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W20: Keynote - T. O'Reilly & J. B...
Attending the day one keynotes at Web 2.0 was an impressive experience.
Not necessarily because of the keynotes themselves (Tim O'Reilly was
okay and Jeff Bezos of Amazon was downright disappointing). As I walked
in (with several thousand of my closest friends) I couldn't help
feeling that I was walking into a rock concert vs. a conference.
At
the front of the 300,000 square foot room were four giant video
screens. Music was blaring and the dozens of event staff on hand were
skillfully guiding people into their seats. Fortunately, I got in line
for the keynotes 45 minutes early so I was only 200 feet from the stage
(vs. some of the unlucky souls in the back that were literally
thousands of feet away.
A few highlights from Tim O'Reilly's talk:
- Tim
stated that we are currently at the same point with Web 2.0 technology
that we were when Visacalc (Excel's predecessor) was launched back in
the late 80's. Sounds like Tim's expecting bigger things to come.
- Tim
also asserted that we should not expect the future to look like the
past. His example was that the inventors of the automobile called it a
"horseless carriage". Future Web 2.0 products will be unlike anything
we've ever seen.
- Finally, Tim referred a number of times as the
Web as a platform. Based on everything I'm seeing here (and in my own
day to day), this is absolutely the direction of the future.
It's
hard to provide highlights from Jeff Bezos' talk because he really was
underwhelming. To start with, he gave a very technical presentation on
Amazon's web services roadmap. While this was mildly interesting to
know, it didn't provide much thought leadership which I believe is the
goal of a keynote (and why Bezos probably go paid $25K plus travel to
attend).
Jeff did throw out a few powerful stats during his talk:
- Last year, Amazon's DB/storage system housed 800M objects. That number grew to 5B in 2007
- Amazon's peak "object request/day" was 921M in 2006
- Their peak "object request/second" was 16K. That is an amazing number!
One
additional interesting (and innovative) fact. Amazon now provides
companies the ability to warehouse any item using web services. What
this means is that Company A can electronically send Amazon a list of
items that they would like warehoused, they can then have these items
picked and shipped. Even more impressive is that Company A can store
its items indefinitely in Amazon's warehouse at a cost of $.45/cubic
foot. There is no limit to how much or how little one can store.
Fortunately,
the final keynote session which featured John Battelle of Federated
Media interviewing Joe Kraus of JotSpot (recently acquired by Google
for big bucks), Mena Trott of Six Apart and Jay Adelson of Digg. See my next post for details.Publish
Tue, Apr 17 2007
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