At the end of 2008, I attended an inspiring mini-conference in Palo Alto for CTOs to explore big ideas. At last I have time to blog it.
The conference was hosted by MIH SWAT – a division of Naspers with the mission to connect the technology strategies of the web businesses in their portfolio. Over the 3 days we heard inspiring talks from Werner Vogels (Amazon) and Jason Hoffman (Joyent) as well as representatives from QQ (China) and GaduGadu (Poland). I learned a lot and met some great people.
I love the Naspers strategy to focus their internet business on ’emerging markets’. It is refreshing to work with a business that has no interest in the US market, instead setting it’s sights on markets like China, Thailand and Brazil.
Their portfolio includes Tencent QQ (a gigantic Chinese service with, I am told, 50 million users coming online at the same time every evening) and mail.ru (Russia’s largest web site with over 30 million users).
This is my keynote on some lessons I learned at Kazaa. It was great fun to be amongst a crowd that are managing bigger communities than we ever served at Kazaa (we ‘only’ got up to 5 million concurrent users) and it felt incredibly retro to discuss tech that was so ‘old’.
Lessons from Kazaa: a retro talk from Pollenizer Studio on Vimeo. The next talk I give, I am going to try really, really hard to not say “ah” or “erm” 🙂
Thank you to John Kotsaftis and Jacques Van Niekerk for embedding me in this process and thanks to MIH for allowing me to re-publish this video.