We attended the web 2.0 conference last week (Nov. 16-19) and learned a few things.

1. Think twice before agreeing to do a keynote which projects a live and very public conference Twitter feed while you give your pitch. One unfortunate presenter was torn apart in real time via a twitter commentary that was shown as she spoke.
2. Style matters. Web 2.0 presenters have a definite look: greasy, wind-tunneled hair, wrinkled clothes, and a self-conscious attitude that seems to say, “I’m too busy being brilliantly successful to bother grooming” . We would gladly emulate this splendid style if we only had enough hair to actually show an effect from the wind off the Hudson.

Other highlights:

• Real time search panel (OneRiot, Yahoo, Facebook, Collecta) offered perspectives on the utility and direction of real time search. No one seemed to have a firm answer to monetization, but what the heck, it’s a neat technical challenge

• Tim O’Reilly’s keynote (The War for the Web): thought provoking and highlighting the inexorable tension in the evolution of the web. As an old philosopher, I would call this the dialectics of web evolution: Thesis: the web should be open and free.  Antithesis: The web is a platform for monetization accomplished by closed products and services.  Synthesis: tbd?

• Conference meme: “Do what you do best, link to the rest” (From O’Reilly’s keynote, attributed to Jeff Jarvis)

• Google Wave: I think I get it now. Real-time collaborative email is one way to think about it. As a conference attendee I was granted the rare privelege of being eligible to work with the Google invite-only beta. Registered last week, nothing yet from Google (guess my hair isn’t greasy enough).

• Pretty hilarious, though somewhat scatological, keynote by Baratunde Thurston of the Onion.

• I thought Tony Jebara’s (Sense Networks) bit on harvesting cell phone data was really interesting, although I cannot claim to understand the algorithms. If privacy concerns can be sensibly worked out, “publishing” this kind of intelligence may be the next frontier.

• Conspicuous by its absence was Google. I guess these guys are too busy for Web 2.0 or maybe they’re already on 3.0 (wait,  that’s the semantic web and Google doesn’t believe in semantics). Seriously though, Google was like a spectre haunting the conference. Not quite a malevolent force, but one that overhangs everything while inducing considerable anxiety and doubt.

Well, there’s a lot more, but check out the site:
Web 2.0 NYC

We had a great time at the Open Innovation Seminar (Oct. 22-23) in Sao Paulo, staged by Allagi, a consultancy specializing in open innovation services. Dr. Chesbrough was there to preach to open innovation gospel to a very receptive audience of Brazilian industy and academic players. For the i8 team it was an excellent opportunity to showcase our product and perspective on innovation, despite my computer inexplicably going into hibernation mode (Thank you HP/Microsoft) towards the end of my presentation. Here’s a link to the site, but you need to read Portugese. http://www.openinnovationseminar.com.br/