95 posts filed under this category.
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. July 12 Coming up short on ideas for my weekly podcast with Om Malik, I suggested we talk about widgets and how they are changing web publishing. I had been playing around with widgets as a form of web feed syndication, specifically thinking of performance on Live.com and other views…
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,…
Over 50 people will be at tonight’s blogger dinner at Henry’s Hunan in downtown San Francisco. If you are in the San Francisco Bay area you should come too. Henry’s Hunan is located at 110 Natoma Street, about 2 blocks from the Montgomery BART and Muni rail station….
It’s been too long since we’ve had a blogger meetup over chinese food. Next Wednesday, May 31, Dave Winer and I are co-hosting a blogger dinner at Henry’s Hunan in downtown San Francisco starting at 6:30 p.m. Come out and meet a few new people, learn about Bloggercon and its themes, and connect with people and projects happening in the area. Henry’s Hunan is located at 110 Natoma Street, just two blocks from the Montgomery Street BART and Muni station. Check out the journey through the Henry Hunan menu blog if you would like to see a blog entry for…
Want to found a startup! First you should go to school and learn a few things. Last Saturday’s Startup School at Stanford brought together about 600 people from across the country and in some cases the world to learn what it takes to take a business from zero to profit without going broke. Om and I both attended and talked about the event and the current environment for new startups in this week’s PodSession. The event was organized by Y Combinator, a venture firm focused on seed funding for geeky projects. Students in the Y Combinator program can try startup…
Microsoft Research will be demonstrating some of their projects tomorrow afternoon in Mountain View. It’s a total geek science fair, with futuristic ideas such as recording and indexing everything you see and hear throughout the day, auto-classifying blog content, or searching the web based on a cameraphone picture. The demo room is open from 2-4 p.m. for browsing. I’ll be on the lookout for a tricorder or new textual analysis of blogs. Tags: msresearch…
The next SF Tech Sessions event will take place this Thursday, April 27, from 7-9 p.m. in San Francisco. I selected a group of presenters covering online personal communication in various forms including text messaging, audio/video, and entire virtual worlds. Read more details and RSVP for this free event on the SF Tech Sessions blog. Participants will have a chance to chat with other local techies and hear 15-minute presentations from Meebo, Userplane, and Linden Lab. Each company has taken a unique approach to online messaging and you should come away with new ideas and perspectives on the technology industry….
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…
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…
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…
Last night I attended a talk at the Computer History Museum about the early history of portable computing highlighting GRiD Computing as one of the pioneers in the space. Some interesting facts: GRiD was one of Silicon Valley’s first stealth companies (back in 1981). Most employees did not know what they were working on until after they were hired. Co-founder Dave Paulsen told a story about sourcing parts from all over the world to try and find already manufactured components that could work in a small form-factor PC. They found their electro-luminescent displays while flipping through a Japanese electronics…
The first SF Tech Sessions is less than a week away! Joyent, Kerio, and Zimbra will each present their groupware product and introduce their company to a room full of 100 bloggers, journalists, and small business owners. It all starts at 6:30 p.m. next Thursday, February 23, at CNET headquarters in San Francisco. More details are available on the SF Tech Sessions blog. Tom Bridge is flying in from Washington D.C. just to attend the event! The event competes with a billionaires dinner alongside the invite-only $5000 TED conference in Monterey. After you see Einstein the talking Parrot at TED,…
Companies should not have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to present their product to a technical and knowledgeable audience. Everyone is burned out on big conferences, big ticket prices, and we want to create more interesting in-depth experiences. I am proud to announce SF Tech Sessions, a new free monthly event that will highlight the latest technologies, products, and companies live and in-person in the San Francisco Bay Area. Every month a small crowd of journalists, bloggers, small business owners, and other interested individuals will gather to learn about a new industry from a small group of companies…
SD Forum is hosting a half-day session all about Python on Wednesday, January 25 from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. in Santa Clara. For just $25 you can spend your morning learning about Python from Guido van Rossum, Greg Stein, Bram Cohen, Alex Martelli, and active startups using Python. $25 for all that and $10 less if you are already a SD Forum member. Tags: sdforum, python…
Tag Tuesday takes place this Tuesday, November 29, at AOL’s Mountain View campus starting at 6:30 p.m. Tag Tuesday is a developer-focused event with lead developers of products and companies involved in tagging come together to share their experience, code, and best practices. Edwin Aoki, chief architect at AOL, will talk about tag spam and some of the existing spam countermeasures at AOL. Kevin Burton, founder of TailRank, will introduce us to tagging of news items within his ranking system for blog posts. Some food and drink will be provided. Our past events have been in San Francisco and hopefully…
I am covering the Microsoft Technology Preview this morning in San Francisco. Microsoft is launching their “Live” software initiatives that include software as a service, synchronization, and even peer to peer. The biggest news to me so far is Bill Gates announcing that Microsoft will build advertising as a service for software development. Developers can call a web service and receive Microsoft advertising content targeted to their users directly in their applications. As the application grows in popularity it can provide different monetization options, but advertising is a good bootstrap model. Microsoft is announcing Windows Live and Office Live…
Tag Tuesday is back! If you are in the San Francisco area come out to Varnish Fine Art this Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. Scott Golder from HP Labs will talk about his recent research paper on collaborative tagging and Kevin Marks of Technorati will talk about the design and implementation of Blog Finder. Tag Tuesday is a developer-centered event. If you are working with tags or related methods of user classification and would like to present, let me know. Tags: hp, blogfinder, tags, tagtuesday…
Webzine 2005, a weekend grassroots event all about online publishing, is finally here! Thanks to all of the organizers for their months of hard work to make this happen for an attendance cost of $22! If you are in the San Francisco area this weekend, come down to the Swedish American Hall at 2174 Market Street to meet the people involved in personal publishing and grassroots media while hopefully learning a few things. I will present a workshop tomorrow at noon on publicizing your work using feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) and tagging. Tags: webzine, webzine2005…
Technorati is sponsoring dinner and drinks — free as in beer — tonight, August 20, at Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto from 7 p.m. until 9 p.m. The event coincides with the nearby BarCamp event nearby. If you are in the Palo Alto area I hope you can join us tomorrow night for some garlic fries, beer, and many interesting people in downtown Palo Alto. Tags: barcamp, paloalto…
Last night’s geek dinner brought together a variety of people from the world of blogging. I enjoy sitting at a table with a group of people I have not met before and learning about how they meet their personal or business goals by creating or reading blogs. I spoke with a woman in charge of web content for the nation’s largest ball bearing company. She is using blogs to help her company communicate better with its suppliers and differentiate themselves from the competitive market. I always joked about how some day people would use blogs to sell even small things…
About 50 geeks plan to attend tomorrow’s night’s dinner at Henry Hunan in downtown San Francisco. We will have a mini-blogging conference over spicy noodles. Dinner starts around 6:30 and the restaurant closes at 9 p.m. I plan to have the restaurant divide our large group into about 5 separate bills, or one bill for each table of approximately ten people. If you or a friend would still like to attend please feel free to join us even if you can only stay for some dumplings. Henry’s Hunan Restaurant 110 Natoma Street 6:30 p.m. Tags: blogbusinesssummit, geekdinner, hunan…
There will be so many interesting people in San Francisco next week for the Blog Business Summit we need to have an informal dinner to mix and mingle. Let’s get together at Henry’s Hunan in downtown San Francisco next Wednesday, August 17, starting at 6:30 p.m. Henry’s Hunan is located at 110 Natoma Street only one block from Blog Business Summit at the Palace Hotel. Please leave a comment below or contact me if you plan to attend so I can coordinate with the restaurant. Please plan for a cost of around $20 with drinks or $15 without. The restaurant…
I just finished a full day of sessions at the BlogHer conference in Santa Clara, a conference focused on female voices expressed through blogs. A met a variety of women who blogged about anything from the life of a professional dominatrix, favorite cupcakes, and analysis of the Supreme Court. You could hear the passion in the quivering voices of women as they stood up to speak in front of this crowd of hundreds and share their story. Most of the attendees I spoke were not local and the conference provided a way for them to meet face-to-face women they…
This Tuesday, July 26, is the second meeting of Tag Tuesday. Odeo developers Rabble and Blaine will share their experience evaluating tagging systems and coding a tagging directory of poscasts at Odeo.com. They will also discuss best practices for tagging backends. Odeo runs on Ruby on Rails with a Flash front-end and makes heavy use of Ajax and RSS. Sound interesting? I hope you can join us at Varnish Fine Art at 77 Natoma Street (between 1st and 2nd) this Tuesday starting at 6:30 p.m. Varnish serves drinks but not food, so I recommend you stop off somewhere on 2nd…
Many geeks are in town for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference this Wednesday and Thursday. I’m planning a geek outing for Friday if anyone is staying in the area and would like to see some sights and unique things, leave a comment and I will announce more details soon. We can do some geolocation-specific things like GoCar or Segway tours, visit the Lucas Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio, walk the Golden Gate Bridge, or many other things. I liked my Seattle experience of a group breakfast followed by group excursions. Let’s plan for a 10 a.m. breakfast at…
