Web 2.0 Expo

The Web 2.0 Expo was recently held in New York Sept 16 – 19 and Blip.tv have posted up coverage of the entire event which you can check out here

Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media, is a conference and tradeshow for the rapidly growing ranks of designers and developers, product managers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketers, and business strategists who are embracing the opportunities created by Web 2.0 technologies.

Two speeches that really stood out of from the rest for me were:

Jason Fried, 37signals

Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. They have created the ever so popular Basecamp online software platform.
His speech was directed towards software developers about how you shouldn’t put in all the features that customers want, as you are producing a product for a collection group not an individual, but you should still listen to customers but be very selected about which features you wish to leave in, to make sure select group of features are kept and the ones that will cause problems with others are discarded.

Ben Huh, I Can Has Cheezburger

Ben is the CEO of the company that runs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, EngrishFunny.com and several other user-created humor sites.

The company has grown from nothing to serving 100 million page-views a month in less time than Sarah Palin has been governor of Alaska.

His speech shows how he was able to learn from users actions, and how user generated content can support his entire network of websites, it goes over the ways he allows users to easily create their own content whereby he now receives over 8000 submissions per day. Which goes to show how his strict guidelines for submissions and a specific formular for posting items has paid off.