Web 2.0 Expo

SAN FRANCISCO--Are video games really all about feeding your ego? Maybe, suggested legendary game designer Will Wright in a keynote interview at the Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday morning.

"Most people are very narcissistic," said Electronic Arts' Wright, creator of the Sim City and Sims franchises and now last year's avant-garde Spore, onstage with Federated Media's John Battelle. "The more you can make the game about that person, the more interested, the more emotionally involved they will get."

Advancements in technology have made it possible for the customization craze of the social-networking world … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A conference about Silicon Valley innovation invariably will feature at least one talk about how the old order of American business is hopelessly broken and needs a tech-savvy recharge. At this year's Web 2.0 Expo here, it was author Douglas Rushkoff's "How the Web Ate The Economy, And Why This Is Good For Everyone."

It was a tantalizing title. But most of Rushkoff's talk wasn't about the Web or how it can help steer the world out of a global financial crisis. He focused instead on how the idea of "currency" as we know it, not to mention the notion of the "corporation," is profoundly archaic and that with the market meltdown, we have a golden opportunity to get rid of them altogether.

"We can make pretty much everything great," said Rushkoff, whose book "Life Inc." is coming out in early June, "and if we don't, they will recover and make us miserable for another few centuries."

Corporations and monetary systems, he said, are vestiges of the late Middle Ages when kings and aristocrats were struggling to exert some kind of authority over the fast-rising mercantile class and to rein in independent currencies before they became too powerful. "It was against the law to create value through one another. You had to do it through a corporation," Rushkoff explained. "That was what corporations were for. Centralized currency came up because most towns in late Middle Ages Europe had their own currencies...they had so much extra money they built cathedrals."

(Tip: if you want to make something sound really awful and backwards, talk about how it has roots in kings and feudalism.)… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher suggests that "you aren't are missing anything if you couldn't make it" to Web 2.0 Expo. That may be a bit strong, but one thing seemed to be almost entirely missing from the show: money.

Yes, there were plenty of sponsors spending money on the conference. There just wasn't much emphasis in the conference program itself on actually making Web 2.0 profitable for more than just Google, despite an entire track dedicated to Web 2.0 business models.

The one session, other than mine, that focused on the topic … Read more

Updated at 10:10 p.m. PDT to correct amount spent on R&D. The correct figure is $9 billion. Also, updated at 9:10 a.m. PDT on April 2 to correct the spelling of Stephen Elop's first name.

During an on-stage chat on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Expo, Stephen Elop, Microsoft's president of the business division, defended himself against conference instigator Tim O'Reilly's challenge that Microsoft's traditional office applications aren't making, and may not be able to make, a successful transition to the Web.

Elop, a slick spokesman for … Read more

Palm is ready to let the world get its hands on the software development kit for WebOS, its next-generation mobile operating system.

At the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday, Palm's Michael Abbott announced that the company is ready to let developers start playing with its Mojo SDK, until now restricted to a few dozen select invitees.

He also showed how developers can tap into the messaging stream at the bottom of a Palm Pre using a Palm-hosted notifications service, and provided a link to Palm's past with the announcement of an emulator that will let WebOS users … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--The floor of the exposition hall at this year's Web 2.0 Expo has been a little bit lethargic, to say the least. "It's a lot emptier than last year," said one representative from a social gaming company that had set up a booth. "I think the 'Web 2.0' thing has become a bit of a stigma."

Indeed, these days the term goes hand-in-hand with broken business models and overblown expectations, as much as it does with innovation. With the economy in shambles, attendance at the semiannual conference is down. The show … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Aza Raskin, head of user experience for Mozilla Labs, could be considered the Doogie Howser of the Web design world.

At the age of 25, he's heading up Ubiquity--one of Mozilla's most experimental projects, along with collaborating on Weave and the concept series. This was after Raskin--the son of the late Apple Macintosh designer Jef Raskin--discontinued his pursuit of a Ph.D. to found Humanized, the company that brought him to Mozilla.

However, at a talk about design at the Web 2.0 Expo, Raskin played down his work on some of Mozilla's latest projects, … Read more

I was not surprised that fully half the walk-up pitches I got at Web 2.0 Expo (as in, people walking up to me and pitching their product before I could barely say hello) were related to Twitter. As we all well know, Twitter as a platform and a network has incredible value, even if Twitter as a company has yet to figure out how to turn it into a cash register. Here are three of the Twitter-related companies you can find at Web 2.0 Expo:

CoTweet is a very clever company that will probably start making a nice … Read more

Lucky break for all you Open Sources podcast fans--Matt Asay and I went to the Web 2.0 event Tuesday and instead of podcasting, we shot some video footage using the iSight camera on my Mac and a Flip Video camera. It won't win any videography awards, but it was great sitting next to each other to record this episode.

As I continue to nurse a hand injury, I am happy to say no one was hurt during the filming.

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom