events. The app turns networking into a game of “People Hunt,” with questions and rewards for figuring out people’s identities.
Soup: Soup wants to pull all of your digital data into one location and give you an easy way to present visualizations and other customized ways to present that material (such as mapping out all your various check-ins). The startup copies your data from various social networks, but says that it has no plans to sell that data. Rather it plans to monetize based on premium presentation templates.
SpotOn: SpotOn offers an iPad and iPhone app that gives you dining recommendations based on you and your friends’ Foursquare and Facebook check-ins. SpotOn lets you rate these places very quickly so you can help get recommendations, but also give recommendations, to your friends.
OneDrum: OneDrum helps make Microsoft Office work more like Google Docs, letting multiple users simultaneously collaborate on a document. Currently, OneDum works with Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel, but ideally the platform could be extended to work with any piece of software.
Pixable: Facebook may be the largest photo sharing site, but a lot of the photo searching and browsing capabilities of Facebook leave a lot to be desired. Pixable’s apps – particularly its iPad app – address this. Pixable takes the photos from your News Feed and presents them in a much more enjoyable format. The app also lets you see popular photos and follow particular friends’ photo updates (which, quite honestly, is probably one of the most compelling things shared to Facebook these days).
Singly: Our personal data is strewn all of the Web. Some of it we share willingly. Some of it, not so willingly. Regardless, even though it is “our data,” that information resides in a multitude of locations and often with a multitude of other people having access to it. Singly is working on The Locker Project which will be a centralized and personal place for everyone to house their information. The Locker Project wants to give users control over their own personal data – deciding who can access that information, for example. Ideally developers will be able to build apps on top of our lockers.
Today’s Speed Geeking session wasn’t just about startups. Both the API provider (and ReadWriteWeb sponsor) Mashery and the game-maker Rovio also had tables and talked about their latest offerings. You can watch a video of today’s Speed Geeking session here.
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Speed Geeking at the 2WAY Summit [Video]
Jun 14th
Speed Geeking is a high-energy event where startups and established tech companies that we’ve selected give quick presentations to conference attendees. Every five minutes attendees switch to a new startup. It’s loud, it’s a little chaotic and it’s a lot of fun. Over the years Speed Geeking has become a fixture at ReadWriteWeb conferences, but this is the first year we’ve had so many international companies participating.
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9 Photos From Day 1 of the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit
Jun 13th
Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder, and Mike McCue, Flipboard founder and CEO
Baratunde Thurston, Director of Digital for The Onion
Andy Carvin, senior strategist, social media desk at NPR and Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University
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Tune in Today to ReadWriteWeb’s 2WAY Summit #rww2way
Jun 13th
ReadWriteWeb is holding its 2WAY Summit today and tomorrow at Columbia University in New York City.
We have a full program today, and we’ll be hearing from thought-leaders, researchers, investors, technologists, and entrepreneurs – all great minds who’ll be sharing their thoughts about the future of the Web.
The keynote speakers today include NPR’s Andy Carvin, investor Fred Wilson, researcher danah boyd, Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston, Hunch’s Chris Dixon, Flipboard’s Mike McCue, and Foursquare’s Alex Rainert.
You can see the full line-up of the events, for both today and tomorrow, on the conference website.
We’ll be livestreaming today’s keynotes so be sure to tune in, starting at 8:50am EST.
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2WAY Summit Preview: Teens + Mobile = Trouble?
Jun 10th
Moral panic. Time and time again, changes occur that make some people feel as though the very fabric of society is at risk. Those changes can be cultural; they can be technological. Often, they involve activities associated with and undertaken by youth.
It’s no surprise then that of mobile phones and children have repeatedly elicited moral panic. According to a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center, 75% of 12- to 17-year-olds own cellphones. Project Tomorrow’s Speak Up 2010 survey found that 20% of children from kindergarten through second grade said they owned cellphones, and 29% of those from third through fifth grade said they did. These children don’t just own feature phones either; an increasing number say they own smartphones and have access not just to mobile voice, but texting and data plans as well.
It’s this ubiquitous access to technology by children that’s cause for concern among some sectors. For others, it’s the ubiquitous text-messaging. It’s the content of the texts (namely sexual content). It’s the places where they text (while driving, while at school).
There have been numerous stories in the news lately about teens in trouble due to their mobile behaviors. At ReadWriteWeb’s 2WAY Summit, social researcher danah boyd will discuss teen sexting and its impact on technology companies.
Although sexting makes headlines, it isn’t the only place in which we’ve seen great upheaval and concern surrounding teens’ mobile habits. Here are some of the other stories we’ve covered here at ReadWriteWeb in the last year that demonstrate how mobile phones are changing teens’ communication patterns – with each other, at home, and at school.
Cellphones in the Classroom: Distraction or Tool?
Although cellphones are teens’ primarily communication devices, most schools continue to ban them from the classroom, arguing that they are a distraction and that students’ data plans and 3G access allow them to bypass schools’ web filtering mechanisms.
Experience the Future of the Web…2WAYS
June 13-14, Columbia University, NYC
Tickets from $495 – Sign up Now
Day 1 Schedule
- When Disruptions Collide: Political Uprisings and Social Media
- Fred Wilson Keynote
- Teen Sexting and its Impact on Tech Companies
- Q&A With Jason Calacanis
- Creative Exploitation of Social Media from The Swine Flu to The Onion
- Chris Dixon and His Extraordinary Machines
- Flipboard & The Future of Media Consumption
- Life is a Game: Foursquare and the Future of Location
- How W3C’s Open Web Platform is Transforming Industries
Don’t miss more sessions and speed geeking on Day 2!
But students are speaking out about this. In a recent survey, they listed their inability to use their cellphones at school as one of the major technology barriers they face. High schoolers said they wanted to use cellphones to check their grades, conduct research, take notes in class, collaborate and communicate with friends, use a calendar, send an email, learn about school activities, and create and share videos.
Despite students’ interest in using cellphones at school and even parents’ willingness to pay for the devices and the data plans, over 65% of principals surveyed said they’d refuse to let students do so.
Cellphones as the Point of Control
The argument for getting a cellphone – whether it was an argument from a teen or a parent – used to involve safety. But teens are now clear that the primary reason they want one is to stay in touch with their friends.
For parents, however, a children’s cellphone is still very much a point of control. Parents put limits on the number of minutes and number of texts. They admit to regularly looking through the contents of their children’s phones, and they say that they take away access to cellphones as punishment.
But cellphones offer another point of control and surveillance as well. In April, ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez wrote about the potential to have parental controls baked in to handsets. Parents would be able to track phones’ location, turn off access to texting when the phone (or more specifically, a car a teen is driving) is in motion, preview photos that are sent from the phone, and monitor Web searches and application downloads.
Will these sorts of technologies that give parents better control help assuage fears about teens’ mobile phone usage? Will they help convince schools to let students bring their phones into the classrooms?
After all, the pervasiveness of these devices means that we’ve reached the point where the vast majority of teens are carrying a small computing device in their pockets or backpacks? Is that technology cause for celebration or panic?
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