Hello? Is this thing on?

That’s kind of the way the first ever PandoMonthly event started off tonight at the offices of i/o Ventures. Put on by new tech blog PandoDaily, this event was perhaps the coming out party for famed journalist and author Sarah Lacy’s new startup. A couple weeks ago, Mrs. Lacy posted on PandoDaily that she would be bringing back an old tradition from back in the TechCrunch days when people would gather at Michael Arrington’s house to meet and talk shop. It’s fitting now that the very first guest for this inaugural series would be the founder of not only TechCrunch, but the CrunchFund, Michael Arrington himself.

As I said, the event was held at i/o Ventures’ office in the Mission here in San Francisco and over 100 people attended ranging from tech enthusiasts to entrepreneurs to other established individuals. People I saw there included Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix, Alexia Tsotsis from TechCrunch, Cyan Banister of Zivity, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, Brian Solis of the Altimeter Group, Hermione Way of The Next Web, and many others. It was definitely a packed house as people were eager to hear what Arrington had to say. Oh, and Mrs. Lacy offered us all a pretty good surprise with an announcement of a brand new staff writer: former mobile editor of TechCrunch, Greg Kumparak–Mr. Kumparak will be in charge of incubators and accelerators and probably attend a bunch of demo days to learn about all the products emerging from them.

However, before the crowd could really hear anything, the one problem that needed to be fixed was the overall logistics of the room. While the entire session was being broadcast live on UStream, the placement of the audience with both Lacy and Arrington just became a bit confusing–almost as if we were to be separated and looking up at them while they had their conversation. The problem was the inconvenient space that i/o Ventures offered the event since we were all separated by a giant wall. And to make matters worse, the microphone system was so horrible that, combined with the terrible acoustics, no one could hear anything and eventually gave up trying to pay attention. On multiple times did crowd-enforcer Paul Carr need to go around and quiet people down so others could hear. Arrington joked that him and Lacy should fight soon–Lacy quipped that she could throw water on him: “I’m good at that…”

But for those that could hear the conversation taking place, Arrington provided some pretty good insights. When asked about whether he misses not being with TechCrunch, he admitted that he doesn’t miss it entirely — he does miss getting that “high” that you get when you break news before anyone else. He does miss being at TechCrunch with the people and doesn’t like how things went down. When questioned by Mrs. Lacy on whether he got fired deliberately, he responded that he wasn’t trying to do it on purpose. AOL knew what he was doing and consented to him setting up a fund, but Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington disapproved. It also seems that he working on another startup idea besides CrunchFund and his blog Uncrunched. No specific word yet on what it is as he kept his answer pretty vague.

Not all the questions were aimed at Mr. Arrington…he actually turned them back on Mrs. Lacy by asking her how she could be a journalist at PandoDaily when nearly every investor (probably not “every”) has invested in her startup. He even hinted that he gave a nice scoop to her, but she never ran with it–she defended the decision by saying that if she did run with that scoop (in talking about an issue about funding), it would create some controversy and she erred on the side of caution rather than news. Another question asked by Arrington was how many TechCrunch employees did Mrs. Lacy try to poach. The answer? She has a no-solicitation clause as does everyone else–she didn’t try and pick anyone up voluntarily.

In the end, the audience became quite ruckus and it was decide to take some questions before calling it off. Eoin McMillan from the StartupHouse asked the first question about what Mr. Arrington’s thoughts are in terms of where the web is going right before Hermione Way took the microphone and sounded off with a litany of questions that ultimately had Mrs. Lacy cut her off. The honor of the last question went to an entrepreneur who just arrived in San Francisco and was looking to find out how he could start his idea for a company. The answer from Arrington? Don’t talk about it. Just do it.

Overall, it was a great attempt at these monthly meetings. I’m definitely looking forward to the next ones over the course of the year, but hope that most of the logistical problems will be eradicated by the next show. These are really great events that allows startups to meet with some of the movers and shakers in the industry and can only help to benefit the industry.

