web2

The future of the cloud

SAN FRANCISCO--The cloud was omnipresent at the Web 2.0 Summit as industry executives discussed the migration from the client to millions of virtualized servers as the information pipe.

"There is a lot of hype. We think about the cloud as the next evolution in computing," said Cisco Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior. "It's a way of abstracting the services and applications from the physical resources and using a more on-demand layer."

Warrior believes that cloud computing will evolve from private and stand-alone clouds to hybrid clouds, which allow movement of applications and services between … Read more

The Obama presidency: 'It's the network, stupid'

At a Web 2.0 Summit panel about politics, author John Heilemann discussed the just-ended campaign and upcoming presidency of Barack Obama with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, and political strategist Joe Trippi.

The upshot: We are in a new era of politics. It started in 2003 but really took hold in the recent campaign. As Trippi said, when it comes to both campaigns and governing, "It's the network, stupid."

He was responding to the theme of the panel, as stated by Heilemann, that the Internet was a fundamental new force in … Read more

Web 2.0 Summit videos: Zuckerberg, Benioff, de la Vega

The on-stage chats at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday featured heavy-hitters from the realm of online applications.

Day 2's lineup at the San Francisco event included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AT&T's Ralph de la Vega, and a four-executive panel of VMware's Paul Maritz, Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff, Adobe Systems' Kevin Lynch, and Google's Dave Girouard. Below are videos of their on-stage talks, courtesy of TechWeb.

Want to know what's up with an old friend or a new acquaintance? For many people, the place to keep up with their social circle … Read more

11 Twitter business models: Vote for the best

I am tired of hearing Twitter CEO Evan Williams give the same old song and dance about his company's revenue strategy.

"It's a valuable service," he says, "I don't think it's going to be hard to monetize." So what's the holdup? I worry about Twitter's business because I want to see the company and the product thrive.

Twitter's delay in implementing a revenue strategy makes me jittery. I would pay for it if I could. But at this point, I don't believe that the Team Twitter actually has … Read more

Start-ups in a funding crisis? So here's a proposal

With the elections behind us, Wall Street's bears returned to form by dumping stocks in a big way on Wednesday and Thursday. Out in San Francisco, another tech conference devoted to all things Web 2.0-ish got under way amid dread about the future. And Cisco's John Chambers cast a further pall when he warned that a sales slowdown has spread from the U.S. to Europe, Asia, and the emerging markets.

On the surface, none of this is encouraging news for the near-term prospects of start-ups, which are the lifeblood of the tech business. So it … Read more

Warner's Bronfman, MySpace's DeWolfe talk music

SAN FRANCISCO--Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. thinks there is still a big place in the world for much-maligned major record labels.

"The value that we have is both on the editorial side, and on the marketing and promotion side," Bronfman said in a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday afternoon. "Those channels are getting harder, not easier." In other words, it was an argument very similar to the one that newspapers and magazines have made in justifying their place in an industry that's getting flooded by scrappy bloggers--big music labels … Read more

New Web apps save the world at Web 2.0 Summit

At the Web 2.0 Summit, a session of product demos showcases several apps and products with a broader perspective than in previous years. These demos were selected because they dealt with global issues, such as the financial situation, global warming, health care, and even "intractable religious wars." A panel of judges discussed each of these products. Here is the Webware take:

Carbon Networks Corporation. This is a service that helps companies understand their carbon footprint, and then monetize it. Say what? It looks like a private carbon offset market for businesses. It also provides tools to help … Read more

Oh, dear, here come the 'Facebook to buy Twitter' rumors

SAN FRANCISCO--John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media, decided to have a little bit of speculative fun onstage Thursday with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit. It's the sort of "speculative fun" that could give tech bloggers a gossip-overload headache for weeks to come: Battelle decided to throw some fuel on the "Facebook might buy Twitter" fire. Which, as far as I can tell, is a relatively new addition to the rumor-roasting pit.

"Is Twitter just a feature of Facebook?" Battelle prodded. Facebook, after all, has its own "status&… Read more

WattzOn asks: How much power are you using?

At the Web 2.0 Summit, Saul Griffith of Makani Power pointed out that a person's carbon footprint is just part of the issue when it comes to living a green life. It comes down to energy consumed, he says. Thus WattzOn, a site that helps you visualize your total load on the planet (actually, technically speaking, the sun).

The service lets you enter in your energy-consuming behaviors, from transit to food to goods purchased. It calculates not just energy taken up by a device (like a washing machine) but the energy it takes to build it, amortized over … Read more

Zuckerberg: Sometimes Facebook goes through 'painful changes'

SAN FRANCISCO--Two of the most commonly heard words in Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's talk at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday were "iteration" and "evolution." Facebook, he repeatedly emphasized, is a company that attributes much of its growth and innovation to going through small changes and expansions.

The site launched in 2004 as a feature-light networking tool for students at Harvard, where Zuckerberg was an undergraduate at the time. It then gradually expanded to other colleges and then corporations before finally opening up to the public. Photo- and video-sharing was added. The &… Read more