There is now a scheduling app for the Web 2.0 Expo. It’ll help you keep track of which sessions you want to attend, find out which ones are most popular, and who’s going to be where. It can be found at http://cal.web2expo.com. ExpoCal has all of the views and pivots that you want for figuring out what is happening at a conference. It provides views of sessions by day, tag, and speaker. If you create an account you can make your schedule. People can also share their calendars (here’s mine for the first couple of days). You can see who else is attending a session and what its tags are. ExpoCal lets you gauge relative attendance size (popularity) with its tag and speaker clouds. It also has a mobile interface that let’s you see your schedule and what talks are happening now.  There is rumor of a Twitter interface in the works. Kellan Elliott-McCrea (an Expo Ignite speaker) updated OSCal for Web 2.0 Expo. He and Evan "Rabble" Henshaw-Plath created the initial app last summer. Thanks!

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. Kevin Marks (Microformats, ) – Sharing meaning not data

A lightning history of attempts at sharing structure online, including IFF, HTML, XML, and JSON, and how the key difficulty is not so much coming up with a data structure, but agreeing on the meaning of the data we are sharing, and that getting people to use the same names for the same things is often the hardest part. Microformats solves this problem not by trying to legislate rules, by getting everyone to agree but by finding areas of agreement and trying to codify and grow them.

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. 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.

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. 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.

6. 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.

7. Mary Hodder (Dabble, Napsterization) – Censorship in Asia of YouTube and Google

Is there a work around? Dabble and other embedded player vehicles do the trick.

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.

Third batch of talks…

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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.

Here’s the second batch of speakers for Ignite Expo (happening Sunday night at 7PM).

1. 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.

2. 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. [Brady: Jordan is doing a repeat of his talk from last week's Ignite Seattle. It was great]

3. Andres Morey (Octopart, ) – South Pole Hacks

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

4. 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.

5. 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.

The Ignite Speakers are coming in and here’s the first batch of acceptances:

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. 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.

3. Andre Charland (Nitobi) – Remore 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. 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. If that still doesn’t torch the stage, what the heck, I’ll also plug a Web2Open Grid session on the same topic.

5. 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.

6. 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!

7. Kevin Marks (Microformats, ) – Sharing meaning not data

A lightning history of attempts at sharing structure online, including IFF, HTML, XML, and JSON, and how the key difficulty is not so much coming up with a data structure, but agreeing on the meaning of the data we are sharing, and that getting people to use the same names for the same things is often the hardest part. Microformats solves this problem not by trying to legislate rules, by getting everyone to agree but by finding areas of agreement and trying to codify and grow them.

More coming and there’s still room on the docket. if you have something that you want to talk about submit it.If you’re still not sure what Ignite is check out this behind the scenes video from last Thursday in Seattle to get a feel for it.

At the Web 2.0 Expo we’re going to have an Ignite Event on Sunday the 15th. We’re also going to use voting to select a pair of Ignite talks on the Main Stage. It is patterned after Ignite Seattle!

Specifically, we are going to have 16 Ask Later talks. These talks will each be 5 minutes long with 20 slides and only 15 seconds a slide. Anyone who is attending Expo or Web2Open is welcome to speak. The crowd favorites will be given keynote slots on the Main Stage of the Expo.

We are going to use Mozes to select two Ask later talks to be given again on Wednesday in front of the entire conference. Let me repeat that the crowd favorites get in front of the entire conference later in the week.

Topics should fall in the realm of web 2.0 technology, entrepreneurship, life hacks, or something else that you think a room full of internet junkies will appreciate. Stories and lessons work better than product demoes. There are still many slots to be filled. Talks will be selected next Tuesday the 10th; slides will be due Friday. Fill out this form to throw your hat in the ring.

If you need an example talk to guide you check out Jordan Schwartz’s Ignite talk on SMS. He did an excellent job with in December and just today he agreed to give a longer version of the talk at the Expo (it’ll be up on the site in the couple of days).

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Fred von Lohmann, a Senior Staff Attorney at the EFF will be running the Licensing User-Generated Content. In this post he covers some of the content that will be covered (his first post).

