Answer to:
What approach has Facebook taken to harness collective intelligence? Response from Owen Van Natta, CEO of Facebook: The thing about Facebook is that it increases information flow among people. We’ve taken a different approach than a lot of folks have in how we’ve done it. We view what we do as we build tools and platforms and vessels that we put into a structure that includes who knows whom, and we let the users basically use those tools for...

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How is Automatic preventing spam? Response from Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic: Kismet is our anti-spam service and it keeps spam off of blogs, wikis and social networks. We’ve seen a doubling of spam on our blogs in three weeks. It’s crazy. So the solution is a centralized service that sees all the spam across hundreds of thousands of blogs, so it’s very good at catching things, if it gets through,...

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How are users going to build Automatic's business? Response from Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic: We are extremely focused in our users and telling us what to do, even more so turning them into contributors and collaborators. We started as an open source project, so with open source it’s all about bringing people in and letting them contribute. Really opening up as much as possible and almost moving into this libertarian model of...

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What direction is Demand Media going for? Response from Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of DemandMedia: What we learned from Myspace is that user-generated content could be a tremendous opportunity, and users use it, bring their friends, and you can build an entire media company for very little cost. What has occurred is the phenomenon with Myspace or Facebook is that these appeal to a specific demographic, teens or college, but the...

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What makes Craigslist a unique entity compared to other web based businesses? Response from Jim Buckmaster, CTO of Craigslist: The roots are really Craig, he just as a hobby put together an e-mail list which friends told friends about, and people kept contributing different things and it was converted to a website. To this day he has no interest in Craigslist as a business at all. Of course there are business elements you have to pay attention to whether you want to...

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How does Craigslist make use of user feedback? Response from Jim Buckmaster, CTO of Craigslist: One example, we’re approached fairly often about running text ads on the site and we could be making tens of millions of dollars per year, but so far our users have been adamantly against this so it’s something we’re really not going to consider.

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How does Craigslist pay attention to users suggestions with only 23 employees? Response from Jim Buckmaster, CTO of Craigslist: We have feedback forms where users discuss amongst themselves about existing problems with the site and things we could be doing differently. You have to have a thick skin sometimes, it can be kind of embarrassing.

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What made Craigslist so successful? Response from Jim Buckmaster, CTO of Craigslist: Just every way our users have been able to think of to do the heavy listing, whether it’s the flagging system where users take responsibility to monitoring the site, right down to our business model from the get go, whether we should raise financing or having a sales force of if we should do marketing, if we should charge for anything...

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How has the internet these days had an impact on the average user? Panel interview conducted by Safa Rashtchy, Moderator at Web 2.0 Summit: Thank you. It is great to be here again, this conference is a great honor to join in. I really enjoy this because I am a true believer. I have two major principles: One is, don’t write it down, and the second one is, ask the customer. And it’s really in this light we’re doing these panels, to...

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What is E-Talos? Response from John Battele, Founder and Chairman of Federated Media Publishing: E-Talos is a provider of open source, on-demand web applications in any hosting environment you want. What they allow you to do is to try out a lot of things that might cost you a lot of money to try out otherwise. They have a beta program that you can you use for large-scale developments with virtually no risk.

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How is Yahoo E-mail going to make use of the Web 2.0 technology? Response from Brad Garlinghouse, Senior Vice President of Communications, Communities, and Front Doors and Ethan Diamond, Director of Product Management: Ethan Diamond: I’m going to play the role of Brad’s mother back in Kansas. It’s going to be me who initiates an e-mail message to him. So this is new Yahoo! mail, I’m going to click on “compose” to...

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How do you think the market is for these Web based businesses? Response from Rob Shiram and Roger McNamee, Both Leading Entrepreneurs in the Internet Business: Roger: You won’t find any shortage of capital if that’s what you need. The market at the moment in terms of market formation and new funds that have raised money outside the bubble period it’s the highest it’s ever been. I’d be very surprised if any idea...

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How do you determine who is the smart money in the web based business? Response from Roger McNamee and Rob Shiram, Both Leading Entrepreneurs in Web Based Businesses: Roger: I think it’s very situational. People tend to look at the firm first and person second. My view is it’s all about the person and the situation. Someone who’s brilliant in on association is not going to be in every situation. Rob: I would say, don’t look at the...

