Passion drives me: People, Tech Innovation, Change. Building Amazing Product Experiences to drive business Growth. Vegetarian Foodie. Aspiration: a limitless world. Empowering people is my thing. Author of IoT Disruptions. Mobile & IoT Instructor at Stanford
Blogging live from Mobilize08 now! Rich Miner keynote on mobile industry landscape going on now!
My quick live summary:
He first set the stage of whats new, why industry is at a tipping point. - iphone launch, Android announcement, new wave of openness.
Next he talks about his experience at Orange as a developer and Orange ventures and addresses the challenges:
app signing for each carrier, each network
jave programming is fragmented for app dveloper,
rev share deals for carriers is each different and time consuming for app
developers.
diff between native apps on phones vs java app of developer cannot talk to each other.Why mobile isimportent
Why is Mobile important? 3Bil mobile phone users worldwide, 1 Bil in US for Google to reach its vision.
Then he talks about Android Framework - Linux Kernal -Navtive apps can talk to third party app with seamless integration. - power to developers - long tail of internet now brought to mobile space - lessons for carriers to think differently to monetize using ads and micropayments and not build walls around content
I feel nostalgic from my first startup Coola experience as we built a device agnostic mobile middleware to connect apps on mobile to web services, we built on Palm Os and added CE client in 2000. Wish Android existed then!
The most interesting part of this talk is his simplicity at expressing the power of Android as the power of developers and the promise to make Android opensource eventually.
Where are we going with livestreaming? Oh I wish my iphone would do Qik without a jailbreak!
Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, All Things Digital, Wall Street Journal
Panelists Bret Taylor, Co-founder, FriendFeed Loic Le Meur, Founder, Seesmic Jeff Clavier, Founder, Softtech VC Leah Culver, Co-founder, Pownce
See you there!
Update: The panel was fun. Lot of discussion about the future of real time sharing on the web. Bret Taylor of Friendfeed is so sincere and committed to build a fundamental long-term business.
Seesmic looks more interesting to me after hearing the entertaining and smart ceo Loic Le Muer who is super active on twitter.
I took lots of video, most turned out to be greater than 100MB which is youtube's limit. Kara cracked up her moderator whip and get everyone focused on their b-model, what they have learnt as entrepreneurs with her quick wit and kept us on our seats.
I am excited about Yahoo App with Opensocial, their new YML and the architecture of Yahoo OS looks good.
There is good developer energy, I see lot of known faces from the facebook world - Jia Shen of Rockyou, Waleed od Weekend Apps etc. Is Jia going to get us a full set of Yahoo Apps next? very cool
Next Yahoo Apps overview is starting, I'll get some video of it. Ciao.
I have been lucky to be involved with the awesome DEMO Conference team so passionately focused on helping 72 new game changing startups launch the next wave of products for the past two days in San Diego at Demofall.
The icing on the cake was the spontaneous call by the demo entrepreneurs this evening, who decided to take 6 seconds each to share their appreciation for what demo meant to them and their launch experience at the closing demogods award ceremony dinner.
Here is a quick video which I streamed live onto Chris Shipley's Qik stream using her phone. It was a special moment shared by everyone at demofall tonight and I could not have captured it except for the Qik. Thank you Qik team!
Demo is truly about the entrepreneurs and run so professionally with such eye for detail. Its heart-warming to see the entrepreneurs sincere comments. Good luck to all of them, see you at the next DEMO.
Look at the audience excitement! More cool startups launching today.
Here is Katie of WSJ talking about Web2.0 companies she saw at demo today!
I personally like Heycosmo.com and Koollage from today's demos particularly.
Demo organizes the event such that each startup gets 6 minutes on stage and everyone gets to watch the demos with no distraction. Then they open the pavilions where the startups each have a booth. I'll checkout the companies there and write again.
Blogging live from demofall08 - Funny, can't capture this totally, going to try and capture the key topics.
