It started with a good tasty breakfast at the lounge - where I got to meet Rambling Librarian again and Siva ! I also met briefly Kevin (Hi Kevin!).

Web 2.0 in Action

Nexus had a twitter board, campfire chat, flickr - everything that web 2.0 stands for - prominently shown on display screens around the venue. I knew twitter really took off in SXSW but seeing it LIVE! in action gave an idea of how impactful communities are.

Wireless, What Wireless?

One of the most touted features of Nexus was the wireless access (which was the only way the above mentioned web 2.0 apps could have functioned). Sadly, the organizers decided to do it manually - which meant we take our laptops, ibooks, and whatnot to a single desk where four harried organizers set it up for you. Of course, they realised the folly of this quickly and tried to amend it by posting the ESSID and the the WEP password on the campfire chat (which was shown on the screen above the speakers). But my ibook never worked with the wireless service there - even after one of the organizers set it up - this was a common problem for the linux users as well.

Disruption, Opportunity, and Innovation

Nathan Torkington, O'Reilly Radar, Perl Foundation Board

Nat is from O'Reilly Radar and gave a very insightful talk. What I best loved about his talk were his simple and effective keynote slides!

Nat talked about how the web is the new Desktop and how ajax is causing disruptive changes in the UI and eventually, there would have to be standards for Ajax applications as well (just like for HTML). Nat mentioned the differences between disruptive changes happening on the web vs. that of physical space - which were:

• anything can access the data (through "APIs" like flickr, twitter, etc).
• apps are improved continuously and quickly (within a few days as compared to a "few months").
• anything can be connected to the internet.

I am glad Nat specifically mentioned the importance of design in the new web 2.0 arena and how web apps start-ups are increasingly showing a pattern of having co-founders who are respectively hackers (in the true sense of the term), businessmen, and designers.

What Makes Web 2.0 Possible

1. Opensource: Free software that has you not sell your soul (and your profit) to Microsoft!
2. Internet Critical Mass: Moore's Law is over. Whatever speed increments you are getting now is because of having more CPUs in your computer. But, Moore's Law enabled internet to reach its critical mass to be counted upon seriously by businesses and making it a viable marketplace for web apps.

Tracking Trends

At Oreilly, they need to track trends to know what is going to be important so that they could have books available to satisfy the users of that technology. Nat gives the example of how the founder of Oreilly found people using "PERL" (in those times a revolutionary language :)) and how he decided to publish a book on it and it became a top seller on Amazon. It becomes all the more important given that they need to have at least 9 months lead time to get books published and onto the bookstores - just in time for the trend to become huge (DM: for e.g. "Ruby on Rails").

Enterpreneurs need to track trends so that you know what the web community is going to take up online. One of the ways of doing so, is to keep track of sites that hackers and alpha users visit and contribute (for e.g. del.icio.us).

Other reads:

• Oreilly's trend blog:radar.oreilly.com
• Techmeme: techmeme.com

APAC 2.0: Regional Leaders Discuss Emerging Opportunities in a Flat World

• Saw Ken Wye, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Microsoft APAC
• David D. Miller, President, Asia Pacific/Japan & Senior Vice President, Lenovo Group
• Girija Pande, Regional Head of APAC, Tata Consultancy Services
• David Dan, Founder, D Square Transformation Consulting, Former Chairman and CEO, Intel China
• Moderator: Wilson Tan, Managing Director, NEC Solutions APAC and President, ASOCIO

To be fair, this panel seemed out of place in a conference that was uber web 2.0, and the panelists comments did not go down well with the audience (which the panelists sadly had to know LIVE! through the ongoing campfire chat!)

Also, this panel revealed how clueless the senior managers of these technological companies were with respect to Open Source, Web 2.0, new trends, etc. The panel seemed very jargon centric discussion on India and China. Saw Ken Wye, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Microsoft APAC confused Open source with Shared Source (when he said, Microsoft also gives the source for the government organizations when he was asked about his opinion on Open Source).

Frankly, the campfire discussion was far more interesting (and insightful!) than the panelists themselves. I noticed people discussing contexts for the web - for e.g. how a website for the people of Vietnam would be contextually very different from a website aimed at China (Preetam was speaking about it).

The Mobile Web Explosion:

• Walter Lee, VP, Consulting, SMB/Partnering Research, IDC APAC
• Chris Sorensen, Lead Product Manager, Microsoft Asia Pacific & Japan
• R. Chandrasekar, CEO, Velvet Puffin
• Moderator: Darius Cheung, Founder, CEO of Tencube

I was shuttling between this panel and the one on crowdsourcing to find which was the better one to attend and managed to catch only portions of the conversations.

The discussions started with a valid question by Walter Lee about what mobility is about: the technology or the devices and how valuable the real estate of 3 billion subscribers is (something I never thought of before). But after that it became a discussion of the obvious - "push email", "consumer/enterprise convergence" - which I think have been dealt with even before web 2.0 came along. I didnt find anything "disruptive" in the conversation.

Crowdsourcing The Media:

• Kathy Teo, Managing Director, CNET Networks Asia Pacific
• James Seng, Editor, Tomorrow.SG and Partner, Tandem Advisers LLP
• Jennifer Lewis, Editor, Stomp.com.sg, SPH
• Kevin Lim, Educator / Internet Researcher, University at Buffalo (SUNY) and Theory.IsTheReason

While I wandered to this panel, I found there was only standing room space - clearly this discussion had generated a lot of interest. Sadly, the only conversation that was happening when I was there was about tomorrow and how they have editors and how some people post all their entries to tomorrow, etc. Somehow the talk veered towards Citizen Journalism (which is not unusual given most of the panelists were from that arena) and crowdsourcing was lost in the crowd :D

Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion defines Crowdsourcing as

It's a process where businesses faced with tough challenges don't try to come up with all of the answers themselves. They tap into the collective wisdom of millions of amateurs around the world to come up with a solution.

