
I spent the last couple of days between the Web 2.0 Expo and the Interop conference here in NYC. Here are some of my thoughts and observations:
– There were very few storage vendors present. There is a lot of exciting stuff happening in the storage space (e.g. FCoE, cloud storage) and so I was a little disappointed not to see a better showing. Plenty of security companies though…
– Many companies exhibiting at Web 2.0 Expo were providing solutions for enterprises versus cool consumer-facing stuff. This dovetailed nicely with Tim O’ Reilly‘s thoughts on ‘web meets world’ and the need to build things that are solving real problems. The big money is in the enterprise and its good to see that the web companies are starting to move in that direction.
– Clay Shirky’s talk really opened my eyes to the impact of living in a more connected world, and specifically the need for smarter filters for all of the lifestream information that is getting produced on the web everyday. Gotta think there will be some investment opportunities there…
– UnConferencing is great! I really love the idea of spontaneously creating sessions democratically as a mini-conference within the conference. I was in a session about startups and innovation which also meandered into a discussion of VC financing (good or bad, bootstrap or not, etc) so it was nice to be able to contribute. Now I will need to check out a BarCamp or two…
– Amazon Web Services has arrived in a big way. I attended a session they hosted offsite during the conference which really cemented my belief that what they are doing is (buzzword alert) game-changing. I can now see very few reasons why any non-enterprise customer wouldn’t consider it as a serious hosting option. The growth they are having is tremendous and to my knowledge they are the only game in town when it comes to affordable, truly (infinitely) scalable hosting. They just announced a CDN solution as well.