Oh yea and did I say no "pictures or video" at Web 2.0 Expo

Besides the ruffle Google created with their "our PR says no pictures please". I did not see any image or video presence at this years expo. Voice was there with Nokia and TellMe amongst others. Maybe video was out there and I missed out, but as far as I could tell they werent.

So what does that mean with 3-6Mbps lines for users and everyone flocking to Youtube making it the more visited than Google ... no Web 2.0 stuff happening with video??

Huh, that's troubling.

To Web 2.0 Expo and back

The fire was there but the sparks were missing. Dont know why but this years Web 2.0 Expo seemed kinda low key to me. There were a number of companies out there showing off their wares but didnt really see the one or two or few killer applications, tools or products. The Microsoft Live Mesh announcement came close but didnt quite stand out as that spark.

The good thing was that almost all of the vendors out there were trying to position themselves as enterprise 2.0. Which means the guns are now trained on making it happen in the enterprise.

Walking around at Moscone I clubbed vendors in 4 main categories this year.

• PaaS vendors
  
• Vendors who'd squeezed Wiki, Blog, Forums, RSS, Chat into a suite that was enterprise friendly
• Vendors who provided specialized manpower with Web2.0 expertise.
  
• Everyone else mobile apps, voice enabled apps, vendors focused on individual components of category (2) above etc.
  

Its interesting how everyone's swarming to the PaaS space, so the webs been the platform for a while now and it seems like this might be the year when we go mainstream by sending the platform through the web.

Web 2.0 Expo 2008

Web2.0 returns to San Francisco in the week of April22nd and Oracle has a good presence out there. There are some unconferences planned on the booth and here are some of the links to things that relate to Oracle and this event.

Oracle Mix - Oracle's social network
Oracle Wiki - you're here
Oracle WebCenter - Web 2.0-esque features for enterprise apps
blogs.oracle.com
AppsLab Blog - blog by Oracle's own Web 2.0 think tank
OTN TechBlog - official voice of the OTN (developer) community
Oracle Community on Ning
Oracle Tweeters
Application Express

Posting to a Blogger...

Posting to a Blogger from Jott. Trying to figure out where the blog title comes from and what it's posted in the blog post. Also, wanted to figure out how it deals with long pauses and other expressions and also wanted to figure out what the experience of blogging via Jott is like because you might have to think ahead of what you wanna speak and get posted on your blogs. Anyways, I wanted it to give it a try. Let's see how it comes out and also wanted to add some tags, CRM(?) Jott online. Let's see how it goes. listen

Powered by Jott

So I believe the title for the blog comes from the first 3-4 words for the post and also there is currently no way of tagging the blog post. Outside of that it seems to be pretty straightforward.
I guess the "Posting to a Blogger" makes me suspicious if I actually dictated that or it just mis-interpreted something. Need to go back and listen to the recording.

Will play around with it a little more and see how my custom Jott Links behave. More on this later. Oh yea the CRM2.0 link ... I guess no more complaining sales guys dont want to log into a system to create and update activities. They can now do it from their phone, while they are in a cab on the way back from a customer visit.

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Simplicity - Its next for CRM

Interesting opinion post titled "Simplicity: What’s Next in Business Software" on SandHill.com by Anthony Deighton who is the SVP of Marketing at Qliktech. They are a leading provider of next generation BI solutions and one of the fastest growing BI software companies in the world over the last couple of years.

Completely agree with Anthony's message that "Simplicity" is the next big thing for business software and more so for legacy enterprise software vendors. As he very succinctly put it, its not like eating broccoli ;-) to stay healthy .. for some vendors its going to be a matter of survival. Having worked with Anthony in the past I can totally see where he is coming from and what he is prescribing.

I believe that simplicity has been the underlying theme for most SW disruptions. It was really tedious for users to type their commands on a green screen or DOS prompt and then Windows simplified it with visual icons, till Windows/desktop applications became so diverse in their user experience that in came the simple browser based apps where all applications could pretty much be intuitive cause there were a standard set of operations you could perform.

Bringing this message to the Enterprise CRM domain we've seen that a number of newer vendors have made inroads into traditional enterprise CRM land just by simplifying their application delivery and usability without providing much depth to the application. Its already happening and its being very well received by customers. Thats where SaaS/Ondemand had its roots as well. Enterprise customers who had issues with their delivery/deployment models embraced the much simpler on-demand model.

To me the bottomline here is that not only should software vendors pick up the "Simplicity" message but also stick to it.