Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco is here!

With so much going on, it can be difficult to keep track of all the great events and programs at this year’s show. So, we’ve put together a list of can’t miss programs available to Expo Pass holders happening on Wednesday.

If you don’t have a pass already, there is still time to register for a free expo pass (use code EXPOPASS)

Expo Hall
10:30am – 4:00pm
First Floor

Come see what the the leading Web 2.0 companies have on display.

Keynotes
3:40pm
Third Floor Ballroom

Wednesday’s lineup includes:
- Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.)
- John Maeda (Rhode Island School of Design)
- Stephen Elop (Microsoft Business Division)
- Amanda Koster (SalaamGarage)
- Michael Abbott (Palm, Inc.)
- Mark Carges (eBay Inc.)

Networking Events
Opening Reception (sponsored by Palm)
5:30pm – 3rd Floor Lobby

Ignite
8:15pm* – Mezzanine (444 Jessie Street @ Mint)

*Priority access will be given to Conference and Expo Plus Pass holders starting at 7:30. Space is limited.

Sunlight Hackathon
9:00am – 6:00pm
Second Floor, Room 2018

Sunlight Labs, part of the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation (one of our favorite organizations) is an open source development team that builds technology to make government more transparent and accountable. We’ve invited them to host a hackathon at Web 2.0 Expo, where attendees build an application that promotes transparency in government. We welcome you to join our hackathon – stop by to help out for an hour or a day, contribute to rebuilding our democracy, and meet some great folks!

The project chosen for the Hackathon is the Fifty State Project, an openly available structured database of state legislation.

Sponsored Sessions
Transforming IT with Cloud Computing
Trae Chancellor (Salesforce.com)
9:40am – Room 2016

This Apps for You: Creating Relevant Content Offerings for a Global Marketplace
Tero Ojanperä (Nokia)
9:40am – Room 2014

Smart Work: Embrace Change & Empower Your Teams to Drive Growth and Innovation – A Panel Discussion
Kathy Mandelstein (IBM Software Group)
Ryan Boyles (IBM Software Group)
Brendan Crotty (IBM Software Group)
Tom Deutsch (IBM Software Group)
10:50am – Room 2016

Use It or Lose It: Proving the Business Value of RIAs
Anthony Franco (EffectiveUI)
Michael Clark (Photobucket)
10:50am – Room 2014

Gadgets Gone Commercial: Building Commerce Applications Based on the Gadget Spec
Farhang Kassaei (eBay)
David Glazer (Google)
1:30pm – Room 2014

Darwinism on the Web – Surviving and Thriving in a Web 2.0 World
Sören Stamer (CoreMedia)
1:30pm – Room 2016

Distributing and Monetizing Windows Mobile Applications Through the Windows Marketplace for Mobile
John Bruno (Microsoft)
Daniel Bouie (Microsoft)
2:40pm – Room 2016

Web2Open
Web2Open is Web 2.0 Expo’s unconference – a free, community-driven event where you can connect with other participants to discuss Web 2.0 topics and questions. As an unconference, Web2Open lets attendees create sessions using an onsite grid, and it emphasizes participation and conversation over presentations.

Hybrid Sessions – We’re picking three sessions in the main conference track that will be open to all Web2Open attendees. Then we’re following those presentations with discussions in the Web2Open.

Web Developer Tools: How to be productive building for the Web
10:50am – Room 2002

The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products
1:30pm – Room 2009

Birds of a Feather Sessions
7:00pm – 11:00pm

Location: San Francisco Marriott, in Sierra Rooms, H, I, J and K. The Marriott is located at 55 Fourth Street, just one block from Moscone West.

Thanks to Shannon Clark, Web 2.0 Expo’s wonderful blog partner for writing up this post. Folks, you’re getting tips from a true SF connoisseur of great food so if I were you, I’d eat up this post (and yes, bad pun intended). Click here for full article. 

Reposted from O’Reilly Radar, author Sarah Milstein.

As I’ve written here recently, we’ve got some amazing sessions scheduled for Web2Open–the free unconference hosted by Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. One that I’m particularly excited about is a new experiment, “Practice Your Customer Pitch.”

