So I’m in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Expo. It’s been fun so far, I’m wearing one of my Politic20 shirts and fielding a lot of questions as people come up and ask about it. It’s interesting that every person I’ve talked to about it turns out to be very interested in our concept of “Bringing Politics Back to the People”. There are a couple non-profits exhibiting in the Expo hall here that we didn’t know much about before who are focused on politics. They both have a wealth of data and both of them showed us how to access their data and display it on the Politic20 site. This should help a lot in providing a centralized location for politicial information that people need to know about their candidates.
There are lots of Web 2.0 companies in the Expo hall, one thing James and I noticed is that there are a LOT of companies providing ‘easy mashup’ abilities. Bungee Labs, an Orem based company is here with a booth as well, they join at least 10 other companies in the Expo hall who are providing pretty much the same thing. James put it best by saying – “These guys are ALL missing it, what is really needed is a good packaged way to market all the mashups, not an easy way to build them, we already have that”. I was wondering if all of these companies are funded, if they aren’t they are spending a ton of money to be here, I hope they get some good exposure. If all of these companies are funded though, I think it’s going to be a lot of money down the drain for the investors as all but one or two of them are bound to fail.
While at the Expo Hall, we stopped and talked to the guys from MyVidoop.com and looked at their technology that makes it so you don’t have to use passwords anymore, pretty cool stuff. We’re thinking about using it to power a common login between several of our sites – they are compatible with OpenId.
Apparently at the Web 2.0 Expo Keynote yesterday, Tim O’reilly gave Jeff Bezos a really hard time about killing alexaholic.com. He told him something to the effect of ‘alexaholic is awesome, figure out a way to share the Alexa data with them!’. Too bad I missed that! I haven’t heard a report on it, but Eric Schmidt gave a keynote this morning that was supposed to be pretty cool.
Utah is actually represented pretty well at the Expo this year, Bungee Labs is here with their whole team; I saw Sandra, Brad and Cory whom I’ve known for a while. I’m here with Daniel, Randall and James from WikiReview, Judd Bagley from Overstock.com is here and Chris Knudsen and Scott Lemon are going to be here tomorrow. Funny thing is, Chris and I have been talking about getting together for lunch for a while now and haven’t been able to, apparently the best way for Utah geeks to hook up is to meet at the Web 2.0 Expo! 
Amazon Web Services has a booth here with about 4 people at it, Jeff Barr is conspicuously absent as he’s currently traveling in Spain. Jeff IS AWS to me, it’s weird to see other people wearing his shirt 
I also ran into Justine who is currently wearing Justin’s cam for Justin.tv. I was on the camera for about 10 secs this afternoon. Wheee! It was actually kinda cool to see the cam Justin wears and the setup, it’s pretty compact and non-intrusive. It got me thinking that it might be cool to set up a rig like that and stream the Seth Godin event and the Utah Bloggers Conference. We’ll see.
