Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Weblogs/Blogging (Page 12 of 22)

Walt & Kara’s ‘AllThingsD.com’ Party

April 17, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Well, it wasn’t a part of Web 2.0 Expo, but while I was here, I wanted to catch a big wing-ding last night at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s launch party for their new Wall Street Journal AllThingsD.com web site. So, we bolted from Moscone West about 7:00 pm, with Aaron Fulkerson of MindTouch at the wheel. It looked like a Volvo, this car he rented, but I think it was actually a rocket ship. Either that or Aaron has received some serious tutoring in Formula One racing in his day. Tha man pushed it. But then we were running quite late for this gig. It was wild ride down the 101, white knuckles all the way (mine). Somehow we got there safe and sound, after almost losing it on a really sharp turn on the freeway exit, while he was telling me he once saw Steve Miller perform at the ampitheater close by. Anyway, it was great event, and we were glad we made the trip. Quite crowded — I’d say a few hundred people, luminaries everywhere. Couldn’t figure out why I was invited… 🙂 Here are some pix, first a few shot in the computer display area, including some with Aaron.

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And here’s a shot of Walt (center) and his assistant Katie Boehret (far left), along with a couple other scenes in the lobby area of the venue, which is really quite nice (my first time there). But they don’t do justice to how crowded this party was…

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Finally, after a couple glasses of some really great Pinot, I grabbed this shot of the whole AllThingD team. Everyone was there to celebrate all their hard work getting the site ready for its imminent launch. The second shot below is of Katie Boehret chatting with a guy from the Participatory Culture Foundation (sorry, forgot his name), whose mission is to build an open and democratic television platform. The third shot is of two guys from Google who work in new biz dev — Tom Sly, whom I met at Demo ’07, and Ronny Conway, son of legendary Silicon Valley angel, Ron Conway. Told him I’d met his dad, way back when. (Way to make a guy feel old, Ronny!) Fun guys! And the best shot I saved for last, of me doing my pose.pngth-famous-person shot with Kara Swisher. It was a fun time! Just wish I’d have thought to hit up Kara for a press pass to their next D Conference, coming up in May…. 🙂 Man, would I love to blog that baby.

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eTech: Magical Mystery Tour

March 25, 2007 / / 1 Comment

I’m off on an adventure tomorrow morning, flying to San Diego again, this time for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, where I’ll be reporting for Conferenza and posting to this blog. I’m looking forward to running into some old friends, and to an exciting program. The “magic” theme this year should be fascinating, based on the descriptions of some sessions I’ve highlighted below.

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What technologies are “poised to blast off into the realm of magic?” O’Reilly asks, as it launches its sixth annual eTech event. [It will be the third one I’ve reported on, by the way.] The goal is to “balance pie-in-the-sky theorizing with practical, real-world information and conversation,” says the firm. The format consists of tutorials, breakout sessions, keynotes, and that most revered form of interaction — hallway conversations! — which “will hopefully spark enough unconventional thinking to change how you see your world.” Etechtheme400

The dates are Monday, March 26 through Thursday, March 29, and the venue is the Manchester Grand Hyatt right on the harbor in downtown San Diego. The promise, says O’Reilly, is for you to be able to learn which areas of technology have sufficiently advanced to the level of magic. So, I’m joining more than 1200 technologists, CTOs, hackers, researchers, thinkers, strategists, entrepreneurs, business developers, and VCs that are expected to participate in this year’s event. Grandhyatt I know from years past that the attendees at eTech are top notch — many leading developers, trendsetters, founders, and VCs (definitely a lot names you’d recognize). The strength of eTech, according to O’Reilly, is how it “taps into the creative spirit of all attendees, sparking provocative encounters and productive inspiration that continue long after the conference ends” — and I agree based on personal experience. In addition to the variety of sessions and extra-curricular activities, eTech has an exhibit hall featuring a focused group of about 14 exhibitors and sponsors.

