The third Web 2.0 Conference (schedule, tracks, speakers) starts today in San Francisco. The 3 day conference will be limited to 750 attendees, who have paid $3,500 a head to get in. With press and sponsors, total attendance may inch closer to 1,000, according to John Battelle, who serves as program chairman for conference owner O’Reilly Media.
Roughly 250 companies applied for consideration for the conference’s Launch Pad. Battelle and a bevy of venture capitalists whittled the list down to a 13, who paid roughly $10,000 apiece for the privilege. They include; 3b, adify, inthechair, instructables, odesk, omnidrive, pidgintech, sharpcast, sphere, stikkit, timebridge, turn and venyo.
Winners on the Internet “have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence,” says O’Reilly, populating “a world in which ‘the former audience,’ not a few people in a back room, decides what’s important.” The Guardian explains and interviews some of the movers and shakers. Michael Arrington’s Tech Crunch reviews all the latest (Company Index).
Adobe announced the donation of their Open Source Flash Player Scripting Engine to the Mozilla Foundation. Adobe will provide the same software, called the ActionScript Virtual Machine, which it uses to run script code in the Adobe Flash Player 9.
The scripting language for Adobe’s Flash Player runs programs written in ActionScript, which is based on an Ecma International standard called ECMAScript Edition 4. The latest version of Adobe’s script “engine,” released this June with Flash Player 9, uses a just-in-time compiler to run programs ten times faster than previous versions, said Frank Hecker, the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation.
This virtual machine is expected to be built into future versions of the Firefox browser by the first half of 2008.
