This is a time for movement. This is not a time to sit still and wait for your business model to fail. This is a time for using what you have.

You may not be able to monetize your free users in the same way. You may have to start charging for some features. Lofty dreams of ad revenue may come to fruition. You will need to charge. You will not be able to do everything. You will need to sell. You will need to be able to tell your story.

Now is still the time to start something. The venture coffers are not completely shut. However, you will need to be wise. You will need to find ways to do more with less.

You will need to go to where the users are. Whether they be enterprise or consumers. Whether the platform is Android or the iPhone. Whether you acquire them via search or social media.

If you’re a developer you still need to learn from each other and share your stories. More than ever you’ll need to learn how to communicate with marketing. You’ll want to learn how to write faster code, be secure and, of course, be greener. You’ll want to find out how to get value from data, how to process that data on less servers than before, and how to respect your users by giving them control of their data. (If you or someone you know is a developer, Web 2.0 Expo has a special offer for you).

We have an invitation; let us know what you think of this direction and the program by adding your comments here. We look forward to hearing from you.

Ignite NYC was a smashing success. Bre kicked off the evening with a soldering competition. Watch the action below:

Ignite NYC soldering competition from make magazine on Vimeo.

Toby Segaran is the Chief Data Wrangler for Metaweb, a company that’s been working on the Semantic Web. He’s going to be speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC on Thursday in a talk entitled The Ecosystem of Corporate and Social Data. I asked Toby to tell us a bit about his talk:

You work at Metaweb (Freebase) and wrote the O’Reilly book “Programming Collective Intelligence“. How will these influence your talk on data?

Toby: I wrote “Programming Collective Intelligence” because I believe that being able to analyze data, particularly user-generated data, will be an important skill for building interesting applications in the future and I was excited to work on Freebase, because it gives me the chance to open up new data sources for everyone. I hope that my talk inspires and guides people to creating new data-driven applications that I haven’t envisioned.

The title of your talk is “The ecosystem of corporate and social data”. Most of your projects use data from the open web. What are the data sources you’ll be talking about? Will they work for the enterprise?

Toby: I’ll be looking at government data sources, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Census Bureau. I’ll also be looking at what companies themselves say in their press releases and what news sources and bloggers talk about. The demos I’ve done so far have attracted the attention of bigger companies as well as data geeks.

What do you think the top take-away will be?

Toby: There’s a lot of cool data out there for people to use, and we’re just starting to see what’s possible. It’s going to be painful to clean it all up and make it useful, but it’s worth it — the next step in building cool applications is powering them with more relevant information.

What are you working on now?

Toby: I just started writing a new book on semantic data, with Jamie Taylor and Colin Evans. We’re hoping to take a much-hyped topic and turn it into real code that people can use. Besides that, freeing data and making it useful!

Lane Becker is co-founder and president of Satisfaction Unlimited, developers of Get Satisfaction - a tool to foster better communication and collaboration between companies and their customers.

Read his recommendations on the exciting talks taking place at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco next week.

1) What is your talk about? Why should attendees come to it?

“Customer Service is the New Marketing” is designed to help companies (and the people who work inside them) deal with the very real changes brought about by the introduction of the Internet and the unprecedented degree of access it gives customers to the companies they know and love — and sometimes hate.

So many companies are frightened by the idea that their customers now have deep access to both information about their company and, more importantly, to *other customers* of the company. Having been up to this point able to avoid interacting with their customers in any real way, many of these companies just want to shove their heads in the sand and pretend that the world hasn’t changed.

But the world has changed, and innovative businesses are recognizing that this change also represents a huge opportunity: to actually talk to their customers, to give their customers opportunities to say what they think and in the process and find out what they really want. These companies see customer service not as customer support but instead as customer *engagement* and treat moments of customer interaction not as a cost to be minimized or a transaction to be hurried through but as an opportunity for real and honest interaction with the people that matter to their business.

In doing so, they gain all sorts of benefits to their organization that weren’t possible before. Hence, “the new marketing” — not just brand messages to ram down your customers throat’s during 30 second commercial spots, but genuine, two-way conversation and community that builds long-term value and lasting relationships for both companies and customers.

