Category : conference sessions

The user experience is more critical today with the emergence of Web 2.0 during the past few years. Today wikis, blogs, and widgets are a part of the daily nomenclature in the work environment, but there are many questions around how this Web 2.0 world moves into the Enterprise world.

How do software vendors bring the best features and functionalities to the masses? Are these companies spending their R&D on bringing to market small applications that focus on one task or are they focused on improving their core applications, or is both possible? Do Web 2.0 apps have enough speed, security, and stability for the Fortune 500 CIOs and thousands of employees around the world?

This panel will explore the intersection of the Web and Enterprise 2.0 worlds and discuss what is ready for prime time.

Speakers :
-- Brady Forrest
-- Lee Bryant
-- Sam Lawrence
-- Laurent Gasser

What is accessibility in terms of Web 2.0? Although many may have heard of web standards or even particular aspects of accessibility such as alternative text or large fonts, most people will have only a vague notion of what accessibility is really about.

The presentations will show the impact of Web 2.0 developments on Web accessibility and introduce a test by disabled and disadvantaged people for the social and commercial area named "BAFIN-Test Side by Side".

Martin Stehle and Jan Eric Hellbusch will take a closer look to both the social part and the technical part of Web 2.0 possibilities and show the challenges in future.

In the first part of the presentation they will discuss social aspects, user needs and legal issues. There will be demonstrations of inaccessible applications and particular aspects will be discussed considered in the context of workflow.

In the second part Stehle and Hellbusch will introduce the “BAFIN-Test Seite an Seite" (“BAFIN Test Side by Side") with the option to pass the test with a three-level distinction. Web accessibility is a potential business area in consideration of the growing population of older citizens and the increasing number of new web devices.

Speakers :
-- Martin Stehle
-- Jan Eric Hellbusch

We know that social networks and other participatory sites are new online gathering places for consumers, and that these consumers are highly involved and keen interacting, not just consuming content.

Because of their high traffic and intense involvement, these sites are very interesting for advertisers… but are Web 2.0 consumers receptive to advertising? What kind of impact does a banner insertion have in a social network?

This panel will discuss the effectiveness of advertising on social networks and other user-generated sites, as well as corporate willingness to devote advertising budgets given the various unknowns.

Speakers :
-- Axel Schmiegelow
-- Nate Elliott

After some initial high-profile successes, consumer-generated advertising campaigns have proven more difficult to get right than they seemed. Context, community, and control (or lack thereof) are hard tricky to balance, and it's easy to get burned or simply miss the target. While companies seem eager to tap the creative potential of their customer communities, marketers must understand what works and what to watch out for.

This panel explores case studies demonstrating different approaches to this potentially powerful advertising strategy.

Speakers :
-- Benjamin Long
-- Dieter Rappold

Scaling a Web Application is a very hard problem, especially for small project and teams who do not have sufficient manpower, money, and time to solve this problem. Luckily Amazon already had to solve this problem in their datacenters and offers their services to other developers.

This talk will introduce the two most important Amazon Web Services, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Simple Storage Service (S3), and will present different ways to leverage them in your own web application. Ruby on Rails will be used for the examples but they will apply to any web framework.

Several use-cases will be covered that show how S3 and EC2 can be used to move load from your servers to Amazon’s or even to completely host your application at Amazon.

After the talk developers should know when and how to use Amazon’s services to scale their own application at low costs. We will also hear the CEO of Web OS platform Ghost and how they use more Amazon Webservices than anyone else.

Speakers :
-- Jonathan Weiss
-- Zvi Schreiber

Analytics for Web 1.0 focused on translating metrics from print and television (such reach) to online (unique users). These measures did not capture the effect the material had on the audience – they could not, since the audience had no way of expressing interest and engagement.

Traditional page view counts and time spent on the site were notable efforts in approximating engagement but it is now clear that the duration a user spends at a page is far more important than just mere page view counts.

In contrast, Web 2.0 is defined by user participation and interaction, both with the site (saving, rating, tagging, annotating), and with other users (forwarding, commenting, responding).

These clearly observable and notable interactive behaviors gave rise to a rich set of Web2.0 metrics that can far more accurately measure active user engagement and the effect the page has on the user.

Besides providing accurate representations of user behavior, these metrics would serve as building blocks for useful user-centric tools.

