95 posts filed under this category, page 1 of 4.
I am once again organizing a dinner gathering during the Macworld conference for Mac small business owners and developers. This year's MacSB Macworld dinner will take place on Tuesday, January 15 starting at 6 p.m. at Chaat Cafe.
The Widget Summit schedule is now complete, and I am pretty happy with the results. My goal for the conference is to provide two days of intensive education about the current state of the widget industry and share best practices with the many new publishers entering the space. This year's conference spans two days, October 15-16, covering both the business and implementation of widgets. I will share some of my speaker notes before the conference, but first let's take a look at some of the overarching themes of Widget Summit.
I am hosting a two-day widget conference October 15-16 in San Francisco. Widget Summit is the sequel to last year's Widgets Live! conference, bringing together developers and product planners for a two-day perspective on the widget industry.
I'm hosting a WordCamp kickoff dinner tomorrow night starting at 6:30 p.m. at Taylor's Automatic Refresher at the Ferry Building. It's our second-annual WordCamp kickoff dinner welcoming visitors from out of town with burgers, beer, and blogs along the San Francisco waterfront.
Google will host a conference this summer focused on building scalable websites. The one-day conference takes place on Saturday, June 23, at the Google offices in Seattle, home to Google Webmaster Tools, Google Talk, and a few other teams. The conference organizers are currently accepting applications for 45-minute talks, and hopefully we'll be able to learn a little more about concepts behind MapReduce, Bigtable and some large-scale data management issues from the Google staff. Registration is not yet open, and it's unclear whether the conference will be held in the downtown sales office or the engineering office in Kirkland, so…
Earlier tonight I attended a Windows Vista launch event in San Francisco and was surprised to find not a single person in line to buy the software less than an hour before launch. CompUSA stayed open late to provide hands-on demonstrations of Microsoft's new Windows Vista and Office 2007 but for most people I talked to in the store the event was a learning experience and a chance for some special sales and discounts. When I left about 45 minutes before Vista officially went on sale to consumers there were no eager customers ready for launch. Potential customers picked…
SF Tech Sessions is back after a brief holiday break! This month's theme is gadgets connecting people on the move, downloading relevant information and sharing new information with others through cellular and open WiFi networks. I've chosen three startups (two launched within the last 6 months) who are well on their way to changing an existing well-proven category with network smarts. This month's SF Tech Session, Connected mobile gadgets, takes place this Thursday, January 18, from 7-9 p.m. at CNET in San Francisco. Recent Best of CES winners Dash Navogation , Zing Systems, and OQO will present their approach to…
I am organizing a dinner for Mac small business owners and developers on Wednesday, January 10, at Chaat Cafe in San Francisco starting at 6:30 p.m. Next week's dinner extends the tradition of MacSB meetings held during each year's Macworld and WWDC conferences in San Francisco, bringing together small software businesses within the Mac developer ecosystem to meet face-to-face, reflect on Apple announcements, and share tips and war stories. Chaat Cafe is located at 320 3rd Street (corner of 3rd and Folsom) in downtown San Francisco, one block from Macworld and the Moscone conference center. The restaurant has free WiFi…
I'll be in Las Vegas early next week speaking at PubCon on feed syndication best practices. The session takes place from 10:15-11:30 a.m. on Tuesday if you are attending the search conference. I have not been to Las Vegas in a few years so I'll be checking out new pieces of grandeur at the Wynn, new Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, etc. Hopefully there will be lots of search geeks in attendance leading to interesting conversations….
Yesterday's Widgets Live! conference provided an overview of an industry but I think there is enough interest in the social networking space to warrant a separate conference. I think Fox Interactive Media and Adobe should partner to create a MySpace conference in the first quarter of 2007 focused on integrating your content, brand, or products on MySpace. The event would cover topics such as the development of widgets, the right and wrong way to engage a social media community, help create new SpringWidgets and outline ways to work with Fox Interactive Media for continued success. There are currently lots of…
I received a few e-mails this morning from people interested in how Widgets Live! came together. Yep, the event really was planned in about a month, from site selection to the actual day-long event. In this post I'll outline how Widgets Live! grew from an idea to an in-person event.
