Indexed Forever

I am gazing into the future this week at the steamy Web 2.0 conference. Despite Alan Greenspan rehearsing for his role as McDuff, the mood is very upbeat. A run down of the trends.

Ajax Apps – wow they have gotten good! They have moved beyond responsiveness to include other desktop attributes like support for keyboard shortcuts and file save reminders. They are also taking advantage of the ease of integration of web services making these services “fully-Web 2.0.” Yeah, dude.

A particularly outstanding example is Zimbra. Think Exchange with every conceivable web service hyperlinked/mashed into your email, as bubble help. Dates bring up your calendar, tracking number go check their delivery status, and of course addresses bring up Google maps. If it works, I want it.

Identity/Attention – The Attention Trust demoed their Attention Recorder, a plug in to Firefox that captures your click stream. The hope is that companies build applications that will provide value to end-users in exchange for the stream. SXIP might be on to something by tying identity to a real world problem with sxore, a distributed identity system to combat blog spam.

Investors. The VCs are out in force despite other pressing business in San Francisco this week. While they are aggressively turning over every rock, they are complaining about Web 2.0 companies being undefensible businesses with small market opportunities.

So are we in for Trouble? Tragically, we will have to wait for Web 2.0 Act II.

I attended Ray Kurzweil’s talk on Thursday night at SAP’s silicon valley reception center – a beautiful place with horrible acoustics and flickering brown-out lighting conditions. I was reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright’s quip that one can tell the architectural significance of a building by the number of buckets required when it rains.

Kurzweil laid out the thesis of his new book, The Singularity is Near. Using 88 slides, most featuring that favorite of professorial obfuscating visuals, the logarithmic chart, he outlined significant events in technology and human evolution, both straight diagonal lines. His point being that change is accelerating, not just in technology, but in human evolution. The next leaps in human evolution will be the understanding of the human body as an information system, and miniaturization technology that allows nano-implants. Extrapolating from this thesis he sees the following developments.

By 2010 Computers disappear into wearable devices, images are written directly to our retina and we interact with computers through virtual personalities.

By 2029 the human brain will be reverse engineered. Humans will have millions of nano-neural implants in their brains. The result is an “intimate merger” of human and machine intelligence and the ability to reprogram our biochemistry to enable extremely long life.

By 2045 we will have reached the singularity, where we are more machine than man.

Sounds good to me, but the timing seems just a bit fast. 2010 for computers to miniaturize and be able to write to you retina – so that’s in Service Pack 2 to Windows Vista? Yes, there are exponential progressions all around us and humans are poorly designed to notice them. However, capital sources, governments and other large organizations are not on an exponential change curve. As one person in audience asked – why did it take 7 years to get to the moon in the 60′s but NASA just announced plans to get back to the moon, in 13 years. Kurzweil’s response was that just because it can happen, does not mean it will. It is a matter of focus and resources.

With significant ideas, criticism is just a drop in the bucket.

At my second GnomeDex today and the feeling is euphoric. Microsoft announced broad support for RSS in IE 7.0 and Longhorn. Excellent coverage here.

This is not a small announcement. Note that every analyst and every major technology and business publication had been briefed. Their demo and presentation was very slick and thoroughly rehearsed. They were prepared for questions.

My guess on the announcement – Longhorn needs a value proposition beyond a faster UI for people to upgrade. And RSS is a great value proposition. Prepare to be saturated with Longhorn advertising stressing RSS benefits next summer. It started today with their positioning on the evolution of Windows – Browse, Search, Subscribe!

The announcement has this, blogger and RSS start-up heavy, crowd feeling very happy. And not only is Microsoft behind the conference in providing a big announcement, but they are heavy financial supporters – “Microsoft Presents GnomeDex 5.0.”

Last Fall the conference was fun, but it was held at the dim and seedy Harrahs’ Lake Tahoe. Today the conference is at the pristine Bell Harbor convention center. Tonight’s party is at the brand new Seattle Public Library. The money is starting to flow in RSS.

On Saturday I was a panelist at the Stanford Engineering School’s annual e-Day conference. Having neither attended Stanford, nor graduated in Engineering, it seemed an unusual lapse of quality control.

The conference was keynoted by Jeff Raikes who runs Office for Microsoft and is by far the best communicator I have ever seen from Redmond. Granted this is not a very high hurdle, but he may have missed his calling in politics. The guy is a combination of aw-shucks Midwestern humility with an obvious keen mind and strong presence – the guy is devastating.

He talked to the standard issue Microsoft Presentation (one word per slide) and discussed the vision for the forthcoming Office 12:
“Remove corporate boundaries” – Groove operating through the firewall.
“Connect information and people” – Search
“Broad control” – Document DRM
“Business Applications” – Play nice with ERP/CRM applications
“Software services” – Live Meeting
“Unified Communications” – He gave an example of being able to take phone calls when he is on IM. Not sure if he realizes a million people were doing that while he was talking.

