Sessions at Web 2.0 Expo 2011 SF on Wednesday 30th March

Y Combinator consistently manages to take smart hackers and turn them into successful startup founders. What lessons can we all learn from the Y Combinator approach to startups? And what exactly does Y Combinator do? We'll talk about the Y Combinator experience, the YC take on startups, and about the moderator's experience with his YC-backed startup (Zencoder).

"TV is broken. Well, not strictly speaking, but the way we interact with our TVs is terribly outdated…" -- David Pierce, PC Magazine. The interfaces we have had to use to simply watch TV are not only outdated, they actually interfere with the way we access our content.

Facebook launched the Open Graph Protocol nearly 1 year ago to power the Like button. Join the lead developer, Paul Tarjan, for a discussion about the design decisions, tips and tricks, and where the future of the Open Graph Protocol is headed.

The title says it all. This session will explore effective techniques for implementing and growing Facebook business pages. Attendees will get tips on tools and strategies to run a successful campaign on their own.

Every advertiser is talking about re-marketing – but what exactly does that mean? This session will cut through the hype and present practical re-marketing tactics advertisers can use to boost customer acquisition and sales.

The Web is inherently accessible, however, there are a large amount of sites that are hard for those using assistive technology.There are 650 million people worldwide living with disabilities and developing an accessible site improves the overall user experience for people of all abilities.Learn how the Yahoo! homepage-visited by more than 300 people monthly was created with accessibility in mind.

Netflix and leaders in other industries are discovering unexpected sources of innovation through their APIs. By letting the enterprise out into the wild and acquiring, hiring, or cloning the best results, they're outracing competitors, delivering stickier user experiences, and winning more profitable customers. In this session, we'll hear how they're doing it--and how you can, too.

To thrive in the business world today, you must rapidly create newer and better products and experiences—more engaging, more what people want or like. But how do know how people feel? You can already track their clicks, but how do you know that you’re connecting with them emotionally?

So you've hired a Community Manager, now what? Come discuss how organizations big and small can leverage investments in community management and social media. How do you prevent a community manager from becoming a "social media help desk employee." How can 1 person or a small team of people really impact and grown an online audience?

Performance matters for everyone on the web. In this session we’ll walk through the steps necessary to create a high performance website using WordPress. The technology and techniques apply everywhere so we’ll do this on a Windows Server as well. Join Frederick Townes, CTO from Mashable and Mark Brown from Microsoft as they walk through how to do it.

Using a case study of the innovative new online program "Bedsider", developed by a team led by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, we will demonstrate tools, techniques and lessons learned from taking a pressing problem into the digital and social media world -- using cutting edge design, agile software development and social media tools.

What happens when you troll through massive amounts of consumer spending data? Can you create meaningful products that provide tangible benefit to users? These are the types of questions we ask ourselves every day at Bundle. Join us to view the results that curiosity can bring about.

Your website has out-of-control CSS bloat. You know your performance is being impacted, but how do you move from organic CSS with no particular architecture to something lighter, more logical, and easier to maintain? In this session, Nicole Sullivan will show you how she improved the CSS at Facebook and Yahoo! Search.

Do you want a happier, more empowered team with an attitude of ownership and a focus on productivity? I thought so. We get the party started right at Cheezburger by having our new developers write and commit code to our production software on Day One. (Yes, you heard that right…we throw a newbie into the fire before they even have time to know what hit them!)

Although most businesses recognize the value of engaging in social media, they struggle to justify marketing spend on these platforms in terms that resonate with executive management. In this session, Sandra Fathi will discuss the tools and metrics brand marketers can use to measure and track the success of your online campaigns.

The mobile platform opens up opportunities to influence people whenever and wherever they are. We’ll look at the psychology of persuasion, understanding behavior patterns, intervention leverage points, persuasive techniques for mobile apps, cultivating lasting attention, triggering action, overcoming resistance to behavior change and more.

Steady user trends bring about dramatic and abrupt changes by handset manufactures like Nokia, operating system providers like Microsoft, and carriers like T-Mobile. AT&T's bid to acquire T-Mobile and Microsoft's billion dollar deal to be Nokia's OS provider and the shake-up in Japan are just the most recent seismic disruptions to the mobile eco-system.

