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 10th, 2008

TechCrunch50: Day 3

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:32 am

Categories: Conference, Live blog, TechCrunch50

Tags: Dr., Session, Andrew Mager

Photo by Steve Maller

I’ve been covering TC50 for the past few days, and believe it or not, I’m still hungry for more startup pitches.

6:30 a.m. The final sessions of the conference are posted on BusinessWire:

s
• Akoha (Presented by Austin Hill and Alex Eberts)
• Bojam (Presented by Andrew Greenstein and Eyal Hertzong)
• CauseCast (Presented by Ryan Scott and Sloane Berrent)
• Closet Couture (Presented by Christine Elia and Sheldon Chang)
• Foglight (Presented by Ben Crockett and Jason Peery)
• Footnote (Presented by Russ Wilding and Brian Hansen)
• fotonauts (Presented by Jean-Marie Hullot)
• Goodguide (Presented by Dara O’Rourke)
• Goodrec (Presented by Mihir Shah and Yishai Lerner)
• GoPlanit (Presented by Steve Chen and Jimmy Ku)
• Grockit (Presented by Farbood Nivi and Michael Buffington)
• Minor Studios (Presented by Dave Werner and Martin Reptto)
• plaYce (Presented by Carmel Gerber)
• Shattered Reality (Presented by Damon Grow and Eric Stone)
• Truecar (Presented by Scott Painter Tom Taira)
• VideoSurf (Presented by Lior Delgo and Dr. Eitan Sharon)
• GazoPa (Presented by Hideki Kobayashi and Go Kojima)

6:35 a.m. Walking from CBS Interactive SF offices to the San Francisco Design Center Concourse.

Demo Pit: Divvy

7:30 a.m. Divvy, a website that allows you rent anything to anyone, launches.

I got a great demo from Aaron Freed, the company’s co-founder. It’s very easy to sign up and setup your subdomain (you.divvy.com). You can rent anything from a Nintendo Entertainment System, to a car, to a house!

Paypal is integrated and a calendar reservation system comes standard.

You can easily find people around you looking to rent:

Demo Pit: Photo Thread

Photo Thread maps out the timestamps of photos based on geography. They will be launching in a few months.

VideoSurf

A visual video search engine:

9:28 a.m. The puppy is helping me edit today. It’s a Divvy dog:

9:35 a.m. They have a huge dome in the middle of the lunch area:

My conference buddy is Meghan Asha from Non-Society. I have been lending her photos for her lifestream.

The first panel of judges (left to right) is Robert Scoble, Sheryl Sandberg, Joi Ito, Bradley Horowitz:

GazoPa

Find images that are similar based on shape, color, and size. If you are searching for people, you can find similar faces.

You can draw things and then search for images that look similar. Let’s try a tee shirt:

Voila:

fotonauts

A Wikipedia for pictures. A place where everybody will come to look for pictures. Think of it as a very smart registry of images.

It’s a desktop app. You can organize photos by town and location. fotonauts will search through Creative Commons photos too. You tag the photo, and they do the rest in the background.

There is a social element too. You can share photos with friends in context.

Horozitz: This socializes tagging and allows me to leverage the work around me.

Bojam

An open source Wikipedia for music creation. Mix Facebook with Garage Band.

You have a drummer in Australia, a bassist in Norway, and a vocalist in Africa. You can all be sitting in your basements and you can still collaborate.

Watch the demo video of Bojam »

For someone who wants to learn guitar, they also have chrods scrolling at the bottom in sync like karaoke. You can mute all the other instruments and practice over the beats. You can even record your track.

Bojam is about a community of musicians.

Grockit

Massively multiplayer online learning. You can earn points for helping one another. Social studying.

10:49 a.m. Jason Calacanis arrives. I think he was out late last night.

10:55 a.m. I went inside that huge dome thing and snapped a picture:

Everybody was wearing 3-D glasses and tripping out. I will have more information about this product later.

Akoha

What if playing a game could make the world a better place?

Akoha claims to use web and real-world missions to create a new form of game play and do good in the world.

