Madrid, FTF, 23andMe and More

At the end of last week, I participated in something called the Future Trends Forum in Madrid, Spain. The idea is to bring together a few dozen eclectic, interesting people from around the world, and
get them to discus a broad trend that will affect business. Our topic was Web 2.0.

While the group spun out some interesting ideas -- like the possibilities for every person to have a health care wiki -- I thought I'd pass along some of the more intriguing bits from individual presenters:

-- Phil Evans, VP at Boston Consulting Group, talked about two of his favorite Web 2.0 examples: T-shirt company Threadless, which outsources T-shirt design to its customers, and Trulio, a real estate mash-up that creates none of its own content but puts pieces from the Web together in a useful way. This led to plenty of conversation about how Web 2.0 can be about making something with nothing.

-- Jim Bower shed light on his company, Whyville, which could turn out to be the training wheels for Second Life.
Whyville is a virtual world built for 8-12 year olds.

-- The ebullient Martin Varsavsky -- an early investor in Technorati, Joost and 23andMe (perhaps the MySpace of
DNA-decoding) -- talked about his latest company, FON. It's an attempt to get people to share their Wi-Fi, eventually creating Wi-Fi that blankets entire cities. He calls it "user-generated infrastructure."

-- Alec Oxenford shared his brilliantly simple business idea: Craigslist is growing like crazy in spite of itself.Founder Craig Newmark won't raise money to grow more aggressively and generally avoids adding features to the site. So, Oxenford concluded, why not swipe Craigslist's business model, shamelessly raise money, add a few key features that should make it more useful, and go after the many, many markets Craiglist hasn't yet touched. Oxenford's company is called OLX.

-- For a while, I've thought one of the more fascinating new companies is Innocentive, which is kind of like an eBay for scienitific research. Or as founder Alph Bingham put it, "We're basically scientific bounty hunters." Turns out about 40 of the Fortune 500 companies use Innocentive to outsource some R&D projects, and the site now has more than 122,000 "solvers" who work on the projects. Innocentive is about to roll out a new version of the site, and has been talking to venture capitalists about a new round of investment, Bingham told us.