I spent all of last week out in California. The first part of the week was spent in San Francisco at meetings, and the second half of the week was at our Web 3.0 Conference & Expo.
The trip was incredibly fruitful. I met some great new companies that will I think be great partners for Kloudshare, including Eric Marcoullier at Gnip. I also reconnected with some great friends.
The conference was fantastic, and we are planning the next one in New York around April. In the aftermath, there was an interesting debate in the comments in a ReadWriteWeb article about the conference keynote, about the definition of Web 3.0 and whether it is at all valid to term the space that the semantic web inhabits as being Web 3.0. Personally I don't care what people say about name as long as they keep talking about it.
There was also some other coverage of the conference at RWW including an article about my panel discussion with Yahoo about their open strategy.
Unfortunately, I returned to a cold which I seemed to get either on the plane, or just after landing and switching from the warm California air to the chilly New York air. As such my post here is decidedly short. I also returned to read about iminlikewithyou.com's Charles Forman and his nasty "fat" comments directed at Allen Stern from CenterNetworks. Forman's comments were triggered by Allen's critique of the New York Tech Meetup and the fact that Forman has presented three times in the last year or so, which Allen considers to be more than his fair share.
Forman's comments were horrific, and deserve a full post, but you can imagine that I might have something fairly substantial to say about this. But I want to be at full strength when I air this one out.
Anyway, the trip reminded me of the value of staying connected to the west coast. There is a whole other eco-system out there, and for us east coast folks, it makes no sense not to be connected to it. While it is certainly true that there can be a bit of a west coast echo chamber, not having a visceral sense of what is going on out there is definitely sub-optimal.
Anyway, more later. I have lots to say but it will probably take a week or so to get it all out so please be patient.
12 comments:
Welcome back! You've been missed here in the heartland. Get well soon.
What is kloudshare??? I'm now really interested since you mentioned gnip in combination with "Anticipating the Next Generation of Search"
When will you uncork the concept? or at least give us a little taste?
vitamin C. lots of it.
Jarod,
Kloudshare is not announced yet, but it is a development platform. The piece I wrote on search is not a product in the pipeline, but it is certainly informed by some of the work we are doing.
Great to have you back... Get well soon!
Frankly, I was disappointed in the conference.
There were certainly some points of interest, especially on the technical track, but the extremely narrow business track focus on advertising turned me off.
Advertising technology is fine for specialty firms, but that work is in effect tertiary, considering that advertising itself is secondary to actually selling or publishing something.
So the general conference advice to focus on advertising technology is to my mind overly narrow and misguided. If the only thing that semantic web and "Web 3.0" firms can think of to do is to squeeze a little bit more advertising revenue out of a content publishing industry that is already in trouble as it is, I think there are serious problems.
So if you're Peer 39, sure, you're an advertising tech startup, so that's your biz. But it's a crowded enough space as it is, and you'd think that there would be more focus on producing stuff of direct value, instead of secondary or tertiary piggybacking on other forms of business.
There were some other decent presentations and demos, but in general the business focus just seemed wrong to me.
I was also disappointed in the attendance and speaker list. So far as I could tell (maybe I missed count), of all the speakers, there were just 4 from publicly owned companies -- all the rest were startups or VCs.
No representatives of data-centric firms producing systems such as RDBMS, EI, BI, ERP, CRM, BSS, etc. Web 3.0 and the semantic web are supposed to be focused on data.
This conference was in Silicon Valley, and shouldn't have been a big trek for most of these folks. So why were there no speakers from Oracle, SAS, SPSS, SAP, Microsoft (not counting PowerSet), Informatica, Endeca, Autonomy, or any of a dozen other major firms in these areas?
Laurence,
I am confused on several points. First, aside from there being a keynote from a advertising focused firm, I would be hardpressed to describe the business track as being advertising focused. Then again, given that most of the internet revenue currently comes from advertising, to suggest that it not have a promient position seems strange.