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How do you figure out valuation and prevent yourself from being kicked out of your own website business once you get VC? Response from Rob Shiram, Major Website Entrepreneur: I’d say it would be crazy for anyone to kick the founders out of their own business. If anyone has passion, unless there’s an issue of ethics or lack of commitment, that happens post funding, I would say that would be the last thing that any investor would think of, and that includes anybody that’s out there investing....

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What is a good business approach when investing in a web-based company? Response from Roger MnNamme, Co-founder and General partner of Integral Capital Partners, Silver Lake Partners, and Elevation Partners: If you take 5 million and you need less a million to launch a business you end up making mistakes. It’s a problem of too much money. I’d rather see startups be scrappy, frugal, nimble, on a lean diet. So I think it’s important to have...

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What should you look for when making an investment in the Internet business? Response from Roger McNamee, Co-founder and General partner of Integral Capital Partners, Silver Lake Partners, and Elevation Partners: We’re going after things where the content is the issue rather than the technology. So there are issues of trust and authority that come into this. If you’re going to make a decision on buying a home, a tool is important but it’s not the...

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What is the difference between Semantic Web and structured data? Response from Marten Mikos, CEO of MySQL: Well the semantic web is different. What I’m talking about is structured data, so you can create a formulaic language so you can connect them. In the semantic web you have various forms of data. This would be a subset of the semantic web I would say.

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What is MySQL's vision for the future? Response from Marten Mikos, CEO of MySQL: We are realizing that the biggest database is already out there, it’s just not yet connected. So what if we could build a sort of Skype for database access so you could share your connections with each other and allow sharing in real time all over the world? And you get very precise and clear data. It’s too complex today, but different...

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What is "The Great Database in the Sky?" Response from Marten Mikos, CEO of MySQL: If we look forward and see the entire world is going online, we have 1 billion people on the internet and 2 billion people using mobile phones, so what does that then mean with all of these web companies building this new society which functions on the web? What does that really mean for how you manage data? So here’s my thinking as of today....

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What is Photosynth? Response from Roger Meike, Senior Director of Sunlabs: Photosynth is a project partnered with University of Washington and other parts of Microsoft. It's a way to allow photos from a variety of sources to come together in a synthesized world. Today you can play with it online. Notice as we open it up, the first thing you’re seeing is this point cloud. It’s a consequence...

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What is LiveLabs? Response from Gary Flake, Technical Fellow at Microsoft: LiveLabs is new, founded as a partnership between Microsoft Research and Windows/Windows Live. Reporting to Ray Ozzie Chief Software Architect. It’s a really interesting mix of people with a variety of backgrounds. One reason why we’re different is that what you may find in many companies is there’s a focus on...

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What is the connection between Virtual 3-D and Photosynth? Response from Gary Flake, Technical Fellow at Microsoft: The combinations of Virtual Earth 3D and Photosynth, what is the connection? Think about Virtual Earth 3-D as a centralized head of digitizing the world, and Photosynth represents the long tail of that. If you haven’t seen Virtual Earth 3D as a demo, I encourage you to try it out.

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What new things is Microsoft working on pertaining to the Web? Response from Gary Flake, Techinical Fellow at Microsoft: LiveLabs, which has only existed for a little over a year. Photosynth, which we’re releasing on the web today as a tech preview. I think it’s something that fits in perfectly with this conference and we’re really excited to show it today. The other thing I want to say is the release of virtual earth 3-d is...

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What other projects is SunLabs working on? Response from Roger Meike, Senior Director of SunLabs: We’re interested in making machines much faster, stronger, better. We have a system called Proximity Communications that allow chips to connect to each other at speeds that we could only previously have by having it all on the same chip. We go from that extreme to basic physics to looking at search technology, speech recognition...

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What is Project Blackbox? Response from Roger Meike, Senior Director of SunLabs: That’s gotten a lot of press and it’s fun, we’ve taken an entire data center and put it in a shipping container. You can take it anywhere, when fully configured, it’s one of the top supercomputers in the world, and you can get it running in half an hour. As you look at what the researchers are getting excited...

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What is SunLabs' approach to taking on new projects? Response from Roger Meike, Senior Director of SunLabs: Labs are an interesting concept because the idea of what they are and why we have them has been changing recently. The reason to have one, well, it’s because you want a group of folks who will take risks that aren’t appropriate for the rest of Sun. So it’s our job to take on a project where failure is an option. Some...

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As projects develop, how does eBay integrate it into their website? Response from Eric Billingsley, Director of eBay Research Labs: Actually a wonderful partnership. eBay internally as an archtectural team that is responsible for continuity of development, deployment mechanisms, etc. We’re very closely plugged in with that organization. Those are really the key guys we work with. We also work with our project management departments so that...

