O’Reilly/Calacanis Fireside Chat

The O’Reilly/Calacanis fireside chat today was a great session to kick-off my SXSW experience. O’Reilly covered topics from brands to discussing his knack for using pattern recognition to predict the future.

Key Takeaways:

• Great brands have a core; they mean something. Brands belong to anyone who uses it.  Create a barrier to entry. Create an identity.
• Hardware used to be the source of value. Microsoft realized the value in software and then open source commoditized it. Value has now moved to user contribution.
• If there was a “Web 3.0”, it would not be user data but sensor data; whatever harnesses collective intelligence.
• Chase the idea. Innovation requires fun. “They don’t think it will make them rich, they think it’s fun”

O’Reilly also discussed Government and shared an analogy regarding government as a vending machine. We put money in (taxes) and expect it to spit out something (services). We shake the machine when we don’t get what we want. O’Reilly proposes that government needs to act like a platform. He called Reagan the founder of Foursquare. The government undertook the difficult development of GPS and opened it up for commerce.