<p>Early this month, <a href="http://adactio.com/">Jeremy Keith</a> posted about a <a href="http://adactio.com/journal/1351/">invite-only gathering Microsoft threw in London</a>. Jeremy shows a critic look on this event that was really enjoyable! You should really read it.</p>

<p>The post includes notes of the presentations he attended, including Lars Lindstedt, researcher at Microsoft, Brent Hoberman, <span class="caps">CEO</span> of <a href="http://lastminute.com">lastminute.com</a> and Steve Balmer himself. Apart from this, there was a Silverlight demo that included mashups with Virtual Earth and Flickr. Seadragon and Photosynth were also shown. Microsoft is really trying hard to get to the web2.0 guys.</p>

<p>At the end there was also a interesting discussion <br />
<a href="http://indexventures.com/">Saul Klein</a>, <a href="http://makinggrain.com/">Ben Way</a> and <a href="http://mydeo.com/">Cary Marsh</a>, moderated by <a href="http://carsonsystems.com/">Ryan Carson</a> that you can read in his post too.</p>

<p>Microsoft has now realized Web2.0 huge success and that are (now) small companies that are making the difference (apart from Google). They want to be the platform on which startups build their web applications (IIS, <span class="caps">ASP</span>.NET, Silverlight, ...) but <a href="http://www.venturecake.com/web-20-is-built-on-open-source/">seems to be failing</a>. Let&#8217;s see if the take any action in order to provide better solutions that are available by OpenSource tools.</p>