Yesterday, AOL Technologies had an all-hands with CTO Maureen Govern. The buzz started earlier in the week as a crew assembled the tent over a 3 day period on the Dulles campus green. I took a couple snapshots of the event, which included vision and goal statements, an interview with Tim O’Reilly by Jon Miller, manager introductions and Q&A, and a good ol’ fashion beer bash to wrap things up. One can usually tell if a meeting is good when it lasts 2 hours but doesn’t seem like it, and you leave wanting more! Furthermore, the meeting had various real-time interactive sessions answerable with Reply wireless devices, which made the event entertaining.
The prevailing theme, at least for me, was about innovation, Web 2.0, and platform contemplations. All this reinforced with the Tim O’Reilly interview, which was great.
Mr. O’Reilly actually has a long history with AOL when he sold GNN to AOL in ‘95. It was on the cutting edge in many respects with edited content and the first website to sell ads. Ultimately, the service and site was absorbed into other AOL offerings. I joined AOL during the tail-end of GNN’s operations, but still remember one program that launched before it was shut down: Spanq!. If anyone remembers that show, along with Trip Anchor and Uncle Dutch, please write a comment for nostalgic purposes :).
Most answers by Tim can be read in his articles. For example, Web 2.0 thoughts can be viewed here, and inventing the future thoughts here. Although I’ve heard O’Reilly speak before about Web 2.0 at the WWDC, it was good to hear about his thoughts on recognizing trends and patterns within the industry in person. Also, I like the quote he used, and uses, from William Gibson, the science-fiction writer, concerning “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
Perhaps I’ll write more thoughts on the event in a future post, but let me wrap up this session by confirming that the beer bash was also a rousing success.
How do I know?
Well, at the end, a few attendants were wheeling out the remaining beer in a tub and co-workers were diving hands into the tub pulling out trophies of beer two at a time, one-handed, as others cheered in amazement.
Haven’t seen feats and spirit like that in a few years.