Atmosphir

Free downloadable video game for Mac and PC. There is a design mode where you can create your own adventures.

It’s starting out as a platform. They want to become an environment where any video game idea is possible.

We hope to be the online interactive equivalent of Lego

View a short video demo »

Playce

Making the world a playground with high-end social games.

Our emphasis is on quick engadgement. You should be able to send a link to a friend and have them be able to just jump right in the game.

Playce is not a tools company, it’s a destination site. They monetize with advertising and virtual goods.

Horowitz: Ahkoa could be a really fun addictive thing. They are trying to do good in the world.

Scoble: VideoSurf has the best potential to be a business.

Exit Strategies, M&A Uncovered

• Michael Marquez, CBS Interactive
• David Lawee, Google
• Ted Wang, Fenwick & West LLP
• Moderated by Heather Harde (CEO Techcrunch)

Marquez: It’s strategy first. We’re an audience company. We are trying to build the largest audience. We want to build engaging and compelleing experiences.

Wang: We are certainly moving into a buyer’s market right now.

Lawee: The exit opportunities out there are looking more and more limited.

Marquez: We try to find people all around the world that are experts in their domains.

If you want to get in touch with me, reach out to me directly. Let me know why your company is interesting. There are business opportunities that we could work together on.

One of the big mistakes is coming in without the point of view of the value between us. What assets do you bring?

Wang: You need to create competition if you want to maxmize your value on the exit. Do you best to create a bidding process with a logical forcing function (raise another round, another auction). You gotta be careful and cautious though. Gotta think through your tactics.

Marquez: It’s a collborative relationship.

Walle: At Google, we don’t really think about the size of the deal, just the impact. YouTube was a small number of people, but the pricetag wasn’t small. A lot of these companies are coming into Google and they have changed the direction of the whole company.

12:35 p.m. Taking a lunch break. I am going to buy myself a new camera. Expect the photos to be better.

2:09 p.m. Officially putting down my Fufi F-50. Let’s see how the new camera works:

Chris Jolley from MSN Money is speaking:

Phoenix-based Flypaper has built a product that is a few steps above Powerpoint. With an intuitive user interface, you can build professional presentations and host them in a web browser. It almost looks like Flash, but not quite:

It’s more interactive than a Powerpoint too. You can have form inputs for users to fill out. They have a 30-day trial now, so try them out.

Tamales for lunch today:

2:21 p.m. Daphra Holder and Charles Best from DonorsChoose challenged me to raise money for their project. It provides students in need with resources that public schools often lack:

Afternoon sessions starting. The panelists are Sean Parker, Don Dodge, Jeff Weiner, and Loïc LeMeur:

BirdPost

Mapping bird sightings. You can make a list of birds that you are dying to see.

You can create your personal “lifelist” of birds that you’ve seen in your life.

All of the birds are tagged with physical characteristics. The site is completely searchable.

Closet Couture

Fashion social network with an online style community.

You upload pictures of your clothes and the community votes on outfits.

There is a calendar integrated so you can plan upcoming parties, or use it as a historical review (you won’t wear the same thing in front of the same people).

You can even make a packing list for trips to see what clothes you’ve packed before. You can use it as an inventory system.

Footnote

Facebook for the deceased.

You can make a timeline of the person’s history. Upload photos from high school and share memories.

Links to historical newspaper articles and public government documents. Write stories about your history with the deceased person.

They are digitizing over 2 million images a month.

Causecast

A powerful online social medium that connects non-profits, leaders, celebrities, and brands to those who want to make a positive impact on the world.

3:37 p.m. Sean Parker, co-founder of Facebook app Causes adds feedback:

Go Planit

A social travel planning tool. Plan your trip and go.

If you don’t know what to do, there is a recomendation engine that gives you tips. Book dinners with OpenTable in one click. Print out a custom travel guide too.

Export the iternary to iCal or Google Calendar. iPhone app too:

4:30 p.m. Steve Gillmormade an appearance:

Online banking startup Mint just had a redesign:

TrueCar

The future of marketing and advertising will be so great that consumers will not be able to get enough of it.

