Web 2.0 in the Clouds

On June 17th at the Stanford Business School I'm moderating the MIT-Stanford Venture Lab event Cloud Computing: Creating Value for Web 2.0 Apps.

Moderator
Ross Mayfield, Chairman, President and Co-founder, Socialtext

Speaker
Jonathan Bryce, Co-founder, Mosso, a Rackspace's company

Panelists
Paul McNamara, CEO, Coghead
Ping Li, Partner, Accel Partners
Michael Crandell, CEO & Founder, RightScale
Lydia Leong, Research Director, Gartner

Cloud computing increases capacity and expands computing capabilities without heavy investment in infrastructure, training or software licensing. Most importantly though, it democratizes Web 2.0 application development. With the removal of two significant barriers to entry - cost and capacity access - suddenly, even small, lesser-funded entrepreneurs can dream big and bring their grand Web 2.0 applications to market.

What are the ramifications of democratization? How are entrepreneurs exploiting cloud computing and leveraging Web 2.0? What challenges do these entrepreneurs face? Are they making money? What are the hot areas of development today and what will the next areas be? Will offerings from these new, small, nimble, creative thinking entrepreneurs change the Web 2.0 user experience? Will cloud computing live up to expectations?

And I always thought these infrastructure guys were below me, stack wise, apparently with this cloud thing we should all look up.  For background, I suggest Nick Carr's blog and book.  Sign up here, and the Facebook event is here.

Oh, and here's how I blogged about some of this when it was called the grid.