We are moving into a new world where everything is interconnected, where the internet is the platform and where software is a service. Welcome to the new paradigm that is Web 2.0. Tim O'Reilly uses the MySQL User Conference to present another verse of his popular O'Reilly's Radar talk. Find out what the alpha geeks have been up to and why the future belongs to data.

Tim O'Reilly shares some interesting observations that he has made in recent times. Why is it that some applications, although open source, popular and widely used, do not facilitate a model of participation? It so happens that to engage a community around an application the architecture needs to be modular, loosely coupled and easily extensible. Why it is that services build on open source platforms, are not themselves open source? The Google, Amazon and Yahoo platforms are closed and proprietary but the real value of these companies is not the software but the data. Data is the new "Intel side" and owning the data is the new source of competitive advantage and vendor lock in.

Will this inspire an open source movement in the dataware market similar to what we have already witnessed in the software market?

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Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. Tim O'Reilly has been an activist for internet standards and for Open Source software. He has led successful public relations campaigns on behalf of key internet technologies, helping to block Microsoft's 1996 limits on TCP/IP in NT Workstation, organizing the " summit" of key free software leaders where the term "Open Source" was first widely agreed upon, and, most recently, organizing a series of protests against frivolous software patents. He received Infoworld's Industry Achievement Award in 1998 for his advocacy on behalf of the Open Source community

O'Reilly continues to pioneer new content developments on the Web via its O'Reilly Network affiliate, which also manages sites such as Perl.com and XML.com. O'Reilly's conference arm hosts the popular Perl Conference, now part of the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and co-presents the Web 2.0 Conference.

Resources:

• MySQL Users Conference
• Presentation Slides (PDF)
• O'Reilly
• O'Reilly Network
• Safari Bookshelf

This presentation is one of a series from the MySQL Users Conference 2005 held in Santa Clara, California, April 18-25, 2005.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Jim Alateras
• Post-production audio engineer: Bruce Sharpe
• Series producer: Arun Tanksali