Kara Swisher vs Walt Mossberg on latest tech topics! Kara- Chrome, why Mossberg gave a negative review? Walt - no bookmark manager, etc features walt expects. Speed is not ready for prime time. Google is worried that MS their competitor controls IE hence rush to launch Chrome. Kara - Google is large and powerful, do they have to do the browser. Walt - Google believes in webapps, so Google says think of this as a platform. gmail has done well, still behinf y!mail, but docs slow. So you could think of Chrome as a web operating system. Walt likes IE8 is good, both IE and Chrome have promise to compete with firefox. Kara - Google becoming too powerful? MS inOS, Apple in music, Google reaching that close to 70% almost a monopoly in advertising. Kara thinks its like a choice between terminator vs Voldemart.
Social Network, facebook (OH How I disagree with this part of the talk !!!) Kara - In two yrs facebook is not a bigdeal. She compares facebook to AOL. Walt - social network as a destination site, will it exist in 2 yrs. Kara - thinks its not going to be one destination site. Walt thinks facebook can survive if they syndicate across the web. He likes Xobni.
Iphone
Waltarticulates amazing adoption of iphone apps. iphone, Rim and Android. He addresses bandwidth - broadband speed in US. Kara says US is 3rd world of broadband speed in the world. Kara likes all smart phone touch pad, mobile browser in all.
Q&A now: Role of internet standards?
Q&A: Why are they at demofall and not TC50. Kara- Getting leactures on journalism ethics by Arrington is like getting parenting tips from Britney spears. It is uneccessary to be rude and compete on the same dates, it doesn't help the entrepreneur. Walt - added that demo is the best place to find new products and trends, it never occured to me to not come to demo ever.
Walt and Kara have summarized the spirit of all attendees here at demofall, with all excitement on the new products and entrepreneurs!
Chris had a creative colorful welcome by stick figures dancing which is part of demo tradition. She gave a very eloquent summary of where the info tech world is moving. Web1.o as we all know it, web2.0 which is transactional web, social web, and now coming up the distributed web.
Trying to get part1 of her keynote video to youtube.
This is followed by cool demos.I am doing a tweet of startups I find exciting. I am trying to blog, tweet, check my iphone if a demoer has an app and also take video all at once, so you are better off by just watching my friendfeed or demos' official friendfeed
Cool demos - gloop - peer to peer photo sharing, ffwd=web meets tv, ioSAN fast storage for IT, invision.tv, bluelave technologies, paperless pens etc etc etc, all cool stuff.
I am in San Diego for demofall08 and plan to blog live as best as I can.
Today the conference opened with a reception at 6pm. All through the day entrepreneurs were seen huddling in small groups charging the air with their upcoming launch excitements.
I had first come to Demofall2000 to launch my first startup Coola and it set the bar high for me about a product launch and induced in me the excitement for startup energy and for tracking new trends in technology.
I am up at this hour as I am too charged with my conversation with Walt Mossberg today. I had an amazing conversation about my past dreams for mobile space from my Coola experience, and his views about mobile devices today - iphone, android, windows mobile and Palm and my favorite topics - Dash, facebook and social media!
I am always a fan of Walt, but his clarity of thinking and ability to capture the history of tech industry and articulate where it can go is very refreshing.
What a difference I feel as an attendee instead of an excited, naive entrepreneur! I am curious about the attendees and will try to capture the real mood here and my learnings for the next two days!
I am listening to Dave Morin present Facebook Connect from Blue Chalk Cafe in Palo Alto.
Julia Lam has done an awesome job with the logistics and facebook developers have loaded this place with amazing energy and support for facebook platform.
7pm: I. Dave Morin presents Facebook Connect
It can be summarized in 3 key points: Feed, Friends, Identity
a) Friends - Facebook has your real friends. b) Social Context acts as a filter You can learn more about your friend if you knew the same friend was on digg and had a certain preference. c) Identity/Dynamic Privacy People share on facebook because of the privacy setting. Dynamic privacy is all about user control. With dynamic privacy with fb connect users can take this comfort level to the web. When you change privacy setting on facebook, it will reflect on a fb connected web site.
