As conferences go, the Web 2.0 Expo is more about panels, sessions and ideas than it is about flashy expo booths. But even if very few of the companies have gadgets or shiny handhelds to show off, there are two things that booths are good for: handing out free swag and conducting product demos.
I did my best to suppress my addiction to T-shirts for the afternoon as I wandered around the Expo hall. I took in a few demos and met some developers doing some interesting things with user generated content – and also helped myself to a free espresso or three. Along the way, I snapped a few pics and posted them after the jump.
The guys from Piczo, a social network that lets users create multiple, slick-looking personalized pages they can fill with photos, videos and text. The fact that it doesn't limit its users to a strict profile-style page has really fueled growth. Piczo hasn't really caught on here yet, but it's doing well in Europe. Especially among tween and teen girls.
Attendees share laughs and lattes at PayPal's coffee bar-slash-expo booth.
Thatched roof palapas and BBQs? Cambrian House is in the house.
Sean Tanner, research manager at MAPlight.org, a site that matches political contribution data with our representatives' voting records. Using the site's open tools, users can generate custom reports that show the correlation between cash and influence in our legislature. MAPlight.org ("Money and Politics") uses humans to scrape publicly available voting and contribution data. MAPlight only tracks California's legislature right now, but it's building a database for the 110th Congress that will launch very soon.
Google's space-aged booth looks like it's built out giant Legos.
The Web 2.0 Expo hosts open unconference sessions in the afternoons under the "Web 2 Open" banner. Anyone who wants to host a session or a discussion just picks an open time slot and puts it on the Expo's wiki.
