We just got back from the Web 2.0 show and wanted to give our impressions of the show. Here's our impression of the conference in four words: packed, infrastructure, APIs, and enterprise.
The conference was packed, prompting Tim O'Reilly to comment that the Web 2.0 moniker has gone far beyond his expectations for attracting people. In the first evening, so many people were in the exhibit hall it wasn’t possible to move between the booths.
There was an interesting talk by Jeff Bezos on Amazon’s EC2 platform, which stands for their Elastic Compute Cloud. Combined with their Simple Message Queue service and Simple Storage (S3) storage, Amazon is positioning itself as the computing platform for hosting scalable web applications. In other words, if you want to build a Web 2.0 company, use Amazon’s infrastructure to host your applications. Interestingly, SalesForce.com also has a similar message with their Apex programming language. You can build you SalesForce.com applications using Apex, run your application on SalesForce.com server infrastructure, and sell your applications through the ApexExchange exchange.
I predict we will see similar offerings from Google and Microsoft in the coming months.
In looking at this infrastructure trend, I get the strong feeling there will be a whole new segment of small, fast moving companies who are very good at combining data from multiple sources using such platforms to get to market quickly (and cheaply).
Speaking of data, many of the interesting talks were around data, the rise of APIs and their business models. I particularly liked John Musser’s (programmableweb.com) presentation, accessible in PDF from here.
There was a lot more enterprise activity at the show than previous Web 2.0 conferences. There were the usual crowd of wikis and collaborative software, but I noticed a lot more companies (RSS Bus, Dapper, Kapow, Denodo, and Strike Iron) offering enterprise tools to create APIs from your data sources.
Many data today is trapped in web-based applications that don’t offer an API. Using tools from these companies, you can create a REST or RSS API to extract data and mashup with other applications.
KlipFolio can read data from any HTTP request (REST or RSS) and alert you on the desktop when it changes. We see this trend towards APIs and mashups creating more opportunities for integrating KlipFolio into the enterprise.
We'll be attending the SugarCRM developer conference in two weeks, San Jose, May 3-5. If you want to meet us, look for the guys with KlipFolio shirts. Feel free to approach us and say 'hi' and let us know your thoughts on KlipFolio.
Why are we attending? We use SugarCRM internally and it rocks. But it's missing a good desktop notification/alerting. Look for a new set of SugarCRM Klips from Serence to bring this great Web application to the desktop.