Mike Vernal fb connect engineer presents an App "The Run Around"
Features to show in detail:
Connect users to your site
Option for user to publish an action to facebook.
Friend linking - finding friends on a site who are also my facebook friends.
1. Track state of user to connect user to your site
Facebook tracks three scenarios a) user not logged into site, not logged into facebook, b) user connected to site not facebook and c) session renewal - Checks if user is using the site and allow a session for 20 min. This will ensure active user from a site to allow feeds to facebook.
2. Identifty - Profiles and Logged-In State Fb connect give three choice to developers to select the most natural experience to connect user to their site. a) Embed user info in site using fbml call eg Welcome b) Client library c) Server library
3. Feed - Sharing Content Register set of template that corresponds to type of story to publish to profile. Call Fb.Connect.ShowFeed Dialog.
4. Communication - Server FBML & Requests Client and Server side is relevant fb:serverfbml
5. Communication - Connect Request - connect friends already using that site to connect up their account. Again in three steps to respect user intent and user privacy. Step 1: App developer can suggest connections Step 2: Allow user to send invites Step 3: Register post authorize URL and rotate it.
6. Dynamic Privacy - Putting user in control ON facebook - give user control their privacy and relation with applications On fb connect - user is in control on what info is shared or to opt-out On your site/app - Give tool to developers. Today users can use friend list on facebook to manage different category of users. You can do the same with fb connect to allow different friendlist of users certain access.
7:58pm : Presentations starting now! signing off to take some videos now.
I am at the fb change-athon event which I (from Bay area fb meetup) helped organize it with Waleed of Weekend appds.
Its a developer nirvana! Breakfast, lunch and dinner served with a room full of fb developers sharing their questions, experience and tips to make the most of migrating to the new profile.
Waleed gave a cool presentation about his experience migrating his App to Facebook
He did a part2 which walked through with real code on step by step guidance on migrating to new profile. The Q&A brought up new tips and techniques and some frustration of what didn't work for some developers. I'll update here after I get these two videos up.
I am a believer of grassroots events which propel brands and cut through crap to help us learn what is really happening in any realm of tech space. This is an evolving movement affecting marketing and user generation for brands, similar to how open source impacted software industry.
I am old enough to have started in online marketing with the linkexchange in 95 to portal co-branded deals as traffic drivers to SEO and SEM thru the 2000s and now onto Social Conversations.
So I am here, blogging live from SocialMediaCampSF, I just was lucky to be able to join this amazing energy of grassroots entrepreneurial social media architects.
This is a BarCamp style event where the topic was created on the fly this morning by all attendees. Chris Heur who founded Social Media Club has spearheaded it and am pleased to report its very well organized, theres lot of good presentations and wonderful hallway conversations.
What I mean by Social Conversation
Microblogs like twitter, friendfeed which makes social browsing bringing all our online activities together for a community of people to follow others and engage in a conversation by comments and a simple google style UI to add a "like" to link an item to our feed.
Ok, I am a huge friendfeed fan, but what I love is they have so many widgets and APIs to seamlessly adapt friendfeed into your online life, its such a natural way to have a social conversation, without stopping to think about it.
Disqus allows integrating of your comments across the web, similar to mybloglog but for dicsussions.
Some presentations I am seeing and liking here today below includes another social conversation or social browsing tool.
1pm: I saw a demo of Yoona by their evangelist Kevin.
Yoona is a sponsor of this socialmediacamp and they showed a demo. Compared to friendfeed to show socialbrowsing with a Firefox plugin. I'll try it out and update my comments here. Its a young, promising looking startup.
1.30: David Cohn is presenting spot.us crowd funding for journalism.
It is kiva style community funded citizen journalism. This looks very very promising. Dave is so sincere in his presentation. Summary - users fund $10 or so to consolidate funds to pay a journalist to get a story, all driven by local community. He has started with a grant from Knight Foundation and he is testing it in Bay Area first. He has checks and balance in place to provide validated real content and took good Q&A.
update: 3pm: Qik Live streaming by Qik's Rishi and Daniel
http://qik.com/video/130494
This is a product demo of QIk live video , nice. Daniel did a live Qik of the room and it was funny we could see our audience live as he moved his hands to talk at http://qik.com/appleuniverse. Good quality video.
Its an exciting day today at work at Dash Navigation and my customer's world of Dash Drivers as Dash kept its promise to improve software and add features with an over the air software update to its first Internet Connected GPS "Dash Express".
As someone immersed in customer conversations at the grass roots level daily, I want to thank our customers who spoke to us and led us to prioritize and bring them just what they wanted next.
I am someone who has consolidated all my net activity on facebook. Every worthwhile site has a facebook app - twitter, wordpress blog etc.
Then came friendfeed. I was introduced to it as a simple facebook app and I could integrate everything worthwhile outside of facebook world to follow friends and find feeds of their activities, interests.
Private vs Public Social Graph: The main difference is that friendfeed is a public world of everything thats open for all to see from the people I follow or the friends who follow me. Facebook is my private world of pictures and comments shared by my circle of friends thats not archived for the world to randomly read.
Seinfeld of the Internet: Friendfeed has become the first site to pull me out of facebook to read random twitter feeds and multimedia digged or bookmarked or commented or shared on flickr or youtube - like a reality tv show in short bursts . Someone called Friendfeed the Seinfeld of the Internet (ping me if you know who said that). But its more than TV, you have control on when you flip channels and read feeds of friends or surf through the tinyurls of links your friends want you to read or get engrossed in a discussion of comments (a lot by Robert Scoble) as if you crashed into a cocktail party discussion about a random topic.
The problem is many of my friends on facebook are on friendfeed. They use twitter to say where they are, facebook status doesn't do it for many. My real dilemma came when I had to decide on where I should post an album of pictures after my facebook meetup. Flickr makes it public for the world. Facebook pictures add a personal angle as my friends acknowledge they saw it by tagging it. Same for videos, youtube is my favorite and I have a channel and followers., but facebook video manages support for all size and formats of videos and friends can tag. I chose to defer the problem and continue to use both with sometimes redundant efforts and friendfeed app feed showing redundant feeds of pictures on flickr while my friends on facebook have already seen the pictures on my minfeed.
Enter Facebook's minifeed imports:
Today I noticed Facebook has a simple "import" option in mini-feeds on a profile. And guess what? We have the choice of importing actions from our public sites onto our minifeed.
One first look this could bring the friendfeed functionality inside facebook feeds, but since we all see what our social graphs show, I think friendfeed is entrenched and its hard to expect my friends to adopt the minifeed as their discussion community with comments. Facebook will have to do more to make this import of minifeed (wish it had a better name than that) to be visible to the world and not lost in my minifeed.
On a different note, this import of minifeed could be facebook's attempt to make the profile page an engaging piece of facebook and allow "profile surfing" as is available on bebo.
Choice is good, but this is not enough to take me away from facebook or friendfeed. This could be fun for us as users if friendfeed survives as a standalone company, else this becomes a smart move by facebook to build friendfeed functionality before Google or MS buys friendfeed.
DEMO Party in SF rocked! ok, it was crowded, very crowded with 600 people! Thanks to Ramu of Qik, I managed to capture live videostream of parts of the event in a single click from a N95.
Rafe Needleman shared his nostalgia of how he was involved in the early days in 89 with Steward Alsop and had a demo story about being a repeat demo alum.
Many had been there many times, some PR folks had taken companies to DEMO, some newcomers wanted to go there soon! Its phenomenal on how Chris Shipley goes around the globe and spots the winner companies and provides the fertile launch pad to succeed.
