Posts from March 2006

Over 100 people participated in the second meeting of SF Tech Sessions last night at the Westin St. Francis. The crowd was a mix of bloggers, journalists, developers, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs all interested in learning about new products, people and ideas. Each presenter had about 15 minutes to engage the audience with a product demonstration. The first three presenters had launched within the last two weeks and Songbird launched about six weeks ago. Below are my brief summaries of each presenter. Skobee Noam Lovinsky of Skobee was the first presenter of the evening. Skobee helps plan meetups with firm...

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Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft employ tens thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay area including many talented people driving close to 100 miles round-trip every day to work for these big companies. AAA released today their 2006 driving costs report and I decided to run the numbers to associate a conservative cost with a commute to these companies. How much would it cost to drive a Toyota Camry to work every day from the city centers of San Francisco, Berkeley, or Alameda? Prices below include conservative costs from AAA for average fuel consumption, maintenance, tires, insurance, license and registration,...

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The next SF TechSession is tonight from 7-9 p.m. at The Westin St. Francis hotel next to San Francisco's Union Square. We'll be on the 32nd floor with free food, drinks, WiFi, and a nice view of the city through some 15-foot floor-to-ceiling windows (might be a deck too). Thanks to Blish.com for providing an amazing venue for this month's meeting. Presenters Skobee, online event planning and local search through your social network. Noam Lovinsky, product guy, will present.Vast.com, an online classified search engine. Founder and CEO Naval Ravikant will present. Noam is a serial entrepreneur and you may want...

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In this week's PodSession Om and I talk about online storage and the increased need to backup your digital lifestyle. The launch of Amazon's Simple Storage Service was just the beginning of online storage utilities. Companies such as Amazon help people feel their data is safe with a company that already manages large amounts of data and will be in business for a long while. We are starting to see some enterprise-level backup and storage technologies applied to the consumer space. Home computer users are consuming more and more storage space by ripping CD collections, downloading music and movies, and...

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Verizon's SuperPages.com has partnered with Google to turn the phone company's yellow page advertisers into sponsored listings within Google Local. It's a huge development in a fragmented local search advertising space. Verizon will act as an authorized Google AdWords reseller using its 3,000 local sales people and existing small business portal to connect merchants to a larger audience....

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Cablevision plans to give its more than 2 million digital cable customers access to 80 GB of remote storage for less than $10 a month. Digital cable boxes would receive a software upgrade allowing a subscriber to select favorite programs for recording on Cablevision's servers. You can record two programs simultaneously while watching a previously recorded show. These types of services are only the beginning of what broadband providers are able to offer their customers on-demand over a high speed network. In the future there may be a channel produced by the cable company on a specialty subject such as...

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Congratulations to Nick Bradbury on the release of FeedDemon 2.0. Nick calls FeedDemon 2.0 "the best work I've ever done" and as someone who has been following the product since its first beta I have to agree. The new version of FeedDemon tracks the feeds you pay the most and least attention to over time, helping you realize who might be most worthy of your 5 minutes of reading time. Stylesheets have received a total overhaul. You can select a default feed reading stylesheet for the entire app as well as custom stylesheets on a per-feed including a photo-specific view...

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Stewart and Caterina from Flickr are on the cover of the April 3 issue of Newsweek for "putting the 'We' in Web." The article introduces readers to the idea of a participatory web where small teams can enable millions of users to create their own site, community, and data interactions. My favorite quote is at the end of the article: The Living Web means that there may be plenty of opportunities to become the next Flickr, and hundreds of start-ups are trying to do just that. At Tim O'Reilly's recent Emerging Technology Conference, it seemed that 1,200 people had...

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SF Tech Sessions is back! This month's event will feature 4-6 companies that may change the way you view search, communities, and online social interaction. All products are from small startup companies who have launched within the last 2 months. Details Wednesday, March 29 7:00-9:00 p.m. Westin St. Francis hotel Alexandra room, 32nd floor Union Square, San Francisco Full details for the event are available on the SF Tech Sessions blog. Add to iCal I learned a few things from the first SF Tech Sessions events: shorter presentations and more time for socializing and Q&A. Our meeting room features rows...

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I am in west Los Angeles today and dropped by theOffice, a community workspace serving the professional writing community of Santa Monica and surrounding areas. They have put a lot of thought and effort into creating an ideal creative work environment combining elements of a cafe, library, and Feng Shui garden into a place creative professionals feel inspired and focused. Background information The workspace was founded by writer and director Aleks Horvat in 2004 with charter members such as J.J. Abrams, Jim Uhls, and Mara Brock Akil. A wall-of-fame tracks successful works written in the space. Aleks was working...

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