The Web 2.0 Summit is an annual event, held in San Francisco, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

, featuring discussions about the World Wide Web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

. The event was started in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media and a supporter of the free software and open source movements.-Life and career:...

, who is also widely credited with coining the term "Web 2.0

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

". It is organized by O'Reilly's company, O'Reilly Media

O'Reilly Media

O'Reilly Media is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books and Web sites and produces conferences on computer technology topics...

, and O'Reilly and journalist/entrepreneur John Battelle

John Battelle

John Linwood Battelle is a journalist as well as founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing. He is a visiting professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and also maintains Searchblog, a weblog covering search, technology, and media.Battelle is one of the original...

 serve as co-moderators. The Web 2.0 Summit is an invitation-only event, and has featured many of the most prominent enterpreneurs and thinkers of the web community.

Spinoff events included the Web 2.0 Expo and Gov 2.0 Summit

Gov 2.0 Summit

is an event created and hosted by Tim O'Reilly and TechWeb. The first conference was held in Washington, DC on September 8–10, 2009 and included two distinct sessions, the Gov 2.0 Expo and the Summit....

.

2004

The first Web 2.0 conference was held October 5-7, 2004 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. It is believed to be the point at which the term Web 2.0

Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

 came into popular usage. Speakers at the conference included Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos is the founder, president, chief executive officer , and chairman of the board of Amazon.com.-Early life and background:...

, Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is an American business magnate and investor. He is the owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of the HDTV cable network HDNet....

, John Doerr

John Doerr

L. John Doerr is an American venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in Menlo Park, California, in Silicon Valley. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed as a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the president and his administration with advice and...

, Mary Meeker

Mary Meeker

Mary Meeker is an American venture capitalist and former Wall Street securities analyst primarily associated with the Internet. She is a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers....

, Craig Newmark

Craig Newmark

Craig Alexander Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based international website Craigslist.-Biography:...

, Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...

, Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow

Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books...

, Bill Gross

Bill Gross

Bill Gross is an American businessman. Born in 1958, he grew up in Encino, California. He founded GNP Loudspeakers , an audio equipment manufacturer; GNP Development Inc., acquired by Lotus Software; and Knowledge Adventure, an educational software company, later acquired by Cendant...

, Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...

, Halsey Minor

Halsey Minor

Halsey McLean Minor is a technology entrepreneur who founded CNET in 1993 . Minor ran CNET for 8 years during which time it became one of the Internet's first companies to achieve profitability. From 1999 to 2001, CNET was a member of the NASDAQ-100 index...

, Louis Monier

Louis Monier

Louis Monier was a founder of the Internet search engine AltaVista. After he left AltaVista, he worked at eBay and then at Google. He left Google in August 2007 to join Cuil, a search engine startup. He was Vice President of Products at Cuil. One month after the launch, he left Cuil, citing...

 and Jerry Yang.

2005

The 2005 Web 2.0 Conference was held October 5-7, 2005 at the Argent Hotel in San Francisco. Speakers included Stewart Butterfield

Stewart Butterfield

Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian-born entrepreneur and businessman. He co-founded the photo sharing website Flickr and its parent company Ludicorp with then-wife Caterina Fake. In March 2005 Ludicorp was acquired by Yahoo!, where Butterfield continued as the General Manager of Flickr until he...

, Mark Cuban, Bram Cohen

Bram Cohen

Bram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent...

, Mena Trott, Joe Kraus

Joe Kraus

Joe Kraus is the founder of Excite, JotSpot, and DigitalConsumer.org, along with his long-time business partner Graham Spencer. Currently, Kraus is an Investment Partner on the Google Ventures team....

, Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla is an Indian-born American venture capitalist and an influential personality in Silicon Valley....

, Barry Diller

Barry Diller

Barry Charles Diller is the Chairman and Senior Executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp and the media executive responsible for the creation of Fox Broadcasting Company and USA Broadcasting.-Early life:...

, Mary Meeker, Ray Ozzie

Ray Ozzie

Raymond "Ray" Ozzie is an American software industry entrepreneur who held the positions of Chief Technical Officer and Chief Software Architect at Microsoft between 2005 and 2010...

, Terry Semel

Terry Semel

Terry Semel is an American corporate executive who was the chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Incorporated. Previously, Semel spent 24 years at Warner Bros., where he served as chairman and co-chief executive officer...

 and Evan Williams

Evan Williams (blogger)

Evan Williams is an American entrepreneur who has founded several Internet companies. Two of the internet's top ten websites have been created by Evan Williams' companies: Blogger, weblog-authoring software of Pyra Labs, and Twitter, where he was previously CEO.-Early life and education:Williams...

.

2006

In 2006, the event was renamed "Web 2.0 Summit". The 2006 event's theme was "Disruption & Opportunity". It was held November 7-9, 2006 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Speakers included Jeff Bezos, Barry Diller, Joi Ito

Joi Ito

is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Director of the MIT Media Lab.Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains...

, Roger McNamee

Roger McNamee

Roger McNamee is a founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. Prior to co-founding the firm McNamee co-founded private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and headed the T...

, Ray Ozzie

Ray Ozzie

Raymond "Ray" Ozzie is an American software industry entrepreneur who held the positions of Chief Technical Officer and Chief Software Architect at Microsoft between 2005 and 2010...

, Eric Schmidt, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Ben Trott

Benjamin Trott

Benjamin Trott, born , is a co-founder of Six Apart, creator of Movable Type and TypePad. In November 2010, he became Chief Technical Officer of , a new online advertising and software company formed by a merger of ad network VideoEgg with Six Apart.Before joining SAY Media, Trott was also CTO of...