While Citizen Journalism is not specifically about coming up with a solution, but rather create content that showcase a problem. Hence, I was just not able to connect the panel discussions to the topic in question and felt lost (leading to my early lunch :D).

Read/Write Web has a great take on crowdsourcing.

The Future of the Web:

• Andreas Weigend, Former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com
• Bobby Napiltonia, Senior Vice President, Global Business Development and Alliances, Salesforce.com
• Reza Behnam - MD of Yahoo! South East Asia
• Nathan Torkington, O'Reilly Radar, Perl Foundation Board
• Moderator: Bernard Leong, SG Entrepreneurs & Singapore Angle and NUS Entrepreneurship Center

This was the most interesting discussion of the whole event. If there was anything I would have regretted missing (by not attending Nexus), it would be this one.

Andreas Weigend was very insightful and gave a great talk that put a structure to the disruptive changes and the rise of Web 2.0.

Here is what he covered (he did this through a formatted text document!):

The Currency of Discovery: Cost of setting up interaction between people was high before (finding the right friends, contacts, etc): now it is not - e.g. Twitter.

How to create economics of Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Some people are in LinkedIn for attention, while others are there because of trust.

Trust is the property of two people - symmetrical Long Tail, discovery - all based on trust.

Web 2.0 has been about making the implicit knowledge explicit.

The Panel Discussion:

How do we get people to contribute credible data and what's the incentive for that?

Nat: People are not benevolent (supplying data to make sure others don't "go wrong" or to make the world "a better place") and that grattitude is a limited motivator. If people contribute, they need to be given something back. Money is ineffective because all it attracts is spam - but appeal to their "egosystems" or something that is effective.

Web 2.0 is the power of the Thumbs Down. Also, online games are a good example of the "currency" of a community where people get to go to another level, experience a sense of connection, of challenges, "solving problems" (appealing to their "ego systems") or get rewards for actively gaming. This could lead to credible data on the web.

Andreas: It should be clear to contributor that his/her review has consequences. For e.g. reputation (downgraded, etc).

Nat: Raise the bar with quality comments, reviews, so that new commentators or reviewers would know what to contribute (for e.g., if you have forum posts full of flames and trolls, you can expect new forum members to do the same).

Credible Data leads to Crowdsourcing: e.g. theyworkforyou.com - which is a site for U.K. which tracks the effectiveness of a Member of the Parliament in the House.

Asians in Web 2.0: Why aren't there many?

Reza: Yahoo Answers was inspired by a similar site for Korea.

Nat: Every country in Asia wants its Silicon Valley. The best would be to look at the local sites where the action is, and find out how they can be made bigger and reach the whole world and gather more people internationally.

Saranjit (audience): Why do Singaporeans not purchase online?

Reza: Rather than push people to purchase online, offer relevant services to what people do online (for e.g. most people go online for information, yahoo answers offers the service of information to them).

LONG TAIL:

Nat: There are no naturally productive communities unless there is a structure (otherwise there is chaos). In Open Source, Software and social systems manage the crowds.

You don't need to assess the credibility of a youtube producer (no need to trust). But for some you need to know the credibility: for e.g. some of the reviews on Amazon used to be done by the publishers themselves! ( But now, Amazon now puts real names besides their username) .

OpenID:

Nat: OpenID "say who you are" and use it for everything. It doesn't claim it is the only id - maintain the blurriness of real world interactions - let people lie (have multiple personalities for each person). It supports this blurriness.

But most companies allow your ID with them (say, ur ID with Yahoo) to be used as an Open ID anywhere else, but do not allow Open Ids created with other websites (for e.g. Drupal.org) to be used on their site.

Andreas: There are always trade-offs. There is a difference between revealed preferences and stated preferences. People are not rational when they come to privacy - they have fears.

Nat: People are not concerned about the financial value of privacy - but rather of the "egosystems".

New Business Model & Advice for New Entrepreneurs

Audience: There is now a new business model. Online forum posts are now powerful and can make physical advertisements ineffective. For e.g. a bad experience that has gathered force in the online community makes advertisements offline ineffective (the greater the numbers online the worse the effect on the advertisements).

Nat: Oreilly now opens access to books earlier. Timeliness is the killing quality (for e.g. books come 9 months after the trend picks up). Oreilly is putting chapters up as soon as they are being written (called internally as "long snout"). Some of the chapters may not make it to the final book.

Also, Oreilly provides chapters from different books that people could stitch together and print on demand with along with their content.

Andreas: Feedback arrives at the speed of light as opposed to older business models.

Nat: Create positive feedback loops - reputation, transparency, etc. in real time.
Customers and Businesses have spontaneous real time connections.

Andreas: Work as fast as you can about what works and what doesn't work for those who want to be entrepreneurs.

FUTURE OF THE WEB:

Next innovation is Nat: Offline behaviour. Yahoo mail etc when u are offline. (like dojo enables)

Bobby: Services getting stitched together - through APIs and creating new services out of this.

Reza: The interaction between broadband and mobile services - Social Networking and mobile broadband along with Location based services.

I didnt stay back for the next conversation on Startups which has been ably covered by Vanessa.

Summary

On the whole, Nexus was a great inspiration and a thoughtful experience on Web 2.0 - but I was disappointed that there weren't more speakers like Nat and Andreas.