After my musings on web 2.0 and the enterprise the other day it was amusing to attend Ross Dawson’s Sydney Web 2.0 extravaganza last week, more about it from Ross at Web 2.0 in Australia: The birth of Silicon Harbour?

Ross managed a jam packed agenda with great discipline and got some interesting discussions going. I felt like we could have kept the discussion going for several days. Lot’s of journalists were in attendance, not really sure how many enterprise practitioners were around. Although BEA, Sensis, and Bigpond had people attending. It was generally agreed that take-up in Australia was significantly constrained by broadband problems (it is so obvious it make me want to go “duh!”).

Speakers included:
* Richard MacManus, Editor, Read/ Write Web
* Allan Aaron, General Partner, Technology Venture Partners
* David Backley, Chief Technology Officer, Westpac
* Brad Howarth, Journalist and Director, LaGrange Communications
* Randal Leeb-du Toit, CEO, Yoick
* Adrian McDermott, Vice President of Engineering, BEA Systems
* Chris Smith, General Manager, Sensis Interactive

There were some presentations by Aussie web 2.0 startups:
* Atlassian
* gnoos
* Omnidrive
* Scouta
* Tangler

Although, apart from Atlassian, I am still not sure (apart from general use of the technology) how any of these will work in an Enterprise environment. I suspect the approach of BEA is more aligned to the regulatory and compliance obligations of many corporates.

Ben Barren has some pics on flickr from both the day and evening activities; and Trevor Cook has written a nice summary of the event too.