Technorati and Flickr are co-hosting a gathering of tag implementors and other interesting people tomorrow evening at 6:30 p.m. at Gordon Biersch in San Francisco. We are calling the event Tag Tuesday and hope this will be the first of many meetings about tags as a freeform organizational tool. Kevin Marks of Technorati and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr will each have small presentations followed by a discussion. Technorati often receives questions from other organizations about the best way to implement tags within their blog, software, or project. I think the best way to learn is in-person and from people that…
In less than two weeks I will be in Seattle at Gnomedex. I attended Gnomedex back when it was in Des Moines and had a lot of fun. As a former sexiest geek finalist — I lost to a Lockergnome employee — I just have to represent. I’m looking forward to the latest version of the conference in the most unwired city in America. Gnomedex will have a very large RSS presence this year with all the major aggregators attending and new aggregators being introduced at the conference so we can all geek out and make people’s reading habits a…
I spent the afternoon at KRON-TV with about 100 other bloggers as part of a hosted meetup. In attendance was a diverse crowd of bloggers covering food, photography, travel, technology, and local news. General Manager Mark Antonitis (pictured above) hosted the event. KRON is a television station struggling to survive after being separated from NBC a few years and they differentiate themselves from the market by airing many programs with a local focus such as full coverage of parades or a weekly show about exploring the lesser-known parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. I arrived at KRON’s television…
I received an invitation from KRON-TV, a local San Francisco Bay Area news station, to attend a blogger gathering on June 11 at their television studio in San Francisco. From the open invitation: We recognize the significance of the personal media revolution, and we want to listen to what you’re saying. We think this is a good way to start. Sounds great! KRON is a local TV channel that was approached by NBC a few years ago but did not sell. They are still alive and kicking with local programming from parades or the back roads of local parks. The…
Tim Draper broke into song during yesterday’s speech at Stanford. I have never before seen a high-profile venture capitalist prance around on stage, play air guitar, and slap his ass, but luckily I had my camera ready to capture this unique moment. Tim Draper recently attended an event with a very unique auction prize: Scott Cargo of The Eagles would produce a song using your original lyrics. Tim won the auction and wrote “The Riskmaster.” Draper Fisher Jurveston sent a CD of the recording to 5,000 business associations last December, and I happened to get a CD from Tim. The…
On Wednesday I attended a lecture by Tim Draper of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurveston at Stanford. Tim talked about new ideas that will change the world and solve common problems of humanity in the process The Draper Fisher Jurveston logo was designed to symbolize change. A globe is at the forefront, representing the referenced but uncharted world. The delta in the background symbolizes changing that world through new investments, ideas, and support. Tim likes to think in terms of “cyberspatial” competition. Given an environment of perfect information a new idea or breakthrough will spread throughout the world…
Last night I saw Paul Graham speak at PARC about how to sell a startup. Eventually the text of the speech should be posted to Paul’s site. Paul sold ViaWeb to Yahoo! in 1998 to create Yahoo! Stores. Paul believes startups should be created and quickly sold for profit. Below are some tips shared by Paul last night. The most powerful motivator is the fear of loss. Startups get bought for one of two reasons: revenues or strategic purpose. You have to convince people at big companies that not buying you would be a big mistake, either as a…
Yesterday I attended the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar to hear Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit and corporate coach to startups such as Google, interview Danny Shader, CEO of Good Technology. Stanford posted a video of the seminar. Danny Shader has an interesting background including companies such as GO Corporation, Collabra Software, Netscape, and Amazon.com. Danny was an entrepreneur-in-residence with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital before joining Good Technology. Bill Campbell was an economics major and a former football coach before his highly successful software career. Good Technology originally developed audio hardware for the Handspring Visor…
Tonight I had the opportunity to meet Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake of Flickr at Cafe Abir in San Francisco. The entire Ludicorp team has moved to the Bay Area and Stewart was sporting his purple Yahoo! access pass. Cafe patrons thought the Flickr meetup group was a wedding reception for Stewart and Caterina; it was interesting to see their reaction to this small independent café taken over by a bunch of photo geeks. I liked how Stewart and Caterina sought out different groups of people even when it involved walking over couches. Stewart mentioned the gift accounts were…
Cal Henderson, senior developer of Flickr, is putting on a workshop for 40 people in San Francisco on Monday, June 20.
Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart, and Jim Stewartson 4orty2wo Entertainment are speaking tonight at the San Francisco International Game Developers Association about alternate reality games and I Love Bees, highly successful marketing campaign created for the launch of Halo 2.
Ira Glass is speaking at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City this Friday night. Doug Kaye and I are attending, and we want to have all the local bloggers and audio geeks meet for dinner before the talk.
On Tuesday, April 12, I attended BayCHI’s monthly meeting at PARC Laboratories in Palo Alto.
The final presentation of the night was from Thad White of Yahoo!… content on their computer and send the content to their mobile phone using an SMS message with a URL.
The second Mobile Monday presentation was by Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol. Funambol develops the open source SyncML server Sync4j.
On Monday, April 4, I attended Mobile Monday at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale.
Jeff Clavier and Marc Brown of Buzznet were the third Mobile Monday presenters. Buzznet is a photo sharing service and platform based on a LAMP architecture.
Tonight I attended a Guinness Believer event at the Merchants’ Exchange in downtown San Francisco.
I attended the “Meet the Community” panel at the Open Source Business Conference today in San Francisco. After reading the list of panelists I knew I just had to be there.
We would like to bring together the community to reflect on the last few months in the world of weblogs and discuss how Technorati may be of service in the future…. Please RSVP to salon-sf@technorati.com and let us know how many people you are bringing so we can plan the event space, food, and drink.
I just called the restaurant to cancel tomorrow night’s dinner in celebration of two years of Six Apart.
Sunday is the two-year anniversary of Six Apart as a business entity.
I just finished editing the audio of David Sifry’s talk at the February meeting of 106 Miles, a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley.
Tomorrow’s Web Spam Squashing Summit will not be broadcast to the outside world. No IRC, no audio, and no video stream will be published of the event.
I have been busy this week organizing a Web Spam Squashing Summit to bring together key players involved in publishing and indexing content on the world wide web.
Ted Shelton of Orb Networks was the final Mobile Monday presentation. Orb Networks offers media streaming from your broadband connection and Windows XP computer to any Internet-connected device with a web browser and RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. You can browse and listen to music, movies, and television from your home computer while you are away from your desktop PC. Orb Networks started in July 2004 and launched its first product at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. They do not have to pay licensing fees since users have already licensed their own content. The top use of Orb is…
Alan Moskowitz of MobiTV was the third presenter at this month’s Mobile Monday meeting. MobiTV delivers 24 channels of live television to your mobile phone for $10 a month on top of your carrier’s data plan. They are powered by Java and claim to be one of the first recurring revenue applications using Java. You can channel surf on your phone with little effort. Alan shared some interesting statistics on MobiTV. Mobile television use is 5.65 minutes per session with approximately 2.34 sessions per day. Live television is used more often than their clips product due to its more…
The second presentation from Mobile Monday was Anita Wilhelm of Caterpillar Mobile. Anita was a student of Marc Davis at Berkeley. Caterpillar Mobile’s current product is a cameraphone game called Zooke. Zooke allows its members to create challenges for all members or only members of an immediate social circle. You might be on a mission to find the best George Bush bumper sticker in Berkeley and have other game players rate your findings. It is a community-driven reality play experience that makes everyone’s day a little more exciting with minimal effort. I recorded Anita’s entire presentation as well as the…
On Monday I attended the Mobile Monday meeting at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View. There was an impressive set of presenters all focused on mobile media. The first presenter was Marc Davis of UC Berkeley and the director of Garage Cinema Research. Garage Cinema Research is interested in adding metadata through context-aware applications. You can infer data about the general location of a cameraphone user from their cell tower triangulation, the time of day, and popular photography subjects in the area. If a user adds a category to their photograph, a server can return a best guess of the object…
Tonight I am hosting a geek gathering at Vino Venue in San Francisco. Anyone is welcome to come check out the intersection of wine and gadgets while socializing with new media types. I start my new job at Technorati tomorrow so this is my last night as a free man. Meet at 6:30 p.m. at VinoVenue, 686 Mission Street, on the corner of Mission Street and 3rd Street. Over 100 wines are dispensed using smart cards, Windows servers, and database technology to suggest new wine types. It’s like Attention.xml for your wine habits! They also serve Oprah’s favorite teas and…
Last night I attended a Future Salon presentation about digital and online identities. The event was hosted at SAP in Palo Alto. Eric Sachs of Google spoke about Google’s relatively new entry into the digital identity realm with services such as Orkut and Gmail. Jeff Hodges of Liberty Alliance talked about identity systems in the enterprise marketplace. Fen Labalme of Identity Commons talked about identity systems built at the grassroots level for non-governmental organizations. I recorded all three speeches as well as the question and answer period using a directional microphone from my seat in the front row. Eric Sachs…
I am hosting a geek wine gathering and tasting at VinoVenue in downtown San Francisco on Monday, January 31 at 6:30 p.m. VinoVenue dispenses 1-ounce sample of wine by inserting a smart card into an automated machine hooked up to wine bottles. Very geeky, and a good space to mix after work. If you plan to attend please leave a comment so I can get a reasonable headcount. If you do not drink wine they also have some nice teas. There is a small market next door, A.G. Ferrari, and outside food is allowed. VinoVenue is located at the…
I try to keep track of events in the Bay Area of interest to techies like me. There seems to be enough interest from like-minded people that I decided to publish an aggregated calendar of local events of interest to me. I pull information from venues, local groups, and personal contacts. Cost information will appear at the top of the notes section. Yes, I could output in hCalendar or RSS as well but publishing my calendar on .Mac is just so easy. Click on one of the links below to view my list of San Francisco Bay area events of…
Technorati is hosting a developer chat on IRC this Wednesday night at 7 p.m. San Francisco time (03:00 UTC). If you are working on an entry for the developers contest ending this Friday the chat is a good opportunity to receive live answers to any problems you may have. Join #technorati on irc.freenode.net. I will be in the chat room and try to answer any questions or explain how the site and services work. Any really difficult questions will be left to the Technorati employees to figure out….
The Technorati Users Group went well. Nine people learned new things about Technorati and five Technorati employees had a chance to interact with potential power users. I enjoyed making it all happen. I tethered myself to a projection TV and stepped through my prepared slides — my first time using the S-Video output on my PowerBook. I highlighted some features of the Technorati web site, showed how to create a watchlist, introduced the developer wiki, and showed the API responses. I briefly showed the Java SDK and an application I put together just minutes before the meeting. I did not…
Come drink beer and learn more about the Technorati API next Tuesday, December 21, at 7 p.m. at 21st Amendment in San Francisco. I will introduce Technorati API calls, demonstrate some existing applications built using the APIs, and lead you through some sample code using XPath and Java. A few Technorati employees will stop by and provide updates on the developer program and provide the latest company news. If you are interested in learning more about live search, web services, or corporate intelligence this event is for you! The Technorati developer contest ends December 31 so this will be a…
Edward Tufte is giving a lecture at Stanford tonight at 7:30 p.m. about his new book Beautiful Evidence. Tufte will discuss the theory of analytical design and methods for displaying eviidence. He will display the design decisions for reporting tools such as the Columbia shuttle investigation. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is on my Christmas list and I have been wanting to learn more of Professor Tufte’s methods for years. If you would like a ride to or from the event I will be driving from San Mateo and returning to San Francisco….
