Batelle and O'Reilly

Web 2.0 Opening Welcome

The State of the Internet Industry
17 minutes, 8.2mb, recorded 2004-10-05

How big is the Internet today, and how does it compare to the late 1990s? What are the major trends in business innovation, commerce, technical infrastructure, finance? In this opening session your conference hosts walk you through reams of data to give an overview of the state of the Internet industry, circa late 2004.

This is a presentation delivered at the Web 2.0 Conference held in San Francisco, CA, October 5-7, 2004. Our thanks go to MediaLive International and O'Reilly Media, the producers of Web 2.0, for permission to bring you this session, one of many from Web 2.0 here on IT Conversations.

John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author who has founded or co-founded businesses, magazines, and websites. Currently on leave from Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Battelle, 38, is also a founder and Executive Producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries and "band manager" with BoingBoing.net. Previously, Battelle was founder, Chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures. Battelle is also at work on a forthcoming book, The Search: Business and Culture in the Age of Google (Penguin/Portfolio), and is the monthly "Titans of Technology" columnist for Business 2.0 magazine. He also maintains a daily site covering the intersection of media, technology and the internet at www.battellemedia.com. Battelle was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and a finalist in the "Entrepreneur of the year" competition by Ernst & Young. He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to publishing pioneering books like Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century), O'Reilly has also been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web. O'Reilly continues to pioneer new content developments on the Web via its O'Reilly Network affiliate, which also manages sites such as Perl.com and XML.com. O'Reilly's conference arm hosts the popular Perl Conference, the Open Source Software Convention, and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Tim O'Reilly has been an activist for internet standards and for Open Source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key internet technologies, helping to block Microsoft's 1996 limits on TCP/IP in NT Workstation, organizing the " summit" of key free software leaders where the term "Open Source" was first widely agreed upon, and, most recently, organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents. He received Infoworld's Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his advocacy on behalf of the Open Source community.


This free podcast is from our Web 2.0 Conference series.