The busy conference season is upon us again (just cleared TED 2007 which was an absolute blast), and I want to mention two events where I will be speaking in the coming month:
WEB 2.0 EXPO / APRIL 15–18 (Moscone Center, San Francisco CA)
The Web 2.0 Expo is a spin-off of the highly popular Web 2.0 conference (now called the Web 2.0 Summit), that will feature a large number of Web 2.0 companies exhibiting their products, as well as a multi-track conference that will be preceded by a number of workshops. A big shout to my co-chair of the Search SIG Dave McClure for co-organizing this event.
On the 15th, I will be running the workshop Starting Up 2.0: Strategies for Pitching, Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup with my good friend Rob Hayes from First Round Capital. If you have attended some of the Camps (BarCamp, TagCamp, MashupCamp,…) I have run a number of sessions about Angel/VC financing, trying to give participants insights on the funding cycle. We will have 3 hours to cover the startup process, and there will be a lot to talk about. We will keep the scripted part of the session to 2 hours tops so that we can make sure that we address as many of questions of the audience as we can. Feel free to send me an email or leave comments on this post if you plan to attend the workshop, and have specific issues you would like to see addressed.
On the 15th, I will participate to a the Panel on Venture Capital 2.0: Bright Future or Broken Forever?. Since there will be six of us on stage, and we are all very opinionated, it promises a fun debate. I am really looking forward to the conversation with David Hornik, Chris Moore, Josh Kopelman, Michael Eisenberg (who we don’t get to see often enough out here). Mike Arrington will have the "interesting" task of keeping us on topic and/or schedule.
SOFTWARE 2007 / MAY 7–8 (Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara CA)
My friend MR Rangaswami has organized the Software conference for a number of years now. We met a long time ago when I was still an enterprise software investor, and have kept in touch to compare notes on the evolution of systems in the enterprise world. MR has asked Ismail Ghalimi – the CEO of Intalio, organizer of the Office 2.0 conference and talented IT Blogger – and yours truly to run an Enterprise 2.0 theme at Software 2007, which will span across 4 panels (titles listed below are work in progress):
- What does Web 2.0 mean to the enterprise beyond the technical alphabet soup
- Enterprise 2.0: Meet the companies
- Office 2.0: Meet the companies
- Enterprise/Office 2.0: the CIO point of view
Our goal is to set the scene in the first panel, establishing what 2.0 means in the enterprise context and where we have seen actual usage from corporate clients. “Meet the companies” will feature 4 startups building products in a particular segment in the Enterprise/Office space and will both their product vision and their market development strategy (against the incumbents). We will wrap up the discussion with a panel of three/four CIOs and get their views (“So what ? Who cares ?”) on this new generation of applications and services. I will post the formal program and names of participants in these sessions in due course.
Readers of Software Only can get a $300 discount off the regular price by clicking on this link.
UNDER THE RADAR: WHY OFFICE 2.0 MATTERS / MARCH 23 (Microsoft Campus, Mountain View CA)
I will also be attending (but not speaking at this time) the Under the Radar event on Office 2.0 put together by Debbie and Alison over at DealMaker Media. It will be interesting to listen and meet 32 company CEOs in the office 2.0 space. Readers of Software Only can actually get a discount by registering through this link.
As unlikely as it seems from the outset, I think traditional media companies (TMC) will ultimately rule the web 2.0/New Media space. TMCs will surely become the next VCs.
Posted by: Francesco DeParis | May 16, 2007 at 04:05 PM