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.

Tag: Aaron Fulkerson

Some of the Great People I Met at GSP and ETech

March 9, 2008 / / 0 Comments

As a followup to my previous blog posts and innumerable Twitters (starting on March3) about the Graphing Social Patterns and ETech conferences this past week, I just wanted to say-hey to all those I met or ran into — at least those I got cards from. It was fun chatting with all of you, and I look forward to staying in touch! After all, we’re supposed to be "social" at these things, right?  In fact, please Facebook me and/or hook up with me on LinkedIn (see links just to the right in my sidebar), if we aren’t already connected (or I will do that from my end). Timoreillyonstage

Hello again to the following folks I already knew and ran into at GSP or ETech (listed alphabetically):
•Sean Ammirati, VP at mSpoke and ReadWriteWeb contributor (PA)
•Dan Carroll, CEO, Intelligent Media Platform and Somr.org (formerly Minneapolis, now Mountain View)
•Rick Enrico, CEO, JuiceMedia (San Diego)
•Aaron Fulkerson, Cofounder, Mindtouch (San Diego)
•Chris Gammill, Web Product Marketing Consultant (LA)
•Dan Grigsby, uber-developer, Unpossible.com (MN)
•Alex Iskold, CEO of AdaptiveBlue and ReadWriteWeb contributor (NJ)
•Jeremiah Owyang, new Forrester Research analyst rockstar (SF) Etechcrowdstage

And it was great meeting all these new people (listed alphabetically); apologies to those I may have missed because I didn’t get a card:
•Bill Binning, CMO, Jaduka (TX)
•Ben Benner, CTO, Jaduka (TX)
•Derek Dukes, Founder, Dipity (SF)
•Pete Forde, Partner, Unspace (Toronto)
•Chris Hendricks, VP Bus Dev, Travature (San Diego)
•Kristofer Layon, Web Project Coord, U of MN (Go, Gophers!)
•Ian Kennedy, Product Mgr, MyBlogLog/Yahoo (SF)
•Sanyu Kirulata, Queen’s School of Business MBA candidate (Canada)
•Vince Kohli, CEO, BizInnovativ (NJ)
•Chris Messina, Citizen Agency/DISO-project.org (SF)
•David Recordon, Open Platforms Technical Lead, SixApart (SF)
•Jodee Rich, CEO, PeopleBrowsr.com (Sydney)
•Jeff Roberto, Marketing/PR Director, Friendster (SF)
•Jason Rubenstein, Cofounder, Just Three Words (LA)
•Todd Sampson, Cofounder and Dir-Tech Mktg, MyBlogLog/Yahoo (SF)
•Maria Sipka, CEO, Linqia (Spain via Sydney)…and she surfs, too!

I hope those of you who read this will let me know what you thought of the events (just email me at graeme at thickins dot com). Best of luck to all of you in your current endeavors! And I certainly hope our respective social graphs continue to intersect in good ways….

Getcodingopensocial

[By the way, if you’d like to get access to any speaker presentation files from either event, they’re being posted on the following pages, which the O’Reilly people said are being updated as speakers choose to add their slides:
– GSP speaker presentations (this is the specific page at Slideshare.net where speakers were asked to post their slides)
– ETech speaker presentations (a page on the O’Reilly site that has several postings already, and I assume more will be added ongoing).
Keep checking these links if you don’t see what you want.]

UPDATE 3/10/08: To update link for GSP speaker presentations.

UPDATE 3/17/08: To give you yet another link to the GSP presentations, this one the official O’Reilly page, which recently went live: Graphing Social Patterns West 2008 – Presentation Files.

DEMOfall 07: What I Like So Far

September 25, 2007 / / 0 Comments

The Bayview Lawn at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina was buzzing bigtime starting at 6:00 last evening to kick off DEMOfall 2007. Georgeous weather, sumptuous food, great friends, new people from all over the place, and tech talk flying in every direction. Does it get any better than this? I was so busy meeting new people and getting pitched, I didn’t even have a chance to shoot many photos. Demofall07party
Okay, one decent shot, and here it is: (from left) Marc Orchant, newly of Blognation…Aaron Fulkerson, cofounder of Mindtouch (who just who strolled over from his offices)…Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods…and Luis Villalobos, founder of Tech Coast Angels. [Man, I love the mixes I can put together at these events!] But if you want to see more photos, just check out these from Brian Solis, who does much better than I ever could. (Brian, you da man.)