During our talk, we’ll review the issues and challenges that arise for companies taking these steps, and we’ll also present an overall framework and initial steps that companies can take to get started.

2) What’s the most important, cool, scary, or useful product or technology (not made by your company) that’s recently arrived or on the horizon?

I’m of the opinion that if a new technology isn’t important, cool, scary, and useful all at once, there’s not much point to it! At the moment I’m really intrigued by Tom Coates’ FireEagle, a project out of Yahoo’s Brickhouse that basically acts as a presence negotiator — developers can use it both to get and give information about a user’s geographic location, which significantly augments what they can do inside their own apps.

Sounds scary to some, but it’s impressively done and should serve as an excellent example of “how to do it right” for other designers and developers who are dealing with the sticky issues of privacy and access to information in this highly transparent, interconnected world we now live in.

3) Aside from your own talk, what’s the most interesting / entertaining speaker, talk or panel happening at Web 2.0 Expo?

Well, Scott Fleckenstein, from my own company, is giving a talk on “The How of OAuth” that nobody should miss. OAuth is a new third-party identification protocol that promises to significantly change the way we manage multiple accounts on the Web. Tired of creating Yet Another Account? Then OAuth is for you.

I’m looking forward to hearing Toby Segaran talk about data mining, because he always manages to take a dry and complicated subject and turn it into something pretty spicy and entertaining: “Social Data: Collecting, Mining, and Using it in Your Applications.”

I’d also recommend Rob Hayes from First Round Capital and Jeff Clavier from Softtech VC, both of who are our investors here at Get Satisfaction, who are presenting on “Starting Up: Strategies for Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup.” Neither Rob nor Jeff is your typical VC — I’ve never seen either of them in either a blue denim shirt or pleated khaki pants, for example — and I know from experience their advice on starting a company is invaluable if you’re thinking that might be something you want to do.

Oh, and one other workshop: Scott Berkun, “How to Innovate on Time.” Scott is brilliant, and comes at his thinking about productivity, and innovation. And, again, an incredibly entertaining speaker (I think that’s important, in case you can’t tell. No one should ever be bored at a conference about the coolest technologies in the world!)

Kevin Lawver of AOL was supposed to give a talk entitled Microformats For Web Services and Portable Content. His talk was rescheduled and through a series of missteps, mistakes and miscommunications (that were mostly by me) he did not find out until it was too late for him to make his new session time (sorry Kevin!). Attempts to get him rescheduled in the Web2Open also failed. Kevin has made lemonade out of the situation and has posted his slides and an associated Rails application.

Kevin did get to present on Bridging the Gap Between Desktop and Web. It covered widgets, microformats, and OpenAuth, “AOL’s opening of its authentication system”. Kevin has made his slides available.

Great summary of Fred von Lohmann’s talk on Licensing User Content.

Seeley Vitacco left a comment about a follow-up event for Sun’s Architecture for Humanity talk:

For those of you who were intrigued by Jim Baty’s High Order Bit on Architecture for Humanity, please join us for an exclusive event in Second Life. John Gage, Sun Co Founder, and Cameron Sinclair, Co Founder of Architecture for Humanity and Open Architecture Network are co-hosting a discussion on collaborative architecture. Tuesday, April 24th @ 10am PT. To register, go to www.sun.com/service/secondlife or email me for more info: sunps_secondlife_ext@sun.com. You’ll need a Second Life avatar to register. If you have not established an avatar name yet, but would like to join, be sure to go to the following URL to join us: http://www.clearink.com/ted

ExpoCal is the excellent scheduling web app that many Web 2.0 Expo attendees have been using. The developers are here and they’ve been adding to the app during the week — including OpenID!

Kellan sent me some of the stats for ExpoCal. They provide a revealing look at the interests of the attendees. These are current as of the evening of Monday the 17th.

ExpoCal is tracking 278 people who are collectively attending 4,951 talks and have applied 188 distinct tags 405 times.

