Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 Recap: Part 2

This post is about 2 weeks late, which in this day and age is the web equivalent to yesteryear’s newspaper. On the bright side, most of the real-time info about the expo was already conveyed by the twitterers out there. Just see this entry as my attempt to seed the machine for future searches. In case you are wondering, Part 1 is here.

4. Robin Sloan (Current) and Zach Brand (NPR, Digital Media)
TV & Radio with an API: Stories from Current and NPR
Twitter tag: #w2api

This session was a bit basic from a geek perspective, but very well done. Being able to convey boring or complex concepts in a clear manner is a rare talent, and both Sloan and Brand did well there. You may not know Sloan, but chances are you saw his cool video EPIC 2014.

Most media companies still don’t expose most of their content, so I bet this session was inspiring for many. I couldn’t find the slides available anywhere, but you may like this kind-of-related deck interesting.

Some lessons learned:

• Use a “brand and release” strategy to increase your relevance
• APIs allowed NPR to create partnerships that would not exist otherwise
• A good quote: “API = how i stopped focusing on my own website and learned to love the whole internet” 🙂

5. Kate Niederhoffer (Dachis Corporation), Marc Smith (Telligent Systems)
Beyond Buzz: On Measuring a Conversation
Twitter tag: #buzzzz

Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the first half of this session. You can see the slideshare presentation embedded below, but a presentation is so much more than slides. Seeing what I missed teased my imagination about how much is hidden in social metrics. I would love to have Kate and Marc presenting in an IBM event in the future, as understanding the potential of social metrics is very relevant for us right now. One more item in my ever growing to-do list: check and play with NodeXL!

6. Sören Stamer (CoreMedia)
Darwinism on the Web: Surviving and Thriving in a Web 2.0 World
No Twitter tag, apparently 😦

I couldn’t get in the room for this session, and if you follow this blog you know that this one would be at the top of my list. Next time, I have to make sure I arrive early for sessions with cool titles. As a consolation prize, here’s a nice blog post by a person who was luckier than me and, of course, slideshare:

Considering that I failed miserably in writing part 2 when the info was fresh, I’m not promising Part 3 this time. In case you still have appetite for more Web 2.0 Expo, you can see all the keynotes here.

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 Recap: Part 1

I enjoyed attending the Web 2.0 Expo last week, despite missing several sessions due to work-related commitments. Here’s a high level summary of what I thought was memorable, along with a link to the official expo page, where you can find comments and ratings for the session, and a link to the session-specific Twitter tag, where you can get the just-in-time tweets by attendees. I highly recommend you to also search Twitter for the speaker name or the tag #w2e as not everybody included the session-specific tag in their tweets.

1. Dion Hinchcliffe
Economics 2.0: Highly Effective Strategies for Putting Your Business on a Recession Diet
Twitter tag: #econ2

This is my recollection of something really bold Dion said. It may be more of a misquote than a quote, so just take it with a grain of salt:

The first wave of IT companies was about hardware. The second wave was about software. The next generation of IT companies will be about data. Google may one day become the first trillion dollar company in terms of market cap.

Here are Hinchcliffe’s slides, courtesy of Slideshare:

2. Nancy Duarte – Tools for Visual Storytelling
Twitter tag: #w2e_story

This was by far the best session I attended among the electives. I bought Nancy’s slide:ology book last year, and found it to be very good but not extraordinary. Having her conducting a workshop in person is a totally different matter. She’s an excellent story teller and brought interesting and relevant examples on how to go from mundane and ineffective slides to compelling and informative ones. Here are some pics from the session:

Designing a presentation as if you are plotting a movie or a play

Combining multiple diagram types in one visually informative combo

Time to go back to the drawing board and redo all those complex slides

Great use of Meebo to brainstorm with the audience in real time

3. Peter Kim, Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang – Why Social Media Marketing Fails – and How to Fix It
Twitter tag: #smfail

I had high expectations for this one, but felt a bit disappointed – maybe because the expectations were unfairly high to start with. I’m a big fan of the Groundswell book, and I follow both Jeremiah and Peter in Twitter, and I know they have a lot to knowledge to share. I’ve been in panels in the past, so I know that they are often hit-or-miss, depending a lot on the chemistry among the participants or the questions from the audience. The major reason for this one not realizing its full potential was that the panel was not diverse enough in terms of opinions. It would probably be good to have panelists with radically different points of view for the discussions to get interesting. Despite all that, I was really pleased with listening to Charlene for the first time and seeing how balanced her positions are toward the business value of Social Media Marketing. Talking to her after the session was great too, as she’s very approachable and addresses all questions very directly.

Part 2 will come some time soon 🙂

Update: Embedded Hinchcliffe’s presentation from Slideshare.

Is failure overrated?

As seen in Biznology (slightly modified to avoid overlapping with previous posts in this blog):

Is learning from failures overrated? When emphasizing the importance of learning from errors, are we actually creating a culture of losers? Read on to hear arguments on both sides of this discussion and make up your mind. Your company’s survival in the long term may depend on it.

