Jeremy Britton of ZURB design consultancy thinks your product strategy may have too many features. And if you listen to his theory (which he’ll present at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this year), you’ll learn how you can chop your plans for one product into bits – and into multiple successful and clean products.

Jeremy’s talk (Add a Feature? No. Make a New Product.) features his own company’s experience as the center case study. Instead of reworking ZURB’s flagship product Notable to update a core screenshot annotation feature, the team created a new product – Bounce - from the idea, and have been overwhelmed with the positive results.

We recently spoke with Jeremy and ZURB’s Marketing Lead Dmitry Dragilev about their product/feature strategy and what to expect from his presentation. Check out the audio interview here:

Included in this interview are the team’s thoughts on

• Gradual Engagement: Bringing a customer in slowly but effectively
• Determining when to make a feature its own product, and when not to
• Why starting fresh makes it easier on your developers
• How marketing fits in to this strategy
• Keeping the customer’s needs in mind through it all

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Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike. To see Jeremy speak, register for Web 2.0 Expo SF now with  discount code websf11bl20 to save 20%.

Facebook’s Open Graph protocol is not yet a year old, but already 10% of all web search results (on average) have Open Graph markup.

The Open Graph protocol, which launched at f8 last April, lets developers add metadata to any web page so that it can be represented within any social graph. It powers the nearly ubiquitous “Like” button and other Facebook social plugins. In short, the Open Graph protocol is making it easier for sites and services across the web to determine what you like.

Paul Tarjan, lead developer on the Open Graph protocol and of such tools as the Facebook URL Linter, will speak at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this March about the protocol , the design decisions, tips and tricks, and where it’s headed. He recently spoke with us about his session and what to expect.

“We’re really betting heavy on Open Graph,” he said.

Paul joined Facebook just two weeks before the launch of Open Graph last year. He said he was drawn to the project in part because of his interest in Web Standards and the Semantic Web. “The beauty of what Facebook’s doing is the Open Graph protocol is very pragmatic. It picks and chooses the pieces of the Semantic Web that are interesting and important,” he said. “It’s trying to do structured data instead of just free-form documents on the web. It’s trying to hand around actual structured information about objects and entities.”

Although the Open Graph protocol was developed by Facebook, Paul said he doesn’t see this as a conflict with open standards.

“I am not seeing this as a play to take proprietary data in. If it was, then we wouldn’t be doing it this way. The Open Graph protocol would be done totally different if it were a proprietary thing. It would be like API calls where people hand us data about their information and then we keep it in our fancy little silos. Continue Reading »

Web 2.0 Expo speaker and serial entrepreneur Hjalmar Gislason today launched an international version of previously Iceland only DataMarket.com. This means users can now use the service to find, visualize and access data from around the world, including organizations such as the World Bank, UN, Eurostat, and Gapminder.

Quick summary of what they offer: DataMarketing has “15,000 data sets from over 40 providers holding tens of millions of time series of statistics ranging from World population and temperature anomalies to the yield of oranges in Cyprus – to name an example,” Hjalmar said.

This spring at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, Hjalmar will speak on “The Business of Open Data,” and how businesses can make money by connecting people more easily with Open Data. Previously, he said, the only opportunities businesses saw in Open Data was to provide the public sector with products and services to open up their data.

“This is all good and well, but the real value in Open Data lies in helping people discover all the available data, see its potential and realize how they can make use of it to run their businesses better, make better decisions and identify new opportunities.

“I think that business models that use Open Data today can largely be divided in two categories: Suppliers to government Open Data initiatives and specialized applications that use Open Data to provide highly relevant services to niche audiences. There are great companies, already creating a lot of value in both categories. My favorite examples are Socrata on the supplier end and EveryBlock on the niche audiences side.”

Hjalmar recently spoke to us on his upcoming session and the launch of DataMarket.com, the interview of which you can read below. To see him in person, register for Web 2.0 Expo with discount code websf11bl20 and save 20%.

Q&A with Hjalmar Gislason of DataMarket.com

Kaitlin: Businesses already use all sorts of data in marketing and business decisions. What is your elevator pitch to someone new to Open Data and how it differs from what we had in the past?

Hjalmar: Most businesses have realized how important good data is to their decisions and planning, and many have gone to great lengths to measure key performance indicators, set up business intelligence systems and thereby be able to make really data driven decisions. What has surprised me is that in most cases, this thinking is limited to internal data; data about sales, customer churn, web traffic, call center activity, employee satisfaction and so on. The fact of the matter is that external data is no less important to a business’ success. You could run a company perfectly based on all the internal indicators and still go belly up because you didn’t account for some externalities. Continue Reading »

We are once again hosting a Non-Profit Pavilion at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. If your organization is a registered 501c3 non-profit and uses Web 2.0 technologies to support your cause, mission, or community goals, we invite you to apply for a spot in our Pavilion.

The deadline to apply is January 30 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

Last year’s non-profits included the ACLU of Northern California, Code for America, Internet Systems Consortium, and the SETI Institute among others.

We will choose 10 non-profits to participate in the Pavilion (located on the Expo Hall floor). Each organization will be supplied with booth space, on-site branding, an Internet connection, and inclusion in the online and printed events guide, completely free of charge.

An internal Web 2.0 Expo committee will select the booth recipients and announcements will be made the first week of February.

Simply fill out the form below to apply.

Leverage your social media popularity to get a heavily discounted or free full conference pass to Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2011. Read on to see how.

Here’s the Deal

“Use discount code [INSERT YOUR CODE] for 20% off a Web 2.0 Expo SF conference pass—discount ends March 18! #w2e http://oreil.ly/eK3hPu”

Tweet this sentence to enough of your friends, and you could earn a deeply discounted or free full-price Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 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 20% 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 March 21 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 New York 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 March 18, 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 @kcpike or @w2e.