I attended a conference on Web 2.0 on the 22nd and 23rd of February, 2007.
Web 2.0 — Innovations & Challenges
Here is my review of the talks presented.
Day 1
Day 1 of the conference was a little disappointing. The Chief Guest of the event, Vidyashankar, IT Secretary, Govt. of Karnataka didn’t show up. I knew enough not to go too early, so I missed all the disappointment. I reached the venue at about 10:30 AM, half way through the keynote address by Ashish Gupta, MD of Helion Ventures, a VC. His talk was engaging and to the point. He talked about the various aspects of Web 2.0 such as social networking and user generated content. He talked about the various business models around Web 2.0, and stressed the importance of having one – which perhaps is an attempt to avoid the mistakes of vanilla Web 1.0.
The talks in the conference were divided in to three four tracks aka sessions (over 2 days).
Track 1 – Business Models based on Web 2.0
Dr. YLR Murthy, Professor, IIMB was the Session chair. He did quite a good job of managing the session, although at times he sounded rude. Perhaps he thought that he was still addressing students in a classroom.
Social Search
This talk was presented by Dr. Arjun Ramanujapuram, who is Director of Advanced Technology Group, Yahoo! India R&D. (OT: Frankly, such titles scare me. Perhaps Yahoo! is well on its way to becoming another “big company†like IBM.) There must have been some confusion because he started his presentation by saying that he didn’t know this talk was to be about business models, but he could add something about it in the end anyway. This bizarre start set my expectations low. The speaker was surprisingly inarticulate. Most of the talk centred on introducing web 2.0 terminology and introducing Yahoo! properties. Soon enough, I dozed off sitting in the very first row.
IBM Innovation Factory – High Performance On Demand Solutions (oh baby)
Talk by one Krishna Satyanarayana from IBM. It took me until the end of this presentation to figure out what this talk was all about. And even at the end, it’s only a guess. So IBM is a large company and needs to find a way to bubble up innovative ideas and evaluate them viz, Innovation Factory. So they develop a web application for this purpose. This app uses blogs and wikis. So it somehow qualifies as a talk in the business model track. Anyway, there were way too many miniature diagrams made by the IBM marketing team in the presentation. Add a black background with blue text in places for that finishing effect.
Search Engine Marketing
This talk was given by Anand and Mahesh from Yahoo! You know this is a talk by two IIT type engineers when you see that:
- The presentation has no title slide, so nobody knows what the talk is about initially.
- The presenter starts by saying “I’m also from Yahoo.â€
- You hear the words, “If you increase the value by epsilon…â€
Coming back, this talk was about search engine monetization and advertising, and about the tools Yahoo! makes available for people interested in bidding for search terms. This talk was informative.
Social Networking
The speaker was Dr. Satyam Priyadarshi, founding member of AOL Labs, AOL. He introduced people to some of the work AOL has been doing in the field of Web 2.0. This was useful, since there are not many takers for AOL in India. He had some useful tips to offer about how to go about expanding reach. Short, and to the point.
Track 2 – Web 2.0 – Challenges in the Process World
The Session Chair was Satish Babu, Software Labs, IBM. He was fairly good at what he did.
Enabling “Kansei Engineering†using Web 2.0
This is not worth writing about. Totally OT.
Ratings and Reviews Platform – Design and Best Practices
This talk was given by two engineers from Yahoo – Hitesh Shah and Tahir Hashmi. They displayed their love of the console by using white on black text in their presentations. Hitesh spoke first, and he was way too fast – both in speech and content. Tahir, on the other hand, was my best speaker of the day. This was the only talk that I enjoyed the whole day. They had some useful information to share about their experiences designing and implementing the ratings and reviews platform across Yahoo! properties.
Security Considerations While Testing Web 2.0 Applications
The regular works about XSS and injection attacks. But the speaker, Kedar Kulkarni from IBM had his share of goof-ups:
- “In web 2.0 applications, we write JavaScript on the client side also.â€
- “In web 2.0 applications, data need not be sent to server side.â€
Design: UED/URG
UED = User Experience Design. The speaker, Abhishek from Yahoo, seemed like he had something to say. He seemed to know what he talked about. But it was too late in the evening for anyone to pay him attention. All I can say is that this talk was badly placed. It would have made more sense to put this talk earlier on.
Day 2
I like Day 2 of most conferences, since I have a better idea of the venue, the time to arrive, and what to expect.
Track 3 — Web 2.0 Tools
Vijaya Ramachandran from Yahoo! was the session chair of this track. Here is an interesting anecdote. You may know that I was an intern at Yahoo! before I joined Interwoven. Vijay Ramachandran was one of the guys who had made me an offer for a full-time job in his team. But since I didn’t like the position, I had to give it up. Had I taken up the offer, I probably would have been working with him. But that’s just my imagination.
Mashups and Maps
This talk was delivered by Sanjay Jain (Product Manager for maps at Bangalore, and has-been engineer) from Google. Given the mediocre line-up of talks yesterday, this sounded like a bit of a relief. That said, the talk was mostly about specifics of Google Maps API and such, and thus not very useful in a general sense. It was still interesting to see some of the mashups people have made. It may be useful to get hold of his presentation (when they are made available by CSIBC – Mar 15) since it contains a lot of interesting links.
Microformats
IMO, this was the best talk of the event. Since I happen to know Philip Tellis (from Yahoo!) personally, and have attended a few of his talks before, I knew what to expect. All I can say is that everything went right with his talk. Most of the audience was unaware of microformats, and the talk served to be educative. Everyonf seemed to notice his t-shirt which had the word “RTFM” on it.
Rich Internet Applications and Flex
This presenter of this talk was Ramnarayanan Krishnaiyer, who is Engineering manager at Adobe. This talk was mostly propaganda about Flex, but it may still have been enlightening for most to see an alternative to Ajax. No demos. The powerpoint presentation was one of the better ones, although bordering on a marketing look.
YUI Library
By Subramanian and Sumeet, two engineers from Yahoo!. Subbu spoke about a few utilities in the YUI library — animation, drag and drop, autocomplete. Very cursory. Almost abruptly, Sumeet recited the entire JSON RFC. Subbu came back with more YUI. All I can say is that this talk was disorganized.
Track 4 — Web 2.0 Technologies
Frankly, I can’t review this section simply because I didn’t attend it. If you find a review elsewhere, please let me know so that I can link to it from here.
Conclusion
The organizers of the event did a great job. Everything at the venue was pleasant and in-place. Many speakers could have done a better job. The morning session of Day 2 was the best part.
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