Debra Chrapaty - Microsoft

Ms. Chrapaty runs IT for Microsoft, and gave us all a quick lecture about the importance of infrastructure: if you want a huge growth curve for your Web 2.0 startup, you need to be prepared with your infrastructure. This includes network infrastructure, servers, power, making sure you have labor and materials, location, and so on. This is something we at Sun are pretty aware of, and reminded me of the announcement Sun recently made around the data center-in-a-box, Project Blackbox.

Ms. Chrapaty talked a lot about the cost of power, how cooling is 40-50% of your overall power costs. This again led me to the "cool" things Sun is doing in this area, where the low power consumption of our new chips is yielding significant cost savings for our customers.

Dr. Hyun-Oh Yiu, CEO of Cyworld

Cyworld is a massively successful social networking, video uploading, and music purchasing site in South Korea. Some interesting stats:

• 20 million subscribers
• 40% of total population in Korea uses Cyworld
• 96% of 20-29 year olds use Cyworld regularly
• $300,000 in sales of digital items daily
• 160 million songs sold (second only to iTunes)
• 100,000 video uploads daily (significantly more than YouTube)

There was a great article on social networking burnout in the Chronicle. But far be it from me to actually criticize the burgeoning growth of the Internet - that would be heresy... :)

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com on Enterprise Mashups

Mr. Benioff demonstrated how the Salesforce.com application can be extended with "mashups" from other providers. He said that many of the big app providers are recognizing the value in providing a platform, not just an application. The one thing that caught my eye was that he said they were providing a web-based database API. I looked it up, and sure enough, they have an API called Apex which is a SQL-like language with procedural extensions that you can call from a client app, either Java or AJAX or .Net.

They added procedural extensions to help reduce the server round-trips required to accomplish data processing and reduce the amount of data shipped to the client. This is basically the standard stored procedure model invented by Sybase with Transact-SQL and used by most database platforms today, translated to Web APIs.

I'm not sure why they didn't use the existing ANSI standards for SQL and procedural SQL or Java procedures. Using the Salesforce API seems to invite vendor lock-in. But it's great to see that somebody's doing this, and I suspect there will be a lot of demand for it; hopefully over time a standard will emerge.

Don Tapscott, CEO of New Paradigm

Mr. Tapscott has just finished a new book called Wikinomics, and this talk was about the themes of that book. He underscored the power of this trend we're seeing of moving away from centralized corporate control of resources to a much more distributed model. He quoted an economist from 100 years ago who asked "why does the firm exist? why isn't everybody an independent contractor?" and the answer was "the cost of the transaction: the cost of resources, the cost of collaboration, coordination, and so on." Henry Ford understood this and put everything under one roof.

But the Internet has helped reduce these costs, and now you are seeing products built with mass collaboration, where we harness the power of self organization. This is a very profound change - not just social networking.

Some great examples:

• BMW x3 was not made by BMW. If you're an engineer, you can get on the web and participate in the design. (NB: I couldn't find any reference to this design approach on the web)
• Goldcorp - Mr. Tapscott's neighbor took over 50-year-old mining company. His own geologists couldn't tell him where to find the gold. Normally geological data for a mining company is kept very secret. This new owner published his geological data, and held a contest - $500K for anyone who can find gold. 77 submissions, from mathematicians, computer scientists, geologists. He chose the top three, and found 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold. His market cap went to 10 billion dollars.
• The Chongking motorcycle ecosystem (see Jeff Clavier's blog on this) is basically open source motorcycle manufacturing
• 40% of Procter and Gamble innovations happen outside the company
• Boeing's dreamliner is being produced through a group of peers - no spec, no traditional supply chain.
• Science Commons is opening up scientific research by providing open access to scientific research. (My brother blogged about the barriers to access of scientific research).

The end result: the basic business models are changing in profound ways, and one of the biggest challenges will be the ability for existing, well-founded companies to adapt. He predicts those who don't adapt will likely be left to the wayside.

So, some pretty cool stuff. I worked the booth in the afternoon, and had a few interesting conversations, including a good discussion about offline applications and synch with Kevin Lynch, the Chief Software Architect at Adobe. He concurred that mixed up with all the interest in rich Internet apps is the need to run these apps offline, and he grilled me on the approach to synch I've been discussing. I could see offline storage in a relational database as being very useful for the Adobe platform. Kevin is a very friendly, approachable Chief Software Architect. I've met many who are brusque and generally grumpy, so a nice change. He pointed me towards the Adobe Apollo project which is working on a way to deploy your web apps to the desktop so they can run independent of the browser.

At the end of a long day, however, it's always good to come home.