Sessions at Web 2.0 Expo 2011 SF on Tuesday 29th March

You know metrics are important. But running a data-driven company can feel like a black-box exercise. Are you measuring the same things that your competitors and peer companies are? How do your numbers stack up? Cindy Alvarez will share benchmark data and insights drawn from looking at anonymized data across the KISSmetrics customer base.

Personalization is one of the top buzzwords for 2011. But it's not without merit. Indeed, building a personal experience on the web can improve user retention, reduce bounce rates and (in an ideal world) even improve commerce. But it's tough to balance the traditional approach to user-generated content with the hard math of personalization.

HTML5 has captured the minds & hearts of web developers with impressive demos in cutting edge browsers. But what can you actually depend on this month? And is anything dependable in a “living specification”?

In this presentation Tantek illuminates what makes HTML5 both easier and more powerful, and which features are ready now, roughly usable, totally ignorable, unfortunately ugly, or worthy of web application experiments. HTML5 is also a work in progress – learn how by using it and providing feedback, anyone can help shape this important update to the foundation of the web.

Hotmail is back. Yeah – Hotmail, seriously… Come see how it’s now pushing the envelope, including delivering the next generation of email to your inbox.

In this session, we'll cover 15 killer techniques you can apply immediately to grow your Facebook fan base and conversions. Learn how brands such as Rosetta Stone, Lane Bryant, and Webtrends have used ads, apps, and analytics in combination. Come away with an understanding of which techniques work best for fan growth, fan engagement, and conversion optimization.

What if you only had 2 weeks to ship your software? I bet you'd ship the best feature first. Would your customers object to you solving their problem that soon? Well...what are you waiting for? Ship it!

Sure, you've heard about how you can finally use real fonts on the web. But you're already using your brand's fonts on your website by relying on images or other workarounds. Is dealing with the technical and legal complexities of webfonts really worth the hassle? Come learn why you actually can't afford not to be using webfonts -- and how a webfont service can make it dead simple.

Join this session to explore the exciting development possibilities of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for PlayBook. Learn how to use CSS3, HTML5 and JavaScript WebWorks APIS to transform your existing web assets into a BlackBerry Super App!

The City of San Francisco challenges other organizations to set our information free, to develop apps that make people’s lives easier using our datasets. Learn about what has been developed so far and let us know what you want to work on. This session is non-technical and will provide info for anyone interested in apps based on city data.

Today's web developer is armed with a powerful suite of tools optimized for writing network-aware, data-driven, interactive graphical applications. Modern web browsers provide a powerful flexible programming language (Javascript), an expressive and elaborate styling system (CSS) and two robust, battle tested document models (HTML and SVG).

As a developer in the RIA and User Experience field, it's important to be armed with some design basics in order to effectively communicate with designers and give sound suggestions for UX improvements on the applications you’re building. This session covers basic design principles and techniques that will help developers understand a designer’s intent and maximize time and energy in the process.

For decades, you've have had to spend significant money to purchase enterprise software and services, and you've had to make a leap of faith that you will derive value from the purchase. Two innovative software startups are now challenging that approach and another startup thrives on a bold pay-for-performance model.

You are the best of the best when it comes to building websites - but can you say that people can easily find your websites once you make them live? Are you sure that you have incorporated all the SEO tips, tricks, tools, and best practices into the actual infrastructure of your website? Do you want to make sure that you have, along with offering SEO optimized websites to your customers?

This is a session for developers who are interested in learning about the Tornado framework for Python and event-driven programming in general. We'll talk about the benefits of Tornado and how we use it and other libraries at Hipmunk to write robust software and to ease scaling.

On the way to launching 24 brands for Unilever on Twitter, we learned a lot more than just the mechanics of strategy through execution on 140-character social media programs. There’s been a lot written and published about how to prepare, launch and develop a following for brands on Twitter. Ours is the unwritten story. Learn from the swings, misses and homeruns of our experience.

Gamification is rapidly changing how we engage users and solve problems - affecting big brands and small startups alike. Early approaches have produced largely stellar results (e.g. Foursquare, DevHub) and some real duds. Most designers know that badges alone are not enough to profoundly engage users, but what does it take to gamify like a champ?

What's up with HTML5? Why did the WHATWG drop the "5" not long after W3C's launch of a new HTML5 logo? What is and isn't HTML(5)? Bring your questions and passion for the open web, standards leader and HTML5 book author Tantek Çelik will lead a round-table sure-to-be-lively conversation to help sort some of this out.

In an era when people are comfortable putting personal information online, companies can uncover market trends and consumer behaviors by strategically aggregating and analyzing massive sets of customer data. This session will teach attendees how to effectively collect and break down data, and how to utilize this information for marketing and product development initiatives.

Reza and Joel will be giving a live demonstration on how to use Expression Blend and Visual Studio to develop a non-trivial Windows Phone application.

Great design ideas rarely spring fully formed from our brains. They are usually a result of ideas from many people, iterated over time. This session looks at the ways we can use collaboration to harness great ideas and then develop them into breakthrough designs.

What separates successful products from unsuccessful ones? As the Web 2.0 product bar is continuously raised over time, best practices in product management, development and UI design have emerged to make it much more of a science than an art. This session will cover understanding customer needs, product design, usability testing, parsing user feedback, and using metrics to optimize your product.

JavaScript is the programming language of the web. Its is making a comeback with Node.js a highly concurrent server based on V8, the JavaScript engine from the Chrome browser. This session will explore how Node.js work, and how you can use it to develop with JavaScript that runs on both the client and the server. This session will show how to apply existing JavaScript skills on the server.

New media has made new ways of measurement possible, but many companies are using legacy metrics such as impressions and clicks to understand the social web. Join Margaret Francis, VP of Products, Scout Labs for a conversation about how brands approach the challenges of social media measurement in a fluid, real-time world.

Join Robert Scoble, one of the premiere experts on startups today, and Alex Polvi, a successful entrepreneur and founder of Cloudkick, for an engaging conversation about the 2011 startups to watch. In the past year, there has been an explosion in the number of startups, incubators and funding . Are we in a bubble or is developer talent and the cloud feeding innovation?

Lynne d Johnson, SVP of social media at the Advertising Research Foundation and John C. Havens, SVP of social media at Porter Novelli will demonstrate how Augmented Reality (AR) provides a ‘touchstone technology’ that layers mobile commerce, social networking and location-based advertising in a seamless format for consumers and brands.

While "Community Manager" is a popular job title these days, the collective nature of community makes it impossible for any individual or external force to create or truly manage one. In this session, Thomas Knoll, community architect for Zappos, will lead a large-scale discussion exploring these ideas for online communities.

The gap between physical and digital has blurred: we use Wiis to get in shape, computers to order a pizza, or phones to find hot dates. Design is becoming more demanding - we can’t stop at digital. The future of design is everywhere the customer touches our product or service, digital or physical. Learn this future and avoid going the way of the dodo, dinosaurs, and disco.

Ever wondered what would happen if you could rethink a decade worth of design changes? Drizzle is a redesign of the MySQL server targeted at web development and cloud infrastructure. Update yourself on the latest features, and use cases for Drizzle7 and what is in store for the near future.

We will discuss 3 topics near and dear to many: mobile apps; social apps; and helping ensure wild success. Join us to learn how Thuzi has created social apps that can run on phone devices (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone,) iPad/tablets, and tap cloud computing to handle rapid growth.

Building a great product is just part of it. A launch needs to have marketing, press, early adopters who will vouch for the product and a million other things that need to line up. Rashmi and Ross will share lessons from SlideShare's recent launch of Zipcast and lead a discussion about how to do great launches.