This past Thursday evening, I attended the Web2Summit Planning Dinner in San Francisco. I attended the Web2Summit last year when the topic was Web Meets World and found it inspiring to be surrounded by very smart and generous people.
The planning dinner was at the Foreign Cinema Café, definitely one of the coolest venues around. Great food and a room packed with about 150 interesting people.
I thought the event would be more of a collaborative discussion of what Web2Summit should look like this year. Instead, there were three questions for us to answer at our tables. I sat with Greg Kerwin, of TechWeb; Wadooah Wali and Joe Perez, from Demand Media; and Bill Harris, the former CEO of Paypal and Intuit.
Here were my thoughts on the discussion…
1. What is the coolest thing – project, service, gadget – you’ve seen in our industry in the past few months?
The coolest thing I’m seeing is all of the projects, services and gadget coming together to form real-world applications. The convergence of all the things we’ve been working on in our web2.0 bubble going out into the world and meeting up with others. People and corporations really understanding the internet and coming up with new uses for what we’ve built.
Example: AWS improvements – Amazon now has scalable servers. Cloud technologies are beginning to completely eliminate the deployment and scalability issues companies previously had.
2. Who would you like to see added to the Web 2.0 Summit speaker line up?
A mix of thought-leaders, I want to be inspired. They don’t need to be all about Web2.0, they need to be intelligent, innovative and have a strong desire to change the face of the world, and this is why I love attending Web2Summit. There might be an opportunity to bring the ‘bad guys’ to the summit and have them discuss how they are using Web 2.0 to revolutionize their industry – SEC regulatory (crowdsourcing SEC reporting requirements), banking (transparency in how assets are being managed, view into personal credit files), government (how are all expenditures being shared publically – the CDN government is a good example of this – we could get them lined up to attend), big oil (ditto, we could also get them to attend too).
3. Other feedback or suggestions for us on the event?
Make sure the Wifi is top notch 
so we can blog in real time and share with everyone else.
As for what’s on deck for 2009? Themes I picked up were a call was for real solutions to real problems, whether energy, health care, government or the environment. There was also plenty of chatter about the utilization of the ‘crowd’ to be part of these solutions, i.e. collective intelligence will be a big part of solutions in our future.
What are your thoughts on these questions?
Shelley
