The enterprise gets a sunburn

by Eric Berto
published on: 03/05/08 8:43:43 AM

It's really hard to complain about anything that involves going to Miami, especially when meeting new people and hearing new ideas is involved.

That's exactly what I got to do last week as I traveled to Miami to attend the Future of Web Apps conference. I must say that the Carsonified crew did a great job of pulling together a great lineup of speakers and a fun venue. Of course, the parties at Nikki Beach don't hurt the overall impression either.

I got to meet tons of new friends, including Digg's Kevin Rose, WordPress' Matt Mullenweg and a few others. It was great to interact with designers and a lot of folks from Florida that are building apps and trying to figure out how to monetize them.

Since the Etelos^TM platform offers freedom to use the tools and services developers are used to, the Etelos Marketplace^TM is a natural fit for distributing those apps.

The one thing that I think was missing from the conference was the discussion of the enterprise. The future of work is the future of Web apps. Now, in my work, I use Twitter and Flickr, I want our blogs to get dugg and I use other consumer apps, but most people also need to accomplish work. I would have loved to have seen somebody discussing how a CRM can help you grow your business or how to monetize an application beyond advertising (*ahem* Ryan, if this interests you, email me :) ).

The enterprise space has billions of dollars and millions of users up for grabs. Verticals are being ignored by developers who, instead, are hoping to get four million zombies at $.02 per click instead of 10,000 users of an app at $40 per user per month. I think that the future of the Web is in the Enterprise as it's the most stable platform for continued growth.

Photo from Flickr. Thanks to
Bryan Thatcher.  

But, it was fun to hear from some great presenters such as Cal Henderson from Flickr and Gary Vaynerchuck from Winelibrary TV share their passion and knowledge. It was refreshing to get away from some of the traditional talking heads the Silicon Valley conferences so often feature. To get a glimpse at how Twitter handles its scaling and trying to shorten the young company's down time from one of the lead architects was enlightening, even if it was mostly above my head.

It's a shame the microblogging service was down during his presentation (his phone kept ringing during the talk).

That being said, I'm looking forward to hopefully getting back out there next year and perhaps to FOWA London this fall.