But what new stuff did I hear about at the party that I like?  Well, for starters, Naomi Wall, content dev chief at MetaRADAR, told me they’ll be introducing a "media masher" that brings all your rich media content together, bridging the gap between websites, desktop apps, and mobil devices. And I also was glad to run into the guys from mSpoke in Pittsburgh (yes, some of those smart Carnegie Mellon dudes) — Sean Ammirati, VP biz dev (a colleague from Read/Write Web, who I’d only met online up till now), and Dave Mawhinney, CEO. They’re launching FeedHub, a whiz-bang new technology to help with your RSS information overload.  We’re talking a personalization engine that dynamically adapts to your reading habits. This is a space I’ve been following, and I just knew we’d be seeing some solutions to this problem soon. Bring it on, baby. A bloke from Manchester, UK, told me about YuuGuu, which lets you instantly share your screen in real-time with anyone, anywhere. Blimey, dude! The founder of LongJump told me about his firm’s online catalog of apps for small business, which can be customized via drag-and-drop. Then, lo and behold, I met a storage startup!  Fusion-io of Salt Lake City I learned will be introducing a revolutionary stroage architecture that puts SAN or NAS on silicon (high-density NAND), with access rates comparable to DRAM with the storage capacity of disk. DEMO says it "may prove to be among the most important products ever to launch" at their events. Yikes! Then, on the way back into the hotel bar [yes, the party continued inside, till God’s knows when], I ran into the the founder of iForem, which has a subscription-free service to store,protect and share intellectual property — an online safe deposit box for businesses and consumers, with a trust account. And then the folks from ideablob (site to
go live later this morning) caught me — we were the last ones on the lawn! — and told me their new venture is funded by
Advanta in Philly [how do all the PA startups find me?] This site is an open
community for small businesses, where members vote on new ideas and get
valuable advice and feedback from one another.  And get this: you can
actually win cash for your idea.

As the evening continued, I had a great chat with my longtime buddies Steve Larsen of Krugle and Shel Israel of Global Neighbourhoods, solving all the world’s problems. Then, it was beddy-bye time so I could get up early and write this post.  More soon!

Wow, It’s Wiki-Wiki Week!

March 15, 2007 / / 6 Comments

First, I hear that MindTouch, which was presenting at the Community 2.0 conference this week in Vegas (which I’m bummed I couldn’t attend), announced the re-launch of its free.pngki site under the new name (and actual Internet domain) “Wik.is”. You can read the press release here. Wikishomepagewmhtalogo The company’s wiki-hosting site was previously located at Wiki.com, but, due to a licensing issue with the domain name operator, MindTouch had to scramble to get its customers’ wikis migrated rather quickly over to a new domain. [More on that later.] I had the opportunity to catch up with Aaron Fulkerson, VP of Product at San Diego-based MindTouch, to do this brief Q&A:

Tech~Surf~Blog: What’s the new site for? And who is it for?

Fulkerson: MindTouch Wik.is gives an organization or individual the ability to integrate a fun and easy-to-use community tool into their existing web site. We offer a free, ad-driven version but, for only $60 a year, users can have an ad-free community wiki that has a consistent look, feel, and navigation with their existing online properties. It’s been my experience that, by giving users a consistent look-and-feel, they’re more inclined to use the technology and participate in the community. The benefits to users of Wik.is include additional and fresh content, community growth, and much more. Wikistypes

Tech~Surf~Blog: Why does MindTouch sponsor this site? What’s in it for you?

Fulkerson: Well, for starters, $60 a year for every organization that upgrades to the Pro version! Seriously, though, we priced the Pro version in order to make the most basic functionality accessible to any organization. We believe that every web site should have a community wiki embedded into it. Wikis are such a powerful and easy-to-use tool that every organization’s web site should have one. At only $60 a year, that’s now a reality.

And, if a user opts for just the free version, we’re still building awareness about MindTouch and our other products. Whether you’re a non-profit or an individual interested in a simple and fun community site, a small business or a large enterprise looking for a community-driven Intranet, or a major media or publishing company seeking a user-generated content strategy, MindTouch has a product that will provide proven benefits. MindTouch is the most comprehensive vendor of wikis, and we’re proving it again.

Tech~Surf~Blog: Explain the “re” launch of this site — what was it before? What will it have from the original site? How is it similar or different?

