I went to the Web 2.0 Summit last year and it was awesome. Sometimes reading blogs and listening to pod casts just isn’t enough. This conference really exceeded my expectations last year and I hope it will do so again this year.

At this time the list of speakers include Marc Andreessen of Ning, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

The conference is by invitation only … but try to request an invitation - you might get lucky.

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with Jake Nickell of Threadless “on location” in Chicago. It was awesome to get a glance of the company backstage and to check-out some of the new stuff they’re working on.

To the few people who don’t know what “Threadless” is all about here’s a quick introduction:

Threadless is a business which to an extreme degree is based on user-driven innovation or “crowdsourcing” - as many call it today. They use these techniques to make and sell T-shirts. Anyone can submit a design, then users get to vote on their favorites. The T-shirts that get the most votes are produced and sold online. Four to six designs are chosen every week from 600+ submissions to be printed and sold from the site with the winning designers receiving $2,000 in cash and prizes.

They’re doing a great job: Came up with a great - yet fairly simple - idea (which many people do!) but more importantly they executed this idea with so much energy and so much skill (which very few people do!) that “idea” quickly grew from a very small to be a million $ business. Well done.

I hope to convince Jake to do some projects together … that would be fun.
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This guy Frank Piller dissected a New York Times article on Threadless and found out that:

2000: Year of founding Threadless.

125: Number of submissions received by Threadless each day.

“Millions”: Dollars earned by selling T-shirts” not by hiring star designers but by asking anybody to design them.

Hundreds of thousands: Number of user voting each day.

6: Number of new T-shirt offerings per week.

1,500: Typical size of a batch of each new design.

2,000: Dollars paid to winning designers.

“Almost everything”: Number of items that sell out.

1: Number of Threadless stores, the first opened in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago in July 2007.

2.6 or higher: Score of most winning designs (on the rating scale from 0 to 5).

2.0: Lowest rank of a winning design.

x*n/z: “The final decision about which T’s actually get made and sold has always involved a bit of nonpublic number crunching. For example, Threadless looks at how many 0s and 5s a design gets; designs that inspire passionate disagreement often get printed because they tend to sell”.

1: There is a surprising degree of consistency — maybe even similarity — in the designs. “It’s a barometer of what’s going on in art and design right now,” Threadless director Kalmikoff suggests.

17: Number of winning designs submitted by Glenn Jones, a New Zealand designer.

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Steve Ballmer is well known for stealing the show - and he did.

Steve was probably the one I was looking most forward to when visiting Web2.0 Summit. Don’t really know why … It’s not because of his visionary thinking (or lack of?). Not because I particularly admire the company he represents (not that I don’t!). Maybe it’s just because he’s among the top5 most powerful and charismatic business leaders out there … it might just be as simple as that.

Ahyhoo. Steve didn’t bring that much new stuff to the table - still he overshadowed everyone else:

MS still want be big in Mobile OS and Advertsing. They want to aggressively expand their position in the Enterprise Software business and keep their leader position within Office Tools. He’s very happy with his partnership with Zuckerberg’s Facebook.

He got very exited when talking how MS one day will rise above the big boys and slam duck in the advertising industry … more or less his exact words.
Imagine this: Sitting front rove with Steve shouting like a lunatic to the crowds that one day this new kid (Live Search) will SLAAAAAAAAAAAM DUUUUUUNK!!! (explosively red in the face!). That was pretty cool.

The most interesting part was probably Steve talking about how aggressively MS will be in acquiring start-up companies in the years to come - especially within the advertising industry. It seemed like he was pretty serious about this: “If you have a company to sell me [between $50m and $500m] my email is steveb@microsoft.com”. That’s nice to know …

———

Yo Steve,

I’m the founder of a beautiful marketing software company called TraceWorks.

[……………………………………………]

Stay cool.

See you, Morten E. Wulff
Chief Visionary, TraceWorks

———

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This was a little strange: People paying like DKK20.000 to come to this conference were acting like teenagers at a pussycat dolls concert pushing to get front row seats to this conversation between John Batelle and Mark Zuckerberg. I got a great center spot on the fourth row :). Yes I’m an idiot - I know.

Was it interesting then? Sure. It’s always funny to see history repeating itself like this. I mean this youngster is a 99,9% copy of Bill Gates 25 years back! Besides that Mark is not a big speaker. Not a charismatic superstar … but he’s professional like hell! If it was me today (or at 24) I would be trying so HARD to impress. Not this young guy. Instead he chose to wear beach sandals and generally a very relaxed attitude.

To all you Facebook developers out there according to Mark a lot of new stuff will be added to the “Platform” soon - together with an advertising platform competing with Google/Yahoo/MSN. The last part he didn’t say explicitly, but he hinted that something big - advertising-wise - will happen in 3 months from now. That must be it!?

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Wow! This guy was interesting … and funny (and he’s a Law Professor!).

Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation, at Oxford Internet Institute.

I hope everybody get’s a chance to listen to his presentation on the Internet. His core argument is that web2.0 (the web as a platform) is in many ways “sterile”, meaning NOT OPEN, and very much legally regulated by the platform providers (e.g. Facebook) … much much more than other existing/previous platforms like e.g.”PCs” and “The Internet”.

He also attacked Apple for a being sterile and closed circuit - which is completely true (Iphone + Itunes). I really hate them for that. They’re cool - but broken.

If Martin is listening: This guy is interesting! You know him?

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Sitting in my hotel room (1am) and watching a great tv-show: 10 lesbians and 10 heterosexual men fighting over a bi-sexual woman. Simply can’t wait to see who wins. Crazy people.

Anyhoo. Need to sleep. Looking forward to the Web2.0 Summit starting tomorrow (Wednesday) at 8am.

By the way, Chicago was great. The DMA07 Conference was only “average”.

