The Web 2.0 Summit isn't just for geeks and software industry insiders--not with a speaker list that includes the likes of Al Gore and Lance Armstrong.
Day 1 of the San Francisco event featured on-stage talks with Armstrong, the multiyear Tour de France champion and force-of-nature bicyclist, along with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and top-shelf venture capitalist John Doerr. Below are videos of their on-stage talks, courtesy of TechWeb.
Yang showed up at an inauspicious moment for his company: longtime rival and sometime partner Google announced on Wednesday that it was giving up on a proposed search-advertising deal with Yahoo, an agreement that had been a key factor in Yahoo's tangling earlier this year with would-be buyer Microsoft.
"It's been a pretty amazing year," Yang allowed. "I certainly didn't expect the year to be
what it's been."
Doerr, meanwhile, had a lot to say about politics and the economy, less than a day after Sen. Barack Obama had become the president-elect. In the first of the two videos below, he talks about energy policy, R&D, a federal chief technology officer, and more. In the second, he focuses on start-ups and the economy.
About energy, Doerr said, "It's the challenge for the generation, it's the scourge of the
economy."
"Act now, and act with speed," Doerr advised start-ups anxious about the economy. Tops
on his 11-point plan: get a loan or secure more financing.
And Armstrong had much to say about endurance, training, and motivation.
"The mind is the thing that wakes up in the morning and says, 'Hey body, let's go do this,'"
Armstrong said.
Correction: This post initially misstated the type of cancer Lance Armstrong survived. It was testicular.
Lance Armstrong, the champion cyclist who was everybody's hero until he dated Mary-Kate Olsen, is taking his LiveStrong brand to the Web much in the way that MC Hammer did with DanceJam.
Armstrong has formally partnered with Demand Media to launch LiveStrong.com, which debuted in full on Tuesday. It's a site for keeping tabs on fitness, wellness, and weight-loss goals, along with discussion forums, editorial content, and videos--other sites in this space are Wellsphere and SparkPeople.
It's a for-profit spinoff of Armstrong's non-profit Lance Armstrong Foundation, or LiveStrong.org, the cancer awareness foundation best-known for those bright yellow bracelets that were ubiquitous in the summer of 2004. Armstrong himself survived prostate cancer before going on to win seven Tour de France titles.
LiveStrong.com is operated by Demand Media, modeled off The Daily Plate, a site the company already runs; Armstrong and his charity have stakes of undetermined amount in the new site.
The Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand Media also owns several domain naming services, a handful of knowledge sites like Answerbag.com and eHow, as well as health and fitness sites like Trails.com, Run The Planet, and entertainment sites like Cracked and a number of online gaming titles.
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