One would think that letting 15 people have dinner at one table in one of the biggest hotels in the world would be easy. Not in the US though, these guys here are so "organized" that they can't get anything done. So, the blog dinner was split over three tables and I did not sit at Dave's table.
But, no worries, my table was full of interresting bloggers. We had a cosy table of 6 with two guys from Switserland/Germany, two Americans and a Britt. We chatted about this and that, two notable subjects:
API's
Microsoft is announcing loads of possibilities to hook in to the Windows Live platform through API's (we heard in the morning). As long as you have no more then 1 million users on average per month, you can use the API's for free. One million is plenty for a small country like Belgium, so we need to have a closer look at that. The discussion at the table was about why Pandore (Tom Conrad - CTO @ Pandora was at the table)does not offer API's. The answer is simple: money. It's very difficult to monetize API's, if you're not Microsoft with HUGE traffic and deep pockets.
Startups 2.0
Tom had an interresting angle about the difference between startups in 2000 and startups today. Back then we had guys in smart suits with fancy business plans in a business they had no feel for. Today it's enthusiastic people who solve a problem they experience themselves, then find out other people may be interrested in that solution and then bring it to market.
That's probably one of the prime reasons why the current 2.0 investment "hause" is not a bubble.
Other issues ... I'm trying to get the Samsung Blackjack to sync somehow with the addresses on my Mac. I'm down to installing Outlook on Vista now ... . There are a number of tools (The missing sync and Pocket Mac)that offer kind of an ActiveSync for Mac. But I'd like to test them it before buying any of them.