eTech Sessions That Especially Sound Good
So, what are some the talks I’ve flagged out? On the first full day, Tuesday, I plan to catch as many of these as I can (some overlap each other, unfortunately):
• Building a “Web-Scale Computing” Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today’s Business (Amazon Web Services)
• Making Offline Web Applications a Reality (Zimbra)
• Movie Magic: Coming Soon to the Real World Near You (Apple Computer)
• Flickr for Office Docs – Content Syndication through ThinkFree Doc Exchange
• RSS Beyond Blogging – Connecting Applications With Feeds (nSoftware)
• Digital Disney: the Mainstreaming of Web 2.0
• Successful Open Communities on the Internet (Wikia)
• Extreme Productivity in the Enterprise: The User is the Developer is the User (BEA)
• The Myths of Innovation
• Virtualizing the Datacenter with Project Blackbox (Sun)

Then, on Wednesday, we start getting heavier into that magic thing:

• The Coming Age of Magic (ThingM) – Excerpt: “The desktop metaphor is dead … Interaction design is significantly trailing the capabilities of the technology because of how difficult it is to explain what all this new stuff does … The desktop metaphor was useful for twenty years as a way to structure and explain information-processing technology. I propose “magic” as a metaphor for structuring interactions with embedded information processing technology …”

• The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life (Danah Boyd) – Excerpt: “While the ‘radical’ practices of young people and the organizational fetishes of technologists are certainly a curiosity to be examined, the real shift is happening in the lives of everyday people without an ounce of reflexivity …”

• Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication – Excerpt: “Today, the re-emergence of craft is part of the DIY movement that is discovering new tools for personal fabrication.

And here’s my vote for best named session:
• Scalability: Set Amazon’s Servers on Fire, Not Yours (SmugMug) – Excerpt: “With companies like SmugMug, Flickr, and YouTube growing by leaps and bounds, storage is a vital but expensive ingredient. Building, scaling, and managing large storage installations is cash — and labor –intensive. Amazon provides a simple API that exposes their internal storage architecture at utility prices. Suddenly, anything is possible. Unlimited, always-on storage everywhere in the world.”

• Sufficiently Advanced Magic (MIT Media Lab) – Excerpt: “…magicians and scientists often play on the same borders of the unknown. Magicians, however, do not have to kowtow to the constraints of reality as technologists do … If technology is man’s search to express control over his environment, scientists should look to magicians for inspiration and guidance as to what has engaged people for millennia … they continue to be successful by adapting their techniques and presentations in order to affect people profoundly.”

• Engaging with Web 2.0 Outside the Browser (Adobe) – Excerpt: “Web 2.0 is more than a social networking phenomenon. It’s a renaissance in web development … Rich Internet applications (RIAs), which break out from the traditional page-based web paradigm and currently run in the web browser, will soon be able to run on the desktop, both on and offline, with the ability to access local data and use web services to present an integrated and unique user experience … best practices and techniques that leverage existing web development skills to build and deploy Web 2.0 applications that bridge the Web and desktop … a new application model for content delivery and collaboration … how HTML, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash are coming together in a new project, code-named Apollo.”

• Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web (Yahoo!) – Excerpt: “Developers can use Pipes to combine data sources and user input into mashups without having to write code.”

• Web Scale Computing (Amazon Web Services) – Excerpt: “Web 2.0 business models are about competing on ideas, not on resources. Yet over 70% of most startup development effort goes into undifferentiated “heavy lifting”! … Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business … 200,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.”

• Ajax Unplugged: Architecture and Tips for Taking Your Applications Offline (Zimbra) – Excerpt: “Looking back, 2006 may have been the year of Ajax … But despite its game-changing hype, Ajax is limited in its usefulness, it only helps people when connected to the Web. Surprisingly enough, people want access to their applications even when they aren’t connected to the Internet …”

And…drum roll…my vote for the funnest sounding session at eTech:
• 1/2 Baked (panel: 500 Hats, Feedburner, First Round Capital, August Capital) – Excerpt: “Half-Baked Dot Com is a participatory exercise in entrepreneurial improv theatre conducted by five teams of startup addicts and judged by an estranged panel of venture capitalists…or several crackpots and D-list bloggers, whomever shows up first … Half-Baked is the latest Web 2.0 craze that’s sweeping the un-conference circuit. Show up early and bring your A-game if you’d like to participate, otherwise bring your camera to record the heinous crime perpetrated on an audience who paid good money to attend this event.”

Finally, on Thursday, I’m seeing several more sessions that I’d like to catch — if I can hang around that long before hittin’ the waves:
• Apollo: Bringing Rich Internet Applications to the Desktop (Adobe)
• Silicon is Invading Medicine (Andy Kessler)
• Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems (Yahoo!)
• Web 20-20: Architectural Patterns and Models for the New Internet (Adobe)
• Your Web App as a Text Adventure (Stikkit)
• Web Feed Workflows – Getting the Right Information, to the Right People at the Right Time (Attensa)

Let me know your thoughts about the sessions above, questions you’d like answered, etc. Watch for my blog posts and Flickr pix, too. And, by all means, if you’ll be at eTech yourself, please look me up!

Subscribe to My ‘Blidget’

February 18, 2007 / / 2 Comments

Actually, I’d rather you subscribe to my RSS feed. But, what the heck, subscribe to this, too! Just click on the blue bar near the top of my sidebar to the right. It lets you add a widget of my blog headlines to your own blog or web site, courtesy of Widgetbox. Blidgetgraphic I saw this company debut at DEMO last year. They thought widgets were gonna be big….and they were right! The company’s been going great guns since then, becoming an amazing source of every kind of widget imaginable. They partnered with Typepad to introduce this “blidget” (blog+widget) concept. Mine looks like this:


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For some reason, my photo was showing up in it fine at first, but then it wasn’t. Are you seeing it on my blidget? The one I chose, naturally, is the infamous hat & lei photo of me above in my header, shot while partyin’ on Maui about 10 years ago…

Blogs as ‘New Media’: The Evolution Continues

February 16, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Wow, some real interesting things are happening out there in Blogland lately! Specifically, new developments that keep raising questions about disclosure and the independence of bloggers. Marshall Kirkpatrick did a TechCrunch post yesterday about Microsoft hiring two respected industry guys (one an analyst, the other a tech journalist), to start blogging for the company. And it drew a hailstorm of comments — accusations of selling out to The Man, etc. But the question about ethics and disclosure isn’t just about big-company bloggers these days. Robert Scoble, who started the whole employee-evangelist blogging phenomenon at Microsoft, has been under attack at the small startup company he now blogs and “vlogs” for, PodTech. A post on his Scobleizer blog a while back drew a very heavy, sometimes downright nasty discussion about disclosure, specifically relating to Robert’s coverage of clients of PodTech’s. [Some of PodTech’s clients it calls “sponsors” and are identified as such on its web site. Robert also has one sponsor for his personal blog, which he says is Seagate.] His post on this topic was in response to Valleywag calling him out on being a shill. Scoble straightens out Valleywag on the details, but admits he doesn’t always give enough disclosure. He resolves to be more careful in the future. Dan Farber at ZDnet also weighed in on the flap.

But the arguments about what consitutes sufficient disclosure will surely continue. Who decides? The evolution to new media is not without its bumps. Traditional journalism has a code of ethics that takes up a whole book at some media outlets such as the NY Times (which hasn’t prevented some notable lapses by certain reporters and editors there in recent times). But bloggers now, more and more, seem to be getting held to higher standards — especially those of the so-called independents that are widely read. Those who have accepted high-profile positions at big-name companies don’t have disclosure issues, however. We all know who’s paying them, and simply apply that filter.

One great blog to read that covers this issue like no other — blogs versus mainstream media — is Mark Glaser’s MediaShift, which is hosted by PBS.org. I’ve written about it previosuly. You’ll find his coverage of the recent “WeMedia” conference interesting as well.

The battle for influence goes on. In the minds of most web users today, that influence now exists collectively in blogs, or at least in certain blogs that are respected and deemed to have influence over others. No question that blogs as a medium are gaining fast on traditional media. And don’t doubt for a second that corporate communicators and their bosses aren’t getting this, bigtime.

