

Tech people appear hyped about their industry again SAN FRANCISCO  Woo hoo! Tech is back! Kind of like Nixon in '68. Or an REO Speedwagon reunion tour. Gives you a bit of an uneasy feeling. The industry is still tingling from the loud and sweaty Bubble 2.0 — whoops, excuse me, Web 2.0 — conference here late last week. The event is being heralded in the media as proof of a tech comeback five years after the dot-com collapse. It's almost like a return from exile. Web 2.0, a Silicon Valley gathering in its second year, certainly felt hot. It had a couple of thousand attendees packed in like hens on a poultry farm. It had parties with decibel levels I hadn't experienced since a 1981 Ramones concert. It had all-new buzzwords. Remember "B2B" and "push technology"? Now, it's "user-generated content" and "AJAX." Until last week, I thought AJAX was a cleaning fluid, or a Dutch soccer team. But no — it's an acronym for something you use to get money from venture capitalists People who had been taking cover in bunkers for five years showed up. Hey, there's Joe Kraus! He co-founded Internet search company Excite — since defunct — in the 1990s and is back with a new company called JotSpot. Hey, there's onetime analyst Henry Blodgett! He was banned from Wall Street for hyping Web stocks and now writes a blog. Everyone half-expected the Pets.com sock puppet to wander through, checking e-mail on its BlackBerry. Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker gave a talk. Remember her? Wall Street analyst to the dot-com stars? She powered through slide after slide of random "data points": VoIP calls in Denmark exceed landline calls. PayPal is bigger than American Express. More e-mail in Japan is sent via mobile devices than via PCs. U.S. Wi-Fi access points will pass 50,000 in 2005. What does this add up to? "We are in or are entering TWO cycles instead of one — broadband Internet and mobile," Meeker tells the crowd. Wow. Not one bubble, but two at once! So THAT'S what Web 2.0 means! What's not to love? This isn't to suggest that Internet stocks are hot again, because they're not. Or that Netscape-style IPOs are back, because they're not. OK, well, there was Google, but its stock is up because it will soon RULE THE WORLD. And if a company is from China, which is still in Web 1.0, it can play by Web 1.0 financial rules and have a huge IPO despite shaky business logic. But otherwise here in Web 2.0 land, the only "exit strategy" for most entrepreneurs seems to be to get bought by eBay or Yahoo. It's either that or — ew! — actually spend a decade building a viable company. Still, people in the industry sound excited about technology again. If only they could explain what they're excited about. Yes, it's the second wave of the Internet. But this concept of "Web 2.0" seems to be like Pink Floyd lyrics: It can mean different things to different people, depending on your state of mind. Most concise definition at the conference: "What sucks now will suck less," says Bran Ferren, co-chairman of R&D firm Applied Minds. That isn't exactly the kind of pitch that jazzes investors. At the conference, people tossed around all kinds of definitions of Web 2.0. It's a more interactive Web, some say. It's the delivery of services over the Web, others chime in. But from what I gather, the essence of Web 2.0 comes down to one word: WD-40. Web 2.0 is a multipurpose lubricant! It lets the different pieces of computing, software and the Web slide into one another and even blurs the distinction between users and websites. So, stuff you once did only on your PC, such as write documents, can be done on the Web. Stuff you used to do on one website at a time can now be done by mixing data from multiple sites, such as those Google Maps mash-ups. And users can now become part of websites — adding photos, blogs, videos and knowledge. That's the idea behind user-generated content, and it drives sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia, GarageBand and MySpace. AJAX is a big part of Web 2.0. The acronym stands for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It's basically a way to make Web pages look and act as if they are running on your PC instead of coming in over the Internet. Among venture capitalists, AJAX is hot stuff, like B2B (aka business-to-business Web commerce) in 1999. Just put it in your business plan, and venture capitalists will consider funding you. A company called Zimbra generated tons of buzz at the conference, and it's based on AJAX. Zimbra uses the Web to offer high-end corporate-style e-mail — doing for Microsoft Outlook users what Gmail did for consumer e-mail users. Zimbra's service blurs the definitions among individual PCs, corporate servers and the Web. Which makes Zimbra a Web 2.0 company. Plus, by offering corporate e-mail, the company is taking on Microsoft in a way no one dared a few years ago. Which also makes Zimbra a Web 2.0 company. Five or 10 years ago, these conferences revolved around Microsoft. Attendees huddled to talk about what Microsoft was doing or might do. Venture folks refused to even talk to companies that encroached on Microsoft's space. Everyone breathlessly watched speeches by Microsoft executives. Now that happens when Google is on stage, but not Microsoft. At this conference, a handful of Microsoft execs sat on stage for a panel discussion after dinner. The vast room of attendees started talking with each other, laughing among themselves and generally behaving like high schoolers when they have a substitute teacher. Apparently, in Web 2.0, Microsoft is no longer the law. Of course, that's what Netscape thought in Web 1.0. Kevin Maney has covered technology for USA TODAY since 1985. His column appears Wednesdays. Click here for an index of Technology columns. E-mail him at: kmaney@usatoday.com.