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.

Technology has become the catalyst for the world civilizations undergoing a slow but vast revolution in thought, ideals, and practice. We are moving from a proprietorized world where money defines the amount of information we have access to, towards a democratized realm in which information is as free as the people who use it.

As technology takes over more and more of our life it is important for us to take full advantage of the benefits it can provide. Not only as individuals, but as a society as a whole. Wikipedia is the perfect example of people taking advantage of the power of technology for the benefit of society as a whole. Each individual contributor is taking part in something bigger than themselves, an organic growing collection of information for us by us.

Proprietary Information - Print-Based Dictionaries, Encyclopedia, Newspapers, etc

• All written by a collection of authors chosen by a select group of “qualified” individuals

• Information was limited to the knowledge of a handful of “experts” and mass distributed to millions

Organic Community Based Information - Wikipedia, Digg, etc

• The power of information is taken from the handful of “experts” and placed in the hands of millions

• Regulation comes in the form of a community, constantly updating and adding input while checking and balancing the information provided by others

• There is a direct correlation between the number of users and the quality of information, the more people using the more viewpoints, perspectives, and ideals are incorporated

• Effectively takes the power of information from the “experts” and “qualified” individuals to the people

All of this is nothing new. Long before the likes of Wikipedia and Digg open-source advocates preached the power of collaboration and freedom of knowledge. But it is not until we saw widely accepted implementations of this sort of collaboration did the possibilities become evident.

Why can’t we apply the same techniques and ideals of open source ideology and organic community based information stores and apply it to the education system. I have been outspoken on my bitterness towards the education system in America and its growing obsoletion as any of my colleagues or friends will tell you. Over and over again I finish my lecture on my beliefs, and I’m met with both faces of intrigue and confusion, but the resulting question is almost always the same — How can we do it better?

My inability to answer this question confidently often nullifies my argument in the eyes of the listener and leaves me in a state of deep thought pondering the very question. I have come up with several theories and ideas, but they were often incomplete and/or impractical.

Recently my partner introduced me to a new project in which we will apply the ideals of Digg/Wikipedia and organic information growth to education. After a brief period of meditation this morning my thoughts and emotions on the projects fell into place in the form of a vision for the future of our education system.

Combine the social integration of Facebook with the informational collaboration of Wikipedia and the community style regulation of Digg and you get our new concept (for development purposes I’ll call Project Ed). I will write more in regards to the specifics in the near future but for now I’ll keep it general for the purpose of conceptualization.

The initial goal of Project Ed is to supplement the educational system by offering a set of collaborative tools integrated with a social network to enhance your educational experience. Our underlying greater vision is to replace the educational system (at the risk of sounding too Dr. Evil, or Bill Gates, I say this loosely with a tinge of humor).

The project begins as a supplemental educational community, but just as Wikipedia has shown, the more users we are able to attract the greater the potential of the community. By collecting and organizing information from classes and universities we can kick start the growth of a virtual organic wealth of information geared towards students. Want to learn Calculus but can’t understand your teacher’s broken English, or just plain can’t stand him? Or maybe you really just don’t get it and your 60 year old teacher can’t fathom your perspective to even begin explaining it to you… why not turn to hundreds and thousands of students just like you for help?

Lets take the power away from the teachers and put it in the hands of the students where it belongs. Take the power from the few and give it to the many. I believe this will be an ideal we will see more and more of in the future.

Expect to hear much more about Project Ed in the near future, for now — Peace.