Websummit

I watched Bob Sutor of IBM and Keven Rose of Digg. It was interesting to watch these videos back to back. Sutor was dry, had a slideshow prepared, talked slowly -- to be blunt he was boring. Rose, on the other hand, talked fast, had a flow of ideas but didn't have a set presentation. In fact, Rose says in the beginning that he was set to talk about something completely different. I liked his presentation better because he didn't seem to be as stuffy as Sutor. Sutor seemed to be more "old school" business than Rose.

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Sutor says we are at an inflection point and big things have to happen in the IT industry. He also says there has to be a partnership between IT and different industries like government. He says that by the year 2011 there will be more than 1 trillion connected devices and 2 billion people will be on the Web. He discusses traffic problems, power problems, and how IT can help with these issues. He talks about a program IBM is working on in Stockholm where they are working together to reduce traffic. So far, traffic has been reduced by 40%. He says there are five things that need to happen. The first is big bets. The second is an open political administration -- much like the one that will go into office on Jan. 20. The third is new collaborators in business, the fourth is open source being the key to privacy and security and the fifth is higher standards.

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I enjoyed the Rose video more. He talked about starting a start-up during a difficult time. He said he had a first mover advantage because, at the time he started Digg, services like techcrunch weren't up yet. He thinks that over the next 12-18 months there won't be any investing in start ups. He said we're heading into a valley area where it'll be good to start something new. He gave some pointers on doing this and keeping it cost effective. When Rose started Digg, he kept his day job. Instead of hiring someone from the US to help him, he outsourced using Elance and got someone from Canada to help him. He also served as his own PR. A couple of interesting things he mentioned: his servers are rented at $99 a month and he said to start a podcast and have it put on Itunes because you'll get 20,000-30,000 people listening to you when you're on the "new" page.