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Oh Captain, my Captain Canucks - Web 2.0 Summit Canadian round up

Posted by austin under Canada Tech Scene, Conference, Silicon Valley

Unfortunately even with my identification of a few incognito Canadians on the Web 2.0 attendee list, Canada was one attendee shy of being the 2nd largest country in attendance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week.

The top five countries in attendance were,

#1 United States: 915 | #2 United Kingdom: 42 | #3 Canada: 41 | #4 Germany: 16 | #5 Japan: 16

The strong Canadian presence included attendees from the following companies.

Brainpen (Les Cedres, Que.), Business Objects (Vancouver, BC), Cambrian House (Calgary, AB), Canoe/Quebecor Media (Montreal, Que.), Coradiant Inc. (Montreal, Que.), Cre8Object Corp. (Ottawa, Ont.), Flickr (I still consider the team Canadians even though they are in their new office in San Fran), Freshbooks.com (Toronto, Ont.), Geosign Corp. (Guelph, Ont.), Hydro-Quebec (Montreal, Que.), Indigo Books and Music (Toronto, Ont.), Radialpoint (Montreal, Que.), Sympatico/MSN (Montreal & Toronto), Torch Partnership (Toronto, Ont.), Tourism BC (Vancouver, BC), Tucows (Toronto, Ont.), Uniserve Communications (Vancouver, BC), Wanted Technologies (Quebec City, Que.), Yahoo Canada (Toronto, Ont.) and the Yellow Pages Group (Toronto, Ont.).

Radialpoint (my old team) and the team at Cambrian House were both there in force as sponsors representing Canadian companies.

Also in attendance was Wikitravel co-founder Evan Prodromou who was reporting for LinuxWorld, Michael Snider from the Globe and Mail and Salim Teja from Brightspark Ventures.

I was able to sit down and do audio interviews with Mike Sikorsky and Jason Woodrow from Cambrian House (who are great guys - and deserve an upcoming post of their own), Mike McDerment from Freshbooks (also a great guy, who spoke on Paul Kedrosky’s Enterprise 2.0 panel and was mentioned in Mary Meeker’s round up of Web 2.0 companies) and my old friend Elliot Noss from Tucows.

I also interviewed Canadian author Don Tapscott about his new book Wiknomics which looks great.

Paul Kedrosky and I were about to sit down, but our schedules ended up just missing each other. I’ll be trying to arrange a skype call with him in the coming weeks to do an interview for my upcoming podcast.

I am very excited about the startup activity I’m seeing in Canada. It was great to meet so many of you at the show.

On Wed 15 Nov 2006. [3] Comments

 

How World Wide was the Web 2.0 Summit ?

Posted by austin under Conference, Silicon Valley

web20people.jpg
Photo from Veryweb.it via Mathew Ingram

There have been a lot of good wrap up posts of the Web 2.0 Summit. Particularly check out Read/Write Web’s wrap up, Fast Companies posts and of course Michael Arrington’s wrap up of the launchpad companies at TechCrunch.

I was interested in just how global the crowd was at Web 2.0. A quick calculation from the attendee list gives the following breakdown.

This was only for people who had a country listed. (Approx. 15% of attendees didn’t list a country). I also added a few Canadians who’s country wasn’t listed. These include speakers Stewart Butterfield, Paul Kedrosky and Don Tapscott.

I’d love to see Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle (who organized and hosted a great event) post the full demographics including the breakdown of female vs. male attendees. There was a great line up of female speakers, but I felt the percentage of women in attendance was quite low. I wonder how the attendee breakdown and diversity numbers compare to last year. It would be a interesting for conferences to start to publish their audience breakdown.

On Tue 14 Nov 2006. [2] Comments

 

Words of Widsom for Upcoming Web 2.0 Conference

Posted by austin under Humor, Silicon Valley

  • Web 2.0:

    For every 1.6 billion dollar buy out, there are 1.6 million start-ups in garages digging their own websites.

  • Startups 1:

    If your target market is the readers of digg, reddit, and delicious then you’re trying to sell shelves to a carpenter. If he really wanted them, he would have built them himself, years ago.

  • Startups 2:

    If you build it, they might come. If you have a nice website they might stay. If you offer a free service, they might use it. If you’ve gotten this far without thinking about where the cash comes from , you’re in trouble.

    These are among the great words of wisdom I found in a great post from Des Traynor. To this I can only add,

    I refuse to let anyone upgrade me to Web 3.0 this year at Web 2.0. I’m technically running Web 2.0 on Internet 1.0 since Internet 2.0 has been delayed. Attempting to convince me to upgrade to Web 3.0 would be like running Windows Vista on a PDP/11 which everyone knows is not buzzword compliant.

    I’m going to be in San Francisco next week for Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference which should be interesting. This will be my first attempt at blogging during a conference. I tend to be very busy meeting people at conferences - so I’ll have to see how productive my posting will be.

    My old team from Radialpoint are sponsoring the conference and will have a team attending. My friends Joi and Roger are speaking and a bunch of friends are going to be in town. It should be a fun show.

    I’d be interested to hear which other Canadians are going to be heading down for the conference. Given I’ve only increased my readership to an estimated 0.00000016 of the Canadian population (well, I’m being generous to myself - I doubt everyone who has visited the site is Canadian) I may just have to run into them down there.

    • On Tue 31 Oct 2006. [4] Comments