Vertical LEAP: the SDForum Search Engine Conference

June 28th, 2005 (8:30AM-6PM) - Santa Clara, CA

It is our pleasure to bring you the first edition of Vertical LEAP, a one-day conference exploring different aspects of the Vertical Search market: business and funding opportunities, established players vs. new entrants, features and differentiations. Our speakers will include startup entrepreneurs, executives representing leading search engines, and tier-1 VCs. We have asked experienced analysts and journalists covering the space to help facilitate the dialog between our panelists and the audience.

Thanks for your interest in Vertical LEAP, we are looking forward seeing you at the conference.

The Program Chairs:
Dave McClure, Director of Marketing, Simply Hired
Jeff Clavier, Founder and Managing Partner, SoftTech Venture Consulting

Program Overview

Search and search engines are changing the way we live, work, and play. First Yahoo and now Google have created search empires and platforms generating billions of dollars of value, and others like AskJeeves, MSN Search, and Amazon's A9 are also competing for search market share. More recently, local search capabilities have become popular on Yahoo and Google, AOL, and AskJeeves. And in the past year, shopping search and travel search engines have established significant attention by focusing on popular niches for search. Now a whole new crop of venture-funded startups focused on vertical search are beginning to enter the field and draw attention. Search is going Vertical -- vertical search engines are available for local businesses, product & shopping search, travel search, weblog & news search, scholarships and search for classified & jobs listings, with more domain-specific search engines debuting every month.

So is Vertical Search just some new hype for Yahoo and Google? Or is there real opportunity for new startups to emerge as domain-killer search engines? Will the big players crush these new upstarts, or do they have a shot? And will Microsoft try to “extend and embrace” these new young Internet Turks, in order to LEAP over Y! and G? The answer to these and other burning Internet 2.0 questions can be found at Vertical LEAP, a 1-day special event on vertical search hosted by SDForum and your friendly neighborhood venture capitalists. Join us for a whirlwind tour of the world of vertical search, and an overview of leading search engines in both popular and emerging new markets for domain-specific search.

Here is the detailed agenda.

Panels & Moderators

Keynote Speaker: David Hills, LookSmart
Investing in Vertical Search: Jeff Clavier, SoftTech VC
Local Search: Charlene Li, Forrester Research
Shopping Search: Gary Stein, Jupiter Research
Travel Search: Niki Scevak, Jupiter Research
Classifieds/Job Search: John Zappe, Classified Intelligence
Blog & News Search: Om Malik, GigaOm / Business 2.0
The Future of Vertical Search: Barney Pell, Mayfield

Blog and News Coverage

Lists the current and forthcoming coverage of the conference. And here is Vertical LEAP's very own blog. The tag used for all posts, pictures and bookmarks related to the conference will be verticalleap. 70-649 exam N10-004 exam 640-822 exam 70-642 exam

Questions Forum

We have setup that page as a sort of pre-conference discussion forum where attendees (and others) can suggest specific questions related to the panels and/or topics being covered.
On the day of the conference, you can join us on the IRC chart using your favorite chat program: irc://irc.freenode.net/#vertical.

Conference Logistics

Location
Network Meeting Center
5201 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, CA 95054
Directions

Registration
Cost*Price includes continental breakfast and lunch.
$75 SDForum Members
$150 Non-members

*at the door
$99 SDForum Members
$199 Non-members

Pre-Registration Closes at 2:00pm, the day before the event.

Registration: Please click on "Register now for this event" on the SDForum site in order to complete the registration.

How to use this page

This is the home page for Vertical LEAP.
Please feel free to add or modify pages -- even this one -- as you see fit. That's the idea of a Workspace.

• If you'd like an introductory tour of the Socialtext Workspace, start here.
• Visit Recent Changes every once in a while to see what's new, and see Help for tips to use this Workspace.
• Make links by putting words or phrases in square brackets. Click on Edit This Page to see some examples.

Any plans to host another such conference in Silicon Valley?

Regards,
Nag /at/
*Startups.in*

contributed by user2060 on May 20 12:34am