Girls In Tech

The Web 2.0 Expo came through San Francisco last week and Girls in Tech made our debut splash as an official Media and Community Partner.

The atmosphere at Web 2.0 this year was sober, and it appeared that a majority of the 8,300 people in attendance were on scholarship — that is, they had the free expo hall pass that limited admittance to the keynotes and a handful of sponsored sessions. Girls in Tech was on scholarship as well and I was bowled over by quality of the free content. If you missed the conference, below is my Best of Web 2.0 “The Cheap Seats” report. Today I’ll highlight the top keynotes, and tomorrow I’ll cover the best sessions.

Best Keynotes:

#1 Designing for Big Data by Jeff Veen of Small Batch Inc.
Jeff Veen’s presentation stood out as the best of the sixteen(!) keynotes because he is a natural story teller and a master at using pictures to convey ideas. He used simple and vivid illustrations to show us that the presentation of data is far more important than exposing the hard numbers that lie beneath.

Take Away: Data is most powerful when users can easily access, understand and ingest it.

#2 A conversation with the founders of Threadless
Jake Nickell and Jeff Kalmikoff are the ultimate accidental entrepreneurs and they were delightfully candid and unbusiness-y as they discussed how they came to start Threadless, a highly successful community-centered online T-shirt store that has spawned an HBS case study on the use of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a term that refers to leveraging a community of users to build key components of a company’s service or product offering. If this doesn’t resonate with you, think Yelp!

Take Away: If you are a business wanting to leverage crowdsourcing, start by asking, “How are people using our products differently than we expected?”

#3 A conversation with Ellen Miller from The Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation is committed to increasing transparency in government through the use of the internet to catalyze openness and accountability. Ellen Miller talked about the powerful impact of creating websites that the public can use to easily access and digest thousand-page bills that are more likely to bury information than provide insights into what our government is doing.

Take Away: Let’s all think about how Web 2.0 applications can be applied to make government more transparent and accountable — and let’s make Gov 2.0 a priority and a reality.

Check back tomorrow for my take on the “Best Sessions at Web 2.0: The Cheap Seats Report”