So here are my five cents of the Webmonday in April 2007 in San Francisco.

The crowd was excellent with a healthy mix of German 'Silicon Valley Community' and Web2Expo visitors that stopped buy for this after hours event. The warm up was nice and people had a chance to mingle. Around 40-50 people showed up.

At 7 Pm the planned schedule started and two short presentations (one was about Web 2 and Global Warming) followed. Not really interesting for me but yeah maybe for someone in the audience maybe. However from there the event quickly degraded into the telephone pitches.

These pitches also existed in the last event I attended in November. The idea is to bring one or more German startups to the audience of Valley folks (which are largely German anyways). So the founder or Marketing guys gets up at 4 AM in Germany and tries to do a pitch in rather Broken English (my English would be rather non helpful at all at 4 AM) over the phone.

This poor person then speaks to an event audience through a cell phone loud speaker (yes your nice old buddy speaker on your phone) through a VOIP connection that comfortably last for 5 minutes (and gets reconnected after that 'Heeelo can youuu hearrrrmeee?'). Out of the 50 people maybe 5 had the chance to be close enough to the speaker to understand a single word. The rest just had to shut up (no whisper guys!) in order to not disturb th pitch.

What a waste of brain power - so many smart people in the room and such a bad concept in terms of entertaining the masses...

Let's hope it gets better - the event organizers and attendees deserve better...




But at least I saw the future of notebook display in SF - 'Post It to your screen... :)