Thanks to our partners at The Changelog, we have a great Web 2.0 Expo New York speaker interview with David Kaneda – designer, web developer, and current creative director at Sencha.

Among other important lessons, David’s session at Web 2.0 Expo New York, “How to Develop a Rich, Native-quality User Experience for Mobile Using Web Standards,” will cover practical mobile development strategies like touch-event handling, non-standard user interface components, and graceful degradation for less-capable browsers.

But for a better preview of what he’ll discuss and teach you, check out the podcast interview:

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Register here with code webny10scm4 to save 25% on Web 2.0 Expo conference passes.

Men’s interest e-newsletter Thrillist has grown from a 600-person personal email list in 2005 to one of the most popular men’s brands online. Today it boasts 2 million subscribers, adds another 100,000 every month, and covers 17 cities across the U.S., and soon possibly throughout Europe. Thanks to the talent and hard work of its roughly 60 employees, Thrillist has successfully used email – an “old” medium compared to new channels such as Twitter – to surpass $10 million in sales this year and maintain a loyal audience.

We recently spoke to Thrillist Co-Founder & CEO Ben Lerer about the company’s success and future ventures such as its recent ecommerce acquistion, as well as what he’ll talk about in his Web 2.0 Expo New York session, “Taking an Online Publication to the Next Level.”

(Check out the full audio interview with Ben Lerer below. And stay tuned: We’ll soon have a way for you to download this and other Web 2.0 Expo New York speaker interviews.)

Content is King

The growth for Thrillist was slow and steady in the beginning, but great content, and not extensive ad buys or list acquisitions, attracted the large audience they have today.

“We’ve never done list buys,” Ben said. “That’s one of the core pillars of the way that we’ve built the business. When we went out and we raised cash the stipulation was that we couldn’t go out and market ourselves; we couldn’t buy an audience. We had to put the money towards building a really great product. We had to roll the dice and hope that the product was good enough that it would go viral.”

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We’re pleased to introduce a brand new program at Web 2.0 Expo New York this year that’s specifically designed to get your new company great exposure in front of hundreds of potential users, investors, as well as Tim O’Reilly and Fred Wilson: Our Startup Showcase.

The application period ends August 2, so apply now. If you want to attend Startup Showcase as an audience member, register here with code webny10scm4 to save 25% (even our Web 2.0 Expo Lite pass gets you in).

The Format

On the third day of Web 2.0 Expo New York – Wednesday, September 29 – approximately 30 startups will demo in one large room. We’ll provide you with a small table and room for two people to demo—you’ll bring a laptop (or two) and a founder (or two).

Web 2.0 Expo attendees will have 50 minutes to see all the demos, and a bell will chime every 5 minutes letting people know it’s time to move to another table. As they walk around the hall, attendees will vote on their favorite startup.

After the 50 minutes is up, Tim O’Reilly and Fred Wilson will each announce their top pick along with the audience favorite. These three startups will then each give a pitch and have an on-stage conversation with Tim and Fred.

Who Should Apply?

• relatively young startups that aren’t drowning in investment (yet)
• companies in all technology areas: hardware, software, B2B, B2C, mobile (just to name the most obvious categories)

For more information and to submit your application, check out our Startup Showcase page on the Web 2.0 Expo New York site or contact us @w2e.

Good luck!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Why do so many companies struggle to drive revenue from mobile?  Industry experts Tim Grace of Apartments.com and Nick Fotis of Cars.com argue that our industry’s current focus is on short-term marketing campaigns that fizzle out, rather than on legitimate product extensions that can be monetized for long-term success.

To correct this bias and share what they’ve learned, Tim Grace of Apartments.com and Nick Fotis of Cars.com will speak at Web 2.0 Expo New York this September in their session “From the Trenches: Monetizing Mobile”.

Tim and Nick recently spoke to us about revenue growth via mobile, mistakes they’ve learned from, advertising on mobile devices, and creating great user experiences on mobile devices.

Kaitlin: What’s the most important difference designers and developers need to consider when converting a website to a mobile version? Specifically if their focus is effective monetization.

Tim: For me, the most important consideration is to understand what users want to do with your content on mobile, which should guide your development efforts towards the most critical features, at least for your first mobile foray.  This should align with your monetization goals and ultimately drive greater conversions, as the experience you deliver is laser-focused on the content that mobile users are most likely to engage with.  Beyond that, the level of awareness you must have around different screen sizes, device types and browsers in designing for the mobile web is much greater than simply ensuring compatibility with IE 6, for example, in the desktop web world.

Nick: I agree with Tim – it’s all about consumer need. Our mobile strategy aligns with our overall business strategy, with the principle that serving consumer needs will build an audience. Once the audience is in place, the monetization will come. Our approach to our mobile website is identifying and optimizing the content that’s most useful to consumers in the mobile context (in our case, on or en route to the dealer’s lot).

