the reflexions insider

For anyone who caught the Powerpoint slide deck from what has come to be known as Sequoia Capital’s “Holy Sh*t” Meeting, this is shaping up to be a challenging environment for even the most innovative startups to raise capital or indeed, survive at all.

But if you heard the who’s-who of Silicon Valley venture fund partners that were gathered for a panel at the recent Web 3.0 Conference, or even a recent NYSIA panel discussion featuring Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, you’d come away with more of a sense of cautious optimism rather than the “OMG it’s the freaking apocalypse” ethos that many seem to have adopted as the the startup worldview du jour.

So for the benefit of those who might have an interest in what some of Silicon Valley’s VC wonks were saying, I’ve compiled the highlights from the discussion in this third installment from the Web 3.0 Conference. The panel was moderated by Rebekah Wu, CEO of Right Hand Partners. I’ve done my best to attribute comments where possible.

On what should make it into a presentation or pitch to [...]

Cloud computing is all the rage these days. Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures gave an interesting talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC recently which covered some of the implications of cloud computing. At the Web 3.0 Conference there was a lively discussion about some of the more technical issues surrounding cloud computing, software as a service, and web architectures in general. Here are some of the points that were made:

A general rule of building out any system that needs to scale is to look at every layer in your system as a caching opportunity to minimize processing.

Start with clusterable technologies wherever possible.

The cloud has made “spinning up” instances of your application just an API call away. It’s extremely flexible and basically means you’ll (almost) never have to think about hardware again.

Amazon AWS is the leading cloud solution right now and is extremely flexible because it provides access to the HTTP layer. It’s becoming the Wal-Mart of cloud solutions and it’s price-optimized for CPU cycles.

IBM could become a major player in cloud computing over the next 2-10 years because of their history of mainframe architecture. The cloud is [...]

Last week I attended the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The atmosphere was a cross between an academic conference and a trade show, trending toward the latter. Sessions were mostly organized as panel discussions split into two tracks: technology and business.

I’ve compiled some comments and insights from the sessions I attended. I thought I’d share them here for anyone who’s interested. This is the first of three rounds of comments, split into Strategy, Technology, and VC/Startups. These are my best attempts at paraphrasing based on my notes and I’ve done my best to attribute these comments where possible.

Semantic technologies are about defining an architecture of participation (Tom Tague, Thomson Reuters)

Shared ontologies are a necessary condition for web 3.0 and therefore must be community-driven (Marc Hatfield, Alitora Systems)

Semantic tech is increasing the granularity of the web’s nodes, shifting from documents to things like objects, facts, places, and people. This increase of granularity is a defining characteristic of web 3.0. An effect of this trend is to increase the number of storable data points by several orders of magnitude. This presents an enormous information management problem. Therefore we need fundamentally new tools to process, organize, and consume this amount of data. (Tom [...]