Top 10 user-contributed tags: community, business, yahoo, ajax, flickr, rails, microformat, free, google, syndication

Most popular talks:

158  "A Conversation with Jeff Bezos"
154  "Conference Welcome"
143  "Built to Last or Built to Sell:  Is There a Difference?"
112  "Launch Pad"
110  "High Order Bit:  Introducing Apollo"
106  "Expo Hall Booth Crawl"
103  "Eric Schmidt in Conversation with John Battelle"  
96  "State of the Web 2.0: Measuring the Participatory Web"  
92  "Mobile 2.0"  
84  "Jeff Weiner in Conversation with John Battelle" 
81  "Welcome" Tim O’Reilly  
80  "Launch Pad"  
78  "Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Is It Soup Yet?"  
76  "Official Web 2.0 Expo Conference Attendee Party, sponsored by Nokia"  
75  "High Order Bit: Architecture for Humanity"  
72  "High Order Bit" David L. Sifry  
71  "High Order Bit:  Joost: P2P Television"  
68  "High Order Bit:  The Other Local" Rich Skrenta  
65  "Ignite"  
52  "Tagging that Works"  
45  "Web2.Open"  
44  "High Performance Webpages"  
43  "The People Formerly Known as the Audience"  
43  "Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches"  
41  "Media 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Transforming Traditional Media"  
40  "Building Web 2.0: Next-generation Web Platforms"  
40  "Social Networking Winners & Losers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"  
38  "The New Hybrid Designer"  
37  "Web 20-20: Architectural Patterns and Models for the New Internet"

At the Web 2.0 Expo last night we had our first Ignite event outside of Seattle. 16 great speakers talked about things like WebFS (a file-exchange protocol), starting a company from the South Pole, a just-launched remote usability service, and how to get free press. We had two block of 8 speakers and we used Mozes to pick three Ignite talks to become keynote talks. Here are the three selected Ignite talks that will be keynotes on Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Expo.
Timothy Ferriss (Random House/Crown Publishing, ) - Mastering the Low-Information Diet How to detox from excessive e-mail, Crackberry, Twitter, and related tech heroin to reclaim time and your life. Lifehacks on steroids from a Princeton University guest lecturer in high-tech entrepreneurship. Is it possible to check e-mail once a week? If you do it this way, yes.

Jane McGonigal (Institute for the Future, Avant Game) - Happiness Hacking Future consumers will evaluate technologies on the basis of happiness metrics. Therefore, we should start making technologies that pass "the deathbed test" and improve everyday quality of life. Alternate reality games show the way!

Colin Bulthaup(Squid Labs, Potenco) - How do you create a power infrastructure in developing countries How we are developing a host of products that will change the way power is delivered and utilized, in both developing and developed countries. 

Photos: Scott Beale

***Ignite Expo will be held in the Moscone Center in Room 2002. Attendance is free. Any conference or expo pass will work. You can get Expo passes for free if you are coming to Ignite at Moscone Center.***

On Sunday Ignite Expo will feature the following 16 speakers (in order). They each get 5 minutes to speak using only 20 slides that switch automatically every 15 seconds.

Doors open at 6:45. The first set of 8 speakers will go on at 7:00PM. The second set will go on shortly after 8:00PM. After each set of talks there will be voting via SMS with Mozes. A talk from each block will be selected for an encore performance during the Wednesday keynotes.

Ignite Expo will be held in the Moscone Center in Room 2002. It is open to all comers.

First Set - 7:00 PM

1. Avi Bryant (Dabble DB, Seaside) - Simple vs. Magic: A Study in Contrast

When we wanted to add a branding feature to Dabble DB, we started simple. But simple’s no fun. In the end, we wouldn’t settle for anything less than magic. Hear what happens when a couple of designers and engineers get caught up in perfecting "upload your logo here", dragging color theory and image analysis along for the ride, and expanding the project timeline from a couple of days to nearly a month - and why we’d do it again.

2. Ryan Stewart (ZDNet’s Universal Desktop; Threecast) - The Rich Internet Application Space: Everything from where AJAX fits to Apollo to WPF to the Flash Platform
3. Timothy Ferriss (Random House/Crown Publishing, ) - Mastering the Low-Information Diet

How to detox from excessive e-mail, Crackberry, Twitter, and related tech heroin to reclaim time and your life. Lifehacks on steroids from a Princeton University guest lecturer in high-tech entrepreneurship. Is it possible to check e-mail once a week? If you do it this way, yes.

