Win A Free Pass To Enterprise 2.0 Conference

It is time again for the annual Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The conference will be held 22-25 June 2009 at last years venue at the Westin Boston Waterfront.

There are a number of new events scheduled at this years conference including new cloud computing workshops and an open enterprise study.

The popular Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad returns in 2009 and a strong group of Enterprise 2.0 developers and entrepreneurs have made it to the round of 8. The comunity will choose 4 finalists to present at the conference based on each firms 2 minute product video.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference organizers at TechWeb have offered 1 free conference pass valued at $2200 that I will give away to one of the OnDemand Beat’s readers.

The pass will go to the first reader who can answer either via twitter to @ondemandbeat or via a comment to this post the answer to the following question:

“Who were the 5 finalists in the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Conference LaunchPad?”

If you do not win the Free Conference Pass you can still save 30% on conference registration or get a free Pavillion Pass by using code CNAPEB22 on the conference registration page.

Yieldex Chosen As AWS StartUp Challenge Winner

As further evidence that many VC’s are still a step behind market and economic trends, Yieldex was chosen as the winner of the 2008 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge.

I am surprised that a startup that has developed a solution for managing online advertising (In the middle of a huge economic and online advertising downturn) won the challenge over companies with more pragmatic solutions such as Pixily and Knewton.

Pixily’s solution actually ended up with 38% of respondent votes while Knewton edged out all 7 finalists with 39% of the vote.  Check out the videos for Pixily and Knewton and judge for yourself if these solutions seem more fitting for our current economic environment.

Steve Blank on Customer Discovery and Development

Couple of video’s from Steve Blank’s recent session at Stanford’s excellent Technology Ventures Program about the absolute necessity for entrepreneurs (Especially Cloud Computing or Enterprise 2.0 entrepreneurs in the current economic environment) to solicit and analyze customer feedback before launching a product or service.

The Customer Development Process

Acting on Customer Discovery
 

Jimmy Wales Discusses Wikimedia Monetization Plans

Jimmy Wales sat down this week with a group of Bloggers and analysts prior to his keynote address opening the 2008 SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas and discussed a number of topics relating to Wikimedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit charitable organization set up to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

The Wikimedia Foundation also operates Wikimedia Commons, the repository of free images and other media and MediaWiki, the popular open source wiki software behind a huge number of corporate wikis.

I asked Mr. Wales what the Wikimedia Foundation’s plans were to increase revenue, especially now that the foundation has increased its staff.

Mr Wales said that the Wikimedia Foundation has to date relied on individual donations and volunteer efforts to achieve its mission and one of the longstanding goals of the foundation has been to increase revenue so that it can expand its mission and keep Wikipedia and the various Wikimedia projects running.

Mr. Wales mentioned that the foundation has recently hired dedicated fundraising staff and is looking at several strategies to increase revenue including:

• Working with additional philanthropic Institutions like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to increase grants and donations to the Wikimedia Foundation
• Spending time contacting wealthy donors who the Wikimedia Foundation in the past could not engage due to the small size of the foundations staff
• Utilizing the Wikipedia brand in co-licensing deals with Mobile Carriers for example, who want to offer a quick and easy way for thier customers to access Wikipedia
• Creating Wikipedia Branded Books
• Launching Wikipedia Branded Games

Mr. Wales said that all of the ideas for raising addition revenue have to adhere to the Wikimedia Foundations values and that the Wikimedia Foundation will never considered offering advertising on its varied projects. But with a dedicated fundraising staff in place he and the Wikimedia team look forward to working through the various ideas and strategies.