Getting users to create and upload content to your website is hard enough. But how do you keep that user-submitted content fresh, relevant, and valuable for other users? And how do you unlock all the markets for user-generated content that you haven’t even thought of yet? One way is to give it all away and let other users find the highest and best use for all those videos, photos, and other stuff.

Unfortunately, giving stuff away turns out to be complicated. You’ll likely need to come up with some license terms that encourage other users to re-use, re-purpose, and re-mix the content posted by previous users. But, at the same time, you’ll need to give the prior creators some reassurance that their works won’t be misused. After all, users often want some control over their creations. And you’ll need an interface that somehow makes all this clear and comprehensible.

For an example of how this gets done right, check out Flickr’s integration of Creative Commons licenses into its photo hosting service. Users not only upload their photos, they are also able to choose license terms that define what other users can do with the photos. Creative Commons has put an incredible amount of effort into developing licensing standards that set out the ground rules in language that non-lawyers can understand. And Flickr has baked those licenses into its interface so that users can assign CC licenses to their photos.

As a result, anyone who needs a photo for any purpose can use Flickr to find photos with license terms that meet their needs. Running a magazine and looking for free stock photos? Check for Attribution licensed photos. Need images for your personal, noncommercial blog, or for the cover to your latest mix CD? You have more than 10 million Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licensed photos to choose from.

With any luck, Flickr (and its users) might find itself the next king of the stock photo business, all as an unanticipated consequence of helping users give away their photos.

I’ll be talking about Flickr, and other successful licensing experiments by Web 2.0 companies, at my session, Licensing User-Generated Content, at the Web 2.0 Expo. See you there.

Fred von Lohmann, a Senior Staff Attorney at the EFF will be running the Licensing User-Generated Content. In this post he covers some of the content that will be covered.

It’s a trite observation that all great creators stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. But Web 2.0 companies that depend on users to generate, submit, and improve content are dealing with the flip side of this adage — sometimes the people whose shoulders are being stood upon get grumpy about it. For example, Viacom recently sent 100,000 "takedown" notices to YouTube complaining about unauthorized uses of its content by YouTubers.

So what can/should/must you do when your users are using other people’s content as the raw materials for their new creations? While this is certainly a lawyer question, it’s also a business question. Getting the answer correct can lead to a successful Web 2.0 phenomenon. Getting it wrong could lead to the smoking crater that the old Napster disappeared into.

The boundaries are defined by the so-called "DMCA safe harbors." Those are the copyright rules that YouTube and MySpace depend on. What most people don’t realize is that most of the "old skool" Internet industry –Google, eBay, Yahoo — also depend on the very same rules. So it’s worth becoming familiar with the DMCA safe harbors, because they literally dictate both the business and design decisions that make new Internet businesses possible.

Here’s a concrete example — Avvenu is a new music lockering and sharing service. Users upload their music libraries, so that they (and their friends) can access the music from anywhere. Wait, you may be asking, how is this different from the old Napster (or the old MP3.com BeamIt service), which got sued out of existence? Does it matter that it’s streaming, rather than downloadable? Should it be a central server-based system, or a decentralized client-side P2P design? Are they paying the same license fees that webcasters pay? Is the company in more or less legal jeopardy than YouTube and MySpace?

If you knew how the DMCA safe harbors work, you’d have the (at least provisional) answers to all those questions.

I’ll be covering DMCA safe harbor basics in my session, Licensing User-Generated Content, at the Web 2.0 Expo. Hopefully, it’ll demystify things a bit for investors, founders, and designers alike.

Etelos is a sponsor for the Web 2.0 Expo and is going to hold a number of session on their platform. They just launched a new set of features for the Google Personalized page platform – it’s funny to think of things called gadgets as a "platform". This is an interesting move and it wil be interesting to see how many companies follow suit and if Google’s lawyers’ let them.

CRMforGoogle is a feature-rich Customer Relationship Management Application that gives any business the ability to automate and manage customer follow up. All of these features are available in the free Personal Edition, with additional features, functionality and accounts available to Professional and Enterprise customers.

        Features Include

• Customizable modules
• Contact management
• Content management
• Task management
• Appointment setting
• Access anywhere
• And much more…

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Ryan Stewart our moderator for Rich Internet Application Platforms at the Expo gives a rundown of RIA platforms in 5 minutes at Ignite Seattle.

Click To Play