tim o'reilly

Tim O'Reilly wants Web 2.0 for grown-up problems

At last. Tim O'Reilly started the Web 2.0 ball rolling, and then moved out of the way to see what would happen. Though no fault of his own, "Web 2.0" came to mostly be about prettier websites and a rerun of silly consumer web "services" of the dot-com bust.

Today, Tim issues a call to action for Web 2.0 to take its opportunities more seriously, and provide significantly more value to the world:

In an era of looming scarcities, economic disruption, and the possibility of catastrophic ecological change, it's time for … Read more

Where did Microsoft's ambition go?

If you haven't yet, take a few minutes to watch the second set of highlights from Walt Mossberg's and Kara Swisher's interview with Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates at the All Things Digital Conference. As the interview opens up to audience questions, Tim O'Reilly asks Gates and Ballmer a very pointed (and poignant) question:

Microsoft has been playing "me too" these past few years, following the lead of other innovators. Do you have any "big, hairy [audacious] goals" now, he asks, or do you need to?

In other words, where did all the famous Microsoft ambition go?

Bill Gates blundered through a response about "Quests" and such, and then honed in on putting a tablet PC in the hands of every student in the world. Ambitious? Perhaps. Inspiring? Not even close. It's just a tired extension of Microsoft's current dominance, without a thought for interesting new vistas for computing (pun intended).

But where things got really odd was when Tim followed up with a question about why Microsoft spends so much time talking about search and the web when these weren't mentioned by Gates as Microsoft's goals.… Read more

O'Reilly makes Foo Camp a startup land

I've long thought that the missing ingredient from Tim O'Reilly's geek empire were the boring business suits that would turn geekdom into cash. Tim's conferences have increasingly spotlighted rising startups in Web 2.0 and open source, but not to the extent apparently envisioned at the O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp, which is scheduled to precede this year's Foo Camp on July 10-11 in Sebastopol, California.

Tim describes the idea thus: "This startup boot camp will consist of sessions led by startup veterans and other experts in a roundtable discussion format on various topics important to founders." Interesting and useful to get feedback from fellow entrepreneurs and Tim, but I'd recommend taking this one step further.

I'd actually find it fascinating for Tim to plumb the depths of the geek sorcery that will descend upon Foo Camp and align technical founders with experienced businesspeople: a "dating" service for technology startups.… Read more

IT predictions and the sneaky rise of open source

Sometimes our beloved analysts get things dead-on...and sometimes their predictions as to where IT trends will take us are very, very off.

In an excellent article, ZDNet traces the non-demise of Windows and UNIX that analysts predicted, the continued dominance of Microsoft on the desktop (which was supposed to have been supplanted by open-source alternatives by now), and generally blisters our inability to predict the future with regard to open source. It's everywhere, yes, but without the expected dominance that was to come with ominpresence.

One thing it has brought us, however, and that is a significant shift in how all companies engage open source:

...[Apache, Firefox, and Samba] are token victories that mainly offer new options for home users and small businesses. No other open-source application has enjoyed anywhere near the massive commercial success of Linux through its creation of an entire services and support ecosystem.

Instead, they have served as game-changers - motivators to encourage for-profit vendors like IBM and Microsoft to up their game and offer extra value in their respective products.… Read more

Jonathan Schwartz's Twitter Q&A posted

Better late than never, as the saying goes.

On Saturday, O'Reilly Media's Tim O'Reilly put up a blog entry with a series of answers from Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz that were in response to Twittered questions from the audience at their Friday morning keynote address at the Web 2.0 Expo.

The post was a result of O'Reilly's having offered the audience at the keynote address the ability to ask questions of Schwartz via Twitter, but subsequently not posing any of those questions.

Afterward, O'Reilly offered a mea culpa on CNET News.com … Read more

O'Reilly invites Twitter questions at Web 2.0, doesn't ask them

Update: This story now reflects Tim O'Reilly's mea culpa for not asking audience questions sent in via Twitter.

SAN FRANCISCO--After all the hooplah over interactivity--or lack thereof--during keynote speeches at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March, I've been thinking a lot about how conferences can incorporate the backchannel.

That's why I was pleasantly surprised to see Tim O'Reilly, who runs O'Reilly Media, which is the co-organizer of the Web 2.0 Expo here, invite the audience for his keynote conversation with Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz to Twitter him questions to ask … Read more

Tim O'Reilly: We are in a 'soup of computing'

SAN FRANCISCO--Tim O'Reilly kicked off the keynote sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo here, pacing the stage and evangelizing the power of the Internet.

"The Internet is becoming the global platform for everything," he said, and it will make everyone in the world smarter. "It's an amazing revolution in human augmentation akin to literacy or the formation of cities," he continued. "It's a huge change in the way the world works."

We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. "We … Read more

Dash: Open sourcing your commute home

Walt Mossberg reviewed the Dash Express earlier this week, an in-car slice of salvation for anyone that spends much time in the car.

What does it do?

...[E]ach Dash Express...becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. Each device not only receives and displays information, but transmits it as well, acting as a "probe," as Dash calls it, to measure local traffic speeds. This information is compiled by the company and then broadcast back to all other Dash units in your area, almost instantly painting streets on your map with color codes … Read more

Google to buy Plaxo? $200 million worth of data

Valleywag is suggesting that Google is buying (or has bought) Plaxo, the online contact-sharing service. According to Valleywag, it may be a pure act of friendship.

I think it's much more likely a pure act of data gathering, as Tim O'Reilly might suggest.

Plaxo would be an incredibly smart acquisition by Google. As of October 2006, Plaxo had 15 million users. While Plaxo has not been as widely used (or, at least, not as widely discussed) in the past year, that's a heck of a lot of personal data sitting on its servers, data that Google can … Read more