Category Archives: People

Will you be at South by Southwest this year? The odds are the if you’ve been there before, you probably didn’t go for a badge this year–or you are and you’re speaking, or you bought one just because you want to either (a) hang out in the blogger lounges or (b) quickly reserve your hotel room (I’m guilty of both). But if you’re fanatical about attending the SXSW interactive conference but didn’t bother to get a badge, one must wonder why? Is it because it’s too expensive? You weren’t selected to speak on a panel or keynote? Or you just wanted to party in Austin?

Regardless of your reason for not buying a badge, you’re not alone in your plight. In addition to the thousands of registered attendees at this year’s SXSW, there’s probably at least double that amount. This year, someone’s decided to reach out to these unaffiliated masses and create a support group dedicated to honoring this tradition and to help celebrate a theme they call “people over podiums”. If you happen to be one of these individuals who believe in this theme, then you are, by definition, part of the #badgeless2012 revolution.

#Badgeless2012 was started as a means of celebrating our individuality while also enjoying each other’s company and experience, while learning and partying from the community with some of the best music, best food, and events from around the world. Here in this temporary international hub of technology, chances are you’re going to meet someone new and get to share your thoughts about the latest trends, applications, and technology while being downloaded on what they find interesting. This sharing of ideas is what SXSW is meant to be about–#badgeless2012 looks to bring that out more by focusing more on the people who make up SXSW instead of the podiums on which they stand on and teach. According to their website, their goal is to learn from each other and self-organize.

In an opening post on the #badgeless2012 website, the organizers believe that this movement is:

…about the meritocracy of the new world, where you don’t have to have permission, money, postion or power to assemble, or to be a part of a community of common interests and common goals. Just as we did with Web2point1, the point is people. And people with social media tools can do a lot, drastically changing the veyr foundations on which our socioeconomic world view is formed.

Started by Social Media Club founder Chris Heuer, #badgeless2012 is not meant to dissuade people from attending SXSW–he still thinks that there’s some merit to attending, but he believes that it’s an acknowledgement of the “alternative and of our freedom to associate and assemble”. Maybe they’re trying to explore the rationale for why so many people are staying in Austin during this five-day period of interactive but aren’t actually purchasing a badge. This movement seems to want to strive to continue the SXSW experience, but without resorting to paying exorbitant registration fees or lack of hotel rooms, etc. In a sense, one might think that the theme of “people over podiums” somehow fits with the Social Media Club because both are about sharing of ideas and its only fitting to be associated with this organization (disclosure: I’m a professional member).

So if you’re going to be at SXSW this weekend and are representing the #badgeless2012 community, it’ll be great to see you. Mr. Heuer and the Social Media Club are creating #badgeless2012 t-shirts that you can purchase and wear proudly while in Austin (and wherever else you are). If you find Mr. Heuer around or stop by the IBM booth in the Austin Convention Center, you might be able to pick one up. T-shirts are also available on Cafe Press. Please note that all proceeds will go to support the Social Media Club and their fundraising drive.

See you in Austin!

It’s funny that right when I published my post about location-based check-in leader, Foursquare’s, recent milestone celebrating its third birthday, days later, I would need to write another post about the service–this time about one-half of the legendary founder team leaving. Yes, you read that correctly, one of the Foursquare founders has announced they’re leaving the company. That person would be Naveen Selvadurai.

In his farewell post, Mr. Selvadurai, mentioned that he’s seen the company take-off and that he’s worn so many hats in his time working on Foursquare. The service now has over a hundred employees and are “building amazing things” and probably has a lengthy product timeline for new releases, but unfortunately it seems that Mr. Selvadurai has felt he’s done it all and now he’s going to move on. Slowly, but surely, as this month starts to wind down, so too will his involvement with the company. But he won’t be gone for good–he’s determined to stay on the board and will continue to advise the service on things to improve and build. Will he go the route of becoming an angel investor or full venture capitalist? Probably not…he says that he’ll probably get back to what he loves the most–being an entrepreneur, learning, and building new things.

First reported by GigaOm’s Om Malik, who apparently keeps close tabs on the company, Mr. Selvadurai’s departure comes at a time when there’s reports that two major VC firms are trying to pick up Foursquare stock. Both Spark Capital and SV Angel are apparently trying to help mold Foursquare into a company that can give them more bang for their buck. In doing so, and with Mr. Selvadurai’s departure, remaining founder, Dennis Crowley, will become Foursquare’s CEO–and it’s probably a good choice since he’s (1) the founder, (2) has got the vision for the company, (3) drive to make it happen. So far the company has secured $71 million in funding and looks to keep on going.

We wish Mr. Selvadurai nothing but the best in his next adventures and success as an entrepreneur!

Photo Credit: Foursquare co-founder, Naveen Selvadurai, poses for TheRichest.org

Sorry Mayor Ed Lee, I’m going to let you finish making an appearance at the upcoming LAUNCH conference this week (assuming he will be), but I got to say that having a sitting President has got to be the tops for any conference. Kudos to the LAUNCH conference.

Announced today, the 2012 LAUNCH conference, which will be held at the San Francisco Design Concourse on Thursday & Friday, will welcome Israeli President Shimon Peres to the stage. The ninth president of Israel, a former prime minister, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (along with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin), will be in Silicon Valley as part of his his trip focusing on innovation in technology. At the 2nd annual conference, host & organizer Jason Calacanis will have the honor, along with famed Israeli entrepreneur and investor Yossi Vardi will conduct a fireside chat with President Peres to talk about the progress in Israel and how the two countries can work together to help foster the progress of technology.

It’s not as if Israel is lagging behind the United States in terms of developing new technology. Some of their latest startups have become quite well-known in the community, like Waze, my6sense, iStreamer, Soluto, and Shaker (a winner at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco last year). And there’s definitely a growing community in this nation. In a BBC 2011 report, Israel currently has approximately 4,000 tech startups, more  than any other country outside the United States (according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Centre). Two years ago, venture capital funds amounted to $884 million being provided to these startups. The same BBC report states that Israel is a world leader in research and development spending as a percentage of the economy–it’s top in both the number of startups and engineers as a proportion of the population, and it’s #1 in per capital venture capital investment.

The arrival of President Peres on the stage of what is the latest tech conferences is a really good thing for the community. While the United States government might still not be a major supporter of the latest innovations, in Israel, it apparently is. Koby Simona from the Israel Venture Capital Research Centre believes that the government helped play a key role in the rapid rise of the “startup nation”. In 1993, Israel created the Yozma programme, a fund set up to invest in local VC funds that would channel money into new tech firms. Even Israel’s defense forces are supporting entrepreneurs–while compulsory, the military has set up high-tech units where those who are computer-savvy can go to come up with innovative ideas in computer security, cryptography, communications, and electronic warfare. So President Peres’ visit to not only the LAUNCH stage, but also the demo pit, should be a welcome sign that one of the United State’s closest allies and a hub of technology ingenuity is taking great interest in seeing how startups are helping to change the world…for the better.

To get your tickets to the LAUNCH conference here. The show goes on starting Wednesday, March 7 through Thursday, March 8.

Photo Credit: Israeli President Shimon Peres via The Jewish Chronicle Online

Word has leaked out about Ben Parr’s latest endeavor and it’s sounding like it’ll revolutionize the future. Well, if what we’re reading is true, that is. A few weeks ago, the former Editor-at-Large of Mashable gave word that he was going to have a series of announcements about what he’s going to be doing now. It was known that he was teaming up with a co-founder to create a startup, but he kept it pretty close to his sleeve, always saying that he’s “not ready to announce yet”. Then, the truth slowly started to come out. First, it was his announcement that he was going to continue writing, but this time it was a weekly column for CNET. And then last week, TechCrunch seemed to let it all out with a post that, if you believe what you read, spoiled the surprise.

So what was this stealthy startup that Mr. Parr has been working on? It’s called the Peep Project and it’s started by both Mr. Parr and his co-founder, Hilary Karis, formerly a senior software engineer for Sociable Labs. The only thing that seems to have been revealed is what the Peet Project is all about: it’s going to be your “intelligent assistant”, which TechCrunch assumed was going to be a Siri wannabe, but Mr. Parr is adamant that they’re “not building Siri”. They further describe the Peep Project being something to “help manage your information universe”. You can get a slightly better understanding of what Mr. Parr and Ms. Karis is doing if you read their AngelList proposal, specifically when dealing with recruiting (they’re hiring for a designer, by the way):

Can’t remember the super-awesome thing you found on the web yesterday? Ever have so many tabs open that you run out of memory? We’re fixing that…We think of The Peep Project as a cause. We’re going to change the way people interact with information. We’re going to change how people use the web.

While they say that they’re not building Siri, what it potentially may seem to be is that they’re expanding on a whole new level of Artificial Intelligence and building upon the platform that created Siri. I’m not saying that the Peep Project will be a voice-activated automaton and I might be totally wrong about what the Peep Project is about, but the fact they’re describing this as an “intelligent assistant” is probably going to be something much more than the next mechanical turk. The age of technology “assistants” is rapidly approaching–Siri was the pioneer in this and the Peep Project might be the one to evolve it to make it much more meaningful (how exactly remains to be seen). Those that I know that have been exposed to the Peep Project say that what Mr. Parr is doing has a shot and I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt (the man has ideas…).

But the Peep Project isn’t the only one thinking about trying to get rid of Siri’s monopoly of being a true virtual assistant. In fact, Google has indicated that they would like to compete with Apple and create their own. In a TechCrunch post written by Alexia Tsotsis, it’s being reported that Apple will be trying to integrate Siri into multiple platforms. So the search engine giant has said they’re working on an assistant program as well and hope to roll it out soon. Perhaps the most poignant part of the post is this analysis from Ms. Tsotsis: “Google has now set its ambitions beyond social and is focused wholeheartedly on building this “Do engine,” or goal oriented search: 2011 was the year of social for Google. 2012 is the year of ‘Assistant.’”

That’s right: 2012 will be the year of the “Assistant” and it seems that Mr. Parr and Ms. Karis have acknowledged this and want to get ahead of the game. We’re no longer talking about just social applications like Instagram, Twitter, Path, Facebook, or Zynga. Instead, the tech industry is slowly moving towards an era where applications and services will be tapping into the awesome API powers of these “assistants”. Maybe that’s something the Peep Project is all about-who knows, we won’t even find out for a while until they fully announce what they’re up to.

The Verge reports that Google’s Assistant service won’t just be a standalone application–developers will be given access to the API in order to integrate Assistant right into their very own applications, but the knowledge would come right from Google’s enormous search engine, not from the application creator’s library. But what Assistant would do is give users the ability to speak to get answers, search results, and more–just like Siri. It will be interesting to see how the Peep Project can differentiate itself from this, but I think that given that only Apple and Google are the two major players who are probably diving head first into this, the Peep Project has a good chance at being a major player and help shape the discussion about this stuff.

Last month, a study was done that indicated that Siri currently accounts for 25 percent of traffic handled by search engine Wolfram Alpha. But compared to how Assistant would leverage the Google engine, the results that Wolfram Alpha would produce for the Apple iPhone is based on data curated by the service, not on algorithms attempting to search the web. In his proposal, Mr. Parr stated that he’s trying to create a product that will focus on “intelligent information”–something that will have us look at information in a different way. Perhaps the service will be about changing the status quo and evolving the information received from Wolfram Alpha or another similar service and building a completely new dynamic that will make things more contextually relevant?

Who knows..we’ll just have to wait and see. Of course, I could be entirely wrong…in which case, he’s probably building a social network for cats.

Photo Credit:
- Ben Parr at work at BlogWorld Expo 2009 by Ken Yeung/Flickr
- Apple iPhones with Siri by Apple

Famed reporter and critically-acclaimed author, Sarah Lacy, is on a roll with her new tech publication startup. Within a few months of leaving TechCrunch, she soon announced that she would be starting her own startup publication to report the news she felt it should be done. It wasn’t that difficult for her when you think about it. This hard-working journalist has gone through it all and reported about quite possibly everything in tech that there is–or at least is aware of it. And with $2.5 million in the coffers, there seems to be a sense of freedom to allow Mrs. Lacy to go to town with it to help bring her publication to the level that it needs to be in order to dominate the market.

Each week, it seems that her startup, PandoDaily, is making new strides and bringing in new people, each one more shocking and experienced than the one before. Already she’s amassed an all-star team of journalists, including TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington (who is also an investor), former TechCrunch writers Paul Carr and Greg Kumparak, and a whole slew of contributors. They’ve even started to get the ball rolling on some live events where you can meet the PandoDaily team and connect with like-minded entrepreneurs, developers, designers, investors, etc. Unfortunately, the first one wasn’t up to par what you might expect, but that was surely a fluke–there’s more every month and the next one hopefully won’t disappoint.

But nevermind any of the bad luck that may have befallen PandoDaily, the bottom line is that there’s been some major inroads and a lot of news coming from this little publication, enough to get the notice of bloggers, startups, investors, and even fellow journalists. But who would have thought that it would have led to one of the biggest snags in tech news this year?

Just announced on PandoDaily, a major news figure in the tech industry has just signed on board to build something special. Highly-regarded reporter Kym McNicholas from Forbes will be signing up to join the PandoDaily team to help build a video department within the publication. Most recently, she was an anchor, reporter, and producer at Forbes and was successful in building the West Coast video department from scratch while also writing for both Forbes.com and Forbes magazine. And in a two-for-one deal, Ms. McNicholas will be bringing her long-time cameraman and editor, Anthony Nielsen, along for the ride. But it wasn’t that Ms. Lacy solicited Ms. McNicholas to join. Oh no, on the contrary, according to Ms. Lacy, the experienced journalist called her out of the blue asking to join. Ms. Lacy’s reply? “Dear God, yes! When can you start?”

This is a great snag for PandoDaily since they’ll be able to compete with the current offerings of TechCrunch and their video off-spring, TechCrunch TV. With a powerhouse reporter who has covered a variety of industries including business and technology, the PandoDaily team gains a great asset in someone who is quite familiar in video technology and how to use it in a way that will be sure to impress the socks off of the publication’s competitors.

Congratulations to Kym McNicholas and the PandoDaily team!