3x3 Consumer 2.0 breakfast, 20 June 2006

Exciting this morning to meet some of the other web 2.0 people in Sydney and put some handshakes to people I've known only thru email, IM, blogger and LinkedIn for months.


Rachel Slattery, www.slatteryit.com.au

Rachel Slattery from SlatteryIT.com.au organised the event and did a great job of the invite list - even the headhunters there were more interesting than usual. The "3x3" format meant that three speakers each had three minutes to talk, followed by three questions from the audience. That doesn't take very long to do, leaving a good 30-40 mins afterwards for people to chat, which is the right sort of balance between presentation and networking time if you ask me.

Unfortunately the nightclub-in-daytime venue was a bit slow with the coffee and a bit dark to get good photos from the cameraphone, as you can see from the following pics.

Nick McNaughton from www.zookoda.com kicked off with a quick explanation of how his RSS-to-email startup had blossomed after some reportage from influential bloggers spread over the blogging referral networks. Zookoda's grown to an extraordinary Alexa ranking of 11,887, with Alexa reach of 73.5% per million users, almost entirely off the back of blogsposure and Nick's excellent personal networking skills. I played a vanishingly small part in the early coverage for Zookoda and it's exciting to see how well it's going now.

Nick McNaughton, www.zookoda.com

Michael Liubinskas of www.zapr.com followed with a helpful outline on how his new business had suddenly appeared on the web 2.0 radar screen after a pitch at Demo. Zapr's got a really interesting and unique spin on peer-to-peer file sharing and I think it will go nuts when it comes out of private beta.


Michael Liubinskas, www.zapr.com

Nik Cubrilovic of Omnidrive, a Web 2.0 veteran who may be able to fund his next startup entirely thru United flyer miles, was up last, talking about how challenging it's been to manage a 'private beta' with more than 10,000 registered users, and about how that has resulted in a complete overhaul of the product based on that user feedback. Nik was questioned, but neatly dodged, some questions about the VC fund-raising experience, but you only need to head to his blog to learn more if you're interested in that.

Nik Cubrilovic, www.omnidrive.com

Again, sorry about the lousy quality of the cameraphone photos, but next 3x3 I'll sit further back and try and get some more light on my subjects. 3x3 seems like a really time-efficient and useful briefing format and I hope I get an invite to the next one without the invitation list growing so long that it's no longer possible to meet and talk with everybody who attends.