The beauty of the party was many many interesting conversations. I caught some on video as DEMO Stories that I am collecting for DEMO's facebook fan page. Ping me if we you have a demo story, the goal is to share our Demo experience on facebook and start some interesting conversations, you never know, something good will come out of it!
I am a DEMO alum from 2000 and have since taken two companies to DEMO, one as VP Marketing in Fall07, and another as startup advisor in DEMO08 . I blogged about last year's DEMO party.
Tonite is the 2008 DEMO Alum party in San Francisco! 600 people have signed up. You can follow DEMOtweets or watchout for the Qik live video streaming I plan to do for you!
If you are at the party and have a DEMO story as an entrepreneur, VC or Corporate Development person, I'd love to chat with you.
We have couple interns in Boston and Bay Area and can always add more if you want to do some DEMO story interviews anywhere in the world.
It is a lisenced under Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), which follows the Mozilla Public License (MPL) with the addition of allowing web services.
What does this mean for the developers?
This is facebook's response to Google's opensocial?
Facebook has 400K developers while Opensocial has been expanding with an industry wide support with developers trying it but waiting for better than beta quality from Opensocial platform. This move by Facebook deters developers from moving to Opensocial because they can now contribute to the platform and improve it to their own choice.
Choice is good and this makes life interesting for developers. myspace is likely to adapt its platform to Facebook style to get fb developers faster.
What does this mean to the Social Media Wars?
One subtle point that goes un-noticed in any analysis I've seen so far is that the lisense has been expanded to include Web services. This is the most interesting piece. This is in line with Facebook's promise of Facebook Connect whereby they plan to open up the social graph to allow access from any web service. This is the bigger step in the Social Media war with Facebook Connect being Facebook's response to Google's FriendConnect and everyone comparing Facebook Connect to FriendFeed etc.
Where is Bebo in all this?
Over the weekend I played with Bebo and wanted to understand the comparison with Facebook platform to see if Bay Area Facebook Meetup would like to see a bebo demo about Facebook migration. Interesting enough I connected with my facebook friends on bebo and haven't heard back from anyone who logged back into bebo. Ok Dave McClure is busy with GSP East, what is everyone's excuse?
I wonder what is the impact for Bebo which has the same Facebook platform lisenced which is not opensourced, right after Bebo's aquisition by AOL. Is this another influence on Facebook's decision to opensource the platform?
What do you think as a developer? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Yday evening, May 29th, 600 of us lined up in Palo Alto outside Aquaris Theater for the 1 year anniversary of facebook platform. Caitline O'Farrell pulled off an awesome garage seamlessly again this year!
Ben Ling of Facebook presented a review of the first year of the platform 400K developers from 160 countries in 1 year! And from the audience, its going on strong!
This was followed by a video of the 1 yr anniversary by facebook team here
New Facebook Profile Page
The bulk of the evening was spent, facebook style on really sharing their excitement for the new profile page changes planned and getting feedback from users and listening to them.
Dave Morin gave a presentation about the new profile page. Youtube will not allow large videos and restricts formats, here is the video on facebook!
My Summary:
The new profile page is going to be a totally different look and feel with tabs for everything.
It takes the base philosoply of facebook treating apps as keeping the platform fresh and allows users engagement with apps to produce new content on their profile.
A new feeds item is going to allow feed notification of profile items to show what a user's friends are upto beyond the current news feed. Feels like a comparison to friendfeed, but for everything facebook only, including apps on facebook. This is the coolest feature!
Apps don't have to be installed and this means work for the developer with opportunity to win with engaging apps as each engagement can showcase content on the profile
Q&A by facebook team about Profile Page and its impact on developers and users
The entire platform team was there and listened and answered questions. I thought I got it when I saw the presentation and demo, but the audience had real good questions. I've tried to capture all Q&A, pl ping me if something is amiss!