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The list today is shorter since I overslept a little. I chose not to rush: Picked up the newspaper outside the door of my hotel room - which seems to be complimentary at Sanderson. Read it. Checked my email. Took a shower using both shampoo as well as conditioner (Silvia would proud!). Got dressed. Packed my suitcase … and away I was (well, after a cup of coffee at Starbucks and a sandwich at Pret).

It’s important not to stress - right?

Speakers I listened to Day no. 2 at FOWA:

Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design. I was looking forward to this. I’ve been following the work of Stamen Design for quite some time now. The work they do is simply awesome taking data visualization to the very next level. Stamen is a huge inspiration to me and the rest of the R&D team at TraceWorks. Eric’s presentation was the best I saw at FOWA.

Eric speaks extremely fast, he’s very articulate making no mistakes - showing example after example of beautiful data visualizations. It was very cool. Great presentation. The only time he was a little of “balance” was when someone from the audience asked something sounding like this: “Do you do any visualization for blind people?”. Eric was silent while considering he’s response for about 30 seconds. Then answered “no”.

Some examples of Stamen’s visualizations could be digg labs, cabspotting.org, and twitter blocks.

—-

Joe Walker of DWR. I didn’t get much of it. Pretty technical stuff. I think “DRW” and “Comet” were the keywords in his presentation :-).

—-

Tom Coates of Yahoo! (Brickhouse). Great stuff. Tom’s presentation was about Fire Eagle - a yet to be alfa-launched service from Yahoo:

“Fire Eagle is a new way to share your location with friends or with other websites and services! It’s built on open APIs so that developers can build all kinds of applications that respond to your location…”

Very inspiring since I’m involved in a few different projects in which location sharing could be part of the value proposition … Dan, are you listening? Check it out!

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Speakers I listened to Day no. 1 at FOWA:

Robert Kalin, the founder of Etsy.com. His presentation was sadly a near-catastrophe - unfortunately. He’s a very charming and witty guy and he has some abstract and very interesting ideas - but in today’s presentation he didn’t really pull ‘em off. I’m pretty sure he could do so if he hadn’t been as unlucky (lot’s of technical problems) and perhaps he could have prepared a little better? Skipping the chewing gum while presenting would have helped - but what the hell … Robert and Etsy.com has some amazing ideas on UI and IA e.g. browse by color.

Greate quote though: “Innovation can capture market share”. That’s great. It’s true. And I simply love it.

——

Daniel Waterhouse of big VC firm 3i. Not much new under the sun. Basic stuff about the process of luring Venture Capitalists in the net. I’ve been there and I’ve done that (twice), so it wasn’t that interesting for me I guess - besides from some case studies telling the story of insanely huge investment in the $300m range.

——

Ted Rheingold of Dogster. Impossible for me to relate to this product: a kitsch-like dog lovers community. I did like Ted though - he did a great job. Here’s a few quotes that pretty much sums up his style and core message:

“Fuck-up fast” = making mistakes is OK - but undo them fast.
“Make you business a business” = know exactly how to make $$$.
“I used the wisdom of my-crowds” = learn from family and friends.

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John Resig of the Mozilla Corporation. Since I’m not a developer I didn’t understand half of what he was talking about. But it’s always enjoyable to listen to a well-prepared, truly passionate, and very intelligent young guy presenting. Not surprisingly he’s working for the Mozilla Corp. Guess, Martin, our genius Front-End Developer at TraceWorks would have enjoyed this guy.

——

Kevin Rose, founder and chief architect at Digg / Pownce / Revision3. Sympathetic and relaxed guy who’s doing what he does best; knitting together some fun, simple and useful web applications - often with some sort of inherited social twist. One can only respect him. His presentation though was unfortunately not all that interesting: going through some rather basic things: Hire a DBA to ensure scalability, features that work for us, watch you burn rate, and stuff like that. The best part was the anecdotes from the actual start-up days.

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should I listen to!? The list of speakers is rather long.

Since I’m deeply involved in marketing technology I should probably go check-out:

• Brian McAndrews, President and CEO, aQuantive, Inc.
• James Bilefield, CEO, Openads

And since TraceWorks is depending heavily on M$ I’m of course considering:

• Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Web 3.0 is something I don’t understand at all so I should probably listen carefully to:

• Nova Spivack, Founder and CEO, Radar Networks (his blog)

I’m pretty involved with idea lab “Frank & Able” (stealth) why I think I could learn a lot from super star inventor (latest Metaweb):

• Danny Hillis, Co-Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Applied Minds, Inc.

Who else should I learn from? What else should I do?

BTW: Anybody else going to “Web Summit 2.0″? Let’s meet-up, have a beer, and change the world.

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Normally I prefer more entrepreneurial style / web 2.0′ish conferences like Carson’s FOWA which I’m attending in October - usually they’re a little more fun than the often pretty mind numbing industry specific conferences I’ve attended a 1000 times - such as SES and Ad:tech.

But since my soul and my life is deeply interconnected to TraceWorks - you know the company behind Headlight, a web application for marketing professionals - I think it will be a fairly good move to check out what the hot shots in the marketing industry has to say. That’s why I’m going to DMA07 to listen to what the biiig Agencies have to say. And since we’re 3 people going from TraceWorks it will certainly be a lot of fun.

Anybody been there? What should I expect?

A very positive surprise is that one of the keynote speakers is the Founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. I’m very interested in learning what’s on his mind and especially look forward to learn about his “Google-killer” search engine “Wikia Search” … I among many certainly hope that Wales succeeds in creating a true alternative to Google, because as he explains himself:

“This is fundamental, basic information about the world. It needs to be neutral, and there needs to be an accountable, transparent, public dialogue about how it’s created.”

Read the full article on FastCompany

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