What makes a blog influential? How does one measure that? How much of it is quantitative vs. qualitative?

Some of the Awesome People I Met at DEMO 07

February 11, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Now that I’ve been back from DEMO for a week, it’s time to go through my humongous stack of cards again and say-hey to all great people I met at this very upbeat event. I’ve been sorting through all these cards on my desk today….

Once again, the whole conference came off very well — the logistics, the networking, the program, everything was great (even if the weather was a little iffy at first). Though it’s always hard to break away to attend these things, I’m really, really glad I did and would wholeheartedly recommend DEMO conferences to anyone in this business, whether you’re new to it or not.

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Normally, I’d have done this “people post” a little sooner, but it’s been the busiest post-conference week I can remember for a while. It seems the startup business is booming everywhere, and I’m hustling to follow up with a lot of blogging and consulting work, now that I’m a free-agent again! On top of that, I still have some blog posts I’d like to do on companies I met last week…which will make this a record in the elapsed time between the conference ending and my final posts. But there were just so many interesting companies and stories at DEMO 07, I really could blog about it for weeks.

DEMO remains the best venue to see all the new innovative ideas coming out in the tech business, year in and year out — actually twice a year. And it proves that innovation can come from anywhere — even, I’m out to prove, Minnesota (if not this time). In that regard, I volunteered to help Chris Shipley connect with promising startups here in my adopted home state in the future. I’m hoping she can do one of her “Innovation Day” meetup events sometime soon in the Twin Cities, and hear pitches from a bunch of our local startups. Though we didn’t have a Minnesota-based company presenting this time, there was one from our neighboring state of Wisconsin — Jyngle, which gets my vote for one of the best, most memorable brand names to come out at DEMO 07. These things are important, people, when you have to stand out and be remembered amidst the information-overload of 68 startups all hyping their wares! (Just a taste of what such startups will face out in the real world.) Smart companies take the time to get this naming thing right. Now if Jyngle could just have a memorable tagline to go with its cool name. As Guy Kawasaki says, you have to “make mantra” — meaning boil down to a few words how you make a difference in the world. Again, not easy, but if you can’t do it, how do you expect your users or buyers to “get” what you’re doing? Without mantra, you can just slowly drown in all the hype of the marketplace. I would describe mantra as “messaging on steroids.” [Hey, Guy — there ya go. As a marketing/branding/messgaging dude, that would be my three-word-mantra wrapup/takeaway of your great talk in Minneapolis a few weeks ago.]

I don’t mean to pick on Jyngle — they’re hardly alone in this. And Business Week liked their service enough to include it in a post-DEMO story. But I sit here looking at their cards again and see a huge missed opportunity — no tagline, no mantra ringing through to me (pardon the pun). Sure, when you go to their site, you see the words “Mobile Group Messaging for the Real World” — but that doesn’t do it for me. Now, a tagline like “Message Your Group, Fast” sure would. What’s cool is the Jyngle service lets you do this group-messaging with either voice or text.

Time savings — it’s ALL about saving time today. That’s a major investment theme of one of the smartest, most successful guys in tech investing, Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners. He wasn’t at this DEMO, nor was his partner Bono (though there was a sighting of the latter at the last DEMO, which turned out to be the most masterful PR trick of that event). So, here’s a lesson for startups: when Roger (the Man) McNamee talks about stuff like this, listen!

But I digress. How did I get off on this tangent? Such is blogging. Back to the people I met. First, I’ll list some of the people I already knew but renewed friendships with (no particular order, just as I kinda ran into ’em). I’ll start with the former Minnesota people I talked about in my opening-reception post, noting where they are now…

