Sessions at Web 2.0 Expo 2011 SF on Thursday 31st March

Thursday's opening remarks by the Web 2.0 Expo SF program chairs Sarah Milstein and Brady Forrest.

There are over a quarter million iphone apps. Fortunes are being made--but not so much in the appstores. So forget the democratic storefronts: this insider's tour of the mobile industry will show you where the real money can be made.

Keynote by Dane Glasgow, VP of Global Product Management at eBay, Inc.

As building an engaged community becomes top of mind for many retail brands, Susan Gregg Koger, founder of ModCloth.com, explores how the company has managed to build a strong community via social networks and how the skyrocketing fashion retailer plans to build a social shopping site that continues to empower their customer base and change the fashion industry.

Keynote by Adam Goldstein, co-founder and CEO of the travel search site Hipmunk.

Keynote by Rebekah Cox, Product Design Manager, Quora.

Keynote by Adam Mosseri, Product Design Manager, Facebook.

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff discusses how the Web-based business redefined its business model and overhauled its planning and design process to embrace location-based mobile technologies, enhance user experiences and improve advertiser ROI. Real estate is ripe for mobile and Zillow’s early and aggressive integration of mobile is helping attract new users and open up new revenue streams.

Tablets! Tablets! Tablets! There's a lot of buzz, but which apps really succeed on these devices and why? Peter Meyers, author of "Best iPad Apps," interviews top app creators to help you understand the pitfalls and opportunities.

The Sendai earthquake was a terrible tragedy for Japan, but I'm optimistic that it will jump start innovation and a collective sense of action in a country that needed a little shaking up. How has living in the most active earthquake zone in the world affected engineering and innovation in Japan? And what seeds of creativity do we see spawning from the aftermath, as solutions or coping mechanisms?

In an ecosystem of tweets and retweets, bloggers and re-bloggers the questions of documentation and credit have become tricky. The identity of the singular, original creator of a piece of online culture isn't always immediately clear – even if that instigator WASN'T posting Anonymously. So... a million "like"s and "post-to-tumblr"s later, a question arises: to whom does this culture belong?

In March 2006, a small podcasting startup called Odeo launched a side project. You now know that side project as Twitter. Interestingly, Twitter is just one of the companies that came out of Odeo; seven employees-- or more than half the of the company-- went on directly to found other ventures, including Instagr.am, Square, Trazzler and CrowdVine.

Bring your brand issues to the table and get your brand attitude adjusted. In this highly interactive session, participants vie via Facebook to be crowned the brand that needs adjustment, then Josh and Kandi in fast forward fashion take them through their five step brand reinvention process. The lucky participants will walk away with a plan for their own brand revival...

Appstores are hell. Why fight it out hand to hand when you can work the system? We'll get in to the nitty gritty of how to build carrier relationships, close OEM sales, and score preloads. Names will be named--be ready to talk about your mobile plans and how to get them on the fast track.

Many workshops teach the mechanics of using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to compete in business. But few dive into the psychological insights that explain which social media strategies work and which don't. In this session, we'll pull back the curtain and help you understand the subtle elements of social media success.

Trying to understand which standards will be used and which are optimized for various types of tasks is difficult. This session breaks through the FUD in the industry to make a very pragmatic analysis of what the future may hold, when it might be best to use HTML5 features over Flash (and vice verse) and how JavaScript factors in. This session is not a "vs." and focuses on likely outcomes.

Social TV services and devices are proliferating. The next question is: What form will advertising take within these new experiences? How will content creators, distributors, agencies and brands participate? What are systemic obstacles and points of leverage that will drive these emergence dynamics? This session will introduce social TV and explore advertising opportunities in the medium.

Games simplify experiences for us. The recent gamification of life trend, by extension, simplifies LIFE for us. They push us through specific experiences that have been specially tailored for our entertainment. Lately, however, game designers have been pushing their luck to see how much they can craft games to their benefit, even if it sometimes conflicts with the players’ best interests. Learn how to make sure you are using games to your own advantage, and not the other way around.

Advertising offers an excellent opportunity for developers to earn a living, but the industry has done little to educate on the real economics of the mobile advertising opportunity for developers.

In this panel, Rich Skrenta, Cofounder and CEO of Blekko, will discuss the challenges technologists face in building a scalable platform that can crawl today’s Web – now an infinite number of pages littered with Spam and worse.

Building software with a UX approach is more than just listening to users, companies must allow customers to participate in the evolution of the products they use. In this session, find out how learning from your users and working as an agile team can help you create the tools they actually need, rather than the features developers think are cool.

The web is filled with pre-packaged solutions for online content delivery. From blogs to video to e-readers, we're constantly taught that general solutions are effective solutions. The truth is that no product designed for mass consumption can perfectly cater to a unique user base.

The rise of the Social Web has been one of the biggest game changers in online advertising, yet marketers continue to struggle with how to best utilize and measure the impact of this channel. You engage with your consumers on Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms, but that's just one piece of the puzzle.

Whether we like it or not the pace of all things new has forced us to get comfy with change or be a doormat for a disruptor. From the familiar to the unexpected disruptors are everywhere. What can visionaries who've upended industries teach us about business, trends, and thinking abut product innovation?

Digital Magazines for the iPad are changing the way readers interact with content. They merge the beauty of print with rich media, social networking and live data, all wrapped up in a UI that readers touch and play with. We’ll look at the iPad magazines that are doing it right, doing it wrong and doing it weird and show how to design for this new media.

Accepting credit card payments is a critical requirement for any company that sells goods or services on its website--which, these days, is most companies. But doing so can be daunting and carries risk. Not only is the payments ecosystem complicated, it's also flooded with providers that have deceptive pricing and questionable business practices--including hoarding your data.

The rise of angel investors is part of a substantial, structural shift in power in Silicon Valley, with entrepreneurs gaining influence and prominence--and leverage. In this session, we'll look at the trends and their significance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t... - you can watch the preso here.

Session given by Mike Kuniavsky, founder, ThingM Corporation.

Eva Galperin from the EFF discusses the growing threat of "traitorware," the class of software and devices that work behind your back to betray your privacy. Notable examples include the Sony BMG rootkit, printer tracking dots, and locational metadata. This talk will dissect the differences between a cool new feature that will help your users and sneaky traitorware that will have them up in arms.

The potential of geolocation capabilities will extend beyond the social web (Foursquare, Places) and into mainstream use – geolocation services (grocery-shopping or family tracking apps) bringing geolocation home. This session will examine business and financial considerations of geolocation trends outside of the social arena, benefitting start-ups looking to capitalize on the phenomenon.