AO2005 INNOVATION SUMMIT... QUICK REVIEW

Yesterday was a good start to the AO2005 Innovation Summit. Great energy. Definitely up a notch from last year's conference.

The opening session by Peter Hirshberg and Michael Markman was creative and engaging. The keynote session with Sandy Berger, Michael Medved and Jerry Brown was solid with good information and statements by all three panelists. It was the first time I heard Medved and he was awesome. Brown and Berger represented the left well, but of course I thought some of their views were off :). Many of the attendees started to trickle out about 30 minutes into it and by the end more than 60% left. This was expected since many people are not that interested in politics much less political seminars, but if you are this was a great session.

This morning's session with Niklas Zennström, co-founder and CEO of Skype, and Tim Draper was cool. They were "skyping" in on Skype's new video phone system. Tim was hilarious and Niklas seemed poised and confident about his company's future success. Tony and MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco moderated the session. Also the chat board during this session had more substance than yesterday's chat string during the keynote session (70%+ of those comments was junk).

Some other reviews by TechCrunch, Outside The Star, Bag and Baggage. JD Lasica has some pictures here.

[tags: AlwaysOn, AlwaysOn2005, Stanford, SandyBerger, JerryBrown,MichaelMedved