• Steve Larsen, CEO, Krugle Inc., Menlo Park, CA
• Beth Temple, CMO, Magnify.net, NYC
• Charles Wilson, consultant to Mission Research (SalesWorks), Lancaster, PA
• Charles Beeler, General Partner, El Dorado Ventures, Menlo Park
• Hany Nada, Managing Director, Granite Global Ventures, Menlo Park
And these other friends I saw again, some of them just a few weeks prior at BlogHaus and CES:
• Robert Scoble, PodTech
• John Furrier, PodTech
• Shel Israel, co-author with Scoble on “Naked Conversations”
• Stewart Alsop, Alsop Louie Partners
• Renee Blodgett, DEMO PR guru, Blodgett Communications
• Julie O’Grady, another DEMO PR guru, here for Boorah
• Gary Bolles, Conferenza
• Dan Farber, VP Editorial, ZDnet
• Rafe Needleman, Editor, CNET
• Brian Ziel, PR guru, Seagate
• Becky Sniffen, who handles PR for DEMO
• Chris Shipley, DEMO Executive Producer
Plus all these new peope I met, at least the ones I got cards from:
• Christine Herron, Director of Investments, Omidyar Network (whose tagline
I love: “Every individual has the power to make a difference”)
• Tom Sly, Manager of New Business Development, Google (a newly minted Harvard MBA;
I told him he was the second Google guy I’d met a conference…the other was Larry Page)
• Aydin Senkut, President, Felicis Ventures, San Francisco (an early Googler)
• Alan Kelley, Managing Director, SJF Ventures, NYC
• Luis Villalobos, Founder & Board Member, Tech Coast Angels
• Jeff Cohn, Investment Screening Director, Tech Coast Angels
• Laura Paglione, Director, Knowledge Management/Entrepreneurship, Kauffman Foundation
• Charlie Crystle, CEO, Mission Research (SalesWorks), Lancaster, PA
• Wendy Caswell, CEO, ZINK Imaging, Waltham, MA
• Wim Sweldens, VP, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, Murray Hill, NJ
• Andrew Horwitz, Senior Director, Market Development, Seagate
• Rhonda Shantz, Senior Director, Consumer Communications, Symantec
• Mike Bradshaw, Partner, Connect Public Relations, Provo, UT (for Symantec)
• Esteban Sardera, CEO, PairUp, San Francisco
• David Jennings, Cofounder & COO, Yodio, Bellevue, WA
• Katie Perry, Marketing, Jyngle, Milwaukee, WI
• Tom McGannon, Founder & VP Operations, Nexo, Palo Alto, CA
• Gina Jorasch, VP Marketing, Nexo
• Benjamin Levy, VP Marketing, Vringo, Beit Shemesh, Israel
• David Goldfarb, CTO, Vringo
• Michael Bates, CEO, iqzone, Scottsdale, AZ
• James Feguson, President, iqzone
• Eric Moyer, CEO/Cofounder, Boorah, Palo Alto, CA
• Ramsay Hoguet, Founder, MyDesignIn, Marblehead, MA
• Eric Sirkin, President/Cofounder, BUZ Interactive, Palo Alto
• Tamara Stone, Partner, Rainmaker Communications, Mountain View, CA (for BUZ Interactive)
• Brian Smiga, CEO, Preclick, Atlantic Highlands, NJ
• Tony Davis, CEO, TeleFlip, Santa Monica, CA
• Christian Gammill, VP Product Marketing, TeleFlip
• Julie Mathis, VP, CarryOn PR, Los Angeles (for TeleFlip)
• Brian Solis, Founder, FutureWorks Inc., San Jose, CA
• Marc Orchant, Blogger and Storyteller (the ‘Office Evolution’ blog/ZDnet), Albuquerque, NM
• Sue Orchant, artist
• Victoria Barrett, Associate Editor, Forbes Magazine

And, finally, here are some people I would have liked to meet but somehow didn’t, including the first two guys listed who were attending from a Minnesota company (how’d I miss them?):
• Mark Dunn, CTO, MakeMusic, Eden Prairie, MN
• John Paulson, CEO, MakeMusic, Eden Prairie, MN
• Marshall Kirkpatrick, Splashcast
• Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
• Oliver Starr, MobileCrunch
• Katie Fehrenbacher, GigaOM
• Barry Bonds (yes, that one), who appeared for Bling Software

That’s it for now on DEMO. More soon on some other things I saw there that I liked…

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