TrueCar is an information service that delivers actual transaction data, showing what everyone else is actually paying for their car.

This will introduce total transparency to the whole car-buying process.

Login to TrueCar, enter your zip code, make, and model and you’re on your way. You can view the data from a local, regional, or national view.

GoodRec

It’s about making recommendations to your friends, not rants. Thumbs up, or thumbs down.

The goal of the product is to make fast, confident decisions that you don’t regret.

4:53 p.m. TechCrunch has a whole row of writers here covering the event. I am sitting one row behind them.

5:07 p.m. Arrington and Calacanis are talking about the Demo Pit winner. The winner is…

iamnews

An open newsroom platform. Basically, they enable publishers to collaborate in the creation of news. Most small to medium publishers don’t have the resources to get everything.

Create news assignments, and pull in data from Twitter, Flickr, Seesmic, YouTube, Blip and more.

5:28 p.m. They just gave away five Xboxes:

Hollywood panel

• Michael Yanover, a secret Hollywood powerbroker
• Matt Diamond, American director
• Adam McKay, creator of Funny Or Die
• Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy and Dr. Horrible
• Stan Rogal, director



Yanover: Silicon Valley and Hollywood are finally getting to know each other. The two sides are starting to appreciate and respect each other.

Whedon: The excitement on the web exists between the creative people and the audience. The Hollywood people are still trying to figure it out. They come to it with great enthusiasm, but they try to either control all of it, or not pay people. Viral marketing is an oxy-moron.



Rogal: I think we are at the very beginning of this. My 15-year-old stopped watching television and completely went over to the Internet. He didn’t know that CSI was on CBS, he thought it was just a YouTube video.

Arrington: Was the wakeup call YouTube?

Yanover: The use of Flash has changed the life of Adobe a little bit. Content is much easier available. YouTube allows you to be more modest with production cost.

Diamond: Every medium has predicted the end of every other medium. Technology tools have changed the way people consume media.

8:18 p.m. Yammer wins TC50.



Full photoset on Flickr »

September 9th, 2008

TechCrunch50: Day 2

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:32 am

Categories: Blogging, Conference, Future, Live blog, TechCrunch50, Tools

Tags: Presentation, Andrew Mager

Yesterday’s presentations were a lot of fun to cover. I’m getting right back into the grind today.

6:30 a.m. Here is a list of today’s presentations:

• Alfabetic (Presented by Oded Broshi and Arik Kopelman)
• DropBox (Presented by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi)
• Emerginvest (Presented by Andrew Waterman and Eugene Kim)
• ExchangeP (Presented by Saul Kato and Charles Katz)
• FitBit (Presented by James Park and Eric Friedman)
• icharts (Presented by Seymour Duncker and Tyron Montgomery)
• Imindi (Presented by Adam Lindemann and Galen Kaufman)
• me-trics (Presented by Christian Dodd and Jame Vreelan)
• MIXTT (Presented by Eve Peters and Diana Agraz)
• Mobclix (Presented by Sunil Verma and Krishna Subramanian)
• Mytopia (Presented by Guy Ben-Artzi and Galia Ben-Artzi)
• Popego (Presented by Santiago Siri and Emiliano Kargieman)
• PostBox (Presented by Sherman Dickman and Scott MacGregor)
• Swype (Presented by Mike McSherry and Cliff Kushler)
• Tingz (Presented by Patrick Hunt and Richard Benson)
• TonchiDot (Presented by Takahito Iguchi and Peter Anshin)
• PERSONALRIA (Presented by Guy Hirsch)

6:36 a.m. Walking over to the venue. I am gonna try to get the same seats I had yesterday.

8:11 a.m. Gathering pictures from yesterday, and writing up two quick reviews if I can.

8:20 a.m. ComScore is doing a breakfast session. There’s about 50 people in the main conference center. I bet more people will be at Apple’s announcement.

8:29 a.m. Internet is much better today. There is about 60% more wired Ethernet cables setup on the tables:

Breakfast is bigger today:

When you get to your seat, there are flyers waiting for you:

8:32 a.m. Michael Arrington taking a pic:

9:01 a.m. I got a great demo from John Holland, Chief Experience Officer at Search Me.

Here is the full writeup »

9:12 a.m. Jason Calacanis announces that we are changing the format of the conference to American Idol style. Judges give their remarks right after each presentation.

Mike Arrington, Kevin Rose, and Mark Cuban hanging out:

Calacanis and other join in:

9:20 a.m. Meghan Asha and TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher are doing a Seesmic video:

9:30 a.m. Stage is set. We are ready for day 2:

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

September 7th, 2008

What do you want me to cover at TechCrunch50?

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 4:40 pm

Categories: Community, Conference

Tags: Floor, E-mail, Online Communications, Andrew Mager

I’ll be on the floor of the San Francisco Design Center this week, trying to liveblog the events of TechCrunch50. The list of companies for Day 1 will be released at 6:30 a.m. PST on each day of the conference.

Send me an email or post in the Talkback below and let me know which startups you want to know more about.

August 29th, 2008

ROFLthing 2008

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 6:49 pm

Categories: Conference, Party

Tags: Humor, Rickroll, Chuck Norris, Policies And Procedures, Channel Management, Internet, Human Resources, Marketing, Andrew Mager

Have you ever been to an internet culture conference? Earlier this year, Harvard senior Tim Hwang threw one in Cambridge, Mass., and it was a massive success.

This time, Hwang wanted to have a smaller get together in San Francisco to chat about memes. Welcome to ROFLthing 2008.

6:14 p.m. LOL wallets:

6:21 p.m. We arrived a little late. Portland programmer and founder of Upcoming.org Andy Baio introduced ROFLthing by showing the most hilarious bloopers that are found on the web.

Have you seen the DEA officer who was showing a class of people how to be safe with a gun and shot it by accident?

As long as it’s convincing, a meme will spread.

It has to have the air of authenticity, but not forever. Just long enough for it to spread it to your friends.

Is it okay to ruin someone’s life, as long as it’s entertaning?

If there’s nothing you can to stop it, you might as well profit from it.

Micro Humor

Ben Huh, ICanHaz

If something has a mass audience and consensus, it has stardom. The part that’s rarely exploited is called micro humor.

Inside jokes are the microest of humor. It’s something that we laugh at every day. Puns carry an entire area on the spectrum.

The Rickroll has moved through all quadrants. As a meme, it has this amazing huge lifespan that we’ve all witnessed.

If you look at the Google Trends analysis for Rickrolling, you can see it jump through the stages. You notice that when April 1st came around, the whole world knew about it. Then it severely dies off and becomes passé.

But what is micro humor?

Three broad categories:

• Inside jokes - when you share an experience, it’s not funny to everyone, just a few
• Situational humor
• Subcultural references

Micro humor is not Web 2.x. It’s not new, or the root of all humor, just something we inherently know as funny.

The first time you were in your mom and dad’s arms and they poked you in the nose, that was your first moment of micro humor.

It’s the little things that we share with each other, and when you go home you watch broadcast TV and zombie out.

Before mass media, micro humor was the dominant force. Imagine a king in a castle with his jesters. It had to be about the situation, or the people in that room.

In the “inner tube” era, because of the ease of publishing, we can move micro humor into other quadrants. The social web gives us a feedback loop. Right now, this growing meme industry is small, but growing. Chuck Norris is now mainstream.

Here are the slides from Ben’s show »

Love & the Cetacean Nation

Sean O’Steen

What makes the failwhale interesting to us? It makes a really good example of what server overload is. How do you explain that to mom? Use the traffic metaphor.

What makes it so sticky on a social media standpoint. Why do we like the failwhale?

5/30/08 - Robert Scoble mentions the word “failwhale” in a video. This was the day I registered the domain name. I say on it for a few weeks. In mid June, it was starting to gain momentum.

6/23/08 - A box of shirts arrives at Twitter headquarters. This is just a way of showing those guys about this problem, and that it’s up front and center. Convinced Twittter would dump the whale and move on.

