Experience@ Web 2.0expo – San Francisco
The Web continues to be an engine of economic growth, fueled by a host of new business models, development models, and design patterns that collectively fall under the umbrella of Web 2.0, a term coined at the birth of Web 2.0 Summit, a joint venture between O’Reilly Media and TechWeb.
As Xebia is always engaged in delivering innovative web solutions on latest and cutting edge technologies to the customers, this year I attended Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco, an event that showcases the latest Web 2.0 business models, development paradigms and design strategies for the builders of the next-generation Web. This annual multi-track conference brings together people, ideas, connections, contacts, products, and companies to foster stronger Web 2.0 communities.
The four day conference(May 03-06,2010) was flooded by people from various countries with diverse interests to attend influential keynotes and speakers sessions. The conference sessions were categorized into various theme tracks. Some of the interesting tracks were Strategy and Business Models, Focus on Mobile, Social Media Marketing and Design & User Experience.
I will be sharing my leanings from few of these sessions in the rest of my blog. Mobile continues to be the most important and indispensable element of Web 2.0 ecosystem. The mobile web has doubled since last year with iphone reaching 3 billion downloads and android becoming increasingly available on devices.
# Jason Crisby shared the Dos and Donts of a mobile strategy for enterprises. As mobile technology proves to be disruptive in nature, it should be considered “The Strategy” and not just an add-on to existing enterprise ecosystem. To re-state Brian Fling here- “Create a product, don’t re-imagine one for small screens. Great mobile products are created, never ported.”
One of the many successful examples is that of BMW converting $70k MMS campaign into $45M Revenue where BMW sent relevant information to its customers depending upon their location of mobile like snow tire add with contacts of the dealers in that vicinity with a “Call” option.
Some key takeaways from the session – device detection must be core part of the mobile strategy, consistent experience across devices and most importantly – The 8 characteristics of the mobile context :
a)Permanently carried
b)Always on
c)Built-in payment channel
d)Creative impulse
e)Social context
f)Location aware
g)Accurate audience measurement and
h)Augmented reality
Augmented reality is the latest to be discovered as a unique characteristic that only mobile has to offer, a way to deliver media content and formats one cannot do on any of the older mass media, not in print, not in TV, not even on the internet. For those who haven’t heard of this – here is a quick an easy example.
You point your camera phone at some view in your city. The normal view in the camera phone screen is that of the city. Then you turn on the mobile application where you are able to view superimposed images with further information – like here is a Pizza Hut, here is a cash machine, here is the nearest restroom, here is the museum, this apartment is for sale, etc. To do this type of augmented reality, phone needs both the GPS for precise location-positioning and the compass ability, so the phone 'knows' in which direction you are pointing the camera phone.
# Matthew Langie from Omniture (now an Adobe company) discussed the potential of mobile analytics. He shared few interesting statistics like smart phones to outship PCs by 2012 and that 40 mobiles are sold in US every second .
For marketers, it’s crucial to understand the behavior of mobile users so as to appropriately position and target messaging and campaigns. The primary mobile segments are mobile specific sites (for ex. m.nbc.com) and mobile applications (example Flixster Mobile) The mobile analytics can help measure first time/repeat visitors, segmentation and location, user experience like time spent, pathing, video usage, conversion etc.
# Another great session was about the business of APIs personified to Darwin’s theory of evolution and adaption. Just as the gene is successful if the organism that carries it is successful similarly the API is successful if the application that carries it is successful. Few names like Amazon, eBay,Salesforce.com, facebook etc are following different kinds of API business models. Companies providing APIs are the demand. Developers building with APIs supply innovation and adaptation.
# HTML 5 seems to be emerging as a promising technology for developing rich internet applications. The ongoing absence of Flash from Apple’s wildly popular portable devices has only fueled the fire.
Apart from the sessions, it was a splendid experience to attend keynotes from June Cohen(TED Conferences), Hilary Mason(bit.ly), Ge Wang from Stanford University who displayed some amazing iphone applications and Christian from Parrot who made a quadricopter fly from an iphone among many others.
I will like to conclude here hoping to have few sessions from Xebia next year.
Filed under: Conference
