SCEA 2007 Annual Meeting - Web Trend: Today and Tomorrow

On Saturday I attended the SCEA 2007 Annual Meeting and participated in the panel discussion on "Web Trend: Today and Tomorrow". The panelists were:

• 
  Paul McNamara: CEO at Coghead
• 
  Ismael Ghalimi: Chief Executive Officer at Intalio
• 
  Sridhar Vembu: CEO at AdventNet/ZOHO
• 
  Etay Gafni: Sr. Director, User Experiences and Web2.0, SAP
• Andy Lee: Managing Director of Berksford

We discussed many topics around these guidelines:

• Future trends and how can we notice them now?
• Office 2.0 - future mainstream or current bubble
• Future mash-ups and "do-it-yourself" applications
• Future Platforms - The power of Facebook and Social network
• Thoughts about Enterprise 2.0
• Cross culture and multi languages sites and examples
• Mobile Web
• Distribute development of Web products and services

I could not capture the whole discussion, so here are some points:

Sridhar was asked about the competition from Microsoft and Google in office 2.0 space. I liked his answer: "The competition does not kill you, you kill you". He then explained that he believe that as long as you keep your focus on your customers, your company execution and technology, you will do well. And there is a place for more than one solution.

Ismael told the story of how he started the idea of running a business using only hosted/online solutions; while he was in Japan and tried to keep working, but had only a Japanese laptop he borrowed from a friend.
Ismael also called for action and help with the great project of the Redux Model 1 (an experimental device built for the Office 2.0 Conference).



Paul provided and explanation about the evolution of business applications and focused on the capability we have now (and which Coghead provide) to compose the application that its your business. I added that working as a community allowing us to be able to reuse ideas and applications and collaborate to define new best practices and to build the relevant applications to support them.

Additional discussion was around the capability to use new Web Platforms to develop and distribute products and services.
Ismael made a valid point that it is not enough to get famous on Facebook or TechCrunch, you must build a real business and gave example of salesforce marketing and businss model.

The discussions and interactions with many people continued during the brakes.
Overall - I had fun and I think it was a very interesting event.
Plus - I got this:



E.T.

Technorati Tags: China, coghead, SAP, intalio, Office 2.0, Web 2.0, zoho