You've seen eye-opening stories of companies small and large who see phenomenal success by marketing to customers through community and social media. They're creating brand awareness and generating new customers. But how does it work for B2B marketers?

How are leading brands measuring User Experience? Measuring user experience allows companies to manage and design optimal experiences for their customers. What tools are they leveraging to measure and manage their customer's experiences? We will discuss how leading companies, such as PayPal, are leveraging these tools and methodologies to measure and optimize their users' experience.

When it comes to the things we like, the activities we do, the products we buy and the places we go, we turn to our friends to help us decide. The people around us are our everyday solution to the increasing amount of choice and the increasing amount of available information in our worlds.

The browser wars are still going strong. New entrants are joining all the time. APIs and plugins are expanding the definition of a browser. Even while the browser is gaining new pawers conflicting standards and conventions are causing headaches for developers. This panel will let you address the browser groups directly.

Kodak Gallery had a mid sized product development organization releasing on a monthly basis and not really making much progress. Introducing lean start up methods has significantly improved the impact of product development activities. Mark will relay the the hurdles and the successes on this ongoing journey.

Your business started as an idea. Look around you. Your clothes, language, furniture, house, city, and nation all began as visions in other minds. If you have an idea for something what you really mean is you want to change the world in some way. You might not be able to change the entire world, but what is "the world" anyway? It is simply all of the ideas of all our ancestors.

From phone to tablets to microwaves to refrigerators, the world is now filled with touch devices. Pulse News, a beautiful mobile application that allows you to read your news visually, was developed by young Stanford graduate students. Started off as a class project, it now has a solid presence on both iOS and Android platforms.

Businesses realize that they need to be part of the participatory, real-time web. Unfortunately, companies big and small, ignore the new framework needed in this new context. The participatory world requires both new thinking and a renewed focus on human skills and behavior.

Tummeling describes the art and science of engaging and collaborating in a networked age. In a world that no longer operates in a command and control hierarchy how do you connect and create a world that puts people at the centre of business, technology and culture. and encourages participation?

The key to success is to have a Tummler play the role of catalyst within a group, to welcome newcomers, rein in old hands and set the tone of the conversation so that it can become an alive and robust space. The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don’t have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage. We don’t have a English name for this role; they get called ‘Moderators’ or ‘Community Managers’, and because when they’re doing it right you see everyone’s conversation, not their carefully crafted atmosphere, their role is often ignored. However, it is a properly Tummeled site that leads to the success of many of the companies we all aspire to mimic.

This perspective of enabling the customers of your business and the audience of your site to be a core part of your business implies a different approach to design and to business processes. Superficial ‘real-time’ or ‘gamified’ approaches fall down without a real commitment to conversing with customers.

This session will be a Tummeled conversation with the audience on how these skills can be cultivated through human, business and technical means, drawing on the year of conversations held at http://tummelvision.tv, and guests who have shared their experiences in building sites up to millions of conversing users through successful Tummeling. In this session we will focus on:

How can I get people to help my site grow?
Why is there no activity on my site?
What do I do to engage users with the site and each other?
Stop looking for ‘influencers’ – amplify good contributions and enable connections
Can you stop saying ‘viral’ ? Being a disease is a goal for you?
Outline the organic, structural and often hidden approaches that focuses on emotion over data.

Coming soon!

Tackling mobile performance is a bigger challenge than desktop - more operating systems, greater browser disparity, and limitations of the device. In this session Steve Souders shows how to analyze mobile performance across all the popular devices. He demonstrates analysis tools, services for accessing devices remotely, and quirks he's discovered that show mobile performance is full of surprises.

Dorie Clark - marketing strategist and former presidential campaign spokeswoman - shows you how to prevent, prepare for, and master crisis communications in an online world.

Product management is an ill-defined and often misunderstood field. This panel discussion will lift the curtain on this dark art by moderating a conversation between a group of seasoned product managers describing how they work, what they've learned along the way and what advice they have for others interested in creating products that delight users.

What does the future of transactions look like? Researcher Heather Schlegel has fresh data on the future of currency and alternate transactions. In this session, she'll share her findings, including current behaviors around transactions, emerging payment options and three invisible cultural trends that will shape our transactions.