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 [...]

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 [...]