O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit: No Cave of Wonders

There is so much happening in the Web world that I went into this year’s annual O’Reilly Web 2.0 event hoping it would be like Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders—full of bright shiny new companies that did amazing things, each more enticing than the last.

Instead, the conference was more like a United Nations conference, full of important people talking about important issues, but not a lot of surprise or dazzlement. The name “summit” really does fit. That’s not the fault of the folks at O’Reilly; their conference has just grown in stature so much that it attracts CEOs from huge companies as speakers. By definition those people are very careful about what they say, and don’t make major announcement at an industry conference.

So while it was interesting to see people like the CEO of AT&T, we didn’t necessarily learn a lot. But there were a couple of highlights worth passing along…

Web apps that understand how you think (sort of).

One of the few sessions that covered new apps was called The Semantic Edge, and featured three web applications that are based on interpreting written sentences and analyzing human relationships in order to do something useful:

Freebase is an online, publicly-editable database that shows relationships between people, places, companies, ideas, etc. It’s hard to describe in print, but think of it as Wikipedia for connections and you’ll start to get the idea.

Twine is also a system for identifying connections, slanted toward helping information workers and workgroups collaborate on ideas. Like Freebase, it’s very hard to describe, but it’s a bit like a combination of Wikipedia and LinkedIn married to an Amazon favorite books list.

The third application was Powerset, and it’s the one that impressed us the most because it immediately addresses a real-world problem. While Freebase and Twine are interesting tools that might (or might not) eventually do important things for people, Powerset tries to do something that’s immediately practical: Conduct web searches based on the meaning of English sentences. In other words, you’re supposed to be able to type in a question, and the search engine will understand what you’re really asking for and produce meaningful results.

For example, the screenshot below, provided by Powerset, shows the search results for the question, “What did politicians say about Iraq?” In this case, Powerset knows that politicians are people like George Bush and Winston Churchill, and gives results with comments they have made about Iraq. A typical search engine would produce links to pages containing the words “politicians,” “comments,” and “Iraq,” which is not what the user really wanted.

This is one of the biggest weaknesses of the major search engines, and although Ask.com promised to fix it years ago, it never really worked. We can’t tell if Powerset actually works, because it’s in a closed beta, but we’re looking forward to testing it.

Will HP pull a Kodak?

Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of the printer group at HP, spoke about his organization’s efforts to encourage printing from websites. HP is producing web tools that make it easier for websites to format content for printing, and is working on services to help people print online content. He said the goal is to get people to print a photo book (for example) rather than just storing photos online.

“If I continued to focus on units, I know that our business will decline, because the connect rate from laptops to printers is just 30% (it was 70% for PCs). We need to switch from printer to printing.”

His efforts sound sensible, but we’re not sure how well they’ll work. Although we’re sure a lot of websites will jump on the opportunity to format their content for printing better, and that may give HP some brand visibility, we’re not sure that it will actually cause people to print those web pages more often. Is printing from the web really broken today?

HP might be better off concentrating its money on specific web applications and services that drive usage of printers—photo editing services, for example, and electronic publishing services.

Other interesting comments (these are summarized quotes, not word for word):

Gaming visionary Trip Hawkins, CEO of Digital Chocolate, on the financial potential for social gaming:

Where the consumer is increasingly going to spend their money is on social value that’s enabled by content. Our social lives are devastatingly bad. Everybody now knows that smoking will kill you. Fifty years ago we didn’t know that, just as today we don’t know what’s wrong with our social lives. If you stop smoking, you will reduce by half your likelihood of dying. But if you are a smoker and join a social club, it has the same effect, it cuts your chances of death in half. Your social life drives your biological performance. This is the real reason why Web 2.0 grows. There are three billion people with mobile phones. At least a billion of them are looking to hook up. Almost everything they spend after they have a roof over their head is to improve their social opportunities. They spend a lot of money on drinks in bars and better haircuts. If that audience thought that $8 a month on mobile services would help them hook up, that’s $100 billion.

Angel investor and Google board member Ram Shriram, on the power of the wireless carriers:

If you come to me with a new mobile application, the first question I will ask is do you have a deal with Verizon or AT&T; without that you won’t get funded.

Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision, on the Sony PS3

It will be four to five years before games fully take advantage of the PS3 architecture. People don’t know how to write parallel processing software that takes advantage of the PS3 architecture.

[Picture yourself as an executive at Sony, hearing that it will be another four years before developers take full advantage of your hardware. By that time Microsoft (and probably Nintendo as well) will have caught up with your hardware. It’s enough to make you fire the head of the PlayStation group—except Sony already did that.]

Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive, on why video clips on YouTube are not a bad thing:

After you were kind enough to watch our show Friday, you came to work and talked about it. You did not recreate the whole show, you just talked about bits and pieces of it. That’s the water cooler experience. Media has never thought about owning that experience. The Internet is full of water coolers. As a media company, you have to be involved in those conversations, you can’t leave it alone. You have to set up a forum that allows that near your property, or get close to them with your advertisers. You have to embrace that instead of fighting it.
The Internet does not cannibalize TV because we can do short video on the Internet to publicize a TV show. They are different media.

Categories: Technology

Tags: O'Reilly , Powerset , Twine , Web 2.0