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: Storage Visions

Some of the Great People I Met at BlogHaus and CES

As a final wrapup of my experience last week in networking of the face-to-face kind — in and around the largest trade show in the country, CES — I thought I’d do what I often do after these things: list the people I met. Most of the these were due to BlogHaus, which is the main reason I made the trip, and where I spent most of my time Sunday through Wednesday noon. Bloghaussign_1 I also attended an event called Storage Visions over the weekend, a press event called Showstoppers on Monday evening, and a party on Tuesday evening sponsored by Blog Business Summit. (See all my previous BlogHaus and CES posts. And my Flickr set, such as it is, you can find here. My friend Doc Searls’ set is sooo much better, and I actually show up in one of his shots. Also see Thomas Hawk’s great photo-documentary of the event on his very own photo-sharing site, Zooomr — and I’d encourage you to sign up for the service.)

Anyway, back to all the people I met — at least the ones I remember (apologies to those for whom I didn’t get a card to remind me!):
• From PodTech:
– John Furrier
– Linda Furrier
– Robert Scoble
– Maryam Scoble
– Valerie Cunningham
– Jeremiah Owyang
– Chris Coulter

• From Seagate:
– Bill Watkins, CEO
– Julie Still
– Brian Ziel
– Woody Monroy

And these others, in no particular order:
– Gabe Rivera, Founder, Techmeme
– Andru Edwards, CEO, GearLive
– Lionel Menchaca, chief blogger, Dell
– Thomas Hawk, Founder, Zooomr
– James Courtney, Skype Journal
– David Berkowitz, 360i.com
– Nicholas Butterworth, Diversion Media & Travelistic
– Oluf Nissen, HP and GeekTieGuy.com
– Betsy Weber, evangelist, TechSmith
– Paul Loeffler, PR, Palm
– Mark Plungy, PR, Yahoo!
– Mike Terpin, CEO, Terpin Communications
– Jennifer Fader, Terpin Communications
– Teresa Valdez Klein, Blog Business Summit
– Sam Abadir, CEO, Broadclip
– Al Carlton, Coolest-Gadgets.com
– Sal Cangeloso, XYZcomputing.com
– Sarah Browne, TheDailyBee blog
– Sandira Calviac, TechAgnostic.com blog
– Rick Calvert, CEO, BlogWorldExpo.com
– Kristian Rauhala, CEO, H2Oaudio
– Dave Botherway, President, Melbourne PC User Group
– Susan Fitzpatrick, CEO, Dateline Media
– Ron Nissen, investor, Bluebox Devices (Melbourne)
– Robert Yearsley, CEO, Bluebox Devices
– Benno Rice, Chief Architect, Bluebox Devices
– Angus Robinson, CEO, AEEMA (Australia)
– Barbara Adams, Australian Trade Commission
– Annette Ahern, US Consulate, Melbourne

At the Storage Visions event:
– Lee Gomes, Wall Street Journal
– Mark Walker, Seagate
– John Freeman, Strategic Marketing Decisions
– Tom Coughlin, producer of the event
(whom I already knew)
– Jim Porter, Disk/Trend (ditto)

Others I also knew but ran into again:
– Doc Searls
– Buzz Bruggeman
– Keith Shaw, NetworkWorld and DEMO
– also met Jason Meserve of NetworkWorld

Whew! I met a lot of great people on this trip. And I look forward to staying in touch with them. I know I’ll be seeing some again very soon at the DEMO ’07 event — for example, PodTech, the developers of the wonderful BlogHaus concept! What a super idea they had, and what a great client they have in Seagate who agreed to be lead sponsor. It was indeed a marketing and PR coup for them! Thanks again to both organizations.

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CES Post 1: “The Year of Glass”

It’s Sunday late afternoon in Vegas, and I’m in the BlogHaus at the Bellagio. Very cool setup in the suite here (stand by for some pix later), Just chatted with Robert Scoble, and he told me they have an amazing amount of bandwidth — the best anywhere here, I’m sure. He said some 400 bloggers RSVPed, many at the last minute, a lot of ’em to take advantage of the ‘Net access, no doubt. So this place will get busy — especially after the Gates keynote, which is about to fire up at the Venetian. Right now, there are probably 50-60 people here.

But back to my first post from Vegas. Actually, this one’s not about CES per se, but rather a pre-event I attended yesterday and today called Storage Visions, across the strip at The Flamingo. Storagevisions A presentation this morning by Steve DiFranco, VP of sales and marketing for AMD, was interesting. He said that in the next three years, more glass will be sold than in the last 30! And a lot of that glass it for things we look at (not through, like windows), meaning all the many displays we have in our homes and offices on computers, TVs, phones and what have you. “This phenomenon has gone almost unnoticed,” he said. But, as you increase the amount of glass, he said, “you have to increase the amount of content you put on it” — which is certainly a focus of both this event and CES. “There are now multiple places to view content in our homes,” DiFranco said, and really everywhere we go. “And our houses must become more aware of content,” he said, referring to the huge opportunity in home networking devices (and his firm undoubtedly has some things up its sleeve in this regard).

“The real problem is the disorganization of this content,” DiFranco said. “Consumers must become content managers.” When the house gets connected, there will be less need for storage on individual devices, he explained, and more need for a “bit bucket” type of device, meaning central storage.

“The ‘connector’ becomes the next big thing after all the glass you’ve just bought,” DiFranco said. In fact, this may be the Year of Glass, but he says next year will be the “Year of the Connector.”

Today’s plugged-in consumers he called the “exposed generation” — meaning their desire to share content, a la YouTube and MySpace, et al. But, he said, they really don’t care where their stuff is stored. “So it will go where it’s cheapest and easiest to access.”

An interesting point DiFranco made in closing was that you’ll see amazingly little in the way of “the connector” at CES this year.

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