January 9th, 2009

The Crunchies 2009

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 7:33 pm

Categories: Conference, Fun, Live blog, Startup, Technology

Tags: Seat, Andrew Mager

The Oscars of Tech. That’s how I explain it to my mother.

7:23 p.m. Arrived just a little late, but got great seats.

Sitting next to MC Hammer:

7:42 p.m. Om Malik announces best application of service to Google Reader. Marissa Mayer accepts the Crunchie.

7:45 p.m. Steve Gillmor announces the best technology innovation or achievement. Live Mesh carries it home.

“When we are in an environment with technological and environmental change, you have to focus on these new huge constraints, but also new opportunities for destruction or rebirth.”
-Ray Ozzie, Microsoft

8:00 p.m. Github wins best bootstrapped startup.

GoodGuide wins Most Likely To Make The World a Better Place:

Amazon Web Services wins best enterprise app.

8:08 p.m. Ritchter Scales perform

8:12 p.m. Paul Graham from Y Combinator speaks with Eric from TechCrunch:

8:18 p.m. e-buddy wins the best international product. It’s like a meebo.

Project Frog wins best Clean Tech.

Marissa Mayer speaks for a moment.

Then the mobile phone orchestra (video coming soon):

8:40 p.m. Om Malik grabs the wrong envelope so I have 10 extra seconds to write this paragraph. Evernote wins best mobile startup.

Lots of press in attendance tonight, include Adam Jackson and Scott Beale:

imeem mobile wins best mobile app.

8:42 p.m. Jason Calacanis speaks:

Ray Ozzie comes back to speak to Om Malik:

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde thanks all of the sponsors. Mayfield Fund, MySpace Music, Charles River Ventures, Microsoft BizSpark, and Founders Fund to name a few.

She explains about the after party at City Hall. I will post some pictures from that later.

8:57 p.m. Best Startup Founder goes to Twitter, of course :)

Zuck wins best CEO:

FriendFeed wins best startup:

And Facebook takes best overall. Think about it though. How often do you login?

Here are all the nominees. I will post some of their links and party photos later:

Best Application of Service
-GetSatisfaction
-Google Reader *
-Meebo
-MySpace Music
-Minted
-Yelp

Best Technology Innovation/Achievement
-Facebook Connect
-Google Friend Connect
-Swype
-Yahoo! BOSS
-Google Chrome
-Microsoft Live Mesh *

Best Design
-Animoto
-Lala.com
-Friendfeed
-Cooliris **
-Infectious
-Sliderocket

Marshall: The best startups survive the downturn.

Malik: We’ve been here before. But we’ve seen tougher times.

Best Bootstrap Startup
-12seconds.tv
-github **
-socialcast
-backtype
-statsheet.com

Most Likely To Make The World a Better Place
-Better Place
-Akoha
-CO2stats
-Kiva **
-GoodGuide
-Causes (Facebook App)

Best Enterprise
-Zoho
-Yammer
-Google App Engine (runner up)
-Amazon Web Services **
-Salesforce

Best International
-ebuddy **
-fotonauts
-openx
-wuala
-event-privee.com

Best Clean Tech
-Better Place
-Project Frog **
-Boston Power
-ElectraDrive
-Laurus Energy

Marissa Mayer: Talks about Google Query Stream.

There are more text messages sent in Nairobi than New York City. You can learn a lot about people if you study how people use technology.

Q: How do you think Google is doing on the social web?

I’m really excited about Search Wiki. People can collaborate with a community of people who do the same search. Blogger, YouTube, and other products promise content creation.

Best Time Sink
-Zivity
-SGN
-Tapulous **
-Mob Wars
-Zyng

Best Mobile Startup
-ChaCha
-Qik
-Skyfire
-Evernote **
-Posterous
-Truphone

Best Mobile App
-Google
-imeem
-smule
-Pandora **
-Rolando
-Big in Japan

Best Startup Founder
-23andMe
-Bebo
-Twitter **
-FriendFeed
-Etsy

Best Startup CEO
-hulu
-zappos.com
-Space X
-Android
-Facebook **

Best New Startup of 2008
-GoodGuide
-Yammer
-TopSpin
-DropBox
-FriendFeed **
-Tapulous

Best Overall
-Amazon Web Services
-Hulu
-Facebook **
-Twitter
-Android

Here are all my photos from Flickr »

September 8th, 2008

TechCrunch50: Day 1

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:40 am

Categories: Blogging, Conference, Startup, TechCrunch50, Technology

Tags: Start-up, Presentation, Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, E-mail, Team Management, Investment, Finance, Financing Startups, Management

When Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis team up on a project, the webs are bound to be shaken up.

Last year, their conference TechCrunch40 was an enormous showcase for startups to present their idea to venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and the press. This year, it’s even bigger.

I will be liveblogging this event for the next three days. I will try to writeup all 50 startups, plus some from the demo pit.

Email me if you want me to cover something specifically.

6:30 a.m. Here is today’s lineup:

• Adgregate Markets (Presented by Henry Wong and Du Nguyen)
• AdRocket (Presented by Scott Milener and Andreas Svensson)
• Angstro (Presented by Rohit Khare and Salim Ismail)
• BlahGirls (Presented by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg)
• Burt (Presented by Gustav von Sydow and Gustav Martner)
• Connective Logic (Presented by Stuart Smith and Jeremy Orme)
• Devunity (Presented by Alon Carmel and Leeron Shalev)
• DotSpots (Presented by Farhad Mohit and Matthew Mastracci)
• FairSoftware (Presented by Alain Raynaud and Eileen Long)
• Hangout Industries (Presented by Pano Anthos and Lucas Smolic)
• LiveHit (Presented by Jeanine LeFlore)
• OtherInBox (Presented by Joshua Baer and Mike Subelsky)
• Quant the News (Presented by Brett Markinson and Ben Goertzel)
• Rinen (Presented by Hirofumi Manganji and Go Hagiwara)
• Shryk (Presented by Shane Kempton and Kim Stroh)
• Tweegee (Presented by Shay Bloch and Adi Brandwine)
• Yammer (Presented by David Sacks and Adam Pisoni)

6:38 a.m. Heading to the San Francisco Design Center Concourse. Hopefully I can plugin there.

Calacanis announced that Ashton Kutcher will be one of the first presentations at 9 a.m. PST.

Google’s Marissa Mayer will give a presentation today at 11:30 a.m. PST.

7:30 a.m. Just got here. The name badges are two sided:

The demo pit is warming up. Qik’s booth:

Video search engine CastTV:

7:40 a.m. Seesmic is here. Think of it as a video Twitter:

Read the rest of this entry »

August 28th, 2008

Say goodbye to Yahoo! Mash

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:00 pm

Categories: Social Networks, Technology

Tags: Yahoo! Inc., Social Networking, Collaboration, Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Andrew Mager

On today’s web, so many social sites never get off the ground because users don’t easily migrate from their online communities. As much as I want MySpace to die, people will still be using it as long as their friends are using it.

Yahoo’s mashup social network had a promising start, but it quickly dropped off. Almost a year ago, I wrote a post about how interactive it was, and how addicted I was to it. I remember going to the site 20 times a day because other people had the ability to update my profile page. I could drag around widgets and import feeds.

I actually said, “It’s more mature than MySpace, more interactive than Virb, and more interesting than Facebook.”

I haven’t logged in since last September, primarily because none of my network has moved over from Facebook. Today Yahoo! killed the project:

Dear Yahoo! Mash member,

Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it.

Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available. We strongly recommend that you return to http://mash.yahoo.com and copy the content that you wish to save onto a separate document.

For a list of FAQs, please refer to the Mash Help Page.

Thanks for trying out Mash!

Matt Warburton
Yahoo! Community Manager

I’m glad Yahoo! isn’t wasting any more resources on this project. It was a cool idea, and the technology behind it is fascinating, but they didn’t apply it effectively. Instead of rolling out a separate social network, why not integrate social features into sites like Flickr, Upcoming, or Delicious?

August 23rd, 2008

CNN beats Obama to the punch on Twitter

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 4:20 pm

Categories: Technology

Tags: Twitter, CNN, E-mail, Online Communications, Andrew Mager

Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to announce his vice president through personal text messages and emails. I still haven’t gotten mine.

I first heart about it yesterday evening via CNN’s Breaking News feed on Twitter:

I could have played a full round of golf in the time it took Obama to tweet out his choice:

Granted, Twitter isn’t his main audience, but the 66,000 followers make him the #1 user. Those thousands of people are probably in the upper 1% of Americans to be always connected all the time. These power users are very influential because they have a handle on the blogosphere. One blog post turns into 100.

If Obama was really hip to it, he would have said @joebiden instead of spelling out the senator’s name.

How did you find out about his choice? Did you get his text message?

UPDATE: That is not CNN’s official Twitter feed. It’s run by a fan of CNN. Alaska Miller from Gawker shared this link with me explaining the story.

August 16th, 2008

Wordcamp 2008

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 8:44 am

Categories: Blogging, Conference, Development, Journalism, Startup, Technology, Tools

Tags: Avatar, Wordpress, Automattic, Blogging, Internet, Andrew Mager

In the quiet flats of University of California San Francisco Mission Bay campus, bloggers, thinkers, journalists, developers, and inventors melt together for a full day of lectures and learning. The goal of Wordcamp 2008 is to figure out the future of publishing on the web.

Last year’s event was two days long, but this year it’s crunched into a 9-hour multi-session jam.

8:00 a.m. Checked into UCSF. Automattic’s Marianne Masculino set me up with badge, a free tee shirt, and pass for tonight’s after party.

8:15 a.m. Wordpress schwag everywhere!

8:32 a.m. The badges use Gravatars, globally recognized avatars. This is the newest product from the makers of Wordpress. Once you set it up, every time you comment on a blog, your avatar will show up.

Wordcamp is broken down into two separate sections today: the user track and the developer track. Since most of us are quickly becoming “users” of this type of software, I will mainly cover that part of the conference.

Schedule for the user track

• 9:00 a.m. The Future of Education and Wordpress -
• 9:30 a.m. SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
• 10:00 a.m. Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
• 10:50 a.m. Andy Skelton - A musical performance
• 11:00 a.m. LOLcats and the Secret of Virality
• 11:30 a.m. Wordpress & Microformats
• 12:00 p.m. Lunch
• 1:00 p.m. Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
• 1:20 p.m. 450 Wordpress Power User Tips - Lorelle VanFossen
• 1:40 p.m. Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
• 2:00 p.m. State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
• 3:00 p.m. Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
• 3:20 p.m. Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
• 3:40 p.m. An interview with Om Malik
• 4:00 p.m. Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
• 5:00 p.m. A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
• 5:10 p.m. Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra

8:56 a.m. Matt Mullenweg welcomes the crowd and gives logistical announcements. He announces the after party; they will show a movie at the bar.

“The idea behind Wordcamp is to set the tone for the following year. It’s sort of a nice milestone. We want to expose you to the ideas that Wordpress has been thinking about over the last year. In turn, it’s the audience’s chance to connect on a personal level with Wordpress. It’s 100% user-driven, so here’s your chance.” -Matt Mullenweg

9:00 a.m. Let the games begin.

The Future of Education and Wordpress

Allen Levine, New Media Consotrtium

The powerful thing about blogging is that it’s personal. It’s the most important subject: me. My first blog was Movable Type, and my recovery time was about ten minutes. One of the best templates I’ve used is Vertigo Blue by Brian Gardner.

Edublogs - UMW is doing something amazing with Wordpress multi-user installations. They’ve had about 15,000 users sign up so far.

University of British Columbia is getting ready to launch a hosted blog service for their student community.

University of Calgary is doing something similar. The Discovery Channel has an “educator network”.

Al Upton teaches third grade kids in Australia. They have a class blog where the kids are paired with external mentors around the world, where they could get comments and criticism about their writing. The state department shut him down for about a year. He got about 300 comments on his blog from educators around the world about how wrongly he was treated. But he is back up today.

An elementary school in Illinois is showing off student art projects on a simple Wordpress install.

ChickSpeak is a website designed for women at college to help them deal with issues they may run into.

A blog is a great tool for publishing. It has a calendar, it archives your posts, and is searchable.

ScholarPress develops specific plugins catered to educators. Courseware, WPBook, and there are more in development.

• Flickr photoset of the slides.
• Presentation wiki

9:29 a.m. Sitting next to SocialTNT’s Chris Lynn:

SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make

Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts

My 16-year old daughter makes about $1,000 a month on a blog about NeoPets.

Read the rest of this entry »

August 13th, 2008

You pick the panels at SxSW

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 7:46 am

Categories: Commentary, Technology

Tags: Panel, SXSW, Andrew Mager

Two years ago, I first heard about South by Southwest. 2006’s event was dominated by Twitter, which, at the time was a new social messaging system that connected people and ideas. In Austin, Tx. that year, everybody was Twittering. Everyone had a voice, and it was easy to pick and choose which voices you wanted to follow.

That openness has spread directly to the panel selection for 2009 at SxSW. Now you and I can help decide on the content of arguably one of the biggest community-driven events in history. Enter the SxSW Interactive Panel Picker:

Even if you don’t have to vote for every panel, you can search for topics and explore which talks are related to those topics. You can search for a speaker’s name or a company’s name and get multiple results.

When you click through the panels, you can read a description of the panel, see who’s speaking, and read any comments that other voters have left.

Even if you can’t make it to SxSW in Austin this year, it’s still fun to see what’s going on.

August 6th, 2008

Zittrain explains the future of the Internet

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 7:35 am

Categories: Future, Technology

Tags: Router, Technology, Zittrain, Internet, Routers & Switches, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Wiki, Network Technology, Networking, Online Communications

Oxford professor and Harvard pioneer Johnathan Zittrain came to the CBS Interactive offices in San Francisco on Tuesday to speak and sign copies of his new book “The Future of the Internet… and How to Stop It“. His presentation was called Civic Technologies.