4. Jon Olsen (ProGroup, ) - Diversity and Inclusion: Hacks you can use

Let’s put diversity and inclusion right in front of this bunch. We’ll strive to challenge the participants, while pointing out some key concepts to take home to their own organizations. The emphasis here is on giving participants serious questions to consider and to raise in their milieu, and in the wider industry. It should be a no brainer; this culture should be leading innovation on this stuff. So we’re making a pitch to get people back on the curve, and an appeal to their pride and brain power.

5. David Crow (Radiant Core, Inc., ) - How to Change the World

The *Camp phenomena has been successfully applied to a variety of technology events. This is the story about moving beyond technology, into public policy. And the impact open, creative communities can have on changing the experience of being a citizen, the face of a city and it’s transit system.

6. Christy Canida (Instructables, ) - K’Nex Guns: Open-Source Hardware on Instructables

Everyone wants open-source hardware, but how do we get there? A group of K’Nex gun-building kids has actually done it on Instructables; I’ll explain how.

7. Salim Ismail (Yahoo!, Confabbb) - Chairman

How do you build and launch a company with no money spent? We did it at Confabb. I’ll be talking through how that was done and some of the challenges we faced.

8. Jordan Schwartz (Microsoft Corp, ) - Beekeeping and the Hive Mind

Crowdsourcing, distributed problem solving, pah! The bees have been doing it for millenia. Learn how to set up a hive in your backyard, free yourself from the iron grip of International Honey Cartel and get a glimpse into the amazing social structure of these clever insects.

Second Set - Shortly After 8:00PM

1. Justin Kan (Justin.tv, ) - The Justin.tv Launch: How to get a lot of press completely by accident and through no fault of your own

Justin explains how the Justin.tv team managed press from before their launch through their one-month anniversary, and through the whole thing were on the Today Show, Nightline, MTV, and many more TV shows and newspapers.

2. Jane McGonigal (Institute for the Future, Avant Game) - Happiness Hacking

Future consumers will evaluate technologies on the basis of happiness metrics. Therefore, we should start making technologies that pass "the deathbed test" and improve everyday quality of life. Alternate reality games show the way!

3. Andre Charland (Nitobi, RobotReplay) - Remote usability for the rest of us

Web developers, designers and community managers have a more challenging role than ever before. They are designing for and facilitating important online activities like communication, collaboration, sharing and socializing. However, it’s hard to know how users are really interacting with websites. They can’t easily observe users in their natural environments interacting with these systems. How many web developers actually get a focus group of target users in a room and watch them navigate their websites? We’re obsessed with helping developers build better user experiences on the web, and we knew there had to be a better, cheaper and faster way than traditional usability testing.

4. Andres Morey (Octopart, ) - South Pole Hacks

remote lasers, glycol spills, and starting a company from the South Pole

5. Simon Wardley (Zimki) - Commoditisation and future stuff. [ Simon is going to do his in 70 slides]
6. Nik Cubrilovic (Omnidrive, Techcrunch) - An Introduction to WebFS

WebFS is a new file exchange protocol being developed by storage providers and application developers. WebFS will allow users to take their files with them between applications and to aggregate all their web-based content into a single storage point. Omnidrive is leading the initiative to develop the open protocol, and will shortly become an open standards based storage point for web users.

7. Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Flickr, ) - Casual Privacy

Privacy has advantages, and privacy has costs. Web 2.0 has seen the rise of interfaces that allow us to cash in on exposing personal info in exchange for the wisdom of the network. Flickr, del.icio.us, Last.fm, dopplr, Netflix’s friends program, Twitter — all sites that reward sharing more and more. But are there patterns that make sharing easy, and low cost (cognitively) without simply making everything public? Can we have "casual privacy"? We can.

8. Colin Bulthaup (Squid Labs, Potenco) - How do you create a power infrastructure in developing countries using human power

How we are developing a host of products that will change the way power is delivered and utilized, in both developing and developed countries.

Ignite Expo will take place at 7:00PM on Sunday evening in Moscone Center. Each of the 16 speakers get five minutes total. 20 slides. 15 seconds a slide. The event is open to all comers and will end at 9:00PM. It’s based on Ignite Seattle.