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…
Category Archives: Events
Widgets Live! conference is sold out!
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…
Bookmarking and social sharing trends
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…
Planning a small conference
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…
Conference industry basics
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…
Widgets Live! conference in San Francisco on November 6
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…
Moderating video search panel tonight in Mountain View
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…
TechSession: Mobile communities
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…
Star Wars tour at The Future of Web Apps
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….
TechSessions: Media Distribution
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…