• Mike Arrington of TechCrunch started the second day by giving his take on startup winners and losers. He defines winners as who accomplished a liquidation event like IPO or acquisition. But look carefully at his list, which includes companies like myspace and skype, all of them got acquired. There was no IPO!

  Further he think this list is hot for new startups:

  • Flex apollo
  • platform/backend
  • developer tools
  • bring desktop app online
  • office efficiency
  • cloud storage
  • identity
  • market destruction
  • ENTERPRISE

  Right after this he downplay his own words by saying best entrepreneurs would avoid this type of advice :)

• Ted Rheingold from Dogster took us for a tour to what he calls passion centric communities, from his own dogster and catster to many many more. What make them attractive to their loyal communities? Entertainment, information, sociality and services are what they should have. As Ted say, you can't fake sincerity. I can certainly feel the passion he radiates.

  Here is one detail he think would make some of these sites better - use something other than white as the background color.

• Cal Henderson talked about things they have learned from building flickr. His advices focus on operation issues. Plan for downtime and maintenance. Setup a process to handle it. Communicate with the users about the problems and so on.

  Also interesting is that flickr does not have a separate QA team. The developers do everything from coding, testing to fixing bugs. He also emphasize the importance of tools. A good example is an one touch deployment tool. They also employs many other tools for monitoring.

My final observation is that the sessions are dominated by people from small companies, most of them no more than five years old. Also a sizable portion of the audiences are very young people. This is the age of new ideas. I am certain that next year we will see even more innovations.

More on day 1.

2006.09.15 [tech, futurewebapps-sf06] - comments