Techweek Roundup

October 17th was the day when Techweek NYC took over 82Mercer in SoHo. As I was on a panel in the morning and wanted to see the FashionTech Show in the evening, I ended up staying the whole day, observing good talks and enjoying even better conversations.

Social Summit

UNIFIED was the prime sponsor and thus plenty of their team was present at the event. Especially as they drove the morning 'Social Media Summit', kicked off by CEO Sheldon Owen. Though set up on very short notice it was well attended with plenty of folks having to stand. As we warmed up for our panel in the 'green room', the discussion 'How Social Impacts Organizations' with panelists from Edelman, GE, HRBlock and Microsoft went on, so I didn't get to hear them.

However, in a chat with one of the panelists, we touched upon an interesting development in the media & advertisement ecosystem: The disaggregation of agencies thanks to advancements in adtech. Companies such as UNIFIED offer more and more of their services direct to marketeers, accessed via online portals and delivered from the cloud. That quickly defies the need for an intermediary as well as it does open the door for more specialization. As transaction costs for smaller service providers (from analytics to boutique agencies) are shrinking on both the provisioning and the receiving ends, the traditional full-service agency will have a harder and harder time to justify the premium price of their solution package. Thus you see brands working closely with adtech or innovative, domain focused creatives, while keeping the benefits of bundled procurement power that the big guys can provide.

Conversing

During the panel on 'How Social Impacts Tech etc' I was joined by Dave Tuner, Salman Ansari, and Tony Katsur while Jonathan Yarmis took the task of moderating, appearing as Dr Disruptive.
During the 30 min on stage we rallied from why Big Data is not 'Smart Data' (Jonathan), that a 'Data Tsunami' (Dave) is on its way, all the way to that it's really about the culture, not the tech (Tony), even though it is mature enough to make things happen (Salman), if only the people could.

The discussion I enjoyed the most however, was as we explored the opportunity of conversations. There has always been communications, but the nature of social media is to host conversations, i.e. multiple communications advancing a common topic. Technology (or the infamous Big Data) lets a brand analyze millions of those conversations and participate in them. However, technology goes only so far to make that a valuable exercise. It needs a strategy where the objective of that action is clear and the goal of an agreement that is followed by a commercial transaction is a pre-planned outcome. The smart company works that out before it dives into social interactions and uses big data to guide its way.

More

The main sessions started at noon, split between the main stage where the Social Summit took place and a second stage right next to the start-up booths. The proximity of booths and 2nd stage made it near impossible to understand what the presenters there said, if you didn't press your head against the speaker. And that looks silly, so I didn't get to hear any of that.
However, the main stage provided plenty of opportunity to follow insightful presentations, when there wasn't a circumstantial conversation with interesting people happening at the same time which took precedence for me.

BING - yes, BING

Stefan Weitz from Microsoft told a fascinating story of how search is evolving under the BING umbrella of products. I was surprised to be surprised. But many things are really coming together to make the experience of search, discovery and exploration in the virtual world exciting and fulfilling. While the semantic web today is mostly a collection of standards to allow a structuring of the content on the Internet, Stefan goes so far as to say that Microsoft is "trying to recreate the real world in the digital world". For them that requires clearly defining:

•  Entities such as user profiles (1.2B today) or real world objects like restaurants, 
• Geospacial Knowledge from photos (in 153PB) or 3D models (250,000), and
• Natural User Interfaces to make all of that accessible

and then building myriads of models connecting all the dots.

A couple of years ago it seemed as if the bottom up creation of virtual worlds through platforms like SecondLife, combined with 3D modeling and the semantic web would get us to the most representative digital version of the real world. But each aspect stalled, probably primarily due to users loosing interest and patience to knit everything together manually, which consequentially also killed underlying business models.
However, if Microsoft (and Google and ... ?) can keep the ball rolling by recombining results from many different successful business models and user activities, we might get to amazing results.

Launch Competition

Not to be missed at any conference like this is the competition for the best pitch from a start-up. Here we mostly saw entrepreneurs showcasing offerings that just opened to the market. That showed in the maturity and thus clarity of their value proposition and uniqueness of the solution (let alone robustness). While some were much more interesting from the standpoint of how they might positively impact the world, such as overcoming typical hurdles in health care where, when unsupported, people quickly become non-compliant in their goal pursuance (e.g. eat well, stay fit etc), others seemed robust and pragmatic as they offer to solve a very clear process problem. The latter category then logically offered the winner with Seamless Docs:

A solution that translates forms from any legacy format into HTML to make it easy to fill them in and send them away.

and else

At the very end the FashionShow was a bit of a let down, as it took the models just 10-15 min to show what they had to show. I would have loved to see more of how tech and fashion fuses together and the stage was all set up for it. Maybe next time?!
But plenty of introductions and entertaining discussions made the day very worthwhile, even though my voice started to give up as I had to overcome the noise level during the whole day. (Thanks for the advice Steve Shaheen, to actively breath in while talking)

and last

... who would have thought that 'silking' spiders in Madagascar makes it economical to use their silk as an innovative ingredient for fashion as well as healthcare...