For example, Flickr's "interestingness" ranking is an example of how these newer metrics on engagement (favorites, comments) can also be used to bubble up outstanding and unique photos amongst millions of mundane ones. While specific sites such as Amazon.com were central to Web 1.0, the notion of a standalone site is disappearing in Web 2.0. Companies are now being represented on widgets and mini-applications on user's sites and Facebook profiles, and being reported on blogs across the web.

There has also been a strong trend towards opening up datasets via APIs and RSS feeds, and encouraging developers to build 3rd party services on top of them. Given these decentralization trends, highly relevant opinions and content are now distributed across the World Wide Web. Analytics measuring metrics on a site alone has become only one half of what needs to be tracked.

Given all these changes, how can you measure these metrics of "active engagement" in both qualitative and quantitative measures, and what are the actions that can be taken based on them? Given new usability technologies like AJAX, how should these affect the ways you measure your analytics? What instruments do you need to develop to collect relevant activities that are happening across the web, both around the data you provide and opinions about you in all the various user networks, blogs and forums?

Web 2.0 has brought about profound changes in user engagement and decentralization of sites. At the heart of companies will be their ability to identify new key metrics that reflect these changes, and develop highly actionable plans that allows for quick and effective response to short-term issues, as well as factoring in a long-term strategy.

Speakers :
-- Andreas Weigend
-- Bill Tancer

This panel will cover the shifts and moves in the whole traditonal media landscape and the role the Web played/ plays in that changing media landscape.

It will begin with short presentations of the results of the three newspaper-surveys done by Luca Conti (Italy), Robin Hamman (UK) and Steffen Bueffel (Germany). All three analyses have been inspired by the Binvings Groups 2006 study of "The Use of the Internet by America’s Newspapers".

The discussion portion dive into the following trends: Decline in circulation, reach of (young) audience(s). Ad revenues shifting towards the Web, new big players on the scene (Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.), Web 2.0 and Social Media (Bloggers, Podcasters etc.)

As a sneak peak here is some data from the 2006 German study on the use of interactive and "web2.0-like" features of Germany's Newspapers. They took the 100 most read papers based on circulation. In ( ) they have included our guess on what will change in the follow study of this year (- = decline, + increase).
* Message board: 49% ( - or no significant change)
* RSS-Feeds: 43% (+*)
* Videos: 37% (+++)
* RSS (Categories): 36% (+)
* Reporter Blogs: 21% (+)
* ... with comments enabled: 19% (+)
* Chat: 14% (- or no significant change
* Reader-comments on news stories: 10% (+++)
* Blogroll: 9% (+)
* Podcasts: 8% (++)
* Registration: 8% (+)
* RSS-Feeds (full story): 5% (no significant change)
* "most read": 5% (+)
* Social Bookmarking: 0% (+)

Speakers :
-- Igor Schwarzmann
-- Sam Sethi
-- Falk Lueke
-- Robin Hamman
-- Luca Conti
-- Steffen Bueffel

Social commerce is so 2.0, it almost sounds like a buzzword mashup. But the idea is really the natural evolution of the principle that your best customers are your best sales people, and it is redefining the affiliate business.

From involving the community in product wikis to providing customers with shopping widgets so they can promote and sell your products, social commerce can be powerful in the right mix. Come hear best practices in this latest take on community practice and commerce.

Speakers :
-- Hagen Fisbeck
-- Jochen Krisch
-- Jeremie Berrebi
-- Mattias Miksche

The mobile phone is becoming more advanced, but should it? This talk is going to take a look at the reality of carrying a personal computer in your pocket.

Some of the trends that will be examined: * Smart vs simple - the buzz of iPhone/N95 vs. huge sales of low end handsets, perhaps it has to with cameras hitting 10MP with flash, auto focus, etc., storage hitting 8GB, GPS, UMTS/GPRS/HSUPA/Wifi and a net result of no battery life
* HMI (human mobile interaction) - as these devices become mobile personal computers the UI is (still) hugely flawed. Sure it can do anything, but only if you have time to click thirteen dialog boxes
* Development Platforms - there is a lot of work going on to provide abstraction layers from the device hardware (DirectX for phones) to allow easier development, at the same time operators are looking to bundle up apps into containers to simplify certification process

Led by Ian Hay and Imran Ali, two well known telephony experts who originally teamed up at Orange.

Speakers :
-- Imran Ali
-- Ian Hay

The Facebook Platform has made accesible one of the richest demographic subsets available, yet most developers are content to create applications that rely on old world interaction.

