Living the life of O'Reilly

Was at the Libraries House Essential Web 07 event today, which is essentially a stand-up and sing routine for emerging European Web 2.0 companies (though with the number of South African accents there I wondered if London had become Jo'Burg North* for a while

Will comment in more detail on the presentations and companies in a later post, there was quite a lot of interesting stuff (both said and more often implied), but the day job now needs doing......still, it was good to put names to blog-faces not met before such as Nicole Simon and Paul Walsh

There were also some great soundbites, which I must note down before I forget 'em, such as:

- "The history of the (IT) industry is about the law of conservation of attractive profits" (showing that the money leaking out of one pocket arrived in another)

- "Get very scared when the companies are full of young MBA's" (I dutifully got scared a few times)

- "What would Google do if they were your mobile 'phone Company"

- "Don't patent it if you can't defend it" (I tried that one on one of the VC's I was chatting to, got one of those patient smiles

- "just build a better service than the pirates" (how to win in media)

- "The Year of the Mobile Internet is always Next Year"

Also, there was a screened interview with Tim O'Reilly done in snippets over the day, and even though it seemed fashionable among some of the participants to refer to him "ironically", damn me if the man didn't talk more sense than quite a bit of the stuff I heard today.

I noted down some goodies:

- Its not about content anymore, its about intelligence

- The future is mobile - but not yet

- Open has trumped closed networks every time so far

The other observation - from an old lag - is that there was definitely a 1997 feel, though the semantics have shifted - "traction" is the new "eyeballs" for example.

Sadly had to miss the session on funding the Euro Startup, as there was some stuff on SeedCamp - which seems like it resembles the BBC Innovation Lab format, a very necessary thing - though its only for young entrepreneurs apparently (hmmmm...isn't that potentially discriminatory practice these days ?)

A very interesting day - more anon......

* without the prawns.....