1. The blatant sales pitch in most of the “keynote” presentations was pretty obnoxious, and a real turn-off. I’ll remember that for future conferences, and I’ll be sure to warn anyone I know to avoid them like the plague.
2. At least one or two product-related keynote presentations were okay, because (a) the products play an important role in the marketplace, and conference attendees did want to hear about them, and (b) they were presented without the blatant sales pitch. The best example of this was Microsoft’s presentation about Sharepoint 2010, by Christian Finn, which was titled “Seven Essential Truths About Enterprise 2.0″.
3. Several of the vendors and presenters gave interesting case-study examples of massive adoption of E2.0 tools and products in their organization. The afore-mentioned Microsoft was one: they’ve got 92,000 employees. And IBM was another: they’re rolling out their E2.0 products to a global workforce of 400,000 employees in 170 countries.
4. There are now lots of knowledgeable consultants in the E2.0 field, many of whom gave excellent presentations, and/or participated in various panel sessions, about real-world experiences helping their clients implement new tools/products, and dealing with the political and culture-change issues. On the exhibitor’s floor, I saw an Infosys booth, and I’m they had plenty of people ready to provide such assistance; but I didn’t see any booth staffed with people from Accenture, or PwC, or various other large consulting firms you might have expected to see.
5. Many of the small vendors who exhibited here last year are gone (or at least they’re gone from this conference). And I suspect that several of the small vendors I saw this year will be gone soon, too. This is not lost on the large customers: they obviously like the security and stability associated with large vendors like IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Cisco, etc.
6. Most of the discussions and presentations seemed to concentrate on E2.0 products and services behind the firewall — e.g., how to use such products/services to enable better collaboration among employees, faster response to proposals, business opportunities, and/or problems. There was much less discussion about reaching outside the firewall to interact/collaborate more effectively with customers, suppliers, and business partners.
7. Microsoft had the most amusing give-away toy: a flying pig, which could be launched in a slingshot fashion, and which “oinked” as it flew through the air. I brought one of them home, and our dog has been looking at it suspiciously ever since he laid eyes on it.

As growing evidence of the popularity and acceptance of Enterprise 2.0, the conference organizers will be hosting another conference in Santa Clara, CA on Nov 8-11, 2010. You can get additional details here.

Enjoy!

While I’ve been here this week, I’ve also had a chance to wander around Rome (when it wasn’t raining) and take some pictures. You can see an overview of the entire Rome photo-album; here’s one example:

Enjoy!

 But after a week of watching a gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride on the New York stock market, and reading various gloom-and-doom predictions of bad economic times ahead, I thought it would be more appropriate to replace that talk with a presentation on “Death-March 3: Software Processes in the New Hard Times”:

If you click on either icon, you’ll download a 12.2-megabyte PDF file that actually contains both presentations. So you can look at either one of them, depending on whether you’re feeling optimistic or pessimistic. Enjoy … or don’t.  

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V53; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52:

1. On page 6, I noted that the Michael Wesch “The Machine Is (Us)ing Us” video has now been viewed 5.6 million times, as of Jun 8, 2008.
2. On page 8, I added a bullet point indicating that while the “long tail” is not one of the main “Web 2.0 tools,” it is a “related concept”
3. On page 15, in the discussion of “risks of Web 2.0″ platform, I noted that the comparison between the Keynote/PDF version of this presentation, against the Google Apps version, was so bad that I recently deleted the Google Apps version altogether.
4. On page 17, I added a note to indicate that the chart showing usage of various technologies — including the Internet and Web 2.0 — was taken from a 2006 survey that had been cited on the previous page.
5. On page 20, I updated the Twitter example with a screen shot from my Twitter home page as of this morning.
6. On page 24, I updated the count of Twitter users to 1,811,515 as of Jun 8, 2008. I also added a new bullet point citing a Business Week article indicating that Obama and Clinton each had approximately 30,000 Twitter followers during their primary campaigns, but Obama used his more effectively.
7. On page 26, I changed the first bullet point to indicate that Zappos is a shoe-selling company, not a shoe-manufacturing company.
8. On pages 29-30, I updated the Dopplr example with screen shots from my Dopplr home page as of this morning, which shows that I’m in Rome, along with various other details about who’s in Rome, who’s in my home town of New York, etc.
9. On page 35, I added a couple of sub-bullet points about MySpace, indicating (a) that it’s larger than every other nation except China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia; and (b) that I had written a blog posting about this issue, titled “A United Nations Seat for Myspace?“
10. On page 37, I updated a note about Obama’s “Yes, We Can” video, indicating that as of Jun 8, 2008 it has now been viewed 8.0 million times.
11. On page 75, I added a citation to a blog posting entitled “Did Rails Sink Twitter?“
12. On page 80, I updated the first bullet point to indicate that the book Web 20 Design Patterns is no longer “forthcoming”; it has now been published.
13. On page 85, I updated a bullet point to indicate that, as of Jun 8, 2008, it was still unclear whether Yahoo would continue as an independent company, be acquired by Microsoft, or consummate some kind of marketing/advertising arrangement with Google.
14. On page 87, which discusses IBM’s activities in the Web 2.0 world, I added a note that IBM now has a Vice President of Social Engineering.
15. On page 88, I added a “placeholder” bullet point for the iPhone 2.0 that is scheduled to be announced/released on June 9th; and I also modified a bullet point to reflect my belief that Apple’s distribution of iPhone software apps via iTunes will represent an interesting example of the “long tail” concept.
16. On page 123, which discusses technology trends, I added a note to the bullet point asking whether computers might someday exceed human intelligence — noting that the June 2008 IEEE Spectrum journal has a special report, entitled “The Rapture of the Geeks: separating science from fiction in the technological singularity”
17. On page 127, I added a bullet point indicating that senior executives’ acceptance/non-acceptance of social networks & Web 2.0 will become a more and more significant differentiator; I also included a citation to a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Clay Shirky.
18. On page 130, I added a bullet point with a citation to another paper discussing the use of Web 2.0 in educational environments.
19. On page 134, I added a bullet point with the publishing details of Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations.