Web 2.0 Investment Opportunities

At the web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco and will be doing a series of posts. I would guess 30% of the attendees are VC / Capital / Investment / Analyst types. And between them and the web start-ups, it’s a schmooze and suck-up fest. So 1998. Yet, I don’ t think most of what I see here is ready for monetization yet. But I’ll kibitz on my thoughts on what does make sense.
Loads and loads of applications and services now exist “in the cloud”. You can use Google’s writely to create sharable documents, and Ning’s social networking site to create your own branded community.

But as all of this “in the cloud” stuff is happening, somebody’s gotta ask the question — where the heck is all this stuff? And what city has enough power to generate for those datacenters? And what is powering the cloud?
Debra Chrapaty of MSFT makes the point at the web 2.0 conference that the datacenters are the “cloud”. My reflection: If you believe more will move to the cloud, then you’ve gotta start deciding which vendor can / should win or if the overall category is generally hot for investment. I also think the storage market could be the proxy indicator to web 2.0 success. If you see the heat come off this bubble, server and storage vendors will be impacted. Fundamentally, infrastructure needs to be built before consumer-focused technology can be deployed. And that explains a bit why Cisco just announced more good results.
And given the volume of processing and related heat, building green could become key. Even more reason to look at reflective building materials, natural cooling design, and solar power. Good adjacent market to invest in…