This was a great event – dinner at the drake
web 2.0 definitely has a lot of hype surrounding it making it uncomfortably close to becoming bubble 2.0
There were far too many businesses are just creating the ‘next social network’ with business models based purely on ad revenue. Sure online advertising is a much larger spend of overall advertising budgets, but advertising will always contract during times of difficult economic times.
In spite of that, there were some ‘real’ businesses and definitely some ‘interesting’ ones at that. GiveMeaning is one that definitely falls into the interesting category. I don’t know how much sense it makes from an investors point of view since they have some challenges ahead – namely, how to get an investor to invest into a company which cannot aim to make too much lest they alienate their customers. but it is definitely a company which deserves to be looked at.
other than that though, i don’t think i met any startups that were really that great. There were many interesting and smart people, but most of them were with established companies.