We’re getting ready to launch a CrowdVine network for Web 2.0 Expo Berlin. I was at their fall expo in San Francisco and thought the sessions were excellent (That was also the first time I got to speak as founder of CrowdVine). This Berlin conference seems similarly great.

The CrowdVine network should be a big boost to the lobby-con experience. We’ll also have icalico integration so you can do session calendaring.

One nice thing (for us) about this network is that Jen from CMP used the software at FooCamp and then recommended it for this conference. That’s a nice vote of confidence!

We’re doing a CrowdVine social network for Adaptive Path’s MX East: Managing Experience through Creative Leadership. The MX East conference is for VPs, directors, and managers involved in product strategy, product development, service design, or design management.

They’ve put together a pretty cozy conference with a great location and great opportunities to mingle with other speakers and attendees. There’s still time to register.

Dates and location: Philadelphia, PA — October 21-23, 2007

Business Innovation Factory put on their annual Collaborative Innovation Summit this week in Rhode Island. For two days some amazing speakers told stories of innovation, highlighted by Walt Mossberg and Mark Cuban on stage (no dancing).

CrowdVine was there, running a social network for the conference. This is the first time we’ve used CrowdVine for a non-tech conference and I’m proud to say it worked great! We’re not just for geeks!

Congrats to the entire staff for putting on such a great conference.

IDEA 2007 joins BarCampBlock and PodCamp Atlanta as conferences that set up their own CrowdVine network to help attendees meet and mingle. Looks like it was a huge succes and thank you Greg Corrin for taking the time to set it up for the conference.

One thing I noticed is that people used blog posting to organize after hour events. This is something that used to happen (poorly) on a conference wiki. We’ve already killed the Who’s Coming page – it’s a lot more effective to browse a directory of people in CrowdVine where you can see their pictures and actually have a way of making contact. Nice to see another aspect of the old conference wiki get shot down.

The last Future of Web Apps was one of the best conferences of the year — great speakers and great attendees. This year Ryan and the crew over at Carson Systems have committed to super sizing the event. The speakers are huge. The attendees are awesome. And they’ve brought in CrowdVine, Pathable, and icalico to make sure the social aspects are top notch.

Check it out: fowa.crowdvine.com

CrowdVine provides the social network so people can connect before and after the event. Pathable is providing their social matching analysis and badges, and a text-messaging coordination service. And icalico is providing a social session calendaring feature so that you can mark the sessions that are interesting to you and see which sessions are popular within your network.

It’s based the work we did for Foo Camp. We added much better design customization. The contact model is new. Rather than marking contacts as friends (what does that mean in a conference setting?) you can mark fan or want-to-meet. You can finally control email notifications. The Pathable and icalico integrations are tighter. We’ve got OpenID. Basically, we’ve made boatloads of improvements.

It’s not too late to get passes if you can get to London October 3rd-5th.

Thanks to the FOWA staff for choosing us (and to Scott Berkun who put us on their radar).

Coolness. Last night Tara Hunt invited the BarCampBlock participants to join a BarCampBlock CrowdVine network to do some pre-event networking.

BarCampBlock is this weekend (Aug 18/19) in Palo Alto. I’d go but I’m the minister for my sister’s best friend’s wedding and this weekend is the Vegas bachelor party.

Also, I’m pretty sure we’re going to do an icalico integration for this one.

ETech is my favorite O’Reilly conference because it’s the one that seems furthest from being vocational. My experience at OSCON is always around learning to use various technologies and my experience at Web 2.0 has been very business focused. The people at ETech always seem to be doing such far out things that I get caught up in their enthusiasm.

Sarah and I head out tonight. Hopefully I’ll finish the revision to Regular Expression Pocket Reference on the plane. Then tomorrow morning I’ll be rolling out the new design for my company so that I have something bright and shiny to demo. If you’re going to ETech I’d love to chat, partly because I’m looking for feedback but also because I want to hear what other people are up to.

I’m at ETel today, mostly to see old friends but still really enjoying myself. Kudo’s to the O’Reilly conference team for always putting on such great events. Here’s some notes.

RAGI
Every O’Reilly ‘emerging tech’ conference comes up with one technology that is suddenly very easy and very accessible. I think RAGI, a Rails to Asterisk interface, wins this time. I managed to miss the presentation but heard great buzz afterwards. Here’s an O’Reilly introduction. An anonymous Odeo engineer asked about scaling issues in Rails and got back a response that Rails scales well as evidenced by sites like Odeo =)

AstLinux – HA
This is a linux distro tweaked for running Asterisk (mostly the same tweaks that real-time apps get). He’s working on adding in High Availability support which would give people an N+1 architecture. Too buzz-wordy? Key detail was that HA would work better and be impemented sooner for VOIP.

Zork on Asterisk.
Awesome! Coolest demo of the day goes to Zasterisk, a project to let you play Zork over the phone. It’s does Asterisk to speech recognition (Sphinx) to Zork to text-to-speech (Festival) and back out.

Imagine playing Zork while on hold or playing a MUD during your commute (VMUD).

VC Fireside Chat.
Sort of dreading this one but the others in the time slote didn’t look good. Turns out Marc Hedlund was on the panel. Point was start off with a product for yourself, but know when to make the switch to a product for others.

Other VC talking about the types of people he sees in early stage investing (spore stage). Two. One with a plan and no product. The other with a hack but no plan. He’s especially interesting if someone has already payed for the hack.

I think the key concept in those two points is that it’s extremely important to prove that someone likes the product (important if you’re trying to get investment).

Favorite phrase of the day was along the lines of: vc’s blog in order to ‘chum the waters’

Marc gave more advice, be plain spoken. Common theme in his engineering management. Complexity is a sign that you don’t understand the problem. Plain speech also gives people the impression that you know what you’re doing. Convoluted speech just gives people the impression that _they_ don’t know what’s going on.

More Marc. Hit it where they ain’t. Find a need that nobody is talking about and go after that. It’s not that you’ll be the only person in the space, but that you’ll be in the first wave.

Quinn Weaver. Open Source is viral marketing. If you create software that is used my millions you can create a company after. Another example of having proven customers. MySQL is a good example of a funded company and 37Signals of a private company. His company Fairpath is planning to give away a Perl to Asterisk software, Dido. Release tomorrow. I like Quinn.

Usability.
A YakPak guy asked who did not have a microphone on their computer. Several Mac people raised there hands. My hand went straight to my forehead.

Favorite Encounter.
Cooper Marcus of Spark Parking. He’s got a nice clear business model, pragmatic goals, and cool tech that involves phones and gluing wireless devices to the ground. He’s also Lowell ‘90.

Web Genius, Justin Watt, had a great time at Webzine2005.

Rather than cooking up your own XML DTD/Schema, the microformats guys are advising using a combination of XHTML (which is XML afterall) and class attributes to create structured data for things like blogrolls (XFN), contact information (hCard), and calendaring (hCalendar).

One of the principles Tantek stressed (at FOO Camp) was that “invisible metadata deteriorates.” I wonder what my librarian friends would say about that? The benefit of XHTML is that browsers already exist on every platform to display whatever you markup. Using a combination of tags and CSS, create a format the benefits the user first, and the machine second.