.

2007

The 2007 Web 2.0 Summit was held November 5-7, 2007 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The theme was "Discovering the Web's Edge". Speakers included Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer

Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer is an American business magnate. He is the chief executive officer of Microsoft, having held that post since January 2000. , his personal wealth is estimated at US$13.9 billion, ranking number 19 on the Forbes 400.-Early life:Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan to...

, Steve Case

Steve Case

Stephen McConnell "Steve" Case is an American businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online . Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to build a variety of new businesses through his investment...

, John Doerr

John Doerr

L. John Doerr is an American venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in Menlo Park, California, in Silicon Valley. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed as a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the president and his administration with advice and...

, Craig Venter

Craig Venter

John Craig Venter is an American biologist and entrepreneur, most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome and for his role in creating the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research and the J...

 and Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...

.

2008

The 2008 Web 2.0 Summit was held November 5-7, 2008 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The theme was "Web Meets World". Speakers included Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Edgar Miles Bronfman, Jr. , is the Chairman of Warner Music Group. He previously served as CEO of the company from 2004 to 2011. In May, 2011, the sale of WMG was announced; Bronfman would continued as CEO in the transaction. In August 2011, he became Chairman of the company as Stephen Cooper...

, Al Gore

Al Gore

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....

, Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington is a Greek American author and syndicated columnist. She is best known as co-founder of the news website The Huffington Post. A popular conservative commentator in the mid-1990s, she adopted more liberal political beliefs in the late 1990s...

, Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla is an Indian-born American venture capitalist and an influential personality in Silicon Valley....

, Max Levchin

Max Levchin

Max Rafael Levchin is a Ukrainian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur widely known as one of the co-founders and for his role as the former chief technology officer of PayPal....

, Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom

Gavin Christopher Newsom is an American politician who is the 49th and current Lieutenant Governor of California. Previously, he was the 42nd Mayor of San Francisco, and was elected in 2003 to succeed Willie Brown, becoming San Francisco's youngest mayor in 100 years. Newsom was re-elected in 2007...

, Evan Williams, Jerry Yang and Mark Zuckerberg.

2009

The 2009 Web 2.0 Summit was held October 20-22, 2009 at the Westin Hotel in San Francisco. Speakers included Tim Armstrong

Tim Armstrong (executive)

Tim Armstrong is CEO and Chairman of AOL, Inc. Previously, he was President of Google's Americas operation. He replaced the outgoing Randy Falco as current CEO as of March 12, 2009....

, Carol Bartz

Carol Bartz

Carol Ann Bartz is an American business executive, the former president and CEO of the Internet services company Yahoo!, and former chairman, president, and CEO at architectural and engineering design software company Autodesk....

, Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...

, Carly Fiorina

Carly Fiorina

Carly Fiorina is an American business executive and a former Republican candidate for the United States Senate representing California. Fiorina served as chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005 and previously was an executive at AT&T and its equipment and technology spinoff,...

, Peter Guber

Peter Guber

Howard Peter Guber is an American film producer and executive and Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment...

, Jeffrey Immelt, Sheryl Sandberg and Evan Williams.

2010

The 2010 Web 2.0 Summit was held November 15-17, 2010 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The theme was "Points of Control". Speakers included Carol Bartz, Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh is the CEO of online shoe and clothing shop Zappos.com. Prior to joining Zappos, Hsieh co-founded and sold the internet advertising network LinkExchange to Microsoft in 1999 for $265 million.-Early life:...

, Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff

Marc Russell Benioff is Chairman & CEO of salesforce.com, a cloud computing company.Benioff started salesforce.com in March 1999 in a rented San Francisco apartment and defined its mission as The End of Software...

, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Weiner, Evan Williams and Mark Zuckerberg.

2011

The 2011 Web 2.0 Summit was held October 17-19, 2011 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The theme was "The Data Frame". Speakers included Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer

Steven Anthony "Steve" Ballmer is an American business magnate. He is the chief executive officer of Microsoft, having held that post since January 2000. , his personal wealth is estimated at US$13.9 billion, ranking number 19 on the Forbes 400.-Early life:Ballmer was born in Detroit, Michigan to...

, Marc Benioff, Dennis Crowley

Dennis Crowley

Dennis Crowley is an American internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding the popular social networking sites Dodgeball and Foursquare.-Education:...

, Michael Dell

Michael Dell

Michael Saul Dell is an American business magnate and the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Inc. He is the 44th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$14.6 billion in 2011, based primarily on the 243.35 million shares of Dell stock worth $3.5 billion that he owns,...

, Reid Hoffman

Reid Hoffman

Reid G. Hoffman is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Hoffman is best known as the co-founder of LinkedIn, a social network used primarily for business connections and job searching.-Early education and career:...

, MC Hammer

MC Hammer

Stanley Kirk Burrell , better known by his stage name MC Hammer , is an American rapper, entertainer, business entrepreneur, dancer and actor. He had his greatest commercial success and popularity from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s...

, Sean Parker

Sean Parker

Sean Parker is an American technology businessman and entrepreneur. He co-founded Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and Airtime, and was Facebook's founding president. His net worth is estimated at $2.1 billion.-Early life:...

 and Christopher "moot" Poole

Christopher Poole

Christopher Poole is an American internet entrepreneur from New York City, noted for founding the websites 4chan and Canvas. He originally started 4chan anonymously, under the pseudonym moot .-Impact and activity:...

.