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What are the details occuring between eBay and its acquisitions? Response from Eric Billingsley, Director of eBay Research Labs: With Paypal and Skype we have an arms-length relationship. They have their own techs who are phenomenal. We’ve been working on a project for Skype thinking about open sourcing, for instance. But it’s more about thinking about what tools exist in our toolbox, but it’s up to them to develop their own ideas.

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How are projects worked out internally at eBay? Response from Eric Billingsley, Director of eBay Research Labs: That’s a good question. We typically do it through our consulting phase. Internally we’re known as a group of smart guys with varied experience and people want our pinions about the projects they’re working on, and through that we get a picture of where the companies going. After we have that, It's up...

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Is there any improvement in search quality for eBay? Response from Eric Billingsley, Director of eBay Research Labs: The investment in search over the last several years has really been out of scale. We get five million items every second, and just the sheer volume of transaction itself is a technology wonder. So we built a massive system for dealing with that and that’s been our focus. So right now in terms of the ability to search,...

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How does eBay come into play as a social network type? Response from Eric Billingsley, Director of eBay Research Labs: As we start mining our data, we always thought of eBay as a social network of types, and what we really want to look at are what are the social commerce implications. We actually take the purchase history of people over a two week period, and we said, the people who tend to buy in the same area, what if that actually becomes...

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What other opportunities is Ebay looking into? Response from Eric Billingsley, Director of eBay Research Labs: We are interested in operational excellence, systems management, we’re investigating new hardware platforms, and how we can get more performance out of our systems. We’re also looking at new opportunities as we acquire Skype, Paypal, and how we can leverage that.

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What is the procedure eBay goes through to invent the future of e-commerce? Response from Eric Billingsley, Director of eBay Research Labs: In the labs we do this in three ways. Our researchers spend a third of their time in consulting, going out, finding business partners, so we can evolve the products and evolve the ideas. In the process of doing that we find the core issues. Once we identify the core issues the tech solutions become obvious. That’s the...

Answer to:
Which British actor's wife was in a Bond movie before he was cast as Bond? I think it was Pierce Brosnan.

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How is Oracle's Fusion going to be a big part in the future of technology? Response from John Wookey, Oracle's Senior Vice President of Application Development: As the technology changes and evolves, we asked ourselves how we can improve our customers' ability to get the job done. People are increasingly entering the work force never having lived their lives without the Internet, he noted. That means they expect collaboration tools, instant messaging,...

Answer to:
How is Oracle's Fusion going to be a big part in the future of technology? Response from John Wookey, Oracle's Senior Vice President of Application Development: As the technology changes and evolves, we asked ourselves how we can improve our customers' ability to get the job done. People are increasingly entering the work force never having lived their lives without the Internet, he noted. That means they expect collaboration tools, instant messaging,...

Answer to:
How is Oracle's Fusion going to be a big part in the future of technology? Response from John Wookey, Oracle's Senior Vice President of Application Development: As the technology changes and evolves, we asked ourselves how we can improve our customers' ability to get the job done. People are increasingly entering the work force never having lived their lives without the Internet, he noted. That means they expect collaboration tools, instant messaging,...

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What is the open-source project called Tamarin? Response from Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Adobe: The scripting language for Adobe's Flash Player virtual machine runs programs written in ActionScript, which is based on an Ecma International standard called ECMAScript Edition 4. Widely used JavaScript and Microsoft JScript also comply with that standard. The latest version of Adobe's script "engine,"...

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Which 13 start-ups made it to the "Launch Pad" sessions? Response from Rafe Needleman, Writer of start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products: Only thirteen companies were selected to participate in the "Launch Pad" sessions on Tuesday. Chosen from more than 200 applicants (I'm trying to get ahold of that list.), these are supposed to be the most promising of the current crop of Web 2.0 start-ups. I'm not sure they are...

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Is Google trying to compete with Microsoft's desktop Office applications? Response from Eric Schmidt, Google Chief Executive: Contrary to popular perception, applications such as Google's Docs & Spreadsheets are not designed to compete directly with Microsoft's desktop Office applications and suite. We don't position it as an office suite. We position it as something you use casually...It's a different way of managing information. ...

