Report From the Field: Web 2.0 Expo

O’Reilly now hosts 2 Web 2.0 events per year and in the last 6 months, I’ve attended both of them. I’ll have to say, bang for the buck, Web 2.0 Expo is the better of the two in my opinion. That’s probably because Web 2.0 Expo is targeted less towards CEOs and VCs and more towards developers, designers, and system administrators.

Sunday was (typical of many conferences these days) the tutorial day. The day was broken into four slots and there were a hand-full of two-hour tutorials you could attend. Because it was a pre-cursor to the actual conference, attendance was lighter than the rest of the conference and wi-fi was plentiful.

Sunday night’s Ignite session was very interesting. Even the boring sessions were great because of the live commentary provided by mozes.com. The most interesting (although not the highest rated) presentation of the evening was Instructables.com. Her presentation talked about open source hardware design and for an example, she showed off the knex weaponry that is available on Instructables. Fascinating stuff!

The sessions I have attended have all be very good. Really, the only problem I’ve had is that there are 0 (Zero) PHP based sessions. It is sad that at a conference this large and energetic, they’ve chosen to ignore the most popular language for building web applications.

That having been said, there have been some great sessions that have really started my creative juices flowing. I think, so far, the coolest thing I’ve seen is swivel.com. It’s hard to describe exactly what they do. You can upload your data and make a graph out of it. You data becomes available to everyone else to use in their graphing products. They describe themselves as “the Youtube for Data”. I’m pretty sure that is a trademark violation but it does go a long way to explaining what they do. If you are a data junkie, you are going to love swivel.com.

Beyond that, Etelos.com, whom I mentioned in my Web 2.0 Summit roundups, is showing off some new features. Etelos has a platform for building and distributing applications. Their EASE language excels at building the core parts of most business applications, lists and forms. When you need to move beyond that, their platform supports multiple languages, including PHP, that will allow you to leverage the native functionality of the language in your application. Looking beyond all the market-speak, they are a cool bunch of people trying to make it easier to build the web.

That’s it for this report from the field. If you are at Web 2.0 Expo, look me up, I’m the one in the fedora.

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