Category Archives: Events

28 May

GigaOM’s NewTeeVee Hits the Big Screen

GigaOM’s NewTeeVee and Metacafe launched a new summer series to share the new world of interesting, viral, and cool online videos at Pier 38 in San Francisco.

Everything starts on the NewTeeVee site where people upload their favorite videos – related to a theme. The community then votes on the best web videos on the Pier Screenings website and the winners are then projected on the big screen at the next event.

The first theme was episodic content and it was very bub.blicio.us in a completely different way.

Videos were judged by the audience, with commentary from Nick Douglas of Look Shiny, Irina Slutsky of PodTech, and Jackson West of NewTeeVee.

Kevin Rose and David Prager of Revision3 also discussed the elements of building a loyal episodic show audience online.


David Prager and Kevin Rose along with Liz Gannes

Metacafe rewarded creators of entertaining video with its industry-leading Producer Rewards program. Metacafe will promote the top three audience winners from the live event on its front page.


Megan McCarthy and Gabe Rivera


Frank Gruber

It wasn’t a rooftop party, nor was it indicative of anything reminiscent of the last boom. It was a simply a gathering of people interested in online video representing a variety of different industries. It was a new kind of community-driven film festival that could only debut in San Francisco.

Popcorn, beer, candy, hot chocolate, and coffee was served to complete the movie experience.

It was a cold, cold, cold night…but it’s San Francisco, so it was to be expected. Event producers encouraged attendees to bring blankets and some did. Those who didn’t simply persevered as The Pier Screenings was the place to be that night.

It was dark, so I couldn’t see everyone, but I did manage to catch up with some of the more prominent and interesting people driving the new web, including:

  • Rafe Needleman of Webware
  • Joel Sacks and Erica Ogg of CNET
  • Kevin Burton of Tailrank and Spinn3r
  • James Yu of BuzzShout
  • Om Malik, Liz Gannes, Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOM
  • Frank Gruber of AOL and Somewhat Frank
  • Gabe Rivera of Techmeme
  • Megan McCarthy of Valleywag
  • Peter Pham of Photobucket (fresh of the acquisition by MySpace)
  • Justin Kan of Justin.tv
  • Elizabeth Phillips
  • Scott Beale of Laughing Squid


James Yu

Shoutout to the Event Sponsors
Co-host: Metacafe
Silver: Revision3
Fan: vod:pod

For more pictures, jump over to Brian Solis‘ photoset on flickr.

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27 May

Flashback – Women 2.0′s Pitch Night at CNET

Content and Pictures by Julie Blaustein

Women 2.0

The Girls of 2.0
The Gals of Women 2.0 Shivani Sopory, Angie Chang, Wen-Wen Lam, Shaherose Charania, and Annie Chang

Women 2.0’s goal is to help foster the next generation of women entrepreneurs. They brilliantly executed their goal when they brainstormed and brought to fruition the Women2.0 Napkin Business Challenge. They opened it up to entrepreneurs of both genders with the caveat that a women under 35 would be included in the group. A screening of business plans arrived from as far as India and were narrowed down to 5 finalists who were invited to pitch to a standing room audience of over 150 at CNET on April 25th.

Pitching the Judges
Shaherose Charania working the Judges and the audience

The contestants shared their power points and fielded some tough questions and were judged not only by the audience who voted with their cell phones using Mozes, but by a live panel of Silicon Valley venture capitalist legends including Carol Sands of The Angels Forum, David Stern of Clearstone Venture Partners, Lara Druyan of Allegis Capital, Marianne Wu of Mohr Davidow Ventures, Marleen McDaniel of Women.com, Shannon McClenaghan of Jimmyjane, Sharon Vosmek of Astia (formerly WTC), Tami Zhu of AOL, New Ventures, and Venky Ganesan of Globespan Venture Partners.

Vish Mishra of Clearstone Partners and his daughter

Carol Sands of the Angels Forum inquired frequently, “How are you going to show me the money?” Another question brought up often was, “How is this deal different from what was done round one during the .com era?” The teams held their own and wowed the audience with their quick thinking rebuttals.

A tie between the two teams granted them prizes of $1500 each, pitch coaching from Guidewire Group, and meetings with Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital.The winning teams were Laser-Seal who are seeking a faster, cleaner wound closures in the operating room with laser technology and O’Light (O for Organic!) which aims to create fashionable, OLED lighting concepts.


Laser-Seal Winners Avishai Shoham, Dr. Milana Trounce, Kristen Gaior, and Avvishai Shoham

O light
O’Light Winners Dr. Robert Zhe Zhang and Yiru Sun

The other panelists included:

FindYourScene – A community website where people can find “their crowd” and post, discover, and rate social events.

QTstar – Video monetization and intermediary ad service company to be located in China and the United States

(YOU)STYLEME – Online fashion community where men and women with particular style needs can connect with other style-savvy consumers in a fun and engaging way.


Michael Blaustein of DCM, Julie Blaustein of Photobucket and Joel Sacks of CNet


Nikhi Bobb and Michael Blaustein Supporting the Girls

Sobby's Cupcakery
Enjoying the yummy cupcakes from Sibby’s Cupcakery

David Stern of Venture Partners leaving with his thank you gift

Champaign
Champaign to Celebrate the Success of Women 2.0

It was a fun, upbet event with a lot of enthusiasm and networking resulting throughout the evening. The gals of Women 2.0 did not miss a beat putting on a fantastic show from great food, especially those yummy and fun looking cupcakes, lots of drinks and champaign to top off the event. They were gracious hosts and made all feel very welcome. Two screens, two judges (vc’s, audience cell phone) and lotofsupport by fantastic sponsors including Google, Spock, AOL The Angel’s Forum and many more made it a top notch, classy event.

