by Victor Karamalis Photo by Brian Solis
The weather isn’t the only thing that’s heating up in San Francisco this week. All day on Friday the 26th at the Yerba Buena Theatre, uber-producer extraordinaire Christian Perry and his crew will be hosting the Social Networking Application Platform (SNAP) Summit. The event is packed with the most innovative experts and entrepreneurs that swim in social apps on a daily basis.
With 200 people already signed up (and paid) for the event, I asked Christian recently how he came up with the idea for this event. “The idea came just before Facebook opened up its API in April. Of course there are other social networking applications and we wanted to talk about all of them as whole. However, given Facebook’s popularity, there is a significant emphasis on Facebook given the speakers and panel topics.”
With big names such as newbie father Robert Scoble (pictured with Christian below), I asked him “in your opinion, who do you not only see as a successful entrepreneur but a true visionary that your audience should take note?” “All the speakers are great with their own unique expertise. Keith Schacht is from Chicago and flying in to speak at the Summit. He has co-founded and sold two successful technology companies.” He’s currently co-founder of Chicago based 42 Friends LLC, a company that develops Facebook applications.
Michael Lazerow is CEO and founder of Buddy Media who have created Acebucks. As Christian briefly explained. “Acebucks is a marketing application that gives people incentives to play games, refer friends, and take surveys while gaining ‘bucks’ for real world prizes”. I personally just installed on my Facebook profile and I rarely install these types of apps. This is definitely a win-win scenario in my book for Buddy Media and Facebook.
With well-known sponsors like Citrix and one of my favorites, Bubblicious, I ended the interview with asking Christian what he wants people to walk away from the Summit. “All attendees should have a better understanding of the platforms. I also want developers to think about the technical issues. They’ll see and hear entrepreneurs that have succeeded. The conferences are also great to meet each other (aspiring entrepreneurs) and that’s why they come.”
by Victor Karamalis
For Alexander Pagidas,the Idea Contest 2.0 is an effort to bring the Bay Area’s brightest to address issues and solve problems that affect not just the US but the world at large. The first event in May was successful in bringing people together to brainstorm on internet solutions to humanitarian issues confirming his belief that “the tech community has an underlying idealism that is absent in other business industries.” The second event promises to help entrepreneurs with their dreams by supplying a platform for the exchange of ideas at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco later this week. The format was designed to create a win/win situation: Any entrepreneur can ask a question, set a reward for the answer, and let the audience try to win the reward by answering the question. The rewards are up to the entrepreneur, but they don’t have to be material. They could be expertise or even networking resources. So someone could ask a question about Web 2.0 development and reward the person who answers it with his expertise on marketing or his connections in the Angel investor community.
Pagidas, a consultant who describes himself as “a Human Factors Specialist but with a focus on Philosophy and Psychology instead of Design and Ergonomics”, is gaining momentum for the second Idea Contest 2.0 happening on Thursday evening beginning at 7pm in 2174 Market St, San Francisco. The Meetup page for his group contains approximately 200 people. When I spoke with him at a café in Soma, he was hopeful in getting at least 100 of his fellow entrepreneurs and creative thinkers to help each other through the exchange of ideas. “As more people understand the concept, I aspire that this will grow to an open and diverse think tank that will be of value both to businesses and non-profits who want to make a difference in the world,” he confided to me as he sipped his herbal tea.
Since its inception on April 2007, Idea Contest 2.0 is gradually becoming a focal point where entrepreneurs exchange ideas and dreams while connecting with potential employers and employees. Pagidas has created an event unlike others in the Bay Area, in that it doesn’t assign its members the role of passive spectators of emerging technologies but rather that of creative participants actively shaping the future of technology. This is one case where ideas beget action and the world may benefit from it.
by Victor Karamalis
Yesterday (10-Oct 07), Om Malik of GigaOm showed an interesting graphic of Facebook’s traffic dropping using Comscore’s information for the first time since February 2007 as shown here on Compete.com. Although this may be too premature to say that all those Facebooks API’s have lost traction, there could be a bunch of factors involved. So, before everyone stops to make Facebook Apps and jump over to other social networks, let us see if it is just an off month with some plausible explanations.
First of all, Facebook has been the social network of choice for most undergraduate students. They have just started the school year. In addition, people that have been away from work for the month of August had to play catch up in the office in September. Also, Compete‘s numbers only focus on unique visitors from the United States. This may be the case as well for Comscore’s Media Metrix Service. As of this post, information concerning Comscore’s metrics could not be obtained. Global traffic needs to be taken into consideration (just like global markets in the financial space).
Let’s just make the most obvious point. This has only been for one month. Although Om’s popped out that spreadsheet from his Fedora seems scary for Facebook with more than a nine percent decline (he will contact FB tomorrow on this if it’s true), the primary concern for Facebook is if the bottom line has been affected. This includes any large multi million dollar advertising deals with the likes of Microsoft as reported over the summer that are in the pipeline. Continued traffic decline could hurt future deals like this and potentially jeopardize its multi-billion dollar IPO valuation a few notches down. On the other hand, ambitious Facebook application developers still have over 24 million users to target. But, it is just too soon to get this feeling of panic.
by Victor Karamalis Photo by Brian Caldwell on Flickr
For some of us, a weekend is a chance to recuperate from a grueling work week. For others, it is an opportunity to create something that is needed in the world. So, this past week, I had a cup of coffee with Tyler Willis, an up and coming lad who has decided to organize the first San Francisco Startup Weekend on November 16th to 18th. This event is open to all who want to start a company in one weekend and become a co-founder of the new entity. Earlier this year in Boulder, Co., seventy co-founders brought online VoSnap. As featured on TechCrunch, VoSnap started as an idea to quickly make a consensus on a decision within a group via email and text messaging.
Numerous startup weekends have been popping up all over the country. So, Tyler decided that San Francisco and its tech mavens should have one too. When I asked him why he wanted to do this when there are many tech events and conferences in the Bay Area, he replied, “so often, the ‘networking events’ evolve into nothing more than a wasteful night of micropitches, this seemed like it would cut through the BS and let you work alongside someone. Anyone who’s done a stressful period at a startup can tell you, you know with great accuracy who’s worth their salt within a very short amount of time.”
There have already been numerous submissions for ideas already and there are spots available from developers to PR, and business development positions featured on one of the site links until October 26th. And as Tyler puts it, “this seemed like this allowed that to occur in a fun way, and that something really cool might be born out of it.” In my view, this weekend event is at what entrepreneurial startups are all about. Who knows, this experiment might end up being an HP or a Google.
By Victor Karamalis
I enjoy a good show in the city from time to time. But in this instance, the producers of SFBETA brought in a huge catch for its monthly Geek Sessions event at the famous City Club on top of 155 Sansome in San Francisco. Hundreds filled the seats and even stood to the back by the elevators. With corporate presenters SFBETA and the Forbin Group, the complimentary libations and catered food made it that much more appetizing to hear fellow database gurus Josh Berkus of Sun, Arnold Goldberg of eBay, Paul Querna of Bloglines, and Chad Walters of Powerset preach their experiences on database scaling in their respective companies.
Josh started off with a poignant presentation that obviously showed preference to Postgre over Mysql. Paul Querna spoke about how Bloglines has been able to keep up with every blog ever written since 2003. Arnold gave us a bird’s eye view of eBay’s properties and issues that only Behemoth eBay can deal with with billions of transactions happening every year and even more money transacted (in Billions too). Chad of Powerset spoke of the intricacies of search in terms of database design. At the end of the panelists presentations, Socializr’s Jonathon Abrams handed a Q and A session. All of this was on top of the free goodies brought on by Arcscale. They were giving away free kick-arse snowboards as part of their raffle.
The demo of the day came from B-Hive. They have software that not only monitors transactions in a network environment, but also shows where an enterprise’s traffic is heaviest at any time. They have a free version of B-hive Conductor that anyone can try out. They also do mirroring on top of a bunch of analysis on traffic. Daniel and Mosche really impressed me with their demonstration (and they were giving away a free iPhone). I wish I had this ten years ago when I was ssh’ing into my edge routers at my former ISP.
Although we must give honorable mentions to sponsors such as Citrix, Sun, and Cisco, all who attended can attest to the human touch by its producers. This venue puts the local tech community on a pedestal and the attendants just want more of it. It just goes to show that Cindy Phung, Shon Burton, and Christian Perry know how to pull off a polished event for the tech savvy.