Photo Credit: “CrunchFund’s Michael Arrington speaks with PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy” by Brian Solis

The days of avoiding congestion on your ride home from work have gotten much safer. Israeli start-up Waze, the world’s fastest driving community centered around a mobile app that let’s the community provide news on traffic and navigation issues, has released a new iOS application today. As reported by The Verge, this free GPS and navigation app is now featuring a hands-free way to activate and file reports without jeopardizing your safety while you’re driving.

Waze has received some pretty good press over the past year or so for its usefulness to help make people’s commute less painful. If you were in the Los Angeles area when the I-5 was shut down for a few days, Waze was promoted as one of the apps to help get you around town easily and probably helped shave driving times. And it looks like word is being spread around the major cities around the United States to use the app. I’ve tried using it once or twice, but often when I found myself driving, it didn’t make sense for me to look at the phone while driving. In fact, it’s pretty dangerous to do so and one might feel compelled to use Waze to report an accident while they’re driving–only to hopefully not find themselves a victim or the cause of another one.

The Verge reports that Waze grew impatient with Apple to open up the API for its famed and often-spoofed Siri application for developers to take advantage of, but with no resolution in the near future, they decided to go with Plan B. Using the iPhone’s proximity sensor, users can now activate a voice-controlled interface in its application. Just wave your hand at your iPhone and it should initiate the voice-control, allowing you to quickly navigate, report traffic, and alert the Waze community as to nearby road hazards. One difference, and probably a good one, between Waze’s technique and Siri? You won’t need to touch the screen or push a button to interact with the app. This will help allow drivers to concentrate on driving, but still allow them to contribute to the greater good without being distracted. No word yet on whether this can be done with the Android app, but this is definitely a good move for drivers safety. Oh, and this update to the iPhone will work for those in the US and in Canada.

Oh, and some other nice lil’ tidbits that are with the latest release? Sharing! Yes, that’s right…Waze now comes with sharing features where you can let anyone know via text or email that you’re running late and it’ll include your current location, ETA, and your destination. Looking at their screenshots, it seems that this is a template message where all you have to do is enter in the number and/or email address and it’ll ping whoever you send with your Waze GPS location.

Here’s a brief video from Waze that tells you more about their hands-free application:

Business can be rough, especially when dealing with customer service. Whether it’s failure to provide adequate Internet service or airline mishaps or even catching a cab, people are getting tired of the status quo when dealing with a company’s representative. They’ve taken to going onto social media sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and even on blogs. So when technology is being used to revolt against customer service, shouldn’t the technology also catch up to benefit it as well?

This is where UserVoice comes into play. This enterprise service has been used by many brands and businesses to reach out and connect with their customers in order to help stem the tide of anger against them. Since 2008, UserVoice has been around to help empower customers to speak and help businesses understand. Through the use of feedback forums, support systems, and other tools in their arsenal, UserVoice allows you to offer your feedback and lets the community contribute to what’s important and what’s not as much. In a sense, it’s like letting the crowd handle your customer service, but in a constructive way that the business can pay attention and easily respond or implement the needed changes. And just about a year ago, the company launched a brand new service designed to help companies better respond to feedback: Helpdesk.

As part of their new package, Helpdesk is designed to give companies a bit more control over their customer service, but without all the unnecessary tools for integrating feedback and case tracking. But on the other hand, it offers businesses more than simply receiving feedback from the customers. Helpdesk is geared towards allowing people to submit support tickets, allow for service rating, and also promotes humane treatment of customers.  And it looks like this gamble has paid off for UserVoice. After a year out in the market, Helpdesk has received it’s 1,000,000th support ticket. According to UserVoice CEO, Richard White, the fact that the usage of Helpdesk has been so great is because companies are recognizing that they need a better experience for both their team and customers. He says in his post, “these are people who want to have a conversation with their customers…and they want the tools to make this easy.”

It makes perfect sense what he says because back in the day, we’re all used to picking up the phone and speaking with a live representative, which soon turned into an automated message that never allowed us to speak with a human (so impersonal). Now, in the digital age, we’re demanding better and through social media, we’re using the technology to force our way back to speaking with humans–because customers don’t want to be treated like they’re just a number anymore. When we want help with a problem with a business’s product, we’re going to want to receive it somehow and that could be through a company’s support forum where the more users that have that problem can vote it up, or by submitting a ticket that receives a much needed response in a timely manner. The technology and practice that UserVoice has is surely picking up steam as their customers are still growing: from Worksmart Labs to Blackbaud to Seesmic, Posterous, and even Rackspace…the growth is becoming phenomenal.

Congratulations UserVoice on your success and your one millionth Helpdesk ticket!

Photo Credit: Call center workers by contrapart/sxc.hu

Have you ever tried to set up a press page for your company? Do you even know what belongs on one? Well look no further because Totem, an independent provider of press page solutions just launched their flagship product into public beta. The goal from creating your own totem is to help set up location where people can find information about your group. In customs that subscribe to the totem, these symbols are a representations of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe. So what it seems that the service Totem is providing is to offer a symbol of the company/group that marketers and interested people can find – a totem, if you will.

Just who would be benefit from Totem? Most likely not established companies like Proctor & Gamble or any other enterprise company since chances are that they’ll be too big or have the resources necessary to bring on big agencies like Edelman or Burston-Marstellar. So we need to think a bit smaller and that points to only one logical choice: small businesses/startups. Startups are usually very small that they wouldn’t have enough resources to handle developing a press page — this is probably the last thing on their list, way behind actually creating the project and raising funds. So that’s where Totem will benefit them. And it seems like a perfect fit because of who created the service: Jones-Dilworth.

Wait, that name doesn’t sound familiar to you? Jones-Dilworth is a power public relations agency based in Austin, Texas and focused on helping early stage startups in technology to market. They’ve been doing so with folks like Siri, Wolfram Alpha, Twine, 80legs and more. Maybe this is a way for them to get more clients, but the ulterior motives are far outweighed by the fact that they’ve created something that caters to startups – it’s almost like a freebie to start off with. It might seem like linkbait to you, but when you see what options you have with Totem, it might make you think about it.

First of all, it’s super simple to sign up for your very own Totem. Just fill out your basic login credentials and then you’re off. Over the next four screens, you’ll be asked to name your press page, create a custom URL for it (e.g., domain.totemapp.com) and then provide the standard contact information for people to reach out to you for press questions or information. In the last step, you’re going to add resources to your totem and this can be recent articles, press releases and blog posts. Documents, screenshots, infographics, product sheets, headshots, and other relevant information can also be dumped into your totem to make it appealing to the media.

So what’s it look like? Well see below…

As you can see, the above example is Totem’s own totem and it looks like a pretty solid template. That’s probably what you’re going to get when you have a “do-it-yourself” simple press page. But what’s good is that you’re going to be able to provide all sorts of contact information for people to reach you, and it’s not just limited to traditional methods. You can include your blog RSS feed, links to you on social networks and even stream your tweets right on your totem. A bookmarklet can be added to your browser to allow you to easily capture coverage and publish it to your press page — Totem makes it much easier to share your good fortune.

Josh Jones-Dilworth, co-founder and CEO of Totem (and also the agency that bears his name), says about Totem: “Totem is a best-of-breed solution that provides incredible agility to organizations that are struggling with mission-critical press page updates. Look at most press pages out there — they’re ugly, incomplete, full of jargon and almost never get granular enough to properly serve anyone. We’re revolutionizing the press page, at long last.” And I agree — they are providing an incredibly agile service to fledgling companies and also aesthetically appealing to users and viewers.

But with this template press page, there’s got to be limitations as well, right? Yes, since it’s a free plan, what you’re going to get are unlimited press pages with all the features the press is looking for. The ability for collaboration with your co-workers and clients, free hosting, a press widget to embed on your site/blog, and a scrolling “as featured in” widget for your homepage are also part of the free package. But, if you pay the one-time $99 upgrade fee, you’re going to be able to customize your domain so that instead of linking to yourstartup.totemapp.com, you’ll point the press to press.yourstartup.com. Oh, and separate yourself from all the other Totem users too since your upgrade will allow you to customize your page and white label your page as well.