We look forward to other successful, bub.blicio.us events from the girls! In fact they will be hosting a women only BBQ mixer that will be held May 30th. at 6 pm at Annie and Angie’s house in Palo Alto. Email women2.0@gmail.com for an invite and more information.

Congratulations to the Women of Web 2.0.

For more pictures go to Julie’s Album

25 May

LinkedIn Says Let’s Do Lunch 2.0

by Alison McNeill


Photo Credit: Terry Chay


Photo Credit: Jeremy Pepper


Photo Credit: Jerry Luk

Hosted by LinkedIn, Lunch 2.0 was bigger than ever this month with a ton of attendees, enough food to feed an army and free kickballs for everyone! LinkedIn did a great job escorting the bub.blicio.us crew around to interview:
Mark Jen – Plaxo and co-founder of Lunch 2.0
Justin Kan – Justin.tv
Guy Kawasaki – Garage.com
Dan Nye – CEO of LinkedIn

Others in attendance include:
Jeremy Pepper
Chris Heuer of Social Media Club
Jeremiah Owyang
Mario Sundar of LinkedIn
Jessica Guynn from the SF Chronicle
Dave McClure
Daniela Barbosa
Jerry Luk of LinkedIn
Johnny Ham of Ustream.tv

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23 May

Pandora is bub.blicio.us


Pandora held a very cool “town hall” style meeting yesterday at SF MOMA to introduce a series of new milestones, features, and partnerships all related to its Pandora Everywhere program.

The room was packed with users, press, and bloggers – and overall, it was representative of everything that is good about the new Web economy. It was all about community.


The crowd – plus special guest, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch

I’ve been a big fan of Pandora since its inception and the experience has grown by leaps and bounds over time.

In an impressive and well orchestrated presentation, Pandora introduced partnerships with Sonos and Sprint which brings the world of streaming music into the home (away from the PC) and to cell phones.

Pandora on Sprint is free for the first 30 days – with no obligation – and then costs $2.99 per month on top of your Sprint Power Vision data plan.

And, they didn’t stop there. They pre-announced a deal that will bring Pandora into an upcoming mobile device to be built by SanDisk and powered by Zing. The device is similar to the Sansa Connect device launched last month by Yahoo.

For those of you new to Pandora, it is a new hybrid Internet Radio Station that allows users to create stations around their favorite artists and refines its playlist with a bit of user guided interaction. It starts with the artist you selected, and then applies a unique layer of intelligence to match that style of song to its database to determine the next song it serves. Users can vote whether they like it or don’t care for it and Pandora does the rest.

What I’d like to see is breadth. If you choose one artist – the music DNA needs to offer a greater assortment of music to reduce repetition and also introduce users to new artists.

Either way, Pandora runs on every PC and Mac I own and I have it streaming throughout the house through a wireless setup that only a geek could love. However, with these announcements, you can bet that I’ll be looking at upgrading the home system very soon. As for Sprint, I guess I have to wait for smartphone support.

Notable attendees included:

Follow me on twitter.

See below for more coverage:

Gizmodo

TechCrunch

Zatz Not Funny

Wired

Guardian

SoCal Tech

TechAddress

Scobleizer

VentureBeat

21 May

SF Newtech Meetup Hits Rockstar Status – bub.blicio.us tv

Oh yes, by all means, this is no joke. The SF Newtech extravaganza hit a new level since it outgrew the CNET digs and graduated to the Metreon (where many a rockstar has played to lucky audiences).

In its first meetup in the new theater, SF Newtech appears to have already outgrown its new home. Kudos to event founder, Myles Weissleder.

It’s no surprise however. Over the last year, the Web 2.0 has truly grown to become a cultural phenomenon that has fortunately, or unfortunately, shed its association with the technology infrastructure which defined it. Now, it’s all about the tech renaissance and the flocks of people who are rushing to be part of the next big thing.

This event also featured none other than Om Malik as the VIP guest moderator.

Christian Perry, founder of Zaptix and SFBeta, stepped in for Adriana Gascoigne to interview an impressive lineup of presenters, including:

  • Podtech & ScobleShow – Robert Scoble, Blogger/Vlogger Extraordinaire
  • Magnify.net - Steve Rosenbaum, CEO & Founder
  • Justin.TV - Justin Kan live from LA w/ Kyle Vogt, Cast, Crew & Hardware Hacker
  • Turnhere – John McWeeny, Senior Vice President, Business Development
  • Kyte – Daniel Graf, CEO & Founder

Other notable attendees were:

  • Debbie Landa and Shay Norin of Dealmaker Media
  • Jeremy Pepper
  • David Ingram of Izimi
  • Ben Wan, angel investor
  • Cindy Phung of the Forbin Group
  • Ben Metcalfe
  • Webware‘s Rafe Needleman
  • James Yu of Buzzshout
  • Joanne Wan of GigaOM
  • Julian Brass of Engage.com
  • Mick Liubinskas of Tangler.com
  • Victor Karamalis of Authenticated Apparel

More pictures are available at Brian Solis’ flickr album.

sf newtech meetup sfnewtech metreon web2.0 web 2.0 web+2.0 magnify robert+scoble podtech scobleizer justin.tv tangler kyte.com veodiah gigaom buzzshour om+malik magnify.net turnhere engage

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