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 13 of 22)

DEMO, I Miss Ya!

February 9, 2007 / / 4 Comments

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Okay, I especially miss your weather! Palm Desert was sooo nice…I recall fondly as I gaze at some quick photos I took, like this one of the palms and the mountains, while I busily hustled between conference sessions and networking opportunites at DEMO…..

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Then I had the misfortune, late last Friday, of returning to Minnesota — just as the coldest temps in seven years were moving in! I’m talking several days in a row where it never even got above zero, all day long (!!)…and lows overnight all this time have consistently been down between minus 10 and minus 20 F.

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This is insane! I should be in California. I have a place at the beach I can work from for cryin’ out loud! Trouble is, most of my client base is here in the Twin Cities. And yes, friends, I am now officially back out blogging and stirring up trouble consulting, fulltime. Wish me well! [Or should I say: startups beware! Graeme’s on the prowl again… 🙂 ]

But note to self after the past week: “Expand your client base, Graeme. Sign up one or more California-based clients — soon! — before you turn into a block of ice.”

Ideas and leads for those client relationships gladly accepted, o valued blog readers (especially you California ones). Graeme’s for hire! Whether for new-media consulting, marketing strategy, messaging and communications, content development….and, well, you get the idea.

Now, let me get back to thawing out my feet!

[By the way, I have to mention some very cool link-love I got from my DEMO attendance and coverage last week. These two were especially nice: the post Brian Solis, of PR2.0 fame, did on the opening DEMO party….and DEMOletter’s Complete DEMO 07 Coverage, which appeared soon after the event. On the opening day, I even made it onto TechMeme’s home page at one point, thanks either to Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm linking to me, or Gabe Rivera doing so — haven’t figured that one out yet.]

DEMO: Magnify.net, Yodio, Blerts, Splashcast

January 31, 2007 / / 4 Comments

Saw four cool demos this afternoon related to consumer media distribution. The first, Magnify.net, empowers online publishers to integrate user-generated videos into their existing web offerings. [We’re talking especially about the little guys here, not the big players as Brightcove tends to focus on.] The whole idea is to create high-traffic niche vertical content sites that will attract advertisers looking to reach micro-target audiences.

Yodio has an end-to-end audio publishing system that it’s used to create an online destination community for creating and sharing audio casts. “The future of the podcast is still ahead of us,” said CEO Clay Loges. All you need is a cell phone, a camera, and Internet access. Post an audio cast, for example, about a vacation you recommend, and upload photos, too. Sharing is similar to Flickr.

Blerts, an offering from ThePort Network Inc., is riding the rapid growth of RSS consumption, which CEO Bob Cramer says now numbers more than 30 million people. “But, even for those who subscribe to 100 or more feeds, only 5-10 are really important,” he said. Sound familiar? Blerts is the first graphics based RSS alert utility that notifies users when their most important RSS feeds are updated. It’s pretty cool looking, and you can download it now.

The Splashcast media syndication platform is “the first one that’s easy enough for everyone,” said CEO Michael Berkley. Create and syndicate an online channel of mixed-media content — music, photos, video, text, RSS feeds. The key is that it’s a universal web-based media player — you don’t have to install a player for every video you put on your MySpace page, for example. In about 48 hours of having the site live, Splashcast users have already created more than 1000 channels.

DEMO: Stealth Company Eyejot Comes Out

January 31, 2007 / / 4 Comments

Lots of video stuff here at DEMO. Eyejot is the first and is about “video messaging in a blink.” It uses Flash and is client free. It works with any web browser, including mobile phones. Here’s a screen shot from the demo, showing a message David Geller, CEO, quickly created before our eyes. And it has business applications, too, he said. Eyejot_1

DEMO: People Are Central in New Model

January 31, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Chris Shipley is giving her introduction right now. There’s an exciting shift going on in IT, she says. Tech is no longer the central focus. “We’re deeply into the age of Age of the Power of the Individual.” Chrisintro_2 We have the power to choose the technologies we use and how we use them. “We’re all becoming designers and producers. We’re ‘creating consumers’,” Shipley says. It’s not just about consumer applications, however — personal preferences of enterprise buyers drive their IT choices, too. And the 68 companies here exemplify both areas, she says. “One person’s office app is another’s home-based business app in the making.”

The first demo presenter was the Kauffman Innovation Network, showing its new iBridge network, which is designed to help universities get their technologies off the shelves so they can be commercialized.

The Buildup to DEMO Intensifies

January 30, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Well, it’s 24 hours and counting till the opening of DEMO ’07 tomorrow morning, and the bits are flying. (By the way, here’s the event schedule.) The blogs are lighting up, traffic tripled to yours truly yesterday, and the pre-announcement news releases are starting to hit my in-box. The first was from BUZ Interactive, which has designed a way to send personalized voicemails, mixed with music, to any mobile phone on the planet without having the phone ring. More news just arrived from ThePort.com, which has gone live with the download for its Blerts desktop RSS alerter (Windows only for now). [A quirk about some of the companies on the alphabetical DEMO presenters list — their service or product name is not what they’re listed under, so don’t look under “B”.]

Over at TechCrunch, I’m not surprised to see a post on Splashcast, a cool new Flash player to embed your channels on a website, since it’s where TechCrunch contributor Marshall Kirkpatrick has been working. (Though he, of course, did not write this post — Nick Gonzalez did.) Turns out Marshall has been blogging at the SplashCast web site for some time.

Meanwhile, Pete Cashmore at Mashable did a great post last night called Social Networking at DEMO – Standards Higher than Usual? It’s an excellent rundown of what we can expect in this category over the next two days at the conference.

Who will win the coveted DEMOgod awards? That we’ll learn at the closing media-panel dinner on Thursday evening. The panel will be moderated by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, and will include Victoria Barret, associate editor of Forbes, Larry Magid, tech columnist and CBS News contributor, and Laetitia Mailhes, correspondent for Les Échos. For some insight into the DEMOgod phenomenon, check out a blog post from my old Conferenza colleague, Gary Bolles, about the recent Churchill Club event in San Francisco. I also note that Conferenza is now running some breathless blogging by Sam Perry out in chilly NYC at the AlwaysOn Media conference, which overlaps with DEMO.

More from the desert soon….

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