We’re bringing in five startups who will get two minutes each to give their customer pitch (not their VC pitch), as if meeting a potential customer at a cocktail party (i.e., no slides but OK to drink if you want). To give them feedback, we’ve assembled a top-notch panel of serial entrepreneurs and marketing experts. It’s not a competition, so there’s no judging or ranking—just discussion among the entrepreneurs, panelists and other session attendees.

We’re trying this idea for the first time, so who knows how it will go? But in the entrepreneurial spirit, we’ve mitigated our risks: even if the format doesn’t sing, the session can only be a hit given the participants. (Thanks to Sean O’Malley for helping us connect with a lot of these folks.)

The rather impressive panel:
*Rashmi Sinha, moderator. SlideShare CEO
*Robert Acker, panelist. LiveSpot CEO
*Michael Cerda, panelist. cc:Betty CEO
*Nilofer Merchant, panelist. Rubicon Consulting CEO

The smart startups:
*CrowdVine, social networks for conferences
*dbTwang, Dogster for guitars
*Doodle, online scheduling magic
*Maestro Market, a Web 2.0 speakers’ bureau
*Magoosh, customized test-prep

The session is on Weds, April 1 from 10:50 – 11:40a. If you still need a free pass for Web2Open, you can register using the code websf09opn. There’s more general event info on the Open website.

Sharing details from a letter I received from speaker Sören Stamer, German entrepreneur,  author and  CEO of CoreMedia.

The very essence of what we think of as the web is changing at a rapid pace. The expectations of users are increasing exponentially as new services and new business models evolve.  More and more companies are competing for the same traffic.

Learn more about how companies can thrive in this massively connected world. On Wednesday, April 1st Sören Stamer will present Darwinism on the Web – Surviving and Thriving in a Web 2.0 World – a discussion on successful business models in today’s environment.

CoreMedia, a global provider of Content Management Solutions is at the leading edge of these innovations, helping companies leverage the web 2.0 world with both customers and employees. Visit their booth next week to meet the author and get your personal copy of “Enterprise 2.0 – The Art of Letting Go.”

Thinking of coming to the Hackathon next week but don’t know what you’d be hacking? Some news from our friends over at Sunlight Labs. They’ve been working on something called the Fifty State Project, which is essentially an openly available structured database of state legislation. From their blog:

Those of you who are familiar with Open Congress know that its power lies not in making legislative information available, but instead in how it makes legislation accessible by allowing people to interact with and repurpose what Congress produces. Unfortunately, hurdles remain in creating a better democracy at the local level and shedding light on state legislation. At Sunlight Labs, we’ve been thinking about this problem for a while and now is the time for a fix.

This is a long-term project and we hope to make significant progress with the help that shows up during the Expo next week.

If you’re planning on coming to the Hackathon and don’t already have a badge, you can register for a free Expo pass using this code: websf09hack.

Hope to see some of you there.

Reposted from O’Reilly Radar. Author: Brady Forrest

Ignite is coming back to San Francisco. On April First, the second night of the Web 2.0 Expo, conference co-chair Brady Forrest will be hosting an Ignite at the Mezzanine (just four short blocks away from Moscone). As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. Folks with a Web 2.0 Expo Badge will get priority entrance, but we’ll open the doors to everyone before the talks start. Ignite is free.

The schedule for the evening will be:

7:30 – Doors Open; Entry is for anyone with Conference or Expo Plus Pass holders
8:15 – Entry for Anyone
8:30 – First Set of Speakers

• Danny O’Brien (EFF) Don’t Push Me Cos I’m Close To The Edge
• Raven Hanna (MadeWithMolecules)- Science of Love
• Thor Muller (GetSatisfaction) – We’re all Collapsitarians Now!
• Veronica Belmont (Tekzilla) – Make Your Business a Meme
• Michael Galpert (Aviary) – Images on the internets may appear realer than they are
• Aaron Rowe (Wired Science) – SARS, Drugs, and Biosensors
• Greg Elin (Sunlight Foundation) – Mr Hacker Goes to Washington

