Presentation I've made for the first Wordpress Barcamp in Paris (wordcampparis)

1. Wordpress
A growing ecosystem, not only for media 2.0

2. Who am I?
• Fabrice Epelboin, 38 yo, French raised in the US
• Startupper since 1995
• 1995 - Babel, web agency, +300 employees, bubble-crashed
• 1999 - Owendo, IT shop, IPO’ed
• 1999 - Prizzo, Priceline mee-too
• 2004 - Agorami, white label social networking platform
• 2007 - Botsarena
• Web strategy consultant for major Eu media companies
• IT B2C prospective consultant for IT companies

3. IT for a startup
• What are the IT choices available when starting a
venture?
• Knowing that:
• Initial project definition WILL change
• Initial business model WILL change
• Initial features WILL evolve
• Fundings WILL be limited
• You need several alternatives ready in case your choice fails

4. Dream IT
• Who can provide this?
• Ruby on Rails
• Scaling is a nightmare, beside that, it’s nearly perfect
• PHP+Drupal
• IT can be a nightmare, but Drupal has proven to be a solid startup
fondation
• PHP+Wordpress
• Considering RoR scaling problem, WP+PHP is a safe alternative
• Features provided via plugins narrows the choices but speed up the
dev process, etc.
• many more, of course...

5. Dream IT
• Must have
• Rapid prototyping
• Low cost (IT, project management...)
• Iterative design
• User feedback / Co-creation (Lemeur vs 36signals)
• User as tester (e.g. fine user management)
• Users as feature designer

6. WP IT as Lego
• WP, WPmu: blog, cms
• BuddyPress: Social network
• BBPress: Forum
• eCommerce plugins
• Vast plugin library
• What else do you need? a new Plugin, perhaps? See IT
ecosystem

7. playing in the WP
ecosystem
• Media 2.0 ecosystem
• Blogs as micro-companies
• Blog networks
• Tomorow’s high-traffic socialwebsites
• Ad network as a link between micro-media
• Designers (premium theme getting very impressive)
• IT ecosystem
• Services (Askimet, widgets, etc)
• Consulting

8. First WP startup
• Beside media 2.0 ventures, what do we have?
• Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors
• Yet to come Kawasaki projects
• Thedesigncanopy, WP as lite CRM ?
• WP in intranets: Weka
• Botsarena, personal attomated aggregator
• Tomorow...
• Social network & WP... look at Automattic
• WP as an alternative to Socialtext

9. Thanks!
Any questions?
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/epelboin
email: fabrice.epelboin@gmail.com