East Meets West – A Web 2.0 Summit Recap

Last week, San Francisco hosted the fourth annual Web 2.0 Summit. The event wrapped up on Friday and with over 100 featured speakers, from Tim O’Reilly to ebay CEO Meg Whitman, there was a lot of related news coverage. For a full report on what’s become a yearly west coast tradition, visit the news and coverage section on the event website.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made waves when he announced that Microsoft plans to purchase 20 web companies a year for the next five years, pledging to spend between $50 million and $1 billion on each of the prospective companies.

“Those will be good acquisitions, and they’re important to us,” Ballmer said. “And they’re of strategic importance.”

Open source developers may also be on the table, according to Ballmer. “We will buy smaller companies. We will buy smaller companies that make some use of open source software,” he said, according to CNET. “We don’t want to discourage people who would talk with us just because they do some open source.” Ballmer even went so far as to offered his email address for any interested developers looking to sell.

Here’s a clip of the Ballmer interview from the Web 2.0 Summit:

Click To Play

Ted Leonsis and Om Malik, featured speakers at the summit, will also be at the New New Internet’s Web 2.0 event, this November 1st. While San Francisco’s Web 2.0 Summit was mainly focused on the technology behind many of the popular web 2.0 applications, the New New Internet’s conference will focus on the implication for business and government.

Leonsis, Vice Chairman of AOL, will be the featured morning keynote while Malik, founder and Chief Blogger of GigaOm, will be the featured afternoon keynote speaker. Like the Web 2.0 Summit event, the November 1st event will host a number of speakers and exhibitors who are at the forefront of the web.

If you missed the event in San Francisco, and will be on the east coast on November 1st, it’s not too late to register for this region’s major annual web conference.

Other interesting notes from the Web 2.0 Summit:

News Corp’s Robert Murdoch calls Google both a “threat and a friend” and Facebook “cool, but not that cool.”

Facebook CEO predicts he’ll double his workforce over the next year alone;

AT&T plans to participate in a government auction of the 700-megahertz band that will be available after broadcast television networks switch to digital from analog in 2009.

Posted by John Stauffer on Monday, October 22nd, 2007. Filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry