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.
Tag: Google (Page 2 of 6)
As I look forward to DEMO, starting tomorrow evening — a VC lovefest like no other — I really enjoyed reading Forbes.com today. I continue to be impressed by their coverage of tech. It surely has something to do not only with their great reporters and editors (especially in the Silicon Valley bureau), but with their very well respected tech-savvy publisher, Rich Karlgaard, whom I count among my most admired colleagues.
And the fact that he hails originally from the part of the country where I live also makes him very special, too! Though he’s a Stanford boy and has lived in the Valley for many years, he gets back to the Minnesota/Wisconsin/Dakotas area regularly, and I suspect that’s partly because it keeps him feeling grounded to his roots.
Forbes uncorked an awesome set of stories the past couple of days on the current state of VC — well, really tech deal-making in general. It’s all tied to their annual Midas 100 List, which ranks the top tech deal makers in the world. 
It’s fascinating reading.
According to Forbes, companies that venture capitalists helped launch hauled in $34 billion from 86 public offerings and 304 acquisitions during 2007. No less than 31 IPOs happened in the fourth quarter, worth $3 billion — "more than any other quarter since the third quarter of 2000." That’s a very telling stat. Their assessment of who did what, and how much they and their investors profited, can be viewed here by rank, by name, or by company.
Some of the related stories to this coverage included the following, which is great reading for anyone involved in technology startups:
• Big Wins For Venture Capitalists – An excerpt: "Recent credit crunch and market woes be damned: Technology’s most powerful deal makers have been on a winning streak."
• Venture Firms Peek Out Of Silicon Valley – I love this part: "More and more firms are thinking that if they want differentiated deal flow, they need to look outside of Silicon Valley," said Village Ventures co-founder Matt Harris. Village Ventures manages $750 million in funds focused on 14 small cities across the country, from Boise, Idaho, to Tucson, Arizona. This article also includes a profile of a VC from my part of the country: John Neis, co-founder of Madison, WI-based Venture Investors, who’s one of the Midas 100.
• The Golden Google Touch – "Google has been a bonanza for venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz, who helped fund the Google when it was a start-up. Their personal gains, according to Forbes’ estimates, are likely north of $800 million apiece."
• Hot Or Not: Where VCs Will–And Won’t–Invest – "Forbes asked 10 top players to give us their assessments of areas they feel are hot–and which are not."
All in all, a great overview of the current situation, and you’ll see even more links of interest, too. They even have some informative videos posted that are part of this coverage, such as interviews with certain players they cover in these articles. I’m really impressed with the expanded coverage Forbes.com is providing on their site, and the quality of that coverage.
[I’m excited that Tech-Surf-Blog will be part of the Forbes Financial & Business Blog Network when it launches soon. (Yes, that’s part of the reason I’m starting to include ads on this site.) ]
What do you think of the current state of tech deal-making? Are you positive or negative about 2008 when it comes to VC funding, IPOs, or M&A?
The lines were blocks long around Moscone West early this morning, and that was just people wanting to get their badges. The real stuff doesn’t even start till tomorrow morning — the Steve Jobs keynote and the opening of the exhibitor floors. 
From the Starbucks a block away, and now from the media lounge, the best stuff I’ve seen online so far:
• Troy Wolverton’s piece in the Merc News comparing to last year’s event, Macworld: Always cool, but calmer?
• A UK site that reported Job’s keynote speech outline has been spied on the web, which was repeated by another site here: Steve Jobs Macworld 2008 Keynote Speech Leaked on Wikipedia. True? Who knows. (Any Apple employee discovered leaking anything gets summarily fired and forfeits every penny of their financial benefits, based on the contract they sign when they accept employment.)
• Macapper ran this Pre-Show Link Orgy post.
• Mainstream blog Techcrunch reported earlier today about Google Beefing Up the iPhone Interface.
• And I discovered I only need to carry my iPhone to navigate the Macworld showfloor, thanks to this little iPhone app. Great, cuz this laptop bag is already getting heavy….
More soon.
You say you’re feeling down, bunky, because everyone seems to have a Facebook app but you? Well, got a web site? Then, perk up, son! Because you are well on your way to having a social app — one that’ll actually run on a whole bunch of social networking sites that have at least as much traffic as Facebook — and maybe even on Facebook itself soon. At least that’s what Marc Andreessen, founder of social-networking platform Ning, has to say on his blog post today.
It’s all thanks to the "Open Social" spec set to be announced tomorrow by Google, which says it already has about a dozen partners, including Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning,
Friendster, Salesforce.com, and Oracle. See this Wall Street Journal story (actually dated tomorrow!) and this one in the New York Times, which was published today.
So, how can you transform your web site into an "Open Social" app? Andreessen says it’s even easier than developing a Facebook app. He says you "just take your current HTML and Javascript front-end pages and create a version of those pages that use the Open Social API."
Andreessen believes web site owners will soon begin maintaining multiple sets of front-end pages for their web sites, in order to get "maximum distribution across the largest number of users." And he says it’s easy. They’ll have a single back-end, but multiple sets of front-end pages. Here’s how he defines what those multiple sets will be:
• One set of standard HTML and Javascript pages for consumption by normal web browser.
• Another set of HTML and Javascript pages that use the Open Social API’s Javascript calls for consumption with Open Social containers/social networks.
• A third set of pages in FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that use Facebook’s proprietary APIs for consumption within Facebook as a Facebook app.
• Perhaps a fourth set of pages adapted for the Apple iPhone and/or other mobile devices.
"The overwhelming good news here," said Andreessen in his blog post, "is that these pages can all be served and serviced by the same back end code."
I think this "Open Social" spec is big news. It’s something I know a lot of insiders have been been thinking about, at least in the back of their minds, since the Facebook juggernaut took off some five months ago. Walled gardens — proprietary platforms — just don’t last on the Internet. Like my buddy PXLated said in a previous comment, "The Internet just routes around ’em." Indeed. Let the party begin….
UPDATE (11/1): Marc Andreessen did another very informative blog post with a screen cast and screenshots showing how the Open Social spec can be implemented, using three actual Ning social networks as examples.
I’m in SF right now sitting in a Starbucks, ready to head over the Widget Summit, which goes through tomorrow. Check out the sessions and the schedule and tell me what you think. 
Which talks or panels would you most like to sit in on if you were here? What questions would you have for the speakers? Use me — I’m your intrepid conference reporter!
I’m all yours, and I’m all ears….
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