Q. Waleed started the first question about box profile. Is the box like the canvas page? Yes but no flash auto play allowed in the box (waleed help fix this, there was more to your q&a)
Q. Jesse Stay asked: Can we comment on the feeds we see in a friends' profile. No. My comments: I've refrained from an analysis and to present the Q&A as I saw it for the benefit of fb fans everywhere who couldn't join us. However, this question brings about the general sentiment that users are looking at this new feed as similar to friendfeed. I think commenting on a friend's profile would be cool. We could always do so with a wall post, so why not allow it in context of each feed item? - imho.
Q. Any limits to number of tabs? 6 tabs UI wise is the limit. Additional apps will be added to a drop down menu. User will have the option to re-order the tabs to their choice.
Q.Any change to App directory? None.
Q. What explicit integration points does app developer has without asking user for explicit permission? Apps can publish stories. User needs to give permission to add app to profile box and Tabs.
Q. Support for apps developed with Flash in feed dialog? Adding flash info to short stories is coming. Feed form - is in the works, not yet ready. A flash developer can use FBJX bridge and do feed forms for now.
Q.Any plans to redesign profile on iphone? Not at this time
Q. Today wall attachments allow us to give free gifts (or other app interaction) to a user who has not added an apps from a user who has added the app. Will this change? Yes, it will work only for combination of users who both have the app.
Q.Where will facebook ads be in the new profile? TBD
Q. Aggregate of feeds? Ari Steinberg came up specially to explain the profile and news feeds. (I am missing something here, my don't have much, pl help if you heard this question)
Q. Tabs limited to Canvas URL, can there be different URL from server for rest of the App action? (Missed this one too)
Q.How will pages, groups be displayed in the new profile page? They will fit in the info tab. Groups and Page layout will be made to match the new profile layout later. Way to add apps to pages remains the same.
Q. (my Question) How much work is it for a developer an average app to migrate to the new profile page? What happens if they did no change to an App? The new profile offers lot of opportunities for the developer to create content thats part of the new profile for engaging apps. If you do nothing canvas page will remain the same, you app will be bucketed into the tab for user to decide if they want to keep it, and you'll lose all other benefits of user decision points to create visibility in their profile page. (I want to hear from real developers who have let behind first few apps and moved on to newer fb apps on their actual experience on this one)
Q. Can one app add to a user's profile box, boxes, info section, tab etc.? Profile box and boxes are multually exclusive, rest all can be added with user's permission.
Q. Whats new with feeds, we have mini feeds and news feed now, is it totally different, is mini feed gone in the new profile?
mini feed is old and won't exist in new profile.
Profile feed is the narrative of the owner of the profile. It includes wall and apps inside it.
News feed will show show a user's friends are doing.
Publisher is an upgraded wall attachment and goes to profile feed by user.
Q.Will platform allow developer to create your app tab? yes
Q. What is the roll-out schedule? Developers should start getting their apps ready for the new profile page. Users will have a beta opt-in period to try the new profile and give feedback. Then old profile will be eventually discontinued and everyone will be rolled into new profile
Q. Because of App add removal, does this mean an app developer can email users? Yes, only with user's permission. It will be another option to ask for user permission by app.
Q. Last Question by Dave McClure - When can 3rd party Apps message into the news feed of a user who has not installed the app? It is already happening now.
After the Q&A we went to the happy hour at Blue Chalk cafe! Bay Area facebook Meetup folks: Is there any interest in covering this topic in our upcoming meetup? Just post on our fan page wall here
Also, help me clean any omissions or inaccuracies in the Q&A. And do try the sandbox of the new profile here http://www.new.facebook.com/
I admire Mike Speiser because I relate to his approach of defining the startup process with an Engg approach. I heard him from a TIECON07 panel last year as an entrepreneur and am amazed that now as a a VC, he has the same advice, with the same passion and clarity.
He founded Bix, raised $7M, spent $700 when he sold to Yahoo, now he is joining Sutter Hill Ventures.
