Promised a lot but failed to deliver

I think you are being very unfair. Granted, everyone agrees that the venue sucked. But if you were not able to get anything from any of the speakers then that is your problem. Not all of the speakers were great, but that is how it always is with these things. But some of them were fantastic. Constructive critiques are always better than an overall "everything was bad".

I agree that some presentations were good, however I also believe that the suck ratio was much higher than the good. I don't believe the "hot air' assessment is unfair at all. As a dev I found the lack of technical content in the dev tracts disappointing, yet the fundamental and marketing tracts were full of the "beating on one's drum" variety of presentations. I can't honestly comment first-hand on the designer and business tracts. The keynotes were a nice daily love-in, but the sessions were not particularly informative. I was impressed with maybe 3 or 4 of them.

The expo was definitely a mixed bag overall. Bad venue, hardly any networking, abyssmal catering. The sessions themselves were also of very mixed quality. Some speakers used the sessions only for self-promotion without giving any insight whatsoever. I mostly visited the marketing and business track and was only impressed with a handful of sessions, while being totally apalled by others. Overall though, the expo was a good experience for me with a decent amount of inspiration.

As far as the negative aspects are concerned, I think it was spelled out quite clearly... so I won't add to it. On the positive side though, yes most speakers talked about trends and concepts, showed stats or showed nothing at all... For people who have been in the industry for a while though, the sessions I attended (at least these ones!) gave me the "velocity" of things happening. Most of the Web2.0 concepts were "thought out" many years ago, some even were studies before the Web came up. What's key for business folks is to detect when these geek ideas start becoming mass realities, ie companies can be built, customers satisfied, money made. Finally, as Europeans, if we want to do better, it's up to us to "invent" our own Tim O'Reilly! We're in Open territory...

As far as the negative aspects are concerned, I think it was spelled out quite clearly... so I won't add to it. On the positive side though, yes most speakers talked about trends and concepts, showed stats or showed nothing at all... For people who have been in the industry for a while though, the sessions I attended (at least these ones!) gave me the "velocity" of things happening. Most of the Web2.0 concepts were "thought out" many years ago, some even were studies before the Web came up. What's key for business folks is to detect when these geek ideas start becoming mass realities, ie companies can be built, customers satisfied, money made. Finally, as Europeans, if we want to do better, it's up to us to "invent" our own Tim O'Reilly! We're in Open territory...

for sure, there were some amazing presentations / speakers! jesse, keith, tariq, Grolimund, Sepulveda, Tapscott and Tom Coates were simpliy amazing ! On the other hand there were such boring sessions - we all know that the web 2.0 is big - why all speakers tried to teach me that!?