Day 3! So yesterday's energy was good. Always exciting to be surrounded by thousands, literally, of like-minded folks, gathering to listen and discuss the state of our industry. The Keynote started with the video I posted yesterday (you'll have to imagine it on a dozen or so massive screens, sprinkled throughout an uber-sized convention hall.)
I wrangled a 5th row seat off to the right. In short, Tim O'Reilly opened it up with some commentary on the evolution of Web 2.0 a bit, and challenged us, the audience, to take it to the next level. He then introduced Jeff Bezos, who started out with a presentation outlining Amazon's new products that embrace and push for a smarter, faster, scalable Web - I'm talking about infrastructure here. This coming from the world's largest bookseller. Obviously prompted questions of why this? And what about your core product Amazon.com? Bezos explained that in building that core service, the company had to innovate technology and processes, physical world and digital, for themselves, and it was natural to take these developments and productize them (I'm paraphrasing here). Truth is, clearly, like any smart Web 1.0 company, they are seeking, searching for, a the next growth opportunity. It's been widely discussed in the industry for some time that Amazon can retain it's undersell-great-products-thru-the-mail as a money-maker for only so long. It's expensive; warehousing, shipping - lots of real-world logistics and overhead. Profit margins are notoriously small; all about volume. So the question for some time really has been, What's next for Amazon? Here's his answer. Or part of it anyway. He mentioned they have much more cooking. We'll have to just see how it plays out.
Included in his preso he outlined 2 major Web Services: the new EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) as well as S3 (Simple Storage Service). Interesting. And rather than trying to explain them, I'll let him do the talking. But they both focus on cost-effective, scalable, on-demand storage and server technology.
What does that mean for us? Ideally - if he is to be believed - even more ability to create, produce (read: all things Web 2.0) and now, completing the picture: Serve, cost-effectively (really cost-effectively, en masse), products and services on the Web.
+ Update with video here.
Next John Battelle chaired a panel with Mena Trott, Joe Kraus, and Jay Adelson discussing each of their adventures and insights in a Web 2.0 world. This was fun, and I found Joe Kraus (of JotSpot and now Google) particularly focused and smart.
That's it for now. Gotta get over there!
Monday Keynote details here:
http://www.web2expo.com/pub/w/53/keynotes.html#Monday
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