Thoughts on Jupitermedia Web 3.0

This was a small (~200 attendees) but successful conference. Dan Grigorovici invited me and I'm glad he did - I'd actually geared the release date of my report to be in advance of this conference and I was very nicely surprised at how many people said they found it helpful. Some quick thoughts:

• I was surprised at how many speakers focused on online advertising or Natural Language Processing (NLP). For awhile I began to think I'd missed something in my registration materials, but I got over any misgivings in time for my panel discussion. Fortunately I had the chance to point out the in the US we have a $13 trillion economy and an audience member volunteered that online advertising accounts for roughly $85 billion. In the remaining $12.9 trillion I'm certain we're leaving many opportunities for Semantic Technology untouched.
• When I gave a brief talk in Cambridge, MA (MA) two nights earlier, I'd been asked if any corporations were exchanging URIs in the course of conducting business. I'm not aware of any large (Global 1,000) companies engaging in this practice although I can see plenty of reasons to do so. During my panel I ran through a very simple example of Kimberly-Clark (KMB) exchanging URIs with Weyerhaeuser (WY) for production, supply chain, and demand management.
• In a later session, a collection of West Coast VCs provided a very interesting panel discussion on what they look for in the companies they select for investment - more on this in a separate post.

All in all, Web 3.0 was time and money well spent.