Fulkerson: Wiki.com was a site that previously licensed our software. MindTouch severed relations with the operator of this site in early November 2006, but, in order to not hurt the end-users of Wiki.com, we allowed Wiki.com to continue to use our software for communities that were already created. Later, in January of this year, when a community member of Wiki.com informed us the operator planned to pull the plug on Wiki.com in 72 hours, we offered to migrate all the content to our servers. We were very concerned that people were about to lose their community and content. It turns out the operator of the site, too, was clearly concerned about this and approved the migration. We worked very hard, almost around the clock, over 48 hours to migrate the sites.

Tech~Surf~Blog: Who is now running Wiki.com (which just also relaunched), and does MindTouch have anything to with it anymore?

Fulkerson: I don’t know the details. We have no involvement with this.

Tech~Surf~Blog: On a side note, how are you and the others who relocated from St. Paul to your San Diego office enjoying your new home?

Fulkerson: I can’t speak for everyone, but my wife and 14-month-old daughter really like Little Italy, as do I — that’s the district where we reside in downtown San Diego. In fact, I love it! It’s a three-block walk to the new office, and I can walk the whole way with a wi-fi connection! There’s a real sense of belonging in the community.

Tech~Surf~Blog: Will you be visiting the Twin Cities again soon?

Fulkerson: I’m really excited to be presenting on a panel at the upcoming Minnesota High Tech Association Spring Conference, on Tuesday, April 10, 2007. I’m looking forward to being back in Minnesota and connecting with friends. [Note: Yours truly is moderating the panel.]

Tech~Surf~Blog: What’s the reaction been to your new Wik.is site so far?

Fulkerson: Traffic has been stellar. [The chart here I grabbed from Aaron’s Flickr page.] We had almost 400 sites register just on March 13! I was suprised. Wikistraffic031306 I really believe the Pro version is exactly what every organization and web site needs in features, and because you can give it a consistent look, feel, and nav. I think about all the organizations I’ve been involved with in the past and know this would be a big help.
[End of Q&A.]

Anyway, back to “Wiki Week.” On the same day as MindTouch makes its announcement, TechCrunch comes forth with a story about another fairly significant development in the wonderful world of wikis: WikiSeek Launches Community Edited Search Engine. WikiSeek is no upstart — it’s two years old and funded to the tune of $5 million by Sequoia Capital.

Just a few days prior, as if to pre-empt the above, the much-hyped new venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales planted another media story: Wikia plans editable Web search engine.

Then, as if this wasn’t enough to make this week extremely wiki-ish, Business Week up and publishes a CEO Guide to Wikis, with several feature articles on the topic — more than you thought you ever wanted to know about wikis. It’s as if someone declared this National Wiki Week!

Meantime, just today, Jimmy Wales’ new Wikia.com venture took a pretty good bashing from one commenter. Search Insider’s Gord Hotchkiss didn’t hold back on his skeptical view of the whole thing in this Mediapost piece: Jimbo Wales And People-Powered Search: A Long Shot.

We all know the human being can only scale so far, but how far can a collective of them scale? I guess that’s the question when it comes to wiki-based search. Can people really ever be expected to do as well or better for search as algorithms can, at least with any speed? And can they be free of politics, as algorithms surely would expect to remain? 🙂 What do you think, is this Jimbo guy smoking something exotic with that “other peoples’ money” he scored for this new deal?

MindTouch Wants to Wow With Wikibox at DEMOfall

September 15, 2006 / / 2 Comments

St. Paul-based MindTouch…no, wait, it’s headquartered in San Diego….no, wait, most of its people are in Minnesota. Oh, who cares — they have a whiz-band new wiki box Mindtouchlogo I’d heard they’d be debuting at DEMOfall week after next. Picked that up at the “MinneDemo” event last week, and I blogged at least a mention of them and Aaron Fulkerson in my recap the next day. Gee, going from “Minne” to the full-on Monty demo at the biggest of all demo venues in the universe — all inside of three weeks! These guys have it goin’ on for a little outfit from Minnesota (or is it San Diego?). Here’s an article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press today that kinda lays it all out — or should I say, lays it on thick? [Example: “the next must-have office machine for small to medium-sized businesses — as common as a fax machine”] I’ll be following up on MindTouch soon, pre or during DEMOfall. Now if we can only get ’em to stop calling their wiki box a “managed office server.” [Can you tell these guys are former Microsofties? Not for the use of the second word, but for the lack of any name cachet. End of editorializing…]

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