Tomorrow morning early, I’m jumping on the 5 here in San Clemente and driving south an hour to downtown San Diego for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns conference. I’m looking forward to a great two-day program. 
Here’s the main page for the Facebook Group, which 200 people for far have joined saying they’re attending, and 81 more are "maybes." The event is being held in conjunction with O’Reilly’s ETech conference, which draws an even larger crowd. It also starts tomorrow (Monday, March 3), but it goes through Thursday. This will be about the third or fourth ETech I’ve atended, including the 2007 edition, for which I wrote this Conferenza review. It’s a geekfest of the highest order, and I’ll be attending through end of day Wednesday. So, two days GSP and one day ETech, and the evening events are common for both conferences. If you’re attending either one, I look forward to meeting.
Category: Venture Capital/M&A/Angels (Page 31 of 53)
Several months ago, some of my Minnesota buddies and I started talking about a need for a site that could focus on the cool things happening in technology and the Internet right here in our state. 
We ended up deciding that a multi-author blog seemed to be the way to go, since we as a group (six of us) seemed to collectively be plugged in to most of what was happening here — the founders, the technologists, the developers, the investors, the new ideas.
We started sharing thoughts of what we could blog about and kinda blew each others’ minds — so many good Minnesota tech stories out there, just waiting to be told. My esteemed blogging buddy Steve Borsch, of Connecting The Dots, really led the charge. Hats off to him, because this idea simply wouldn’t have happened without his energy and passion.
Well, today, Saturday, you can now check out Minnov8.com — "Minnesota Technology Innovation News & Insights." After talking about it for months, it’s finally a reality. Well, kind of a soft-launch, anyway. Trouble is, starting in January, we all got really busy, but we decided we had enough content in the can, as it were, that we should go, at least with a few posts to get started. (More is coming as we speak.) My first post was about innovation in angel investing, a topic I’m very close to and have also written about here on Tech~Surf~Blog, as well as on GetGoMN.org.
None of us needs another blog to be committed to. But I hope to be able to contribute ongoing, at least in my spare time, weekends, etc. And I personally intend to recruit guest bloggers from time to time. The community needs a forum like this, we’re convinced, and it was time to let ‘er rip. We all really believe strongly in our community. But there’s lots more to come from our current team of contributors, so keep your eye on Minnov8. And do let us know what you think. Go, Minnesota tech!
Especially the comments. Though donning your skeptic’s hat ain’t a bad idea when reading the posts, either. For example, is a startup written about on TechCrunch any better, or worthy of your time, than one that isn’t? 
They all start from ground zero; some just have money and influence, or a friend on the staff. I found it interesting when a key TechCrunch writer recently quit, saying he didn’t think he could write about "one more f**king startup." Thank you, because I don’t know how many more I can read about, either. (And the quantity is even worse on Mashable.) But I digress…
This post was mainly inspired by the drivel that runs through a lot of the comments. It’s reader beware, folks, as many of you know. What really irks me are negative comments from people who make up an identity to anonymously take a shot a one of their competitors. There must be a way for a site with open comments to make people verify who they really are (and out them, if necessary), or to at least police such comments better. Sometimes, readers do — but it’s not their job, now is it?
I saw such a comment on this recent TechCrunch post: Amazon Web Services Goes Down, Takes Many Startup Sites With It — #8, to be specific (which I won’t give more play by repeating here). First of all, the post itself was overly dramatic to begin with, leading many to comment (most of them constructively) that this really wasn’t as big a deal as the writer was making it out to be. And more than one implied "you get what you pay for." In other words, this occurrence is one reason why bootstrapping a startup may not always the best when you’re a web company — meaning, risking your customers’ experience with only a "three nines" service. But the cheap shot #8 guy takes, out of the blue, is a direct attack on an alternative to Amazon’s service, which is a much more robust offering. The comment offered nothing to the discussion — just a cheap shot. In fact, when at least one other commenter asked later for more information from the guy, he was nowhere to be found.
Now, maybe I wouldn’t take such issue to this if the competitor he was talking about wasn’t one that I know — Nirvanix, which just so happened to be one of my top picks of the presenting companies at the recent DEMO ’08 conference. But I decided to ask Nirvanix’ CEO, Patrick Harr, whom I had met at DEMO, what this guy was talking about. Here’s what he said, in his very responsive email back to me:
"There is no customer registrant under that name, nor beta customer with that name that has ever tested our SDN service. In fact, [the situation is] quite
the opposite. Our service is very stable. We consistently maintain 100%
uptime at 2.5 to 3X greater performance than Amazon. Just as important,
our architecture of distributed geo nodes with 99.999% data availability would
not have allowed this type of outage.
Net, net — the comment must have been from a competitor."
Or a disgruntled somebody-or-other. Harr also told me that DEMO went very well for Nirvanix, and that the firm "just won a big Fortune 10 company, and another Fortune 100 is almost signed." In fairness, the firm seems to be targeting large enterprises much more than it is startups — so one would expect its uptime would have to be better than Amazon’s.
[Too bad Harr couldn’t have been as responsive as he was to me in commenting directly on TechCrunch. That is, responding quickly to comment #8 in particular. The lesson for companies, especially if you’re a startup seeking to make inroads against big-name competition, is simple and clear: you’d better have somebody monitoring key blogs on a daily, ongoing basis!]
If you’d like a second take on Amazon Web Services’ downtime problems, here’s an article from the AP via Business Week: Amazon’s Cloud Storage Hiccups.
Another interesting thing about TechCrunch commenters is how often they go after the writers themselves — accusing them of a certain stupidlty limited view of the world. These writers get accused regularly of all sorts of improprieties, as they sit and type away there from their cloistered little Silicon Valley digs. Case in point: commenter #14 here. "Bad journalism," the man says. Does what they do even fit into the category of journalism? Well, there are those who would argue that one pretty hard. Yet, alas, that’s a topic for another post… But the fact remains: be skeptical when reading traditional media, and even moreso with blogs — and especially with open comments on either.
Time for my traditional waltz through the business card stack from the DEMO conference last week in Palm Desert. Besides, I need something to do on the plane home. I always meet so many interesting people at these events, and this one was certainly no exception. The mood is so upbeat at DEMO, the energy level so high! I mean, 77 companies launching, and probably a half a dozen people in attendance from each firm on average (counting a PR rep and many times an investor or board member or two) — all higher than a kite, ready to tell anyone who’ll listen about their red-hot new company! 
On top of that, a press contingent of about 80 is wandering about, not to speak of a whole slew of VCs, angels, and corporate investors and biz dev people. I collect a lot of business cards from these folks, even though I’m quite busy most of the time, attending every session — nose to the Macbook and/or iPhone blogging or Twittering.
Before I get to the new folks I met, here are some of the folks I ran into again whom I already knew or had met previously (alphabetically by last name):
– Stewart Alsop, VC, Alsop-Louie Partners (and the original founder of DEMO)
– Renee Blodgett, Blodgett Communications (for SpeakLike and Toktumi)
– Gary Bolles, now CEO of new startup Xigi.biz
– Katie Boehret, Technology Reporter, Wall Street Journal
– Kevin Dorren. now Chairman, HubDub
– Dan Farber, VP Editorial, ZDnet
– Mike Garity, VP, Network World Conferences
– Dan Gillmor, Journalist, Author, Angel Investor (one is Seesmic)
– Paula Gould, PEG PR (for Delver)
– Shel Israel, Blogger/Author, now FastCompany’s Global Neighbourhood TV guy
– Steve Larsen, CEO, Krugle
– Erica Lee, StrategicLee (for DEMO)
– Walt Mossberg, Technology Reporter, Wall Street Journal
– Rafe Needleman, Editor, CNet, and Chief Blogger, Webware.com
– Keith Shaw, Editor, Network World
– Chris Shipley, Executive Producer, DEMO
– Becky Sniffen, MC2 Communications (for DEMO)
– Brian Solis, Founder, Future-Works PR
– Don Thorson, now VP Marketing, Ribbit
The pix on this page are just a couple random shots. Here’s my complete DEMO ’08 Flickr set.
And now for the new people I met — at least those I got a business card from (again alphabetically by last name):
– Liad Agmon, CEO, Delver
– Michael Bogart, The Bogart Group (who does the production of DEMO)
– Bill Bryant, Board Advisor for both Blist and Liquid Planner
– Terra Carmichael, SutherlandGold Group PR
– Jinnan Cai, Cofounder/VP-Prod Dev, Buska (Perth, Australia)
– Gerry Caulfield, Lead Technology Engineer, Buska (Perth, Australia)
– Kirk Chen, Cofounder/Product Architect, iLeonardo
– Matt Clark, AE, Lotus PR (for Catalyst Web)
– Sanford Cohen, CEO, SpeakLike
– Mike Dever, CEO, YouChoose.net
– Nigel Eccles, Chief News Junkie, HubDub (Edinburgh, Scotland)
– Quentin Hardy, Silicon Valley Bureau Manager, Forbes
– Patrick Harr, CEO, Nirvanix
– Linda Huang, VP Marketing & Sales, Santrum
– Ryo Koyama, CEO, Yoics
– Miiko Mentz, Future-Works PR (for HubDub)
– Melinda Meggyesy, Online Community Manager, LiquidPlanner
– Dave Merkel, VP Products, Mandiant
– Yannis Papakonstantinou, Cofounder, App2You.com
– Stephanie Rice, Sr AE, Ruder Finn West
– Michelle Schafer, Acct Supervisor, Merritt Group PR (for Mandiant)
– Robert Schettino, Marketing, iVideoSongs.com
– Dan Seyer, VP Product Management, Ribbit
– Carnet Williams, CEO, SproutBuilder.com
Once again, it was great meeting all of you! I thought it was a particularly good DEMO, and I was excited about the quality of the startups presenting. I hope to hear again from you folks I met at the event. Stay in touch! For more, see this index page of my coverage of DEMO 08 on this blog, and even more on Twitter, plus my DEMO 08 photo set on Flickr.
It’s been a couple days since DEMO wrapped up, but I took my time to think over my picks. (Plus I’ve been busy working on other research.) 
I haven’t even looked on DEMO.com yet to see who won the DEMOgod awards (the site was down when I tried to the day after), and I also haven’t read any of the various media stories on the picks they chose (eWeek was one I saw scroll by, and there are many more, I’m sure). So, these picks of mine are totally unadultered by the opinions of others… 🙂
At first I thought for sure I had just five obvious, really top picks. Then I realized, looking over my notes, no, there are too many other good ones — I’ll do ten. Well, darned if I couldn’t narrow it down that far, either! So I finally settled on 15 this morning. This DEMO seemed to have more great companies, great ideas than others I’ve attended — technologies I know we’ll be hearing much more about in coming months. Some are still nascent upstarts, of course, so it may be a while before we hear a lot — whereas others presenting have already raised significant capital and will likely make a splash sooner. [I noted there were less companies this time that had raised big bucks before they got here, which was interesting…]
It was really hard to limit myself to just the picks I name here, but I thought anything more than 15 would just be too much. It doesn’t mean any of the remaining 62 aren’t worthy — I just simply chose the ones that resonated the most with me, in the categories I most relate to. Someone else with a different perspective would likely choose a completely different list. It’s interesting that, of the seven categories DEMO uses, my picks come from four of them: consumer devices (2), consumer software & services (6), enterprise software & services (1), and enabling technology (6). In fact, that latter group was the standout for me: I chose 6 of the 11 companies thus categorized.
So, without further ado, here are my picks, alphabetically, with the few words I Twittered live about each company during the event. I encourage you to click through on each link and find out for yourself why I think they’re cool…
• Blist is the world’s easiest database for mainstream users – very nice, clean, like simple spreadsheet, but powerful
• GreenPlug is a chip & protocol for real-time communication between devices that lets you charge multiple devices w/one power supply
• HubDub, news-aggregator prediction market (wisdom of the crowd), makes everyone a "news participant" — start w/$1k play money
• Iterasi, wow, my own personal wayback machine – do I need this!
• LeapFrog‘s Tag, portable reading system that fits in child’s hand – a pen with a speaker in it, very cool – "brings books to life"
• LiveScribe Smartpen, a computer in a pen that records and links audio, a "new medium for storytelling" – oh, baby, gonna get one!
• Nirvanix, storage delivery network to scale w/o buying all those expensive arrays – affordable, full featured, more than Amazon S3!
• NotchUp is one of my favs for sure – employers pay to interview *me*? oh, god, am I dreaming? my price comes up at $550 a pop … [and this one merited a second Tweet:] …
just launched and already is up to 50K members, and 400 cos have signed up – this one just resonates – I smell a DEMOgod
• Notebookz’ iLeonardo, first "parallel entrepreneur" presenter at DEMO (also CEO, Cozimo), social utility to connect people doing web research
• Ribbit merges your mobile phone w/your online life (three VCs in it, lotsa buzz) — see their phone widgets — oooh
• Semingo‘s Delver, first socially connected search engine, indexes soc web, imports your social graph, find answers from trusted friends
• Sprout is so cool (SproutBuilder.com), lets anyone build sophisticated Flash-based widgets and other files, drag/drop, effects
• VisibleMeasures, awesome, captures video viewing data, all user clicks, in-stream behavior, easy setup, $5M Series A/Gen Catalyst
• Yoics‘ univ networking makes remote access simple as IM, any connected device is accessible to anyone, like view web cam on phone
• YouChoose.net, a widget to replace comments sections on most blogs; when comments entered, they appear on all sites hosting widget [note: the whole story appears not yet to be on their web site…just expect to hear more about "distributed comments"]
Why did I do my live coverage of the event on Twitter this time? Because it just seemed so fitting for an event like this, where things move so rapid-fire. Let me tell you, your brain gets a real overdose of new information at DEMO! I’ve done full blog posts in the past, but can only do so many of those at any one event. [Dan Farber of ZDnet was nice enough to ask me if I was going to write my in-depth stuff again so he didn’t have to… 🙂 ] Twitter just seemed to be the thing to do, after I’ve been getting into it lately and finding it the most fun thing to read on my iPhone when I’m waiting somewhere. I actually considered some live blogging software from an outfit in Toronto, which CNet’s Rafe Needleman uses. [He told me it worked well for him.] I just didn’t have time to learn that or set it up. And I decided I liked the challenge of trying to net out everything for my readers in 140 characters or less per "post." It’s kind of the extreme opposite of my long posts, but I thought worth a try. And speed does matter. What did you think? I put up something like 85 or 90 Tweets, and — not to be just a word guy — also about 90 pix on Flickr. It was another great DEMO! I really enjoyed it. Learned a ton, and met a bunch more great people.
UPDATE (2/14/08): By the way, the DEMOgod winners are listed here. Finally got around to looking that up. Looks like four of mine made it. Kinda anti-climactic to bring up at this point, but that’s how the awards are — even when they’re first announced, because most people leave before the final night’s banquet when the winners are revealed.
UPDATE (2/20/08): And one of my picks gets some dough. Here’s the news, just in from Mashable: Fun Spreadsheet Maker Blist Gets $6.5M.
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