There was a FAIL party about a month ago. There has been coverage on NPR, CNN Money, and Wired.

Buckminister Fuller and the Technoratic Counterculture

Fred Turner, Stanford University

The children of the 1960s were caught between nuclear holocause and the consumer cornucopia. Large scale industries that built things that could possibly blow up the world were competing with other industries that made fun things, and kids were trying to figure out which was right.

Buckminister Fuller had a notion of comprehensive design. They harvested the potentials of the realm. You should not work for a large institution, you should freelance. Look around, survey the information scape. Redistribute the goods of the world that would build more egalitarian communities. This appealed to the counterculture because it was seen as an anti-war activity.

Comprehensive design is our hope for technologically-enabled communities of consciousness. This legacy is beautiful and risky. A community that’s “just for us” is not okay.

Online worlds are described “as if they were alternative worlds”. There is a fantasy of living. Lurking in online worlds connects back to offline worlds, and that’s where the thinking of the future has to happen.

7:25 p.m. This is what my screen looks like when I’m liveblogging:

7:43 p.m. The bar is open. I will try to keep updating this with party photos if it doesn’t get too crazy in here. The party is being held at Mighty.

7:53 p.m. They are selling ROFLcon shirts for $10:

8:00 p.m. Poshy and Jay Zee in attendance:

8:01 p.m. CBS Interactive’s Gautam Joshi had a clever nametag arrangement:

It’s funny how people just go by their Twitter names nowadays:

8:20 p.m. I got to meet the event’s organizer, Tim Hwang. He is thinking about throwing a ROFLcon in SF :)

8:30 p.m. John McTaint was in attendance tonight, polishing his plans for the White House in 2008:

He told me that he was on his way to buying an 8th house. His jokes are totally satirical.

8:40 p.m. Internet’s Martin Sargent and Alex Chiu, creator of immortality devices showed us their happy faces:

“He sold so many immortality rings, he now owns two houses in San Francisco.”

9:43 p.m. Dino Ignacio pictured at right is the creator of Bert Is Evil:

10:20 p.m. Heading home.

Flickr photoset from ROFLthing 2008 »

August 19th, 2008

An Event Apart 2008: Day 2

Posted by Andrew Mager @ 8:53 am

Categories: Conference, Design, Development, Live blog, Standards

Tags: Web, Event, Channel Management, Quality, Marketing, Business Operations, Andrew Mager

The second day of An Event Apart will feature plenty of web standards jargon. I will be posting photos and notes from today’s events.

Unfortunately, the slides are reserved for attendees only, but I will try to gather as much information as possible.

8:23 a.m. Jeremy Keith, Derek Featherstone, and Jeffrey Zeldman discussing today’s presentations:

8:29 a.m. Keith is taking a souvenier photograph of the AEA crowd:

Patterns in the Process

Jeremy Keith, Clear Left

There are different phases of design patterns: discovery, content, information architecture, visual design, templates.

We have a client worksheet that people can download if they want to see how much it costs

Copy writing is interface design. Setting a tone of voice and sticking to it can really impact the user’s experience.

It’s okay to be silly sometimes too. Humor makes people feel comfortable.

Post-it notes are a great tool. You can easily move them around or modify them. Using paper and pen is the most natural form of design. Clear Left makes wireframes in HTML and CSS because you can sit down with a client and interact with it.

Visual designers take these wireframes and draw on top of it. It’s more fun when you use LEGOs actually:

We see many patterns in forms, tables, and microformats. What is the best way to mark up a form? Everybody has a different way of doing it. Your way is right.

Web development is a mess; we are all making it up as we go along. But processes are good. But as you go through different projects, you will always be tweaking things. We’re all flying byt the seat of our pants in this industry.

Cool links from the presentation:

• Edenbee
• Elf Cartel
• Dean Edwards’ IE7. This is like a browser tax for IE6 users because they have to download one extra file.

9:25 a.m. The room fills up as the morning progresses:

9:34 a.m. CSS king Eric Meyer prepares for his presentation on debugging:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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