Random Media Observations

DEMOfall’s final dinner pulled a handful of media visionaries to discuss the technologies they saw unveiled over the last couple of days, what trends were important and why. Network World’s John Gallant moderated the panel, which included BusinessWeek’s Steve Wildstrom, Forbes Victoria Barrett and Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher.

Kara is cynical about the whole notion of social media platforms and other related start-ups that focus their efforts on getting sold to Yahoo or Google.

Steve says, “there seems to be a lot more money out there now, good ideas can get funded again, and now even bad ideas can get funded too.”

Kara blames venture capitalists for the fate of the late nineties. “What happened in the dot.com era was about the ‘event, the sale,’ not about creating good companies.”

A few fabulous shots of the panelists in action below.

On the hype around user-generated content, Steve talks about the brilliance of YouTube, “sometimes I think it’s a great idea, it is also America’s best videos on the web but how are they going to make money long-term and avoid not getting sued?” He also brings up the point about how fickle youth is, one day, something is really cool and they next day, they are onto something new.

All seem to agree that Silicon Valley is insular and in their own web 2.0 bubble, their own web 2.0 thinking, which is not reflective of the rest of the world. It is a bunch of people within the industry talking to each other.

They also add that the blogosphere is an echochamber. Says Steve, “blogs keep us honest but they do less reporting.” While that is changing, it is still small. Kara reminds us of the importance to be cognitive to how people want to read in the format they want it in, and this will change depending on you audience and what the content is. (print versus online, and how it is presented on both sides).

Steve talks about the trend around advertising as a business model, so prominent among so many of the DEMO companies this year, “It is a strange thing about advertising only models…..you create customers that are your users and those who are your advertisers. There is a conflict there. Also, the metrics of how many people are reading, how many eyeballs are there, are not necessarily accurate.”

Victoria says, “half the companies are dependent on ads, is this disillusional?” The audience laughs.

Kara says, “We’re enjoying the guys on the treadmill.” Her dry and cynical sense of humor attracts this crowd as most resonate.

Bottom line, that while MySpace and YouTube are wildly successful, not everyone wants to share every aspect of their life with the whole world. Clearly a trend with the sub-25 year olds and some vertical market groups, but for mainstream, it will be much more narrow and it also needs to be much easier to use up front.

They ran through the companies and everyone agreed on the top cool factor companies – once again, the hardware guys. High votes went to the USB battery and the wireless rabbit, but BuzzLogic also got a plug.