The data available radicalises the way businesses, marketeers and developers can exploit the social graph. This enables application architects to visualise the intuitive and hence make applications that are responsive, and thus subsequently immerse the user in his own social network rather than that of the product or service being conveyed; an inherently more intimate interaction and hence more persuasive.

This presentation explores the various possibilities, pitfalls and future hopes surrounding the Facebook API in general, but also in relation to the way developers can make more socially aware applications.

Speakers :
-- Ankur Shah
-- Gi Fernando

With the launch of the iPhone, the Telecoms industry enters a new and a disruptive phase - the drivers of which are no longer the traditional players in the industry.

This session explores the synergies between the web and the Telecoms industry.

It outlines the opportunities and the disruptive influences of the Web on the Telecoms industry.

Traditionally the Web and the ethos of the web (open standards, interoperability, etc.) are viewed with suspicion by the telecoms industry. The Telecoms industry in general, does not trust the Web. It is almost as if it chooses to ignore the 'Web' in 'Mobile Web 2.0'.

But the Web forms the bedrock of Tim O'Reilly’s seven principles defining Web 2.0 and it is not possible to ignore the Web any more - especially considering the rapid growth of User generated content.

Unless it adapts to the web, the industry risks missing out on the huge opportunities that can be leveraged through the power of Mobile Web 2.0.

This session talks about the Good, the bad and the ugly - in the interplay between the web and Telecoms.

Speakers :
-- Ajit Jaokar
-- Tony Fish

While OpenID is certainly gaining traction around the Web, many questions around security and privacy have been raised.

Additionally with companies like Sun Microsystems shipping OpenID code, the question of how OpenID helps the enterprise becomes increasingly important.

In under two years, OpenID has grown from a thriving grass-roots community to being supported by major companies, service providers, and open source projects.

This session will provide an introduction to OpenID, thoughts on how enterprises can benefit from integrating the technology, as well as a showcase of innovation around security technologies combined with OpenID such as smart cards, browser add-ons, and the like.

Speakers :
-- David Recordon
-- Martin Paljak

Location is now fundamental to the dynamics of the web, and there are powerful tools from Google Maps to Wifi Location Based Services available today.

This talk takes a tour over the recent development of the 'where' of the web across techniques and both open and closed technologies.

Google Maps forms a core which many are familiar with but maps and location on the web really go far beyond, from base data to 3D 'spinny globes' such as Microsoft Live Local.

We will cover the major APIs (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) as well as some lesser known but powerful players such as MultiMap and Map24 and how you can use them with simple tools such as Mapstraction, an API to provide common abstraction over various map providers. When on the move, there are a variety of ways to locate yourself including GPS, wifi location and from cell towers and we will go over the tools available to use those.

Aggregating and sharing geodata is an expanding and powerful area including tools such as mapufacture and data formats like GeoRSS (extensions to the common RSS formats) and KML. Geodata itself makes a lot of this machinery tick and has it's own section. Who owns data? What can you do with it? Where can you get it?

We'll cover these topics and cover projects such as OpenStreetMap which aim to free up data and make it more usable to all with clearer licensing. We'll take you through the community aspects of many projects and why it pays to build community by using a few simple techniques and tools. Finally, where's it all going? We'll look at the immediate future of location online and place a few bets on the coming developments.

Speakers :
-- Steve Coast
-- Nick Black

Behavioral targeting is more than just a trend. It's a fundamental shift in the advertising world. Where once the focus lay on booking printed paper, timeslots on television, or websites with the hope of reaching the right target group, it's now possible to speak to people directly.

Advertising is no longer oriented toward edited content but rather directly toward the behavior and affinities of the user.

People instead of pages, precision instead of scattershot, for edited or user generated content alike—that is behavioral targeting, which is the future of advertising using electronic media!

Leading minds in the fields of technology, media planning and marketing will come together in this forum to discuss their insights into the development of advertising in digital media and the significance of targeting technologies.

A glance at the list of participants suggests that controversial opinions should be expected. Yet even if there remains a lack of unified understanding of the possibilities and limits of the different approaches, the market is just beginning to sort itself out.

This is the perfect forum to learn why you should be putting your bets on behavioral targeting. Form your own opinion, and help shape the field's development as well.

Speakers :
-- Frank Wagner
-- Mark Pohlmann
-- Martin Radelfinger