- Posted by Greg Arnette on February 7th, 2007 filed in Web 2.0, concept G, Conferences
I’m at the MIT Enterprise Forum 2007 Winter Conference today. Getting totally immersed in the “web 2.0″ product and technology space we are steering concept G into. First thoughts are that we need more of these kinds of events in New England to bring the business people and technologists together in the same physical space. The “energy” from this large, sold-out group is really encouraging. A nice compliment to the Webinnovators Group. One gets the sense that “big” things are happening and we’re at the beginning of a big wave of innovation in both technology and business models.
Some highlights so far:
Lot’s of discussion about targeting niche audiences, which is a big part of the concept G business model, and how this is where some of the big social networking sites (MySpace, etc.) will need to move in order to be relevant the future.
Treat your customer like your audience. Engage them, listen, and overwhelm them with love.
Operating a business in the “web 2.0″ world requires a certain level of transparency. Pay attention to the echo chamber discussions about your product, and if your service hiccups, apologize quickly and publicly.
Jeremy Allaire’s keynote was inspiring to the technologists in the room. A CTO can be a CEO!
Market and brand is more important than the specific technology in the “web 2.0″ world. Technology is a commodity - from open source stacks to agile development frameworks, these allow rapid innovation and lower start up costs.
Business are using consumer-orientated products because internal IT can’t react fast enough to implement blogs, wikis, and specialized content collaboration systems. IT needs to realize this is happening, and get proactive. This reminds me of the past when Palm Pilots made their way into the enterprise because executives could purchase on their own. IT had to react eventually and support these devices. It feels like the same thing with “web 2.0″ technologies.
I’ll post more thoughts after the break.
February 7th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
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February 8th, 2007 at 10:21 am
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