Daily Archives: July 18, 2006

Bound for BWI and on to Virginia

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The house is 99.5% painted and looking really nice.    We even got to some of the spots I missed ten years ago during house paint number one.   4 colors…fancy!

Off to the Virginia Reunion tomorrow with mom.    MFR to PDX to ORD to BWI.    Thanks to hotwire.com I got great deals on rental car (200 for 8 days) and hotel (Ramada near Airport for 55+tax).    I’m so pleased with hotwire results over the past few weeks of travel I think I may shift my booking sites over to them, though it’s not clear to me that most people are comfortable booking without knowing the hotel or even the exact location.   I’m finding that since motels are clustered together anyway you are likely to get a desirable location as I did in Silicon Valley and tomorrow near BWI.

Mashup Camp 2 Roundup

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I wanted to throw out some closure items for the Mashup Camp 2 experience, which indeed is a bit like a disney theme ride through Web 2.0 land.   Doug and Dave did a fantastic job pulling together hundreds of folks and making it all come together in the unconference format.

Lots of good notes on sessions:
Wiki details for most mashup camp sessions

Mashup Blog

Programmable Web

For me a key question remains “Can great mashups become great businesses?”.     I think I’m inclined to agree with Peter Rip, a Venture Capitalist who has been to both camps and discussed the major challenges facing new companies that depend on other company’s technology and data.     Mashups can be a great value add to an existing company but it’s not clear that a mashup website alone can become a thriving online business.

That said, mashups are certainly destabilizing.   Their importance could be in shaping the way the web moves forward.   That’s more than enough to make mashups a significant online force of change.

PS Microsoft:   Thanks for all that free espresso.   It just … wore … off…..