I am going to upload a video of part of his presentation, will do better justice to his passionate advice for entrepreneurs! (will update here once it is ready)
My summary: I've taken 3 key points and as I sit listening to Mike, I remember many entrepreneurs I know who are in early stages building out their startup either from my blog readers or my mentorees from MIT VMS program and everyone of his advice is so true and profound. 1. Iterate, Iterate and find your real product This is not about speed but about finding the real product-market match that creates revenues. He was making a subtle reference to this other point. The key is not about building technology for the sake of technology or a product thats productizing of your technology by a product manager, but finding a product that generates real revenues with market validation for it.
2. Do not do marketing before your product is ready
As a marketing person and entrepreneur, I find the need to add a clarification here.
Marketing for new entrepreneurs, especially engineers includes everything other than engineering design and development.
I think Mike refers to spending time/focus/money to reach users/customers with outbound marketing efforts like a launch event, PR, speaking engagements, conference exhibits etc. This does not mean you build a product in vacuum, but you as the entrepreneur need to spend time understanding your customer, reaching them and listening to their feedback to adapt your product to iterate to what really generates money directly or scaling excitement of consumers that can be monetized.
This implies for Web businesses (or facebook app based businesses) that you need to build metrics by which you understand your real user behavior and you have to be super aggressive in reaching variety of customers who would pay.
You iterate here as much as the product and be ready for the chaos of change and hire the early team that can survive, appreciate your approach and help you succeed in adapting to customers.
3. Recruit the best VC
Thisis another gem of wisdom here. Focus on building product, finding market validation that scales, then go find the best VC.
Do not select a VC only based on giving out less equity but find the best VC who can help you scale your business, aligned with your long-term vision.
Its been my dream see all local entrepreneurs, angels and startup geeks all over the country connected without losing their local flavors to demystify the startup process for new entrepreneurs!
I came across the Atlanta yenta when I connected with Sanjay Parekh who started Startup Drinks as a world-wide phenomenon from Atlanta, an energetic entrepreneur and fellow angel investor. Sanjay is head down focused on organizing StartupRiot, a cool one day event with 70 entrepreneurs presenting in Altanta on May 19th 2008.
Today I located the Chicago Yenta, and the search process made my day!
During the search I learned that we in the valley tend to rely on upcoming.org for our events, events seem to find me on Facebook, and from my east coast past and as an organizer of the Bay Area Facebook Meetup, I tend to lookup meetup.com for every special interest group.
Chicago is ahead of everyone in sharing events. Techcocktail is on twitter. Techcocktail is the first to bring total transparency and sharing the excitement of the conference planning live on twitter, not just during the event for live micro-blogging.
All of you in Boston, DC, Chicago and Denver, look for Techcocktail in your local area Its amazing startup energy! Tom Sherman maintains a calendar of events in Chicago at Windy Bits ha, local thinking in the name of the windy city!
Footnote: I cannot shake this thought out of my head after Web2.0 Expo, after hearing AOL, Y! and everyone announce open APIs.
Are we getting ready for the next phase of the Web and like Open source movement changed the face of software development, the barcamps, and techcocktails and startup dinners are scaling up the existing SuperHappyDevhouses, developer garages and Code-a-thons to build a huge wave of localized developer and geek networks to create an interwoven web with a new layer of product and services not even imaginable today!
Anyone there who shares the same vision, I'd love to hear from you!
I have covered the keynotes with blogging here ! The main theme was opening of their platforms from Y! Mozilla Firefox for mobile and AOL opening up AIM. AOL is no the most open platform on the web and if you are a developer or entrepreneur you cannot miss it.
Sun's Jonathan shared his vision for Sun and Marc Andresson for Ning. Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs was the most entertaining funny session buried with smart insights in his keynote.
Here is a roundup I did talking to people as I walked the Expo hall. Of course, I carried my Dash Express GPS and people shared their excitement for it!
Watch this to hear web2.0 feedback from Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve jobs, Naveed Anwar, Director AOL Developers Platform and many more users.
