I'm at the Fast Forward '07 conference in San Diego. I'm a little bit jet lagged however the brashness of the conference has certainly blown any cobwebs away.
I've never been to a vendor conference like this before, and I'm flabbergasted. It's a million miles away from my usual "faire", with glitzy light shows, thumping bands and sales people who live it "large".
The tagline "innovate, accelerate, dominate" conjures up strange images of being mugged by a rampaging horde of highly creative horsemen intent on world domination - it's Ghengis Khan.
I now know what is wrong with my life, how to solve world peace and make everyone happy - the secret is product ABC and here is the pitch to prove it.
Still it's fun, and the corridor track is good with some very interesting people - I'm writing this whilst sitting with Drew Broomhall from the Times online
On that note, I spent about half an hour talking with Tim O'Reilly on a number of subjects from utility computing services (a la Zimki) to 3D printing. He was actually presenting on web 2.0 at the conference, and as usual was excellent.
The thing about this conference is that web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 (two terms which describe real changes in the environment), are being hijacked to describe this product and that product as Search 2.0.
Hmmm, just adding 2.0 doesn't mean there is a significant change. Or maybe it does - I'm Simon Wardley 2.0 - the new and improved version of me.
Nah, I don't buy it.
I've just shown Drew my blog, and he says that if I post this, alarms will probably go off, I'll be blacklisted and expelled by burly salesmen. It's those horsemen again, but this time they are using blog feeds.
Innovate, Accelerate and Dominate ... or in my case start running now.
