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
I usually blog from real events. Intuit Academy hosted its first virtual conference (vconf) for customers for two days Jan 21 and 22nd 2009 and I had the privilege to attend as their social media strategy consultant.
It was fun and talking to customers is the best way to understand any real business.
Conference Technology: It was a conference in our web browser and once we logged in, it opened a real player plugin and we were in a second life like environment. At first my pc speakers didn't work and it felt strange to watch characters move around quietly, but once it worked, it was very engaging.
There were Exhibits with staff ready to answer (chat) any questions.
There was a lounge area where one could post announcements or just chat with a fellow attendee.
We had a briefcase where you could collect interesting documents for reference later. It was beautifully integrated with Intuit's current web property and the scheduled chat led to a webex session.
It was social only to the extent that we could find other attendees and chat with them any time.
A great start, time and money saver as a virtual conference tool. As for the conference itself, its one of many innovative social media moves to come from Intuit.
Today I remember my first TV watching experience in India when I was 9 and a neighbor bought the first tv in my entire neighborhood and invited everyone to their house on a Saturday evening to watch the one movie they showed in the only channel available.
Not long after, tv became a personal family affair with cable and 100s of channels and in my family now its a personal affair as we got rid of the box and watch hulu for what each of us want when we want! Its of course very social as we discuss Lost and Jon Steward and Seinfeld (nostalgically) with co-workers and friends.
This morning as all America woke up to an exciting day for the inauguration of President Obama, facebook took us to CNN.com live to show the live video stream along with a facebook connect feed.
A Screenshot of cnn live here
This allowed us to sign into cnn with our real identities and bring our real social graph to the site in a side bar to post our status and comment on our friends feeds sharing in the anticipation as we waited for Obama, revelled in beautiful music and poetry, fretted about how it felt to become free from the last 8 years of divisive politics, marvelled at Mrs.Obama's dress, took in the weight of the moment and let the promise of hope and optimism wash us.
Facebook had it setup privacy setting to let us decide to send each status update to go public to everyone and did you notice it allowed us to comment on only the ones made by our friends, all feeding into facebook feeds for rest of our friends to watch and join in.
Facebook App Plaform excited me because of the power of the viral play and the entrepreneurial energy of developers. Facebook Connect takes the app platform out into the web (potentially into the desktop and mobile).
Facebook marketing has always been about delivering, building large scale support before a pr launch. Facebook is doing it again with Facebook Connect launching 1000 sites before we saw press coverage.
Facebook Connect Timeline
Launch @f8 July 23 followed by a garage Sep 29 2008
Luke's Q&A to Bay Area Facebook Meetup
Snap Summit03 Oct 2008 - Dave Morin's talk
How-to-add facebook connect to your blog in 8 min
Power of Facebook Connect
Cnn live of the Inauguration with Facbook Connect subtly shows the power of bringing your social graph for an event driven media consumption. As Don Thorson put it, "this is how all tv should be"
If you are have a web app or desktop app you have to tap into the power of facebook connect. Think - social commerce on web sites, and social influencer marketing for user generation and lots more to come building upon access to dynamic facebook user profiles! its a no brainer!
I am at iphone meetup at TIPS Palo Alto. Nice Energy in the room here, lot of friendly faces from the facebook world here! Quick Qik of the audience energy here: (use this to see if you spot someone you met and want to connect back)
7pm: Christopher Allen, author of upcoming "iPhone in Action" book and programming guru is talking about Web Development vs SDK
He compared web development vs sdk development. Interesting to see his comparison of what's compatible with other phone development.
Web App uses similar technology to iphone: Google Android, Palm Pre (goes beyond local storage AQLite on iphone to ability to put a web app inside the app)
7 types of iphone development - iphone compatible web - iphone friendly web - iphone optimized web, not compatible w nokia or android - iphone web app eg iui app - Dashcode web - native app sdk web app examples google reader, facebook app, hahlo.com, apnews.com, mapquest.com, 101cookbooks.com/iphonerece
Here's part of Chris's talk here:
@ChristopherA drew a lot of audience interaction with excellent Q&A. (See video of q&a part below)
8.15pm: Suzzane Ginsburg of ginsburgdesign, presents good visual design for iphone apps with a Urbanspoon vs Yelp
Summary is urbanspoon is built for iphone, yelp expects you to got the web site and iphone app is a translation.
Here's Suzanne's slides: Awesome presentation. I don't know if Yelp or Urbanspoon who will move fast to hire her!
Listening to Shel sharing his wonderful stories all evening!
Tatyana Kanzaveli organized the event and did an awesome job. Her Flickr stream of the event is here I even got good selection of veggie food :)
Started with his Crowdsourced book building story:
He started by comparing his last book "Naked Conversations" which he co-authored with Robert Scoble vs the new upcoming book "twitterville". Here's a quick summary of what I grasped from this talk:
First phase of social media was about reducing marketing excesses where advertisements create lot of noise while blogs filter to create conversations.
Now, twitter was about optimizing the conversations.
Shel was genuine and his focus was on keeping transparency and the joy of having real honest conversations.
Twitter Story:
Next he shared Twitter's story of how the founders came with it, and how it got traction from SWSX 07.
Twitter for Business:
We got to this part very later and Shel has wealth of stories. He shared the Dell story of how they got started from SWSX07 and made $1million, motrin how they managed the pr fiasco to curb it within a week by coming out and being honest on twitter, Ford story, GM Volt story that broke a news on twitter about a plant closing just as GM was going in front of congress. Best of all was @Comcastcares. Nice mix of pr, communicating with customers for brand management and a customer support example.
Sorry, at this stage, I had to stop and listen so my video doesn't do justice to the evening. I have some zoomed out video from my flip atleast you can hear Shel's own voice. (ok I'll update back once my videos are uploaded.)
Hope you enjoy the initial part of his talk!
Q&A: This was the best part of the evening. Shel engaged with the audience with the same passion and honesty to hear their stories. I noticed something today! He cares about learning new twitterville stories with a genuine passion and does not pretend to be the expert. Yet he has perceptive answers for audience questions. Here are couple questions I captured:
Question by @cathybrowne What do you think about twitter as a news feed eg Mumbai story. Shel: "We in social media are feet in the street in every corner of the world. We have information that can be braided into traditional media. point where Mumbai made the key point was when a 19 yr old kid took pictures and posted on flickr, where associated press, bbc , reuters didn't have feet in the street there and used the kids story. @cathybrowne shared her own twitter story story about a plane stranded passengers that the world didn't know that cathy tweeted about and got media in to change the situation. Looks this Shel got another story for his book.
Q: How can we trust the accuracy of information on twitter? Shel: Every reporter has to validate the truth of any story within their means. Twitter validates it better by real people respond, retweeting and spreading it around for validation.
Q: When people are tweeting about your company and you are the marketer when is the good time to get involved? Anytime is good, just be transparent. He addd 'talk to me, have a conversation, don't make it all about your message and do all talking to me". You can use tweets and Direct message (DM) and continue your conversation with the same customer. Q: Another discussion was about using twitter for specific educational ngo goals. Spurred good discussion about the community aspect of twitter and tapping into it. For anyone getting started important is to build reputation.
Two overall takeaways from the evening are:
Twitter is about the real-time response from the market, its fast
The real purpose of marketing is to build relationship and somewhere along the way we forgot it as we made ads. Twitter brings it back to the basics of having real conversations with customers.
My personal interest in this topic:
I am a facebook fan, and use twitter a fairly decent amount. I have been wondering about the overlap of our private vs public social graphs. How do you see it merging or moving away for you as a user? How do you see it impacting your social media mix as a business? let me know!
2008 started differently for me when a friend posted a facebook status saying "baby looks like an alien in the ultrasound" bringing me into his home as he opened his heart.
All through the year, thanks to my facebook friends, I have hoped as we voted in my first US presidential election shared excitement of friend's cool dates pondered the meaning of life, career and dreams mused over spontaneous valley events comforted the heartbreak of atleast one divorce helped with couple job losses shocked and pained with friends as Prop 8 passed supported parenting nightmares with toddler power struggles stayed up to chat with insomniacs and twitter addicts shared the joy of new babies and many baby's first holidays and fretted with growing-up parents as their kids grow up.
My life before my real friends were on facebook:
I have spent 14 yrs of my life mostly in Boston and thelast two years in beautiful Silicon Valley, enjoying America, making it my home and loving it. I have many friends, we have lived in our own worlds and meet at work, schools, temples, churches, gyms, play groups, hobby groups and recreation centers. There, we exchange a common american humor, curiosity towards other person's diversity and chat about what we share in common with sincerity which in my case is a lot of technology aka facebook, social media marketing, startup stories, mommy saga and yoga.
Once we moved to the valley, I was amazed at the diversity and the self segregated societies of the valley that preserve their cultures. Everything was new, our friends were all in Boston and the geek groups were the first to accept us. There's the Chines New Year in SF, Vietnamese Parade in San Jose, Durga Puja in Sunnyvale, Polynesian festival in Foster City, India Day in Fremont, Independence Day fireworks at Stanford, Garlic Festival in Gilroy and several geeky meetups including my own Bay Area Facebook Meetup each month. I've chanced occasional peeks into two separate corteries of 'serial entrepreneurs' and 'hungry wannabe-entrepreneurs', the two prominent groups that co-exist in the valley. I am not even listing the many sports hangouts, charity fundraisers and kids shows. (I cannot share all videos I like as they are in facebook limited by the privacy of friends who posted them)
Facebook has enriched my year by helping me cross the politically correct workplace boundary into the lives and hearts of friends.
In 2008, I have had more birthday wishes than all my past years, and wished everyone with wall posts and virtual gifts. I have visited more places on earth and shared special and scary moments with friends and made real friends of distant business acquaintances as they opened their feeds and their hearts and homes to us on facebook.
I've gotten a glimpse into the real lives of many of my friends who I knew professionally and bonded with family across miles. The best part is feeds come as everyone does whatever they do in their real lives - across boundaries of political correctness into their religions, culture, priorities near and dear to their hearts and ways of lives.
I've seen what holidays are important to each of my friends and what they really do to celebrate their holidays, thanks to facebook.
I've seen my friends Naveed, Raymond, Junaid, Shammara fast for Ramadan and wait for the moon for Eid. I celebrated Diwali by sharing a picture of a Diwali light arrangement we made at home and tagging 30 (facebook's maximum tag limit) Diwali celebrating hindu friends on facebook . I saw ghosts, fairies, Joe the Plumber among my friends. I have gotten a real Xmas cheer as I saw Luke share his Xmas tradition of making cookies at home with his wife. It put a smile on my face as this feed brought back childhood memories of the smell of an Indian sweet called Mysorepagu made by my Mom. Wed 25th was Christmas and the third day of Hanukkah, a gentle reminder thanks to Josh's feed.
For the past two weeks, I've joined the cheer and delays of of travels locals and far, shuddered at the ice storm pictures from my east coast friends, smiled at a cheeky video " All I want for Christmas is some jews" and at Jesse sharing the real christmas story video on facebook asking us to spread it around.
I have truly arrived in America, and though I am known to be obsessed with facebook, this time I think all credit goes to facebook to let my real social graph flow through facebook and getting me one step closer to my friends and to America.
Wish you all a wonderful new year 2009! Thank You all for enriching my life, looking forward to a new year as we continue to grow, share, learn, live and let live our connected lives.
Enter Facebook Connect! Now Businesses can move from offering Androids (remember data from startrek) with their personalization engines to Droids that can really talk to us!
Executed with steady precision, with a hunger to listen to the market true startup style, architected to make it so simple to adapt, one story at a time - bringing user controlled dynamic privacy, with our real identities, with our real world social graph to our favorite web sites with choice at every stage to let us decide which web actions are shared with our facebook friends!
update: everyone is talking about it - tc looks as it as single signon on the web, carrying your data w you!
Web businesses are beginning to see the power of the real user telling them what they are ready to share with their social network about their brands, about every step of their purchase behaviors. They can grow and scale in each site in beta using facebook connect to build vast repository of data, much more elegant than the works of the web 1.0 personalization engines which always reminded me of Data from Startrek.
With Web2.0 came social media - voice of the consumer everywhere with user generated content. Facebook revolutionized the social network bringing our real social graphs online where we can set our own levels of privacy and share our thoughts, pictures, videos, and comment,send tons of virtual goodies from pokes, cupcakes to vampires and friends for sale.
The old web is stuck with massive sites trying to personalize and customize our experience to reach us as individuals to market just what we want when we want it.
We don't stop to think of the web, we are fatigued signing up for each site, we prefer socializing with our friends, who influence our purchase cycles with our total trust be it that beautiful outfit our cool friend was wearing, or the travel we are planning or the big screen tv we watch the game together, introducing us to new music, telling us about what movie is worth watching.
Show me the money!
Wed businesses can now monetize my presence 10 folds more with perfectly targeted ads, build products to recommend just what I want and use my social network to influence my purchase, all with my permission.
They can bring the power of what Amazon did with "people who bought this also looked at this". If its a gift purchase I can say "no thanks", else send feed to facebook - tap into the power of whats made facebook apps successful - show my coolness factor to my friends, share naturally for purchases of movies, songs, and all digital downloads and opinions about brands.
Sites can layer and build complete suite of facebook apps as services on top of their current offering as part of their social marketing mix.
Power to the web sites who allow me to login with my real identity from facebook and by getting my trust because of the privacy control, now it is not the merchant selling me stuff, they are giving me just what I want when I want - that beautiful fine line between ads that appear intrusive and those that provide the right deal for the right product that we might just need.
A dream example - beta.citysearch.com
I goto citysearch and it shows me "a Grinchmas at Universal Studio Hollywood ad". Not relevant to me and wasted opportunity to sell me stuff I came looking for and have the need and desire to buy in the near future.
Their beta allows me to login with facebook connect, I log into facebook and they get instant access to the "real me" - age, sex, location and my profile preferences. That takes them 1 step closer to serve relevant ads. I like that better.
But imagine! If they could layer a facebook app right on top of citysearch in their site using facebook connect and could learn what I am upto this moment, and with my permission.
If I am planning to goto Boston for the holidays and want to find local gifts and restaurants to meet my friends, they could facilitate that discussion with my friends (who are on facebook and maybe on citysearch)if they let it happen using facebook connect on citysearch. They could offer a facebook app layered on top of citysearch that allows me to let citysearch know I am looking for a restaurant to go with these particular friends and know our preference (past ratings/reviews by me and my friends on citysearch), and use the power of facebook feeds to facilitate conversations about our current travel and party plans and tie it to citysearch options to facilitate the purchase/recommendations as ads.
Now we have to wait and watch this scale all over the web!
My job was so easy, CodeCamp had this cool Confett chat room so audience kept asking me questions and chatting live. ok! I admit it made me look like a total geek with my laptop onstage!
Steve Cohen of Bebo presented Lightspeed mVC framwork, charged the room about Bebo's scale story. 400Mil pageviews daily on 120 servers, using Resin and single Java container! Wow!
Tom of Y! talking presented YOS. He spoke about YQL for normalized data via web services. Discussion is about silo of data.
Marina Fisher of Sun presented Sun technologies Opensolaris and Glassfish.
The first five in there are technologies I user daily and sun cannot shine on a day without any of them, though twitter is extra special and can go up and down and we will still wakeup to go see their funny downtime messages.
This year the nominations are open till today November 16th 2008. The voting rounds will be held from November 19th till December 15th.
Make your vote count, speak up and pick the winners of this year!
What I enjoy about the awards process is to checkout cool technologies and finding how much my friends agree or disagree with the same votes. But also it is a test to true social media marketing as every technology company leashes out its evangelists to find creative ways to get the word out to their base to get their votes up.
As a tech startup you can do old fashioned email to your customers to vote for you. Real winners are those whose customers volunteer on their own to spread the joy of particular technologies they love. Here are some ways:
Level One - Social Media Savvy Happy Customer:
1. First go vote for your favorite technology.
2. Show your excitement with a blog post on why that company is cool.
3. Do a tweet on twitter (w the blog post as a tinyurl or your 140 words of wisdom)
4. Change your facebook status to show the link for your favorite technology voting url.
Level 2: Super crazy unpaid evangelist for your favorite technology
5. Make a facebook group or friendfeed room or twitter bundle for your favorite technology and share links about how cool your technology is and the vote url.
6. Create an event to vote for your favorite technology and invite all your friends to join.
7. Visit all related meetups and pitch to everyone to vote for your favorite technology.
8. Make a video to show your love for your favorite technology, preferably something funky and blast it out to all video sites and tag friends on facebook. Make sure your video sites are all tied to your tweets and friendfeed so your followers get double feeds of everything.
9. Especially if you are in SF, throw a party to celebrate this technology's vote and drink with fellow lovers of your technology.
BeboDevNite has been my labor of love and it totally rocked tonite!!!
120+ developers all charged, got excited about bebo.
The best part of organizing BeboDevNite has been the bebo team. See them get ready for the event @AOL
We had a series of presentations and some cool announcements.
Cool Presentations:
Blake Commagere (Vampire, Werewolf, Zombie app network famous) presented migration to bebo from facebook, and said it took him only 4 hrs to port 4 apps to bebo.
Bebo Demos - We had a lot of Bebo love from a series of presentations by bebo app developers, each focusing on engagement, monetization or scaling apps with their stories - Water Cooler, Make a baby, Smart Change,Knighthood and Zoosk.
Cool Bebo Announcement: Jessica Alter of bebo announced engagement metrics and Javascript support (in beta)for bebo platform followed by breakout session w bebo engineers. She announced the B.E.S.T contest for developers.
I love the valley, and it feels like a big thanksgiving gathering each meetup seeing a subset of the same group of people, and coming home tired, full (of pizza) and loaded w the latest greatest in the valley tech scene.
Today Facebook announced a partnership with Salesforce.com to bring Facebook Connect to the enterprise using Force.com making it easier to build social friendly enterprise apps hosted upon Salesforce.com cloud! (see my wishlist of enterprise apps at the end of this blog post)
Facebook still operates like a startup and has gotten Salesforce to adopt Facebook Connect as a channel into the enterprise. Look at the launch of the partnership - facebook style - honest, humorous presentation by Dave Morin.
I've been super excited about Facebook Economy because I see it extending the web into a whole social platform where I can use technology more seamlessly intertwined with the "real me"
Facebook has been successful in building the platform and getting developer excitement going, theres no doubt about that one!
Many pundits argue (read Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher) that social is real and but the big question is whether it will be on facebook or on a bunch of technologies that all becomes social.
For social to become ubiquitous, it has to go past consumers (who don't make it super easy to monetize it) to the enterprise. For example Google is a consumer company but makes all its money from businesses. I think enterprise + social has to be lot more than apps on linkedin.
We as consumers get used to status udpates, and comments from friends and sharing apps to expecting some of it in our business life but the real value comes when it improves efficiency for the business.
Linkedin is back with positive pr as a social platform because of its now open app platform. I think it has more to do with very low expectations we have on linkedin and I'll give lot of credit for opening the platform to Linkedin advisor Dave McClure aka Mr.Social Network. Heres my dream and its all possible with Force.com on Facebook
Communication and Collaboration: Why can't we break the barrier of friends circles inside companies that helps engine the corporate fiction in all our decisions to get real work done across organizations?
