Tag: Krugle (Page 1 of 3)

DEMO 09 – A Closing Conversation With Some Buddies…

March 5, 2009 / Graeme / 0 Comments

Graeme Thickins of Tech~Surf~blog has an impromptu, rambling, fun discussion with Steve Larsen, Erik Haus, and Chris Gammill, on the Pavilion showfloor of the DEMO ’09 conference as it winds down. The event was held March 1-3, 2009, in Palm Desert, CA.

Talk about an impromptu podcast! This is kind of a “DEMOgang” thing, as it were…with my longtime buddy Steve Larsen, a serial starup founder and former CEO of Krugle Inc. (just acquired), which he debuted at DEMO ’06 … Eric Haus, a product manager at Zuora … and another buddy, Chris Gammill, who’s a startup advisor in LA and had previously been with a DEMO presenting company, in ’07; he was attending DEMO this time with TechZulu.com, which did video coverage. The four of us just happened to converge to the same table in the midst of some of the Pavilion stations to unwind with a glass of wine — and we ended up having a very fun, weird, rambling bull session on everything from startups, to chemistry experiments, to motorcycles — totally ad hoc stuff, and the discussion ended up being my longest podcast recording of the whole event! Yikes — a 10-meg MP3! At one point, one of the guys asked if I was going to edit it, and I said, hell no, I don’t have time for that. So, here, friends, the full, uncut version… (In the photo, left to right: Chris Gammill, Erik Haus, and Steve Larsen.) What a way to end another great DEMO!

Download the MP3

Zen and the Art of Startup Maintenance: The Story of One Helluva Serial Entrepreneur

May 17, 2008 / Graeme / 1 Comment

I’ve known Steve Larsen for a long time — ten years at least — and, wow, it seems a lot longer in Internet time. Steve is one of those people you feel you’ve always known. He’s one of the guys I respect most in the entire technology industry — a smart marketer, brilliant strategist, and just a top-notch people person and leader. Even though he left the Twin Cities five or six years ago for the fast-lane of the Valley, we still manage to run into each other a few times a year. Graemewstevelarsen
One of those times was at a conference several months ago, where we got to talking [okay, it was over several adult beverages] about how long we’d known each other, and I started recounting the amazing ride this guy has been on since I first worked with him when he was SVP of Marketing at Net Perceptions here in Minneapolis, back in the day. And we decided I should write about him [Steve has this way of making me feel like I’m a really good writer] — that is, track the story of what I thought was just an extremely interesting and unusual background for one guy to have in this crazy startup world, stretching over at least a decade.

So, that’s what I set out to do: a full-blown feature on the life of a serial entrepreneur who just can’t stop, going from one cool gig to another — much like his other life of testing new motorcycles and touring all over the world. You see, Steve likes speed, in more manifestations than one, and is just always on the go. [I remember when he took me for a ride in some hot, new red sports car he’d just bought, taking it up to like 80 mph in about a two-block distance(!), on a lonely stretch of frontage road near the Sofitel. My life flashed before me.] It seemed an interesting mix to me — motorcycles, speed, and the entrepreneurial CEO — that people could relate to. So, I proceeded to put together the basics of an article soon after we met, then continued to tweak it here and there in my extra time on weekends, adding updates along the way. Soon, with some help from one of Steve’s very fine PR folks at PageOne PR, we set out to pitch it to some mags. Well, we didn’t get far till Chief Executive Magazine grabbed onto it, and, to our delight, decided to publish it last week as one of the first articles in its "Entrepreneurial CEO" section. Perfect. If Steve doesn’t fit that label, nobody does. Here it is: Zen and the Art of Startup Maintenance, by yours truly.

I’m delighted that the readers of this fine, long-standing publication are now getting to learn about this very talented guy. I think they’ll learn a lot. And, Steve, my hat’s off again to you! It was a pleasure being about to tell just a part of your amazing story….one that’s really still being written, as the readers of this article will learn. Continued best of luck with Krugle, a company I am convinced will rock the world of code search!

Krugleappliance

You can bet I’ll be following along, and I certainly look forward to being able to relate the next chapter in this very interesting guy’s life. [Okay, Steve, you now owe me another adult beverage at our next conference! Maybe DEMOfall in September? And Defrag, too, in November 🙂 …and…and…]

Krugle Bags Amazon Deal

October 17, 2007 / Graeme / 0 Comments

We interrupt this coverage of Widget Summit for news about code-search site Krugle announcing a deal that will help software developers more easily find code within the Amazon Web Services developer network.
I was just sitting here in the lobby of the Palace Hotel, where the Web 2.0 Summit is getting underway, killing some time before I head for SFO, when the news popped up. Steve Larsen, Krugle’s CEO, just told me by email that his company’s code search tools are now "in front of one-third of the world’s 14 million developers." That’s big, dude. Congratulations.

DEMOfall 07: What I Like So Far

September 25, 2007 / Graeme / 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!

DEMO Alumni Party Packed ‘Em In

August 15, 2007 / Graeme / 0 Comments

I don’t know how many people actually showed up last night at Zibibbo in Palo Alto, but the DEMO folks said more than 500 had pre-registered. It’s a good thing they reserved the whole place for this affair — bar, patio, restaurant — because they needed every bit of that space. It was close quarters! But fun, and I saw many old friends, colleagues, and clients, and met some other interesting people. I thought I’d come pretty far, flying in from Minneapolis just in time (and staying today to do some other business), till I learned some other dude had come from France!

The roster of company founders and their VCs and PR people at this gala was pretty amazing. I could name drop, but I won’t. You could look at my Flickr pix of the party, though, and maybe pick out some you know. The list of companies that DEMO has launched, over some seventeen years, is nothing short of remarkable. What a record this conference has. You can read all about that at Demo.com. And, while you’re there, sign up for DEMOfall ’07 in September in San Diego. I’ll be there with bells on.

Here’s a selection of some on my (bad) photography from last evening. Hey, it’s not easy trying to swill wine with a notebook in one hand and a camera in the other! ….while engaging in charming banter 🙂 Well, trying to, anyway.