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…
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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…