Marketing and supply-chain improvements: Why can't business build relationship with customer and build social technologies that integrates their business processes.
Product Development and inventory management: Why can't we as consumers interact with each other and our favorite brands to help them build just what we want at the right price when and where we need it.
If you are a facebook developer you have an advantage over the enterprise developer in that you know facebook platform and viral scaling of your app, now you just have to build it upon Force.com on Facebook!
Force.com on Facebook makes me wonder what is needed for Enterprise +Social to be successful.
Going by my past life of evangelizing the web in large companies where I worked - Fidelity Investments, BMC Corporation and GTE Internetworking(now Verizon) and Harcourt (now Reed Elsevier), I believe that we need cool technology championed by real social architects evangelizing each enterprise from inside, one group at a time, to bring the excitement focused on real business goals to build grassroots teams one at a time!
Corporate Evangelists - My Casestudies
Here I showcase 3 of them from my recent acquaintances.
1 Intuit:
Intuit hosted a Marketing Summit on Oct 28th in Hilton SF, where I was at a panel called "social influencer marketing" with a cool set of people and got a taste of Intuit's commitment to use social to build true customer relationships.
Today they all use twitter, blogs, facebook apps inside facebook, and customer forums, where will they go with Facebook Connect for the Enterprise?
Ping me if you have a story of social media marketing or social media experiments in your world!
update: Marta strickland is a social architect who truly gets Social Media and its vision in shaping the future of the web. I met Marta at Web3.0 Conference at an interesting panel.
Its a good event if it still lingers on in the background of your mind as you get closer to the weekend. Snap Summit 2008 was one such 1-day event packed with good content - all focused on the entrepreneurs and tech geeks in the valley.
The Organizers!
Cassie is an energy ball and Christian Perry is the well prepared partner with questions for every session in case there is a lull in the audience, which was very rare.
Lets talk about the talks
I moderated the first panel of the day about Critical User Mass.
We had interesting discussions about arriving at critical mass of users for different types of sites.
Rockyou's Eric Yieh and Siqi Chen of "Friends For Sale" were focused on building metrics from the start.
Anil Dharni of Hi5 shared lot of good examples about scaling to different markets and focusing on engaged users different from new users.
Stephen Hood of Delicious said Critical Mass is not a discrete position but one thats ongoing and shared how delicious focuses on users and is still growing @ 5.2Musers. Delicious was at 300K users during the Y! acquisition.
Next, Max Engel of Myspace gave an excellent presentation about Data Availability.
Heres my qik stream (its starts with zooming in on my panelists and Mr.SocialMedia Dave McClure, and then I sat for the Myspace talk). Myspace is commited to adapting open standards like openid, xrds-simple, oauth, portablecontacts and opensocial
Lets talk about the talks
I attended part of Gordon Peters' "Monetize User Generated Content, which spawned excellent discussions. Panelists were: Seth Goldstein; CEO, SocialMedia, Andrew Chen and Michael Burke of Appssavvy.
Interesting to note in this video is the conflicting advice from the panelists about how to survive the current economy!
Todd Fast, CTO of Zembly gave an arresting presentation about Zembly.
Dave Morin presented Facebook Connect and made a clean case for it!
Image via WikipediaI am heading out to SNAP Summit to moderate a panel called "What is Critical User Mass and How Do You Get There?" at 9.30am this morning in San Francisco.
The Panelists are:
* MODERATOR: Sudha Jamthe; Social Platform Strategy Consultant; AOL/Bebo. * Siqi Chen; Co-Founder & CEO, Serious Business * Eric Yieh; Director of Product Development, RockYou * Anil Dharni; Director of Products, Hi5 * Stephen Hood; Director of Product, Delicious
Critical mass of users is the moment when a social site naturally becomes viral, when it works well on its own, when it is considered a "success".
Ping me with questions, on twitter @sujamthe or on facebook. What do you want to see in this panel?