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What does Skype have in store for the future? Response from Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Skype: The next version of Skype will enable people to post a link on a blog or Web site that will take people to a public chat room when clicked on. The live chats would be "Skypecasts." Skype has had conversations with many social-networking sites about offering services that would allow users to share content with each other in...

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What is beneficial about the Web 2.0 tools? Response from Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext: These Web 2.0 tools used in businesses--sometimes referred to as "enterprise 2.0"--give companies collaboration software that is far superior to e-mail. And the applications in SuiteTwo itself are each extensible via application programming interfaces. We're shifting away from the push model of e-mail, in the attention model,...

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How does SpikeSource come into play with the Web 2.0 application? Response from Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource: SpikeSource will integrate the different components and provide ongoing support and maintenance to customers. The company will build a single user interface to the various tools, as well as single sign-on capability, integrated search, a dashboard and an administration console. That lineup will be available in the first quarter of next year....

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What is Intel's Channel Marketplace? Response from Lisa Lambert, Managing Director of Intel Capital's software and solutions group: An extension to an existing hardware-oriented reseller program that will allow Intel partners to resell software as well. The Channel Marketplace will be available worldwide by the middle of next year. The addition will give resellers more products to sell to small and medium-size...

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What is Intel's goal with the Web 2.0 software suite? Response from Lisa Lambert, Managing Director of Intel Capital's software and solutions group: We tried to figure out a way that small and medium businesses could get a solution already integrated and have support attached to it. It chose these applications because they were "best of breed."

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What is Adobe's take on AJAX? Response from Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe: We don't view that as competition. Google Finance uses Flash because Flash can do some things that you just can't do with AJAX. We want to pick up what people are already doing and take it up one notch.

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How does Adobe feel about Microsoft's attempt to steal its customers? Response from Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe: I'm flattered but it's scary. I'm thrilled that Google is there. They act like a heat shield.

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How is Adobe handling the next generation in the Web movement? Response from Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe: The challenge for Adobe was that we were a peripheral player on the Web. We weren't the heart and soul. Adobe intends to work more in open source. it will provide the ActionScript Virtual Machine--software to run JavaScript and ActionScript programs--to the Mozilla Foundation for inclusion in future versions of the FireFox browser. ...

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What is the future of AOL? Response from Jonathan Miller, Chairman and Chief Executive of AOL: Video is key to AOL's future, given the growth in broadband video-on-demand. On-demand video over IP (Internet Protocol) will be the...biggest form of (video) viewing in single digit years. It's under way already.

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What is the future of Amazon.com? Response from Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com: It allows small companies to spend most of their time developing their business, rather than occupying themselves with the "undifferentiated muck" of buying servers, setting up bandwidth contracts and the like. The basic idea is that there are certain pieces of heavy-lifting infrastructure where we can take all that fixed cost and...

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Is there any new development regarding relations between Windows and the Web? Response from Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect for Microsoft: The transition to integrate online services into Microsoft products has been a challenge but that changes within the company are happening. Office Live, for example, complements the Office PC applications with online services for small and medium-size businesses. I don't see the right thing to do is to take the PC...

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What are the product goals for the next version of Windows? Response from Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect for Microsoft: The (operating) system needs to help application programmers to consume (multiple cores) in a reasonable way without forcing everyone on Earth to factor their code that way The next Windows should also include features for "state separation," where individual applications are separated in terms of execution and...

Answer to:
What are the product goals for the next version of Windows? Response from Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect for Microsoft: The (operating) system needs to help application programmers to consume (multiple cores) in a reasonable way without forcing everyone on Earth to factor their code that way The next Windows should also include features for "state separation," where individual applications are separated in terms of execution and...

Answer to:
What are the product goals for the next edition of Microsoft Office? Response from Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect for Microsoft: Office can be better adapted for Internet-connected mobile devices. And the next version of Windows should aid software developers in creating applications that run on machines with several processing "cores" on a chip. On the Office side, the biggest opportunity is that it's a world where mobile devices...and...

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There are many Internet start-up companies, such as Ning.com, attending this year's Web 2.0 conference. What does Ning.com offer? Response from Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning.com and Marc Andreessen, co-founder Netscape: What’s different about Ning from other (social networking) services is that we give you your own video site like YouTube, or social-networking site like MySpace. But unlike being a page in somebody else’s service, it’s yours. You get to choose what it’s about. Our basic theory...

