Web 2.0 Expo: Diamonds in the Rough

Today was a busy day with a few good sessions and personal, lengthy meetings (with nothing I can disclose at this time) and I wanted to jot down some thoughts before heading to an event this evening.

The image at the bottom left is a crowd shot of the exhibit hall this evening. It was SO PACKED you could hardly move, let alone talk to anyone at booths. What a home run for CMP Media, O’Reilly, the exhibitors and attendees. The human connections made at venues like this is where good stuff happens and I was amused that CMP had to announce the show closing not once…not twice…but three times and people kept on talking with one another. You could tell people were hungry for more time on the exhibit floor.

My exposure tonight was cursory and I’m planning more in-depth booth discussions tomorrow. But I was impressed with four vendors:

1) Curl: Web services (e.g., widgets, gadgets) are the lifeblood of composite applications. Their value proposition in a nutshell is, “With Curl, developers can implement a new class of enterprise-grade, complex Web-based applications that cannot easily be developed with other RIA technologies. Additionally, corporations with legacy client-server applications can move to Web-based delivery, increasing reach and reducing cost.” They’ve got a huge opportunity with both new delivery and, most importantly, to repurpose existing datasets and application functionality. This re-launch in North America is going to be really interesting to watch.

2) Viddler: Happened to by the Long Tail pavilion and stopped by a laptop showing a video. My instant thought was, “Oh….yet another video site” until a guy asked me if I was interested to learn about Viddler. He proceeded to show me several of their competitive differentiators and here’s ONE to whet your appetite: at any point in a video, you can add a tag and select an embed code.  The kicker? While YouTube and others allow you to embed an entire video on your site, Viddler allows you then to embed the video but it starts from that point in the video!

You can also set multiple points and, for example, be able to have navigation links on the page where the video is displayed for people to immediately go those various points in the video. I’m NOT doing this justice…but this is very cool and if I was delivering video content other than Mentos shooting Diet Coke high in the air…I’d use these guys.

3) Egnyte: is a collaboration and sharing application that I happened to be standing by talking to someone else. While I stood watching them, I was stunned by how they actually do what they describe, “Egnyte delivers a web based application that uniquely combines sharing, automatic organization and a powerful search capability. Use Egnyte to store and organize your documents, emails, IM and to share this with others.“

4) Yugma: These guys were my client in 2006 and I am so pleased that they’re here *and* that they’re getting so much traffic. They did something pretty fun in that they have a schedule up in their booth calling it Stage 2 (as in another stage besides their booth stage) and others who didn’t come to the Expo are delivering content, via Yugma, during the event! Clever and a great showcase for their technology.