Web 2.0 Expo - Looming Gloom & Doom
It’s nearly done - three days of Web 2.0 Expo excitement are over. Web 2.0 Expo was a conference which would have cost you a whopping EUR 1,300 if you want the full deal and didn’t book ahead, held at the fabulous Berlin Congress Center, was very well organized and turned out to be simply… boring.
I don’t even think it was the fault of the organizers - somehow most sessions (at least the ones I attended - which might be a problem of adverse selection) missed to inspire, missed to create a connect to the audience and too often defaulted to ’state the obvious’. Now this all might not even be the fault of the speakers - it might as well be the audience.
It definitely has been a while since I saw such a rather uninspired crowd. Gone are the days when you literally could feel the buzz, the energy to create. Now all you can see, hear and feel is the looming gloom of an economic downturn… or was it the simple fact that we are all sooo fed up by the damn Web 2.0 buzz?!
Anyway - I leave this place rather uninspired, yet knowing that these are great times: It’s a time where we will build real companies for real people with real business models. I - for one - am looking forward to this. It will be tough. It will be hard. But it will be good.
Now - back to London and get some real work done.