According to Jones-Dilworth, press pages have long been the “low-hanging fruit of PR and marketing programs”, but they rarely get the attention they deserve because they require a tremendous amount collaboration between webmasters, designers, community managers and outside consultants. Totem is going to eliminate those business barriers and puts the marketing team in control of the press page, a vital marketing asset. In an almost meta-fashion, Totem is disrupting the press room world by creating a new press room. It’s press room 2.0!

Go ahead and check out Totem yourself and see what you think about it.

Exciting news for startups eager to make a name for themselves while getting a big chunk of change for their effort. In today’s LAUNCH newsletter, Jason Calacanis announced that his LAUNCH competition has raised over $250,000 in prizes thanks to the help of Charles River Ventures. In next month’s LAUNCH festival, Calacanis and the select judges will award one of 10 prizes to some lucky startup within two separate competitions: 1.0 and 2.0. Within each category are five individual prizes, including Best Presentation, Best Business Model, Best Design, Best Technology, and Overall Winner/Best in Show.

What separates 1.0 from 2.0? For those who have never had any press, public demos and if they’re in closed alpha or beta, then you’re in the 1.0 category. However, if you’re experienced and just launching a new product or a significant new version of an existing product, then you’ll want to be in the 2.0 category. Of course, LAUNCH doesn’t want you to feel left out if you’re already been around the block and just want to promote yourself. Unfortunately that means no on-stage theatrics for your company, well not necessarily. You can apply for a spot in the demo pit and if the judges come by and love your stuff, they may select you to jump on stage to pitch the crowd.

With Charles River Ventures supporting LAUNCH, one winner will receive a $100,000 investment in the form of a convertible note without a discount or cap (similar to the notes provided to Y Combinator companies) and will have George Zachary as an advisor.

Other prizes that the LAUNCH festival will have include admission for one fortunate startup into the TechStars program next semester, while another startup will get a $51,000 investment for being the winner of the 1.0 competition. Of course, Calacanis makes us all aware that you could win multiple prizes — if you win the CRV award ($100k) and then get the TechStars prize, then that startup stands to gain a $269k investment just for being at LAUNCH! Who knows what will happen this year at LAUNCH!

You can buy a ticket to the LAUNCH festival at the Design Center Concourse in San Francisco by clicking here. The event is from March 7-8 and features judges like Cyan Banister, Paul Bragiel, David Cohen, Tony Conrad, Don Dodge, Rob Hayes, Dave Goldberg, Tony Hsieh, Dave McClure, Peter Pham, Kara Swisher, Robert Scoble, Andrew Warner, and Bill Warner — and those aren’t all of them!

Startups, get your entries in and good luck in your launch!

All Things D is reporting that professional social network powerhouse, LinkedIn, will be buying contact start-up Rapportive. The deal isn’t official (yet) and there’s nothing on either Rapportive or LinkedIn’s blog, but seems there are sources saying that it will happen. Not wanting to comment on the validity of this rumor, I wanted to instead focus on the fact that this would be a great deal in the making for both companies – should this actually happen, that is.

In case you’re not familiar with Rapportive, it’s a service that integrates inside Gmail to provide you helpful information about your contacts right inside your inbox. So if you’re crafting an email to a business colleague, that contact’s information and social graph (as long as it’s public) will be displayed right on the screen where you might normally see Google ads being displayed. This is especially helpful since you’re going to get to apply some more context to your emails to help make it more personal. Since its founding in 2010 by Rahul Vohra, Martin Kleppmann and Sam Stokes, the goal of the service was to allow people to immediately see what people look like (using social media avatars), where they’re based, and they do. And just like the name implies, the service is meant to help people establish a rapport that can lead to more conversations, relationships, and success. There’s no doubt that Rapportive has been successful in this area as over 20 million lookups are being done through their system every month!

So why the sudden interest by LinkedIn? Since LinkedIn is the 800 pound gorilla in the professional social network scene, it makes sense that creating some sort of rapport is essential to getting any business done. Whether you want to connect with a potential business partner, looking to hire someone, or even want to be the one that’s hired, a Rapportive-LinkedIn marriage would be beneficial for the end user. Since Rapportive is right now available on Gmail, one might wonder about it’s limited nature and how good it will be in the long-term. In a report by Return Path, at the end of 2010, Gmail had over 193 million users – granted it’s way less than Yahoo! and Hotmail, but it’s picking up steam at a much faster rate than the other two. In 2011, Comscore estimated it at 260 million users, meaning that it’s drastically catching up to the email leaders. So eventually in the near future, Gmail will be the dominate leader in email service and with Rapportive’s integration, LinkedIn will have a great opportunity to extend professional profiles further out there.

Even ReadWriteWeb agrees that LinkedIn and Rapportive would be a match made in heaven. And with LinkedIn’s last acquisition of business card scanning technology Cardmunch, LinkedIn would be able to bolster its offering and create a warehouse of professional contact information. I’ve always wanted to find a way to take all the business cards that I get from conferences and events and mesh them into a contact relationship management system and have it all linked to a professional bio that is updated and associated with my email address book so all I have to do is type in that email address: john@johndoe.com and find out how I know him, how things have been since we last talked, and make the email more meaningful. No longer will I need to waste unnecessary emails chit-chatting…it can all be personal again.

Jon Mitchell from ReadWriteWeb probably puts its best:

LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It’s the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it’s already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it.

Ideally, it would be a great move for both teams and the hope is that this isn’t one of Silicon Valley’s most famous “acqui-hires” where they go for just the talent and not the technology. It is definitely a compatible service and will be a boon for people using LinkedIn.

Photo Credit: “Don’t you come a step closer” by Ed Yourdon/Flickr

Event managers and planners have something to celebrate today. I’m sure you can ask any event planner how long they take to struggle to find the right place for your party or event. Not only do they have to navigate around the city, quotes, and specs, but it’s all time consuming. And often times, there’s not a website around that features photos of the event space — just how efficient is this? Well not very. But now, thanks to Los Angeles’s newest and hottest tech incubator, Eventup is here to help make your event planning much easier.

LA’s tech scene has definitely been heating up over the past few months and one of its main contributors has been the new incubator Science, the brainchild of former MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham. After the latest collapse by MySpace, the LA tech scene took a hit and needed to find a solid foot hold in which they could bring back the success of days past. And with the recent release of Eventup, it looks like the incubator is onto something. And it’s not surprising since they have some of the best minds in the LA tech scenes, such as Mike Macadaan and Sean Percival, two former MySpace execs who have gone or are going through the fires of entrepreneurship and have created something great. And you might wonder why are all MySpace colleagues working in the same incubator? It seems to be perfectly normal, especially when you consider that MySpace encompassed a large portion of the existing talent pool in the city. VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell has a great interview about Science that you can read here.

But back to Eventup…we know that it’s a product of Science, but now that it’s launched, just what does it do? Well in a nutshell, it’s the AirBnB of event planning. As TheNextWeb’s Courney Boyd Myers writes, “just Googling ‘event spaces’ brings up a load of miserable options…” So why don’t you save youself some time and just go to Eventup’s website and do a search of what you want, easily. Right now it looks like only Los Angeles and Southern California venues are available in their database, although they’re doing a bit of a grassroots approach and crowdsourcing for venue information — so if you want to make sure your city is represented in here and help bring in more business, then share your venue with Eventup! But enough of the San Francisco plug, let’s talk about specifics in what event planners will get as a result of this experience: a pretty good results page that shows a lot of promise, I must say…let’s take a look at one in particular:

What event planners will get is a helpful screen with a description of the venue, the types of parties that can be held there, maximum capacity, photos, location and calendar of availability. And the fact that there’s a “verified listing” badge also adds a measure of security knowing that you’re looking at something legitimate.  And no longer will you need to trouble yourself into wondering whether it’s available or not — the calendar will allow you to easily look and book! It’s easy, right? I couldn’t have put it better than what they have on their site:

Simply, search by location, filter down by event type, your budget, how many people are attending, and find venues that are available for the date you have your heart set on. You’ll have high-resolution images, maps to show you what part of town it’s in, and ratings and reviews that help you not get ripped off. All of this, without having to spend hours, if not days, searching through various websites and making phone calls.

The cost? It’s probably all set up by the homeowners and venue managers, just like you’d expect when trying to find a place to stay outside of a hotel. Eventup will take 10% of each booking and will manage all financial transactions and bookings. And for your safety, they also offer venue owners insurance options just in case (we all know what happened to AirBnB, right?).

In one of my former lives, I used to work in tourism and each city has unique spaces that you could rent, like a museum or hotel conference room or even a restaurant back-room. Eventup is the replacement for that and very much the yellow pages of event space. Imagine being able to find some ridiculously awesome venues like Jim Morrison’s former residence or even one of Entourage’s actor’s home just to have an event — that’ll give your attendees something to remember, right? Right now they have over 350 venues in LA and I’m sure that it’s only going to grow.

Eventup is out in the wild now for you to check out. It’s also one of six products to come out of Science and is headed by former MySpace exec Tony Adam.

In a bid to help increase their reach and add more significance to their metrics, influence measurement service Klout purchased the mobile and local neighborhood app Blockboard. The exact terms aren’t being disclosed, but according to Klout’s blog, they see this acquisition as an additional way for them to build an amazing local-mobile app  and will help make Klout useful and accessible no matter where people are.

If you’re not familiar with Blockboard, it’s a neighborhood app that allows the community to really become a virtual community. It’ll allow your neighbors to chat with you and others to talk about issues plaguing the community like potholes, vandalism, graffiti, crime, observations, and even converse with one another — almost like a private community Facebook. But surely this private community Facebook model fits into Klout’s metric platform, right? Well…it doesn’t seem like it. In a post on TechCrunch, writer Leena Rao states that Klout will use the technology and the team to invest in local and mobile product efforts. In looking at the deal, it appears that Blockboard was an “acqui-hire” and should be a good one if the local and mobile strategy pays off. For now, people who are checking their Klout score only knows what their scores are from a global perspective — there’s no localization to help advertisers and businesses figure out what a customer’s influence is within a specific region, county, or city.

But what’s the deal with Klout wanting to go mobile? Isn’t the site already mobile? No, it’s mobile-friendly…you just have to go to their site and view your profile and sign in through the browser and there’s your score. What Blockboard brought to the table is something that Liz Gannes from All Things D remarked in her post when talking about their authentication: the first time someone uses Blocboard’s iPhone app, it validates via GPS that they are located in a particular neighborhood. So now, your Klout score can let you size up your friends and whoever you’re with, all depending on where your phone is. For example, if you happened to be at the Super Bowl last Sunday and part of the collective group tweeting away, the NFL could use Klout to determine who is the most influential tweeter there and give them a spontaneous perk and the service would know you’re there based off of your phone GPS.  Might seem a bit unrealistic, but who knows what mobile opens up for the service. Whether this localization will allow brands to view people based on more filtered Klout scores (e.g., if you’re influential about technology, photography, and sports–what are your individual scores for each of these topics?). This would help with better targeting by brands and advertisers.

The acquisition of Blockboard is the latest string of strong news by Klout. In December, they topped over 10 billion API calls, have more than 4,000 API partners, and indexed over 100 million profiles. With strong funding and their recent round of $30 million from Kleiner Perkins and more, what lies ahead for Klout?

You can read Blockboard’s post about the acquisition here and Klout’s statement here.

Photo Credit: Business handshake by acerin/sxc.hu