They are moving in this direction as Microsoft chose to “Expand the view of the Opportunity.” As such Office is no longer about productivity applications, but about “enhancing the productivity of those who do information work.”

I don’t know. For the first time I had to give serious thought about whether to buy Office with my new PC. I did, because of Outlook. But I find myself using OpenOffice more than Word as it has a great HTML editor and every document can be turned into a PDF. And it’s free. Their grip is tenuous. And the fact that he never mentioned RSS when his goal is “enhancing the productivity of those who do information work,” is stunning.

Moving on to our panel, Jeff Kleck did a stellar job of keeping it conversational and fun, complete with Nerf rockets to shoot at audience members who asked bad questions. While we were supposed to talk about “Managing Next-Generation Information Technologies and Services,” the discussion quickly veered to entrepreneurship and software business models. But not before someone asked me about the relative benefits of XML vs. relational database as a data model – a question I am uniquely unqualified to answer as a Finance major.

At the conclusion a member of the Stanford engineering department presented me with a token as I do not have an affiliation with Stanford. It was a School of Engineering drink coaster.

Well, it’s not an honorary doctorate, but I will get plenty of mileage out of this with the development team.

Walking up Broadway on my way back from dinner, I noticed a crowd of people cheering under bright lights in the middle of Times Square. AudioSlave was blasting. Being a fan of the Jimmy Kimmel Show, particularly the concert series, I guessed it was a live simulcast and went over to join the fun. The picture below is the camera man dancing to the music while operating the steady cam.

Part of the concert series is the ability to buy the live performances. It was a good song and a nice “only in New York” moment, so why not?

Because to get the music, you must download Sony’s soundstage software. I don’t know what that will do to my computer, and Sony is not telling as there is not even a FAQ on the site. Even better the music is DRMed to death – it only comes in Sony’s proprietary file format which only plays in SoundStage or Sony’s iPod knock-off.

I would have happily paid my $0.99. I would have paid $10. But if you want to install your spyware on my PC and give me a crippled product, no thanks.

Earlier in the Day I had listened to Scoble discuss a major value point for RSS – he is happy to have relationships with companies, but it must be on his terms. I could not agree more.

Returning to my hotel (too cheap to stay in the conference hotel), I found that the common areas had been rented out for the Radar Magazine Launch Party. Pushing through the Paris wanna-be’s on my way out to dinner, I was talking with my daughter on the mobile who was enthusiastically telling me the results of her swim lesson. As I exited the hotel, one of the staffers ran after me down 45th street and in panicked tones yelled that I forgot my goodie bag. I began to object and he screamed “Just take it!”

In the Bag
Match.com ¾ arm length burn-out t-shirt.
“Don’t you know who I think I” Radar Magazine T-Shirt
Jhane Barnes eye glass case (no glasses)
Radar magazine
Altoid small mints
Bottle of Mark Body Lotion, “Hollywood Pink Flamingo”
Mark Kiss Therapy lip balm, “Sheer Red”
Hotel QT Lollypop
Small Piece of unblessed Kabbalah Red String
Hardcopy book “StarStruck” When A Fan Gets Close To Fame
One bottle each Gardnier Shampoo, Conditioner and Leave in Conditioner
Pamphlet, Betty Ford Institute.

Overall it was a rousing success, especially given it was a first time conference. A sell out crowd – I moderated three panels and I did not get a conference bag – they ran out. The audience was heavy on execs from the publishing side of media companies trying to figure out the implications for their business. Mix in a few technologists and a few dozen corporate marketers and you quickly see that RSS is everywhere and changing everything. Below are a few of the most interesting thoughts/factoids from the conference.

Paul Kedrosky Companies give their CEOs $500,000 of training on proper disclosure under Sarbanes Oxley. Then they give a product manager a blog. Both are disclosures in the eyes of the SEC. This will lead to a lock down of information in the post hobbyist phase of blogging.

Elliot Ng and Scott Wilder of Intuit. There are 20 million small businesses in America and only 3 million use account software. Our challenge is to reach these late technology adopters. We use Blogs, Wiki and RSS Feeds to help create highly engaged customers that will evangelize our product and create new customers.

Charlene Li email is my to do; RSS is my to know.

Bill Flitter our customers are lowering their cost of customer acquisition by 50% using RSS Advertising.

Rok Hrastnik Three case studies with hard facts:
RSS for Search Engine Optimization resulting in a 75% increase in traffic,
Private label branded RSS Aggregator resulting in 23% click-through rates
RSS Feeds to customers with click through rates 75 times higher than commercial email.