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Answer to:
Among the start-up companies who took center stage this year, how much did they have to pay and what was the time limitation for their presentations? Response from Ben Stricker, PR for Web 2.0 Conference: An advisory board winnowed this year’s field of applicants to 13 lucky startups who paid $10,000 apiece to take center stage before a packed room of venture capitalists, reporters, bloggers and Internet cognoscenti. Each demonstration was limited to five minutes, a constraint that required some presenters to wrap things up...

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How many people are going to attend the Web 2.0 conference? Response from Ben Stricker, PR for Web 2.0: More than 5,000 people wanted to attend this year’s three-day event, but the organizers capped the attendance at 1,000.

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Do you believe that the dot-com business is making a comeback? Mike Liedtke, Web 2.0 Conference regular/Business Write --Conditions haven’t returned to the feverish levels of the dot-com boom, but the Internet’s business atmosphere is clearly heating up.

Answer to:
I've been to web20con.com, and I'm wondering: Would anyone care to expain Web2.0 in plain english? Check out this answer for more information: http://web2con.answerbag.com/q_view.php/34456

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Answer to:
Why won't Microsoft's Zune MP3 player be compatible with existing MP3 players? Response from Ray Ozzie, Microsoft CTO: There was one very strong focus on Zune - we had to stay focused on that, and we had a build an end-to-end experience related to Windows Media. Nothing is forever, but we never would have succeeded if we put too many capabilities into the application.

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To Jonathan F. Miller: What is AOL's position on portals having a political voice, like newspapers? Response from Jonathan F. Miller (AOL): That's a great question, do we have a voice? We are not at the point where we want to publish political views, but we are looking towards it.

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What do you think about personalized search? Response from Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com: I think the majority of poeple don't customize. We try to wait for them and have the right product at the right time.

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What do you think about personalized search? Response from Steve Berkowitz of MSN's Online Servcies Group: In a perfect world, the ability for you to have preferences will help the user, but I think we have a long way to go.

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To Ross Levinsohn: Can you tell us a little about the guy (Brad Greenspan) who is suing you? Response from Ross Levinsohn, CEO of Fox Interactive Media: He was involved with the old parent company (Intermix), and has lost every motion he has filed.

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To Ross Levinsohn: Are you looking to buy more properties (sites/companies)? Response from Ross Levinsohn, CEO of Fox Interactive Media: Yes, and there are some great new ideas out there. My head is spinning from what I have seen here (at the Web 2.0 Conference) in the past couple of days.

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To Ross Levinsohn: Will MySpace open their API like Facebook did? Response from Ross Levinsohn, CEO of Fox Interactive Media (parent of MySpace), Tom (Anderson) is he keeper of the flame - we are looking into it. Tom has spsect a lot of time on this, but no decision has been made. Dan Gould also likes the idea.

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What did you think of the Google buyout of YouTube? Response from Ross Levinsohn, CEO of Fox Interactive Media: It was good for YouTube, and good for Google. We made no bones about how we felt, but given the price, no biggie.

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Answer to:
How does someone who has not yet created a critical mass on a site commence in doing so? Response from Barry Diller (IAC): Don't sell it, keep finding interested people, build it, ride it. Equity is built by holding on.

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To Arthur Sulzberger (NYT) - I don't see the New York Times embracing citizen journalism as other papers are. There is an amazing amount of content out here - why don't we see more of it in the Times? Response from Arthur Sulzberger: You will be seeing more of it, we are looking into aggregating answers from amateurs as we continue to unveil the user created content.

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To Eric Schmidt - You are obviously investing in data centers, but saying that web applications are better, but what about scenarios like being on an airplane, archives, etc? Eric Schmidt responds - it is presumed that the network will always be around, and you can always plug into that. we are working on that, ubiquitous broadband is arriving.

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To Eric Schmidt - do you think it's possible to build another Youtube "playing by the rules of copyright"? Eric Schmidt responds - I think there is a premise in your question that YouTube does not play by the rules, I am not sure I agree. What happens is somebody had a better idea, and they drive it, so, yes, all of these sites can emerge with a set of insights on how people use these tools and share content.

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To Eric Schmidt - Google is famous for having attracted and kept some of the best minds in the industry, what can you share about that? Eric Schmidt - people don't work for money, they work for impact. we are run in a special way, we work in groups, people talk to each other - better buy in, better results. we give out people questions about limits, search, mobile, etc.

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To Eric Schmidt - Most advertising is off the Internet, in 30 years can we expect the same from Google? Eric Schmidt answered: 30 years is a long time, most investors want ROI - if you can give people a better way to use their capitol. We are looking into radio.