Open source evangelist Tim O’Reilly has a small request for all you Web 2.0 startup wannabes: While you're working on your first billion, do a little something to save the world, OK?
O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media and head honcho at the Web 2.0 Expo where he was speaking, made his plea during remarks which were in sharp contrast to some of yesterday's rah rah keynote speeches.
He showed a New York Times front page which featured two depressing stories -- the wrath of Hurricane Ike and Wall Street -- as a stark reminder that there are more important things to do than develop the next killer app.
“We may be living in something of a bubble, and I don’t mean investment bubble -- I mean reality bubble,” he said.
His advice follows the theme that Dean Kamen shared with wired.com yesterday with the announcement of his global developer contest: O’Reilly thinks that developers are not focusing their work in the right places or with the right applications.
Some projects that he thinks are headed in the right direction: the Quake Catcher Network at Stanford University, which hopes to capitalize on the huge network of Mac users and their machines to monitor and predict earthquakes, and InSTEDD which uses collective intelligence to monitor and predict epidemics.
On a smaller scale, he said he sees a new wave of sensor-based computing that streams useful information automatically, like laundry machines at colleges that tweet their operating status.
So, use your power for good instead of pointless, O'Reilly urged. “Business is the engine of innovation,” he said. "Do what has to be done."
