Niall Kennedy's home on the web
Google just signed an exclusive deal with Clear Channel to provide its search services across all of the radio conglomerate’s web sites. Clear Channel is the dominant radio network in the United States.
The partnership is for text-only ads at the moment but Google has been interested in extending its advertising reach to radio and print media. Google currently advertises its jobs site on NPR stations.
Richard Ault just announced he has left Technorati to join Metroblogging, a network of blog sites focused on local content from over 45 cities throughout the world. Richard was Director of Product Marketing at Technorati since January 2004, and one of the first company hires.
Metroblogging was co-founded by Jason DeFillippo, who left Technorati in February to focus on the blog network full-time.
Richard enjoys skiing and it wouldn’t surprise me if he and his family is working from Lake Tahoe until the snow melts and their house is remodeled.
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.
Noam Lovinsky of Skobee was the first presenter of the evening. Skobee helps plan meetups with firm or fuzzy plans. A plan may begin as “coffee next week” and a few stages later become “coffee at 8 a.m. at 1st and Main Starbucks.” Skobee helps out each step of the way and helps you pick a venue.
My favorite Skobee feature is the ability to view popular destinations by time or restricted by your group of contacts. Where do my friends and contacts like to have dinner on a Friday night? You might want to visit the same restaurant.
Naval Ravikant presented classified search engine Vast.com. Vast crawls the web looking for specific types of content. Vast currently indexes cars, jobs, and profiles, but Naval mentioned they can build a new vertical in about two weeks! A search for “BMW M5” within the car category returns results from a specialized M5 message board, a BMW classifieds page, and even a blog post. You can drill down in the results using metadata such as milage, price, model year, etc.
Vast.com exposes their entire database as a REST API with no query limits. Vast will make money through premium placements within each search result page and share a portion of their revenue generated from sites using their API.
Dorrian Porter presented mobile bookmarking tool Mozes. Mozes allows cell phone users to take notes on the run by sending a text message to its servers with special action terms. If a user sent the term “KFOG” to Mozes the server would retrieve the currently playing song from the KFOG radio station and display that information on its website for later viewing.
Dorrian showed off some features still in development such as adding a Flickr contact from your mobile phone or retrieving product information from Amazon.com. The crowd last night was very interested in locking up keywords on the service for popular terms.
Rob Lord and Navi from Songbird demonstrated their networked music player. Songbird is based on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine and the entire application is open-source and extensible. You can view tracks on a web page such as a MP3 blog and subscribe to that page as a playlist even if the page does not have a RSS feed. Music is streamed by default but you can jump to any point in the track at any time or download tracks locally.
Songbird is an extendible player which means you can apply your own skin and add your own take on Songbird’s stored data. I would like to see some specialist extensions such as a classical music extension that would explain selected pieces and their key features.
I am currently planning the next SF Tech Session and expect to have another group of startups presenting the week of April 24.
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, loan finance charges and depreciation costs. AAA estimates a per-mile cost of $0.49.
According to Salary.com the median Senior Web Developer in Sunnyvale is paid $99,000. Commute costs from San Francisco would account for about 14.3% of this person’s salary after taxes.
| San Francisco | Berkeley | Alameda | |
| Average | $8,776 | $10,941 | $9,192 |
| Yahoo! | $9,393 | $11,495 | $9,762 |
| Microsoft | $8,573 | $10,769 | $9,012 |
| $8,362 | $10,558 | $8,801 |
A monthly pass on San Francisco public transit is $45, or $540 a year. Can local startups compete for talent with these multi-thousand person companies? I think so.
The cost-per-mile used by AAA includes national average numbers that are cheaper than urban centers such as San Francisco where it costs more to insure a car or hire a mechanic. The AAA cost-per-mile number uses last year’s gas price of $2.405 a gallon and not the current price of $2.717, a 13% increase.
Milage includes a roundtrip drive from 4th & Market in San Francisco, University & Shattuck in Berkeley, or Park & Encinal in Alameda including bridge fare. Not included is the two hours one might spend in the car every day when driving with no traffic.
Yes, I know there are public transit options. Some companies offer a free shuttle either for the entire trip or from train stations. Public transit from the East Bay to Silicon Valley does not seem to exist, but CalTrain is one option from San Francisco.
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.
Each presentation will last 15 minutes and include live demonstrations of the products. You’ll have a chance to talk with the people behind the product, do some research, and learn some new things you might want to write about or integrate into your own company or project.
A few audience participants will have a chance to stand up and introduce themselves and their project to the crowd towards the end of the event for more efficient mingling. Start thinking of something clever!
Come for the free food, come for a drink, come for the people, come for the talks, or just come for the view. Please RSVP on the SF Tech Sessions blog to help me help you find a seat and food. The weather report is decreasing showers throughout the afternoon with clear skies tonight.
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 loading large images from their cameras. Lost data means either a lot more work or memories vanished forever, creating new opportunities for a data insurance policy for individuals.
This week’s PodSession is titled Online storage. The podcast is 21 minutes in length, a 9.6 MB download.
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.
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 high school sports or cooking and never broadcast but available in a time-shifted environment.
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 using Media RSS and a row of icons above each post to help you add a bookmark on del.icio.us or search for blogs referencing the post on Technorati. You can synchronize your feed list and read/unread items using the NewsGator API and even reach into your Windows Common Feed list to keep all applications on your local desktop in sync as well.
Nick is an immersive developer who dives right into his product and its user experience. When I first met Nick he was playing with a new Tablet PC to make sure FeedDemon delivered a good experience on that platform. When podcasting started gaining traction Nick took his time adding enhanced enclosure support while he tested out existing software with a variety of MP3 devices and the latest features in Windows Media Player before releasing FeedStation. FeedDemon 2.0 is yet another step in the right direction where Nick took a step back, listened to his users, and created a new application that solved their common frustrations with the feed reading experience and took care of a few problems they did not even know they had.
Congrats to Nick and the NewsGator team on a stellar release.
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 signed on to some collectively generated business plan: starting a company in a spare bedroom, outsourcing the programming to some Indian company they found on the Web, getting content from users and then having users organize the content by tagging, pocketing money from Google ads placed on the Web site and, finally, selling the company to Yahoo. (Bad news: Yahoo’s Horowitz admits, “We can’t buy everyone.”)