BloggerCon took place yesterday at the Stanford Law School and was described by Dave Winer as the “unconference,” where everyone is equal and participates in a university setting as users. During the Information Overload session led by Robert Scoble there was some vendor identification beyond the rules of the conference, and the response to the vendor violations set a tone for the conference that left many participants on edge and caused some audience members to get up and leave as an act of protest. The discussion focused on what features users would like to see in the feeds they used…
Feedster is hosting a blogger dinner on October 19 at Vino e Cucina at 7 p.m. Scott Johnson, Scott Rafer, and François Schiettecatte will be in attendance. I will be there as well. Should be an interesting crowd….
On Saturday I attended the second meeting of the Bay Area Mobility Forum. Ray Rischpater spoke about BREW development and how to get your application into the carriers’ mobile shop. I learned there are a lot of gatekeepers in the world of BREW and as a result individual developers usually do not have the financial resources to develop for the platform. You need to purchase a VeriSign document ID, submit your code for independent testing, and convince the carrier your application is unique and worth inclusion in their mobile shop. Some applications receive special placement and reap the rewards of…
There are a lot of cool technology events in San Francisco this Saturday. I plan to attend the Bay Area Mobility Forum and the geek dinner. At 2 p.m. the Bay Area Mobility Forum features a presentation by Ray Rischpater on BREW development. At 4 p.m. the San Francisco WordPress Meetup may be happening at Cafe Royale. So far the event has no confirmed attendees. Michael Creasy and Robert Scoble are hosting a geek dinner at Barney’s Gourmet Hamburgers in Noe Valley. These geek dinners are always a fun and informal way to get to know other technology folk in…
Tonight I attended The State of Online Journalism event hosted by the Online News Association and held at CNET headquarters. I recorded each presentation and took a few pictures. The audience was a mixed crowd of technical knowledge. Jeff Veen made a comment about DRM and a few audience members were not sure what that term meant. I uploaded my pictures of the speakers to Flickr. The first presenter was Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path. Jeff talked about weblogs and personal publishing as a distributed and real-time news source. He used an example of his personal investigation into the source…
Benoit Mandelbrot, Yale professor and inventor of fractal geometry and the Mandelbrot Set, will be speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on August 19 at 6 p.m. Mandelbrot’s new book, The Mis-Behavior of Markets, applies fractal theory to financial markets. Should be an interesting event!…
Scoble is organizing a Silicon Valley Geek Lunch today at Buck’s of Woodside at noon if you are in the area and would like to attend. There will probably be a small group, and that worked well last time….
Tonight was the Corporate Blogger’s Dinner. The attendees, starting to my right: Don Park Jay Fienberg Rauno Saarinen John Dowdell Russell Beattie Phil Stanhope Venture Frogs had a strong wireless Internet signal. The conversation did not focus on corporations or weblogging but instead flowed, as it should, from one topic to the next. I learned that Microsoft showed off some new mobile weblogging software today at Mobile DevCon. Rodney Brooks has a robot summer camp for kids. We also discussed the weblog echo chamber, what do readers expect, do we care about those expectations, and what are the next big…
Tomorrow night, Wednesday, at 7 P.M. is the Corporate Blogger’s Dinner at Venture Frogs in San Francisco. I view corporate blogging as a marketing tool to a user base in search of something more trustworthy than a PR spin. Mark Cuban’s blog is corporate blogging. Why? It makes you more interested in the Mavericks. You fee involved, part of the action. Even if you have never been to a NBA game. How do you put a face and a name to a product people love or will grow to love? Weblogs help establish a community around your product(s) or company…
Robert Scoble and Ross Mayfield put together a geek dinner tonight at the Palo Alto Cheesecake Factory. We all braved the rain and even as our party grew from 8 to 12 to 20 we still were able to stay as one long table. Below is a list of all attendees, approximately in the order they were sitting, starting to my left. Niall KennedyScott RaferPeter KaminskiPatrick ScobleAlex ScobleGretchen HundlingCourtney PatuboLisa CanterMarc CanterMimi CanterAndy RuffSteve SloanRoss MayfieldMike MasnickMark FinnernWendy SeltzerEnoch ChoiRobert ScobleMaryam ScobleTantek…