I’m in San Francisco this week, speaking at and attending the Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone West. In a number of sessions, the speakers emphasized that failure is an important part of the innovation game. Knowing that I also tend to subscribe to that theory, and commenting on the Charlie Brown comic strip I embedded in my previous blog entry, a colleague at IBM pointed me to an interesting piece written by Jason Fried, from 37signals, who challenges that whole concept: “Failure is overrated, a redux”. It’s a good post, and the comments are also worth reading. To have a complete picture of the discussion, I suggest you to also read the New York Times article Jason refers to, “Try, Try Again, or Maybe Not”.

As it’s often the case in heated discussions, I initially found that Jason was defending a completely different perspective toward failure and learning, but this comment of his on another related post made me think that the difference is mostly one of weight.

“Everything is a learning experience. It’s just that I’ve found learning from your successes to be more advantageous. (…) I’ve always found more value in learning from the things that work than the things that don’t.”

I definitely can live with that position. What I have more trouble with is the cited Harvard Business School working paper. Here are some excerpts from the NYT article:

“The data are absolutely clear,” says Paul A. Gompers, a professor of business administration at the school and one of the study’s authors. “Does failure breed new knowledge or experience that can be leveraged into performance the second time around?” he asks. In some cases, yes, but over all, he says, “We found there is no benefit in terms of performance.”

(…) first-time entrepreneurs who received venture capital funding had a 22 percent chance of success. Success was defined as going public or filing to go public; Professor Gompers says the results were similar when using other measures, like acquisition or merger.

Already-successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-backed companies was 34 percent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had been liquidated or gone bankrupt had almost the same follow-on success rate as the first-timers: 23 percent.

If the article is accurate – and that’s a big if, considering that this is still a working paper – it seems that the HBS research is not actually proving that “when it comes to venture-backed entrepreneurship, the only experience that counts is success”, as stated in the opening paragraph. It basically demonstrates that enterpreneurs who managed to go public or filed to go public are slightly more likely (going from 22% to 34%) to have a repeat, but isn’t that expected?

There are several factors that come into play when filing a venture to go public, and having done it once gives an entrepreneur some knowledge of what it takes to get there again. I actually find surprising that, even with that edge, the rate of failure is still very high. Another way to interpret the same data is: roughly two thirds of entrepreneurs who were successful the first time (and I’m using the same loose definition of success here) fail the second time. If anything, the data tells me that success is also overrated.

The “learning from failures” approach makes more sense when you take a granular approach to it. Every single initiative you undertake is composed of a vast number of small wins and losses. You definitely can learn from both outcomes, so regardless of which one will teach you the most, embrace successes AND failures. The fundamental message when advocating a culture that allows failure to occur from time to time is to avoid analysis paralysis, or even worse, denial by hiding what went wrong and exaggerating what went right.

The bottom line is that innovation entails good risk management and shares many features with the financial world. Low risk initiatives are likely to generate low returns, and don’t give you much of a competitive edge. Being bold may lead you to collect wins and losses along the way, but also can reward you more handsomely overall. Knowing that, it’s important that you balance your innovation initiatives the same way you handle a portfolio: diversify them and adjust the mix to your comfort level. During economic downturns like the one we are going through now, it’s easy to panic and stop innovating. Keep in mind that a solid and consistent long term approach to innovation may determine your ability to survive in good and bad times.

Top Web 2.0 Expo Keynote Videos: Clay Shirky and Filter Failure

I had great expectations about Clay Shirky’s presentation, as his book “Here Comes Everybody” has plenty of interesting insights and was one of the best books I read this year. So I was a bit underwhelmed by his presentation, but maybe that’s my problem, not his 🙂 . In any case, it’s still a good talk, and has a Canadian flavour to it, by using the case of Ryerson student Chris Avenir, who was threatened to be expelled from school for creating a Facebook study group. You may like it better than I did, so here it is:

Top Web 2.0 Expo Keynote Videos: Gary Vaynerchuk on Building Personal Brand

Gary is one of the most entertaining speakers I’ve ever seen. You may not like his message, but you gotta admit he’s got passion. But it’s better to hear directly from him:

Top Web 2.0 Expo Keynote Videos: Jason Fried (37signals) High Bit Order

All the keynotes from the Web 2.0 Expo are now available in video on Blip.TV. For your convenience, I selected the ones I liked the most and placed them here. My first selection was Jason Fried, co-founder and President of 37signals, the guys behind Basecamp. Very engaging speaker. I don’t actually agree 100% with him, but he’s got some good points. His major message is that a software designer has to act as a museum or gallery curator: you don’t try and put everything you have or everything people ask there. You have to keep it simple. While I agree with the main message, I would say that museums and galleries have physical limitations, or shelf-space constraints that makes the metaphor less applicable. Implementing every single feature request people ask is not the way to go, but listening to feedback and making products rich in desirable features and still useable is still very important.

The initial iPods were very simple devices, and became very popular as they did their one thing very well. Over time, though, it evolved to the current iPod Touch, which is a very complex tool, and essentially can run hundreds of applications from the AppStore. The key is not to limit your product to a low number of features: the trick is to keep the product usable and useful. Here’s the video, so that you can make your own mind: