Category Archives: Events

Last Tuesday, at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, Face.com decided to throw a party. Why? It wasn’t to launch a new product. No, it was actually a celebration designed to help the team let loose and also have some fun with their close friends and family. At this event, there was no pitching or press there to hear about the product — it was an evening designed to be jovial and to relax after months of hard work in developing a new product for the service.

Yes, Face.com had completed a new product. Called Klik, this is Face.com’s camera application that uses facial recognition to help you quickly tag your friends in real-time. No longer will you need to take a photo, then upload it to Facebook, and then tag your friends. This app will have your friend’s name appear next to their photo instantly before or after you snap it! An example of what image is rendered appears above – you can see clearly that the names are embedded right on the photo to help you associate who is who. But that’s not all…while the main benefit from using Klik is its facial recognition software, the application also includes filters, very much like Instagram, PicPlz, Streamzoo, Hipstamatic, and many others. And what would a photo application be without its social component? You can post the photos to Facebook, Twitter, or even on the Klik public page. Okay, so it’s another photo-sharing application, BUT this time it’s with facial recognition – don’t forget your friends ever again.

So now we have a photo application that can tag all of our friends in real-time, what’s the one thing we can do to celebrate and really give it a test? Why, throw a party! And that’s what Face.com did…they flew in their entire team to San Francisco to celebrate, had specialty-made themed drinks, and had an amazing band called Feedbomb on stage to perform. And this isn’t any normal band…Feedbomb is comprised of some of the most talented individuals in Silicon Valley, mostly former Facebook employees, but still talented people in the tech community: Randi Zuckerberg, Chris Pan, Robert Johnson, Sean Chaffin, Andy Barton, and David Ebersman

And boy do the Face.com people know how to throw an event! People like Chris Tolles (CEO of Topix), Bear Kittay, Joe Braidwood (CEO of SwiftKey), Shervin Pishevar (Managing director of Menlo Ventures), Sarah Austin (Pop17), Hermione Way (The Next Web), Owen Thomas (Daily Dot), Justin Kan (Justin.TV), Sol Lipman (AOL), and many more!

And now here are the photos from the evening:

Presenting tonight’s musical artists: Feedbomb

The Next Web’s Hermione Way and Randi Zuckerberg

Facebook’s Program Manager, Chris Pan

Throughout the evening, Face.com had iPads live-streaming to televisions around the room & tagging people using Klik

At one point, Face.com’s CEO got on stage & performed with Feedbomb — he’s the one with the tambourine

Not to be outdone, Daily Dot’s Owen Thomas was serenaded by Randi Zuckerberg during Katy Perry’s “Hot & Cold”

AOL’s Sol Lipman, Marie Domingo, and David Speiser

Chris Pan, Face.com’s Gil Hirsch, Shervin Pishevar, and Justin Kan

More photos of the evening, including Feedbomb’s performance from the evening can be found on my Flickr photostream by clicking here.

Photo credit: Heroshot photo taken by Gregg Delman. All other photos shown here taken by Ken Yeung.

Last week one of Bub.blicio.us‘ long-term media partners and friends, Liana Burtsava of Trendy Lime, was a partner at the Startup Week Vienna that welcomed 100 investors, 70 speakers, and over 1,000 guests to beautiful Vienna, the city known as the bridge between Eastern and Central Europe. Thanks to Liana, we are connected to blogger Vukasin Stojekov of Seebhub.me and the unfolding of startup events in Europe.

Contributed by Vukašin Stojkov of SeeHub.me of Serbia:

Morten Lund, investor and entrepreneur from Copenhagen, Denmark

A plethora of keynotes, presentations, panels and workshops participated in last weeks event in Vienna. Oliver Holle and Erik Bovee of Speedinvest held fantastic informational presentations. I have heard a fair share of VC presentations, but these guys really killed it. Not only did you learn a lot, you could enjoy it too due to their great presentation style. The Startup Week Viena is a must for early stage startups, and I hope to hear them in the future, ideally when they come to Belgrade. One of the best motivational keynotes was given by Pascal Finette on Wednesday, when he compared startups to running a marathon and shared his lessons with entrepreneurs in the audience.

TechCrunch day was awesome. A small part was due to Mike Butcher being on the stage where he is a Superstar. He is awesome presenting himself, moderating a panel, having a fireside chat or even presenting an awards ceremony.

A great piece of motivation and inspiration came on Thursday with Facebook’s Christian Hernandez highlighting Serbia’s Nordeus as his favorite European success story. This was an illustration of how close Nordeus and Facebook are which I believe many in this region take as a signal that one can indeed make it BIG on a global scale no matter where one comes from. Our last day on Friday, we had a chance to hear Doug Richard’s amazing story about his biggest mistake and I can not wait to hear from him again.

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch, soaked with champagne by the winners of the Start up competition, MySugr

The Networking was the best part of Startup Week for me. My biggest impression from this event was a who’s who in the CEE startup scene which was a significant upgrade from the traditional circuit of conferences I have attended in the past. I had the chance of meeting and talking with amazing people from Germany, Austria, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia. You name it, they were there. It was a great experience at what is poised to become one the central European startup events. This year’s edition was just a sign of things to come.

More photos from the conference found on Facebook. (photo credit Luis Kentzler)

It’s an exciting week, it’s the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City! In addition, it’s my first trip to New York City and I’m enjoying experiencing the local tech scene.

Since arriving, I’ve had the pleasure of learning quiet a bit about what the city is doing on both the social and technology front. Coming from San Francisco, a huge technology hub, it’s easy to assume that the rest of the tech world is very similar. In Silicon Valley, there are new start-ups launched everyday and an amazing amount of entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers and more to support a robust technology atmosphere.

This morning, I sat in on a presentation by Seth Pinsky, President of New York City Economic Development Corporation, as he outlined the key efforts New York City is working on to keep key technology talent in the city as well as attract entrepreneurs and engineers away from the better known technology hubs like Silicon Valley. From incubators that provide low rent office space to city-funded angel investors to local training programs and competitions, NYC is committed to moving the tech start-up talent to the East Coast.

One part of this effort is geared specifically at education institutions to attract and foster science and engineering talent in New York City. The program, dubbed Applied Sciences NYC, is even asking institutions to submit and RFP (request for proposal) and the city will provide property to build on and develop from the ground up. So far, more than 25 top tier institutions have submitted proposals.

As the session closed, I asked what I think is a key question: can this model be applied beyond New York and the technology sector. Seth very much believed that it can and should although his focus in 100 percent NYC right now.

What do you think? Is NYC in a good position to attract the talent they need? To learn more about Applied Sciences NYC, click here.

Imagine a day without access to your computer? The One Laptop per Child San Francisco Bay Area community (olpcsf.org) sees to it that no child goes without a computer in under-developed countries and even shows them how to use and fix them.  This is a community of volunteer educators, technologists, anthropologists, enthusiasts, champions and others. Monthly meetings are held at the SFSU downtown campus where they share stories, exchange ideas, solve problems, foster community and build collaborations around the One Laptop per Child project.

Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor of the Information System at San Francisco State University is the force behind the grassroots group that has organized the OLPC SF Community Summit 2011. The Summit is a combination of panel discussions, “Birds of a Feather” sessions, speed-geeking and much more. A few of the topics that will be covered include Education, Technology and Outreach & Deployments of OLPC programs. Last year it was a local meeting, this year the Summit is open to an audience worldwide.

Verma, who is passionate about the cause due to growing up in India where many children still lack educational opportunities.  says, “The Summit will bring together people who want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege. They share the belief that the One Laptop per Child is one of the most revolutionary endeavors going on in the world today.”

WHEN: Oct. 21st to  23rd.

WHERE: SFSU Downtown Campus in San Francsico

COST: General $40 and Students $25

REGISTER:  Eventbrite: bit.ly/plMJnH

Newly created hackathon incubator, AngelHack is about to take Silicon Valley by storm. A new idea that has not brings together 20 of silicon valley’s best and brightest together to create 2 new startups!

On November 11, 2011 a private bus will leave San Francisco holding 20 engineers and developers, en route to an exclusive location, to take over a hotel for 3 days and create two accelerated startups. Upon return, the teams will present their final product to a room full of media and investors.

“Angelhack is about 4 things: Collaboration, Entrepreneurship, Technology and Investing,” says AngelHack co-founder Krystyl Baldwin. “We call it AngelHack because we allow a select pool of angel investors the opportunity to invest in our companies in return for helping to sponsor the event.”

AngelHack is currently seeking out 20 bright engineers to put their entrepreneurial skills to the test. Interested parties can submit applications at http://angelhack.com/apply

Starting on October 3rd, product ideas will be crowd-sourced from the larger technology community. The owner of the product idea that gets chosen, will receive a stake in the company’s equity along with being one of the cofounders. The deadline for submissions is Nov 1.

For more information check out http://www.angelhack.com