The Widgets Live! conference sold its last ticket this morning, filling the room next Monday with 200 people interested in the current state of the widget ecosystem and what's next. We have a good mix of people in attendance, representing large content publishers, investors, designers, and even some hardware manufacturers. It should be a lot of fun. Below is some more information about Widgets Live! attendees. The conference website had visitors from all over the world and is a pretty good correlation to conference attendees. We'll have companies present from Europe, India, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the United…
The ability to save a URL has been around since Mosaic 0.2 but is currently experiencing a transformation as we learn more about the pages and content behind the pointers and share our findings with others through social networks. Hotlists, bookmarks, and favorites are changing and this month's SF Tech Sessions next Monday will take a look at a few new companies changing the way we think about sharing bookmarks. Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid The inspiration for this month's SF Tech Sessions came out of a conversation with Jeff Weiner and Joshua Schachter of Yahoo! earlier this…
I like small, focused events especially in the early days of an industry. Om and I organized the Widgets Live! conference to bring together the major players creating widgets, gadgets, and modules and the major endpoints of deployment. Many decisions were made along the way, and I'll share just a few in this post. When? We knew lots of people from around the web industry would be in San Francisco for O'Reilly Media's Web 2.0 conference November 7-9. Scheduling the widgets conference adjacent to the Web 2.0 conference creates a convenient opportunity for a few people to extend their visit…
I've been busy over the past few weeks organizing the Widgets Live! conference. I've talked to lots of people interested in various aspects of the conference industry, so I'll summarize a few logistics in this post. Venue costs Event venues typically charge a room rental fee combined with a minimum catering expense. All prices quoted are usually a "list price" and negotiable depending on factors such as the length of the conference, number of rooms booked at the hotel, your total catering spend, and your repeat business if you host multiple conferences a year. Many venues will waive the room…
The first ever conference dedicated to widgets, gadgets, and modules will take place on Monday, November 6, in San Francisco. The one-day conference will capture and summarize the emerging widget economy and allow developers, business leaders, and content producers to collaborate and better understand how they might participate in syndication at the edge of the network. A small web loosely joined. I am organizing a conference named Widgets Live! next month in partnership with Om Malik to capture the emerging webspace of widgets. There's so much happening in the fast-moving widget space right now it's a bit difficult to keep…
I am co-moderating tonight's Search SIG event on the video ecosystem with Om Malik. Speakers include founders of VideoEgg, CastTV, Dabble, and POSTroller. I'll do my part to make sure the topic stays on search and discoverability, and hopefully we won't get too caught up in billion dollar buyouts. The event takes place at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus starting at 6:30 p.m. If you're in the area and have an interest in search or video come by and check out the crowd and presentations. I'll be down in Silicon Valley for most of the day, visiting Google for lunch and…
The mobile industry in the United States is starting to take advantage of new data networks and cheaper messaging costs to connect subscribers and their interests. It's a world filled with acronyms describing ways to help you stay connected as you leave your home-base and wander around cell space with an info beacon in your pocket pinging the network and collecting new data in between voice conversations. What can EV-DO, HSDPA, SMS, MMS, WAP, and XHTML do for you? Next week's SF Tech Sessions event is all about mobile communities will bring together three companies exploring new methods of communication…
This Thursday I will lead a tour of the Letterman Digital Arts Center during the lunch break of The Future of Web Apps summit. The Letterman center is the new home of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and LucasArts. The 23-acre campus had design influence from George Lucas and is one of the most technologically advanced offices anywhere. Every artist has fiber to their desk for the fastest possible connections. The building includes a 13,500 square-foot data center and render farm for processing special effects, and every desktop computer can be added to the computing cluster for after-hours crunching….
SF Tech Sessions meets this Wednesday evening in San Francisco to learn about the latest trends in distributing large media files. Local technologists, podcasters, videobloggers, and anyone else doing their part to clog the tubes should come by CNET headquarters starting at 7 p.m. this Wednesday to learn more about the latest distribution technologies. Media producers should have as many choices as possible when publishing their work and not rule out high-quality, high-definition content. San Francisco companies GUBA and Red Swoosh are two examples of newly launched products alleviating the bandwidth and distribution strain while delivering more content choices to…
I'll be at the Search Engines Strategy conference next week including speaking on a blogger panel on Wednesday from 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Google CEO Eric Schmidt kindly agreed to be our opening act, warming up the crowd for 45 minutes as they recover from a night of drinking (but not much dancing) at the Googleplex. If you're at the conference or one of the evening parties say hello and let's talk about search. I'm still hoping Yahoo! will rent out Great America on Thursday night so I can ride Top Gun over and over again….
WordCamp is this Saturday, bringing together bloggers and developers using the open-source PHP blogging product for a day of discussion and learning. We're kicking things off on Friday night with dinner along San Francisco's waterfront for anyone who is in town. Join us for dinner at Taylor's Automatic Refresher at the Ferry Building. We'll be outside on the patio starting at 7 p.m. enjoying the sun and some good local food. The team from Automattic will be on hand to encourage increased use of BBQ sauce on everything. You can tryout one of San Francisco's first municipal WiFi nodes…
The World Cup Final match between France and Italy will be shown this Sunday in Dolores Park starting at 11 a.m. If you live in San Francisco it should be a pretty fun place to watch the game with a good crowd. Food and drink proceeds will help fund science field trips for Bay Area inner city kids to places such as Slide Ranch. I recommend a trip to Phil's Coffee on 18th and Sanchez to wake yourself up before the game….
Amazon S3, Box.net, and Fabrik will present at tonight's online storage TechSession in San Francisco. If you're interested in cheap, reliable online storage for your digital media at home or your startup's backend you should come learn how each product is taking a new approach to online storage and user interaction. 7-9 p.m. tonight at 1 Market Street in San Francisco. Please RSVP on the blog or on Upcoming to help plan food, drinks, and building access….
This month's SF Tech Sessions event is all about online storage and the new services changing the way we think about our data. Jeff Barr of Amazon will introduce us to S3, a relatively cheap storage backend for developers and their applications. Aaron Levie from Box.net will demonstrate popular consumer applications for online storage including a free gigabyte easily managed on Box. Fabrik will talk about online backup built-in to hard drives in our machines and connecting to the Internet to share files and insure none of your precious data will be lost. Tech Sessions is this Thursday, June 15,…