We are cranking along in our new digs in Palo Alto, yet took some time to enjoy the sunshine and buzz of local events. Web 2.0 Expo provided a plethora of meetings and parties throughout Silicon Valley. The Bay Area has long been known as the epicenter of technology innovation and we enjoy the benefits of rubbing up against the best and brightest in the world of software.
The Web 2.0 Expo made it quite clear that some of the basic ideas that we think of as Web 2.0 are slowly becoming the key future add-ons to enterprise software products. While it is great to see that the corporate software types are starting to "get" the web, some of their products looked a little like dogs dancing in dresses. Familiar, but a little disturbing, and not exactly what I would call a mashup. It was also interesting that only a few products looked tailored to their audience. The wild developer-centric buzz of last year was fading and the mainstreaming of Web 2.0 is well at hand.
The SNAP conference last month seemed to be closer to the leading edge and was a great event for Floyd and I. It gave us a closer look at the trends and techniques that are driving the social media space. Key players FaceBook, MySpace, & RockYou shared what is working and key pitfalls to avoid. There was even a talk by a Stanford professor, BJ Fogg, who is teaching Facebook app developing! Doug McClure, the king of Silicon Valley conferences, always has great perspectives and made this conference time well spent.
As always, outings include mandatory coffee snob stops. While at Web 2.0 Expo we finally found the right alley location of the latest Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco. It was only down the block from Moscone but hidden behind the PlumberMan van. Great photo of the bizarre drip machine they had. As long as I am mentioning great cafes, I have to give a shout out to our local favorite - Cafe Del Doge; but they will soon have competition from a new shop opening across the street called ZombieCoffee.
OK, enough, got to get back to building the doctors’ daily destination.