- Is critical mass a state a site should achieve or is it a repeat event for different stages of the product lifecycle? - Is this critical mass dependent on your product life cycle or is it dependent on your competition's growth cycle. - How do you get users to share and help you be viral, especially when you are still small. -Is there a magical number for the critical mass of users for different types of sites. - Are there specific ways that product engages users and what that has meant for growth. - I would like to hear specific examples of success and failed attempted in building critical mass for different sites. -Is it a different path for a social network like Hi5 vs. a product like delicious
I went to SF city to start an interesting work project in the afternoon and decided to stop by at the Social Media Summit at Moscone West on Oct 1st.
I believe if I meet an interesting person or learn one thing new, my time at a conference is well-earned, but today I found both!
Social Media according to Charlene Li
I have followed Charlene Li and seen her only at big screens from a distance in conferences and today I missed her keynote before I came in and heard many references to her talk. Then I met her! She has a gift for articulating the essence of key technologies and their business impact. She spoke about Social Media and why it is important for marketing.
Shel Israel's new Twitter Book
I found Shel Israel is working on a new book about twitter. He was ready to talk about "Conversations" and not about "Brand Extensions".
I attended a session by Eric of Ticketmaster about extending a brand to social media.
It was by far the best presentation I have seen summarizing real life experience of extending an existing brand to social media.
I work with Demo conference advising them on extending their brand to social media and you have seem my tweets, friendfeed, facebook fan page, youtube videos all from demofall!
Eriks talk summary:
Erik gave a very structured talk for all aspects of extending your brand. What I liked best was that he was unassuming and shared his real experience of executing on it.
Ticketmaster partnered with ilike and added it to their site to create user engagement. They tried facebook apps, twitter etc with lot of applications built based on real business case.
Their facebook apps did not yield results. Twitter was successful as their affiliates adapted it and found it useful to get real time stats faster than their existing system.
Erik was very clear that his focus was all on real business goals. Users know and related to ticketmaster as a brand but come visit twice a year on average and his goal was to create social conversations to increase that to 4 times a year.
I have this new found hobby of tracking a conference live with all my gizmos while I listen, learn and network at a conference.
Last thurs I was at Gigaom's Mobilize08 at San Francisco. I did a bunch of videos with my flip camera to goto youtube and facebook, pictures from my iphone that I emailed to twitpic to go on twitter and on facebook mobile to goto facebook photos.
I went in at noon. The audience pulse speaks volumes!
The audience were business folks and lots of VCs all looking for the latest trends in mobile space, very different from the geek crowd in usual valley events.
My favorite was the promise of Social Media on Mobile - a panel with Chamath palihapitiya of facebook, John Faith of Myspace, and Evan Tana of Loopt and Noelia Amoedo of Hi5 which supports Opensocial.
If you are someone tracking the mobile space, you can see the difference in their approach from answers of Chamath Palihapitiya of Facebook and John Faith of Myspace. The moderator Sebastian worked very hard but ended up grouping facebook and myspace together often.
Here is a snippet, I have more of the videos on facebook. This is the panel that brought me to the conference. I am going to compile rest of the videos of this session and blog about the promise of Mobile and Social and Facebook's opportunity in detail later.
I got the pulse of the audience by talking to the launching startups, VCs, media folks and attendees.
Startup Plusmo has a cool sports App on the iphone, worth checking out!
Pete of Trapster has a speed trap on the Dash GPS. He showed his cool preview of trapster on the iphone and Blackberry.
The conference content was good, rooms were very packed. I met a whole bunch of cool people who were at demofall08 back at mobilize08 all hungry to find the latest mobile startups and trends.
Philip of Nekkei Electronics was back from demo to Mobilize08.
Tim Hay of Venturewire summarizes the conference
This one is from the last panel of the day!
The conference staff and volunteers were wonderful. I missed veggie food. Thank You! Jennifer Santana! gigaom volunteer who is a UC Berkeley student from Inveneo went out of her way to arrange for some for me
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.
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