Web 2.0 Expo: A Showcase for Innovation

Heading to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo this weekend and am eagerly anticipating it. The sessions are top notch; there will be launches, announcements and many vendors; and I have several meetings I’m pleased to be in.

As is typical for me, there are numerous concurrent sessions I’d like to be in at every time slot during the day! I know it’s impossible to experience it all — and I rely on other bloggers like ReadWriteWeb to tell me the highlights of conferences that I AM ACTUALLY AT! — so hopefully I won’t miss much and the hallway conversations are routinely 10x more meaningful…so I’m looking forward to those almost as much.

Knowing what I do about the Expo at this stage (from talks with the CMP Media folks), there’s no question that this Expo needs to be regionalized for other States in the US and other countries. As I’ve stated many times before, just look at the incredible value of the hundreds of Web 2.0 companies you can get to from lists like the ones here. How many of them have you heard of? How is a business leader, functional department head or project team even have solutions like these on their radar screens?

Over and over again I’ve worked with clients, friends and family to whom I’ve recommended one or more solutions from these lists. Over the last five quarters, I’ve gone through ALL these lists and looked at ALL the value propositions of these companies. This exercise has given me a solid feel for how well their value propositions are presented on their site (and sadly not very well in many cases) while allowing me to also take more “test drives” than I care to count.

What that constant trolling and analyzing has done for me is this: I can match solutions to needs or instantly provide people with a starting point for their own due diligence or exploration. The biggest consequence of these efforts is that I’m more excited and enthusiastic about the Internet-as-a-platform and Web 2.0 (or NextGenWeb, FutureWeb or whatever you care to call it) than almost anyone else I know. This excitement, the possibilities, the opportunities need to be more widely disseminated since the wide majority of people are clueless about what’s going on with the emergent Internet/Web platform…let alone the almost laughingly huge number of solutions that are already built and just waiting for them to use.

If you’d like to be able to take a peek at the booths in the Expo pavilion and see for yourself, I’ve been provided with a code to get a $100 discount you can use when you register *in advance on the Web*:  webex07mk38

This is good for $100 off any conference pass (if you want to pay the big bucks and see the sessions) or the Expo pass (which costs $100, so using the code makes attending the exhibit area free).