Got an email from the nice folks at O'Reilly thanking @gregarious and me for participating at Web 2.0 Expo:

Dear Stowe,

We'd like to thank you for presenting at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 and helping to make it a big success!

The presentation file page is now live at:
http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/proceedings

One of the most common requests we receive from attendees is for access to the slides from presentations, so we like to post as many as possible. If you do not see your slides listed on the page above, you may:

*email a pdf, ppt, etc. to shirley@oreilly.com
*send me the URL where it is posted and we can link to that site from ours
*upload it to your account/dashboard and select the checked box when complete


Thank you again,

Shirley Bailes
Conferences Speaker Manager
O'Reilly Media, Inc.

We have already started outlining the features to allow a PPT or PDF presentation to be created from a presencetation. Basically, we will catch every comment or topic change as a new 'slide' in a slide show. More to follow.

Front Channel allows the moderator to change backdrops and select topics of discussion. The speakers are displayed along the bottom, and the tweets directed to the Twitter account associated with the session are displayed in the center. We make the back channel the front channel.

Screenshot showing the Topics menu pulled down. Note that attendees and presenters can suggest new Topics in realtime.

Gregarious Narain and I are running Front Channel as a micro business: extremely low overhead, minimal infrastructure, and zero bureaucracy. Partly this is because we are too busy to create a big fat company, and partly because we are enamored of all things micro. Part of that 'micro, micro, micro' philosophy plays into the business model for the application.

We are planning to allow non-commercial use of the tool for free, as soon as we can get a hosted version of it up. For conferences that are for-fee, we intend to use this micro fee model: Fee = A x T, where A is the full retail cost of attending the conference and T is the number of tracks. So, a conference charging $250 and has three tracks would have to pay us $750 for the use of the tool.

We intend to use the 'trust, then trustworthiness' model where we will allow the conference organizers to fill in the details, and get started without interference. We will, however, reserve the right to block users who are untrustworthy.

Anyway, we hope to have a hosted solution up in a few weeks. In the meantime, we are directly supporting a few conferences that are too eager to wait. More to follow on that front.