The Devnuts team invaded Web2Expo in NYC yesterday. We got a chance to meet a lot of cool people and see a ton of really cool products. We registered for the “Expo Hall Only” pass, aka the free one, which we were reminded of quite harshly as we tried to enter a conference by 37 signals that was outside our track.

After our rejection we headed down to the “Sponsored Sessions”. The sponsored sessions are conferences offered by various sponsoring companies open to anyone. When I first read about the sessions I figured they would just be bloated advertisements disguised as conferences with free giveaways. Boy was I wrong. We’ve been able to catch 2 sponsored sessions thus far and I was overwhelmed with the amount of great ideas and information we’ve received.

Seven Habbits of a Successful SaaS company

The first session we attended yesterday morning was Seven Habbits of a Succesful SaaS company hosted by Mark Trang and Kirk Krappe. Mark is with Sales Force and Kirk with Apttus. They both have a ton of experience in traditional software development so hearing their perspective on the switch to software as a service and everything related was very fulfilling.

Their talk covered topics such as developing your software as a service business model, customer success (customer satisfaction), customer retention, and growth. I have requested the slide show from Mark and I will share it when I get my hands on it.

Measuring ROI around Web 2.0

The second talk we heard this morning was Measuring ROI around Web 2.0. This was the session I was really looking forward to hearing because I’ve always tended to have my hands more in the business side of our operations than the development side, and the idea of accurately valuating our communities and applications is baffling to me. The talk was held by Dave Carter of Awareness Networks. Dave was really accurate and detailed with his concepts and lessons so I learned a ton. I plan on writing a followup post on this topic so I’ll be brief with my summary. Dave covered a variety of topics including Measurement Tactics for your web 2.0 company, knowledge management, and acting on the data you collect.

Overall the conference was extremely educational. His points were backed by years of experience and painted with real life examples. Check back for more on what he spoke about shortly.

The Expo Hall

Entrance to the Expo Hall

After spending the morning attending the sponsored sessions we hit the Expo Floor. The expo floor is full of a ton of booths showcasing everything from new development platforms, social communities, collaboration applications, to Microsoft Surface and O’Reilly reading materials.

Platform as a Service seems to be the running theme, talk about a bloated market… more than half of the booths here must be showing off their new platform. One company in particular caught my eye, http://www.octopz.com/. I got a chance to interview the guy running the booth, I’ll post the video as soon as I get a chance to edit through it.

The Mobile Business Expo is also being held here in the Javits Convention Center, which is really cool because we’ve got to see a ton of cool mobile technology. I even got a chance to play with the BlackBerry Bold and the new BlackBerry flip phone. Can you say AJAX Enabled mobile-browsing??

Ajax Enabled Mobile Browsing!

The Keynotes

Well we accidentally overslept the Keynotes today, oops. So no update on Thursday’s keynotes, but yesterday we got a chance to sit in on the keynote and it was a great time. We got there a bit late and missed the history of New York’s web industry. In all honestly we were really only looking forward to hearing Jason Fried from 37 Signals speak.

We arrived just in time for Deborah Schultz’s keynote on the “Death of the Grand Gesture”. Her speech was long and drawn out, and it took her forever to get to the point, which was very evidently turning the people around me off. But once she got to her point I was very intrigued, her concept was very interesting. The concept is that from a marketing standpoint the “Grand Gesture” has become a tool most often used ineffectively. Too often businesses use the grand gesture of something like SuperBowl Ads but forget the ongoing small personal efforts required to maintain customer base. She made it clear that one gets lost without the other, and one without the other is ineffective.

Deborah Schultz during the Keynotes

Once Deborah finished Jason Fried made an “interesting” appearance. You had to be there to understand, but don’t worry you didn’t miss much, just an F bomb or too. Jason’s theme for his keynote was “saying no to the customer”. He stated, “Your product isn’t good because it has everything, you need to learn to say no, be a curator, keep things simple”. He went on about how you need to curate your piece of software and keep specific regulation on the growth of your software to avoid becoming bloated or losing your specialty.

He also suggested that you attach cost to as many things within your company as possible. Costs beyond just monetary such as time and things that aren’t getting done. So when your employee comes to you and says “We gotta have text message alerts”, assign a value to that task. How much time is it going to take, what aren’t you going to be working on because you’re working on the alerts, and how much is it going to cost? Assigning these values allows you to prioritize more efficiently. This is something we at Devnuts have been implementing at every corner. It is really a great tool for properly organizing your efforts.

After Jason finished I bounced out of the keynotes early, but as I went to leave the conference hall I made eye contact with a familiar face. A tall slender, almost celebrity like appearance with a face I knew I recognized. After a second’s glance I realized it was Jay Adelson. He was just chilling in the back of the hall watching the keynotes like any of us. Its odd to me how I know he’s just another nerd just like me and yet I can’t help but look at him as a celebrity. Regardless I thought it was pretty cool that I got to see him in person.

Ok back to the expo floor for a bit, I’ll have another update shortly.