We can actually carve our technologies into one or two categories: civic or non-civic.

A civic technology is one that invites people to contribute to it, and the success of it depends on how many people choose to be a part of it.

When the Internet was conceived back in the 80s, they didn’t need to have a business model. They didn’t have to worry about moving data around.

But today, moving data around is like trying to move someone around in a mosh pit.

Back in the 90s, companies tried to use the Internet as a business model; Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy, among others.

“You cannot build a corporate network out of TCP/IP” -IBM, 1992

With these civic technologies, you often run into a common problem. People say, “There goes the neighborhood…”

When AOL first built that land bridge from their isolated network to the Internet, people were like, “Oh, there’s the AOLers”. They don’t share the ethos of the original network.

Email is a shared hallucination app with nobody at the top running it.

Civic Defense

There is no single map of the Internet. Instead, every router on the Internet sees through the fog and looks for it’s nearest peer. The routers all trust each other. We trust every router on the net to tell us where it is.

In February, Pakistan tried to block YouTube. One small Pakistani ISP advertised exactly where it was, and then other routers around it said they were two clicks away. In less than 120 seconds, most of YouTube was blocked around the world.

What if 20 ISPs around the world, as a practical joke, decide to publish false routes for 20,000 sites? That would probably bring down the net, and NANOG would go nuts.

Wikipedia is definitely a civic technology. The idea of having articles that anyone can edit is actually a crazy idea. It’s not perfect though; it still has the same, “Oh, there goes the neighborhood” feel. What is their civic defense model?

They have an administrator’s notice board, which is an editable page itself. It’s just a big pile of problems. There are people obsessive-compulsively reloading the noticeboard and they are solving the problems faster than they are coming up.

If all these people attended a Battlestar Galactica at the same time, Jimbo’s site would be in trouble. Wikipedia is always about 45 minutes away from utter destruction.

Another example is the Apple II computer. Years ago, it was just a plastic box with some microprocessors.

Now, we are presented with task managers and lists of processes that we don’t understand. What do alg.exe and lsass.exe do?

Is there a civil defense model for computing? Short answer: no.

The Internet is a polyarchtical, bottom-up civic technology. When the neighborhood goes, you either have to come up with your own self-defense, or get help from the commons; or join the commons.

We will see the end of the personal computer. “Here are the five approved applications you can use with this machine, and here are the five sites you are allowed to visit”.

We will see a new generation of devices. Linux inside the TiVo is dying to jump out, but it can only be controlled with a dinky remote. The Amazon Kindle, the iPhone…

Steve Jobs said it himself in January of 2007, “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC.” But he still has control of it. His SDK is not “open”. You cannot put chocolate and peanut butter together without piping it through Reece’s.

Let’s look at Facebook apps. They reserve the right to see if your apps make it onto the site. The new “Great Apps” program gives preferred app developers higher priority on their platform. They can throttle your app if they think it’s being too active. They can pull some oxygen from it. Is this fair?

New non-civic technologies

Soon your stove-top kettle will have an IP address, and that might not be a good thing. Think about a toaster in a SaaS world.

You come down for breakfast and you see the message, “You have just gotten the latest update: you have a third slot”.

Next morning, they rollback the update because the toaster heats up too fast.

You start to ask yourself, what did I buy? You bought a “breakfast-oriented relationship”. Instead of owning it, you are a subscriber.

Back in the 19th Century, there was something called “the posse”. They would deputize the public to help enforce the law. The police in the north would announce, “all able-bodied men must report slaves back to the south”. This was the last thing able-bodied men wanted to do. I was dead-letter on the books; it wasn’t the civic ‘umph’.

How do we create and reinforce new civic technologies?

Digg is a hybrid civic technology. What’s popular is a function of how many people think it’s popular.

This gives hope to a site like Subvert and Profit, a service that accepts payment for diggs.

The Wikipedians wouldn’t go for this deal.

Another example: couchsurfing.com - a social network for people looking for a place to sleep.

There was a time when hitchhiking was a civic technology. Now it’s a dangerous thing to do. Then a guy named Craig starts a list in San Francisco, and hitchhiking is back again.

Can we embrace the civic moment of this time, or is it just cash and carry?

The bad guys have already decided that they wanna be bad guys. It’s their job, that’s their advantage. Our advantage is numbers and good will.

Zittrain’s projects

StopBadware.org is a community of software experts that will tell you if it’s safe to run certain programs on your computer.

Herdirt Network Health - A distributed model for online threats.

Pick up a copy of his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.