9:15 – Break

9:45 – Second Set of Speakers

• Jeff Veen (Small Batch Inc.) – “Great Designers Steal”
• Violet blue (Tiny Nibbles) – Open Source Everything
• Brian Malow (Science Comedian) – Hydrogen and Helium
• Heather Gold (the Heather Gold Show)- How to Get a Lesbian Pregnant
• Lisa Katyama (Tokyo Mango) -Japanese Tech Culture: Demystifying “Weird” Japanese Toys and Tools
• Romi Mahajan (Ascentium) – The Consumer Experience is DEAD
• Jer Faludi (Faludi Design) – Priorities for a greener world: If you could design anything, what should you do?
• Jen Bekman (20×200) – Overcrowded- How Crowd-sourcing is ruining everything.
• Mat Honan (Barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com) – Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle

I hope to see you there. You can RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming.

If you can’t make it to this Ignite perhaps one of these other ones will fit your schedule:

• Ignite Salt Lake City #2 – Thursday, March 26th (more info)
• Ignite Web in Sydney Australia – Tuesday, April 1st (more info)
• Ignite Cardiff #2 – Wednesday, April 8th (more info)
• Ignite Bloomington – Thursday, April 16th (more info)
• Ignite Santa Fe – Wednesday, April 29th (more info)
• Ignite Seattle #6 (tentative) – Wednesday, April 29th (more info will be forthcoming after we inspect the venue)
• Ignite Baltimore #3 – June 25th (more info)

If you don’t live in a place with an Ignite start your own! Check out our community site for more information.

Over on the O’Reilly Radar, Kurt Cagle has published an interview with Will Wright,of Spore and Sim City fame, who will be giving a keynote presentation at Web 2.0 Expo on Thursday, April 2 at 10:00 a.m. 

In the interview, Will looks back at how his fascination with models and robots started him on the gaming path and forward to Sims 3 which is scheduled for release in June. Of his development process, Will notes: 

…we’re basically exploring an emergent system. And because it’s emergent, by its very nature, you can’t sit there and engineer it top-down. What we have to do is we have to sit there and kind of play with a wide variety of algorithms and structures. Turn them on. Observe the behavior. Then when it doesn’t quite do what we want, we go back to the drawing board. We refine it a little bit more. But it feels much more like the process of exploration that is in engineering.

I’m looking forward to hearing more of Will’s thoughts about the relationship between game development, city planning, and behavior at the show next week. And now off to the full list of sessions for the show to see what else I’m going to add to my personal schedule!

Internet television live? Crazy, right? Join us at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, Thursday, April 2, 3:30pm for a live filming. Followed by a meetup on our expo floor lounge with the show hosts. See here for registration details.

I’ve posted this to the O’Reilly Radar and wanted to share it here, too. -Sarah

Next week is Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a four-day mind meld for programmers, practitioners and novitiates. The Expo is co-produced by O’Reilly and TechWeb, who, for the third year in a row, are devoting resources and a row of rooms to Web2Open–a free, two-day unconference that anyone can attend.

The Open, April 1 and 2 at Moscone West, is like most unconferences in that we provide a blank grid and designated rooms so that you can create your own discussion sessions. But unlike a lot of unconferences, the Open includes a handful of prescheduled sessions. And I gotta tell you, this year, we’ve got some incredible stuff on tap–all for the low, low price of free.

Among the highlights are Hybrid sessions (more fun than the name suggests). We pick three sessions in the main conference track and open them to all Web2Open attendees. Then the presenters from those sessions follow up with lively discussions in the Open. You can join both parts of Hybrid, or just one. This year’s Hybrids include:

- Web Developer Tools with Ajaxian’s Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer

- The Lean Startup with customer development expert and “Lessons Learned” blogger Eric Ries

- Sparking a Crush: Attracting and Retaining New Users with Adaptive Path’s Alexa Andrzejewski

To attend the Open, you need a free Expo pass and the urge to participate in conversation. The Open site has details on how to register, along with session times. See you next week!