Saturday, March 31, 2007

Barcamp at Web 2.0 Conference called Web2.0Open

web 2.0 conference in SFO has decided to include a barcamp model piece called Web2.0open
where an attendee can create a real-time conference by posting a topic and speaking on it like a Barcamp.

I've been thrilled to be part of the Barcamp community at Boston, was pleasantly surprised at the real-time comments on blogs and podcast on my talk "Technology Commercialization - Concept to Business"

At Web2.0Open, I am debating on what topic to speak, so please help me out with your feedback.

The buring Web2.0 topics dear to my hear are the following, so help me pick one of them with feedback, questions . . .

1. Building a Web 2.0 community site - tools and techniques, more like success or horror stories focusing on good CED process/tools, using Open source CMS like Joomla with Community Builder vs building custom.

My main take on a web 2.0 site is not about just using AJAX, but how live the site it - showcasing users acceptance and live updates like scraps on orkut, or list of communities growing on mybloglog.

2. Web 2.0 Community Models - The user is incharge in a web 2.0 site. What makes different types of user communities online and what are the tools and best practices available to build, market, engage, grow and monetize different types of web 2.0 communities.

This is a topic I've been researching and playing with several pet projects. I'll start by sharing my Google spreadsheet comparing web 2.0 community sites, will focus on different marketing and revenue models from real life experience of my experiments and from entrepreneurs I have interviewed for my other blog Startupstories.com

3. My ever favorite - building startups from concept to launch. I loved the energy of the audience at BarCamp Boston when I presented this. I would like to expand this with more current experiences observed from the startups I advice and from those I mentor at MIT Venture Mentor Services.

If you are going to be at Web2.0Open, say hi, I'd love to meet you. Let me know your comments or questions on these topics. Look forward to it :-))

Friday, March 23, 2007

Geek Entrepreneurs at BarCamp Boston

I helped organize BarCamp Boston2 by finding space at MIT and then moved to Bay Area!

I love the entrepreneurial energy of all the smart Boston Geeks at Barcamp. Wish I were there!

Thanks for simon of Isabont.com, the jobseekers CRM site who led me to this video of the programming contest that happened in BarCamp Bostob 2 Mar 17-18, 2007.



Saturday, March 17, 2007

Silicon Valley's Favorite F-word by Guy Kawasaki - Part1

Guy is awesome, so authentic a person.

I took his talk at Stanford "Silicon Valley's Favorite F-word- Failure on Mar 1 at Stanford "as a several part video.

Part 1 - he says not trying is the biggest failure.



He said, silicon valley is used to so many successes its forgetful and forgiving of failures, so just do it!

I've tried to zoom onto the audience as Guy was amazing at making us laugh and connect with all audience 180 I think, all around him and above in a gallery too.

I'll upload more videos soon.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Failure - Silicon Valley's Favorite F-Word

The best part of my moving to Silicon Valley is that I can hear Guy Kawasaki talk this evening at Stanford. His topic is Silicon Valley’s Favorite F-Word — Failure

Guy's provocative honesty has been my inspiration in this blog. I hope to record and bring you some piece of the event.

You know my F-word story

I meet so many people daily in my exploration to find my place in the valley and recall several options I had to close Coola gracefully. As I had a good advisory and investors everyone presented options when we were close to closing. It was trying to evaluate them to understand the core of what was my company - my team and I decided I'll take any option that would keep jobs for my team and keep Coola technology alive for my customers.

Most options were trying to buy me personally for my success in getting GE Medical account for such a small company, there was even an option from an Asian firm that wanted to buy us for the loss we showed in our books, but the rate at which these options came and from people 3 degrees of separation away who wanted to help us to do favors to one of our advisors or investors was mind-blowing.

So thinking of failure, I think its important to understand how one can lose a piece of their soul in losing integrity by choosing what I call as "declaring victory" options to close, which you select knowing you are actually failing but think the world won't be able to see it.

I took a longer path as we auctioned out our office desks and everything and moved out to share offices with another fellow startup to buy time to decide if closing was the only viable option. When you fall from a height, it softens your landing if you take multiple steps.

In the end, what matters to me is that I can talk about this fondly and know the taste of success upto a point and am back tasting the joy of building a great startup with a great team.

SV Web Builders Event - World Premier of Opera with builtin video support

Attended SVWebBuilder meeting tonight at Yahoo offices in Sunnyvale. Great group, great energy, the tech group I've been looking for in the valley. Bess Ho is definitely a great organizer, dedicated volunteer like Navdeep Jhimb took care of all details.

It was called Browser War: Episode II - Attack of the DOMs .

It featured a panel by Chris Wilson Group Manager of IE from Microsoft, Mike Shave founder of Firefox and Hakon Wium Lie founder of Opera and CSS.

Mike and Chris were very personable and presented a pleasant evening while we waited for Hakon Wium Lie to reach after 22 hrs of flight from Europe.

I'll write again as I have lot of videos and the whole discussion is worth sharing.

Hakon dazzled us with an alpha preview of Opera showcasing his proposal to include videos in web browsers natively.

He also showed Opera on a coola $1K PC.