The Gong Show

I attended the Brave New Web conference in Boston today. It was Web 2.0 conference, which, considering the range of services that are considered to be Web 2.0 today, is a very broad topic. Here are a few quick highlights:

Making the Case for Investment
Adam Bain of Fox Interactive said that when he makes the case for an acquisition, he maps the decision based on three variables:

• Technology (is this innovative?)
• Revenue/Traffic (is this popular and is it monetizing its popularity?)
• Strategy (I’m not sure what he meant by this, but it could be two things: is there a sound big picture strategy and is this a smart strategic move for Fox?)

Adam stopped there, but I thought it was interesting that one can map these three variables on a triangular plot and then measure the effective area. The larger the area, the better the investment. Of course, this assumes that each variable is equally-weighted, which is likely not the case in an investment decision. Still, pretty cool.

A Tale of Two Bay Areas
There was a lot of debate about the advantages/disadvantages of doing a startup in Boston vs Silicon Valley. I didn’t hear many new points made, but someone near me in the audience noted: “I bet they don’t have this conversation in Silicon Valley.” Too true.

Traction Trials and Tribulations
The best session was a panel on scalability. During this panel Antonio Rodriguez of Tabblo made a few great comments (which I’m only paraphrasing):

• “Ten years ago, 300,000 users using your software was a major life acheivement. Today, 300,000 users means you can finally start considering moving your company out of your parents basement.”
• “Once you hit a certain point in the growth curve, you have to choose between building out advanced features to keep your early adopters happy and building out basic trailing-edge hand-holding features for the mainstream users that don’t know the difference between uploading and downloading.”

The second comment here really resonates with me because balancing the design needs of power users compared to novices was the biggest dilema I faced while working in Product Design at Homestead, and I never figured out the answer. It’s a very difficult balancing act of resources and screen real estate.

Overall, the conference was entertaining, but no more informative than a day of posts on the blogosphere. The information exchange going on everyday on the blogosphere is the cutting-edge of thought leadership today. That being said, I dig conferences for the value of getting out from behind a computer and meeting people. There’s no substitute for face-to-face conversation.

The posts over at CenterNetworks are solid if you want more info on the event.