D7 Conference

Geeks of the world unite. And, go watch the D7 videos, since most of you, like me, could not afford to fly to California and attend the event live. I must say, they have been quite effective the way they implemented their clips page ( I suspect AJAX is the answer). Selection of a clip is lightning fast and their small size player works just fine, almost with microHD quality. There aren't yet enough implementations like these on the net.

It's fun to check out an article with all "worthwhile" quotes too, mentioned during the conference, and mostly extracted during the interviews. My favorite one came from Greek nationality turned US citizen, GOP fervent supporter turned extreme Liberal, Huffington Post owner Arianna Huffington saying: "You are so lucky I am not born in this country", responding to a question about her running for President. And the other one from Monkeyboy who mentioned that h'd have preferred Boom as a name for Bing. No wonder Fake Steve Jobs used to call him Monkeyboy...

I liked both interviews with Carol Bartz and Ballmer, not so much for their content, but for both characters participating in these. Carol Bartz was totally unknown to me and she's fun to watch as she radiates a feeling of "wash your mouth first before you dare talk to me, dude" whereas monkeyboy is as ever full of energy and... shite!

Finally, the interview with the two MySpace folks was quite interesting to the point that I transcripted for you a few of their quotes. These were actually made by the News Corp digital head Jon Miller, who kind of appeared to me like News Corp CEO's watchdog over the dude who manages MySpace, Owen Van Natta (sounds Dutch), but I may be wrong. These quotes seemed to me fair and rather general, but, above all, demonstrating that boring CEO lingo that I am so much NOT gonna miss, ever.

"You got to get the product right, you got to nail those experiences for well defined groups and communities and once you do that , then that's when you can really... it can grow big on you...

It's fine to have competitors... I don't think it's gonna be a winner takes all game...

The product process needs to be such that you can continually wrap, continually iterate and continually innovate... and that is a process... and you gotta bake that in on how you organize your product teams or you use metrics to let you know the right things are happening... in real time or every five minutes even, things like that...

It's about iteration and about getting that into the DNA of the company... And I think why it's so important and why a lot of companies do not end up doing it on a continual basis, is because, as they grow the product process tends to become more inwardly facing.

And so the whole key to me in continuous innovation is having continual market focus but making it really real... And I think keeping that market focus and continual innovation process intact... And I think that it is very hard for any company over time to do that, that's why you have to be focused to it..."

PS. If you were wondering what that picture I posted here from a D7 Program Book with Ballmer and Bartz side by side, their bios printed on same page, read the gossip behind here...