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Today’s post is brought to you by Web 2.0 Expo New York speaker Laura Klein whose session Combining Qualitative Research, Quantitative Analytics, and Vision to Improve Design covers “qualitative and quantitative methods to learn from users, generate great design ideas, and validate your product decisions.”

Come see Laura this fall by registering today. Use discount code webny10scm4 to save 25% on all conference passes.

I’ve been talking to a lot of startups recently, and it seems like they’re all saying the same thing: “We use metrics to help us make the right product decisions.”

Don’t get me wrong. Metrics are an incredibly useful tool, and every company should be A/B testing and measuring the impact of their new features and product changes. But if you’re relying solely on metrics to steer your product development decisions, you’re going to cost yourself a lot of extra time and money.

The thing is, metrics are great for measuring things: acquisition, retention, revenue, etc. They’re fantastic for telling you what your users are doing. But what they can’t tell you is why.

Let me give you an example. Imagine that you’re looking at your metrics dashboard one day, and you realize that you have quite a lot of drop off in the middle of your registration flow. You now have a very clear goal: decrease that drop off so that more people who hit your landing page will become registered users.

Here is a wildly incomplete list of the things that might be causing the drop:

• People don’t have the information necessary to move on
• People don’t want to give you the information you require because of privacy issues
• People don’t understand what you’re asking for
• People can’t find the button to move them to the next step in the process
• People get bored and wander off because there are too many steps
• People get confused about what to do next

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Come to Web 2.0 Expo New York 2010 with a heavily discounted or FREE pass this year by playing in our bi-annual “Tweet This” Contest. Read on for more info:

Here’s the Deal

“Use discount code [FAKE] for 25% off a Web 2.0 Expo NY conference pass—discount ends Sept 19! #w2e http://oreil.ly/czJyUt”

Tweet this sentence to enough of your friends, and you could earn a deeply discounted or free full-price Web 2.0 Expo New York conference pass. Every time someone buys a conference pass using your personalized discount code (which we will send you—read on), you get an additional 10% off the cost of a full-price pass. That’s on top of the 25% discount we will give you for participating.

Here’s How to Play

• Sign up for the contest at the bottom of this post (scroll down, please!). All we need is your name and an email address to send you a personalized code. Space fills up fast and is limited to the first 100 people who apply.
• Tweet the discount code we give you to your followers so they can sign up using it.
• Kick back and let us do the rest of the work. We’ll contact you on September 20 to tell you how many people signed up using your code… and also to tell you how much money will be shaved off your conference pass.

If you already have a conference pass, you’re still more than welcome to participate. Although the credits you accrue will not work toward the pass you already purchased (retroactively that is), you will be able to earn another deeply discounted or fully paid-for pass for a friend or colleague.

You can also use your credits toward Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2011. One last thing—although we think Twitter is the easiest way for you to spread this deal, there is no restriction as to where you can post your code! Feel free to email your friends or post it on your Facebook account.

We are limiting this contest to the first 100 people who apply – so hurry! The discount code you are given will only work through September 19, so the sooner you start spreading the word the better.

Post any questions in the blog comments section or message us @w2e on Twitter.

Good luck!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Even you lean startup folks can’t afford not to have a content strategist, says Web 2.0 Expo New York speaker Margot Bloomstein. This may be a bit of a biased statement considering it’s her chosen line of work. But when asked to defend the position in a recent interview with us (found below), she made a salient case for why content strategists can improve everything from your team’s editorial workflow to your chances of getting VC funding.

Content strategy remains a relatively misunderstood and perhaps underappreciated discipline. Despite efforts from content strategists such as Razorfish’s Rachel Lovinger, Jeffrey MacIntyre, and Web 2.0 Expo veteran speaker Kristina Halvorson, Web 2.0 companies have yet to fully embrace the idea, and hiring a content strategist is far from universal.

In her session for Web 2.0 Expo New York, Faster, Easier, Better: Use Content Strategy to Your Advantage, Margot will discuss how content strategy can “drive your clients to deliver, help you save time, and shift budget to more worthwhile activities” while staying within your set timeline. See our interview with her below for a longer preview of what she’ll cover, as well as some more information about the future of content strategy.

Kaitlin: For those unfamiliar with content strategy, can you provide a quick list of the duties a content strategist takes on? What essential skills are needed?

Margot: As a content strategist, I’m part consultant, part psychologist. Content strategy itself is a broad umbrella: under it, we plan for the creation, aggregation, and governance of useful, usable, brand-appropriate content. That’s a lot! As such, some content strategists focus more on CMS selection and integration; some focus more on editorial workflow. Others, like Razorfish’s Rachel Lovinger, focus more on tagging and the semantic web. Me? I focus on messaging and articulating the vision of a brand through content strategy. In that capacity, I work with clients to document and prioritize communication goals, determine content types and attributes to realize those goals, and then develop tactical editorial style guidelines to shape the new content.

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