Second,I am not clear how oracle, sas, spss, or most of the other firms you mention have anything to do with web 3.0/semantic web technologies. If I am missing something please reference specific technologies you would have liked to hear about. As is usually the case in new markets, new companies are where all of the action is at. That said, Yahoo, and microsoft (both public tech companies) did have a substantial presence.
Laurence,
I am confused on several points. First, aside from there being a keynote from a advertising focused firm, I would be hardpressed to describe the business track as being advertising focused. Then again, given that most of the internet revenue currently comes from advertising, to suggest that it not have a promient position seems strange.
Second,I am not clear how oracle, sas, spss, or most of the other firms you mention have anything to do with web 3.0/semantic web technologies. If I am missing something please reference specific technologies you would have liked to hear about. As is usually the case in new markets, new companies are where all of the action is at. That said, Yahoo, and microsoft (both public tech companies) did have a substantial presence.
Well, I know you were at at least one of the technical track presentations that I was at, so perhaps you missed some of the other business tracks on monetization and so on? The advertising theme seemed pretty well hammered home to me in multiple program items, and in some tracks no one could think of anything else to monetize.
As regards data-centric firms not being relevant to web 3.0, I am a bit taken aback. How could they NOT be relevant? Data is the whole point of the semantic web, not to mention the larger and ill-defined hype zone of Web 3.0 that somehow includes the semantic web.
What is the W3C vision for the semantic web? Interconnected databases. What do EI firms do? They interconnect databases. QED.
Anyway, to spell it out in more detail, SAS, SPSS, Microsoft, BusinessObjects, et many al. all provide enterprise integration systems and services. The same EI that Michael Brodie pointed out as a key challenge at the Cambridge Semantic Web Gathering last week.
So EI interconnects heterogeneous enterprise data sources, including both structured and unstructured data, including raw text and web pages along with connections to enterprise business systems. Endeca and Autonomy among others both emphasize this kind of semantic analysis for the enterprise, just like say Thomson Reuters does as a public web service, as PowerSet and others do for "semantic" web search, or the way (presumably) Peer 39 does for advertising.
So I find it surprising that none of these major firms thought the conference was worth attending.
"So I find it surprising that none of these major firms thought the conference was worth attending."
We didnt invite them.
As I see it, your definition of semantic essentially being anything that relates to data is, well lets just say, at odds with our view. But if you were confused as to who the presenters were and what the concept of the show was, I think the web site should have done a fairly good job of dissuading you from attending. We certainly did not purport to address the angle you seem interested in.
Please, I didn't say 'semantic' is anything related to data. 'Semantic' refers to the knowledge level in the old AI hierarchy. That hierarchy includes data at a lower level. Information, data, knowledge: these are the three classical tiers.
What I said is that enterprise integration is a model problem for the semantic web, and that some enterprise integrators use familiar semantic analysis techniques similar to those used by those firms that do associate themselves with Web 3.0.
But this begs the question, "What is Web 3.0?"
I had a call with a Forrester analyst just yesterday, and his first question to me was just that. And it wasn't a rhetorical question, either, he really wanted to know. The fact that a Web 2.0 research specialist could ask me that question with a straight face -- when I wanted to ask *him* questions on the subject -- shows how vague the limits of this thing are right now.
"The fact that a Web 2.0 research specialist could ask me that question with a straight face -- when I wanted to ask *him* questions on the subject -- shows how vague the limits of this thing are right now."
I would not disagree that there are differing definitions. This shouldn't be so upsetting though. There is disagreement about what web 2.0 is too but we still all essentially know it when we see it. There will always be debates around the margins, but I don't think anyone is totally lost regarding what we are talking about. But from our world view (your mileage may vary) we did not consider the companies that you are interested in to be a part of what we wanted to showcase and discuss. Perhaps you can convince me that we should. I am certainly not closed to including new or different ideas from how we have looked at things already.
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