Brendan and I spent the past couple of days in Orlando at Fast Forward ’08, self-described as “the Industry’s Largest Business and Technology Conference Dedicated to Search-Driven Innovation.” At the heart of this event was a focus on the user-revolution, and how search technology would play a role in facilitating it.

Here’s a quick hit-list of some of the highlights (unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of the surreal experience of witnessing an Oscar-like awards ceremony for search companies):

1. John Hagel on his two big revelations of 2007/2008:
   

   A) China and India are at the leading edge of management practices, focused on a collaborative mindset (networks rather than individual companies) which allows for enormous scalability, flexibility and an ability to mine specific skill sets.

   B) The N-Gen’s fascination with profiles and themselves isn’t about vanity or narcissism but rather an astute attempt at getting attention in a world of ubiquitous information.

2. Juha Tiihonen, CEO & Cofounder of Starcut, noted that by 2010 there will 3 billion mobile phones in use across the globe, that’s 4 times the number of PC’s whichwill be in use, and 3 times more than the number of television sets.

3. Sue Feldman, Research Vice President at IDC, shared some great research on the impact of China and Chinese companies in the search marketplace. Today, Baidu attracts more queries than Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and ad networks. She expects that advantage to more than triple by 2015.

4. Mark McCarthy, Project Manager at ReliefWeb, shared some great stats and stories about the collaborative processes that have seen over 2,900 NGO’s contribute data and information to the site, which then combines into some powerful tools for humanitarian efforts.

5. And finally…. Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect at KAPS, had my quote-of-the-conference with: “In this supposed Web 2.0 environment all we ever hear about is “revolution.” Everything’s a revolution. Well, whatever happened to evolutions in technology? What’s so 2.0 about all this stuff – what about 1.2 and 1.4! Only Evangelical christians talk about evolution while High-tech evangelists are all about revolution!”

Oh, and some guy called Don Tapscott spoke as well. I think you know what he’s all about.