Tag Archives: technology

By Miiko Mentz

The 2009 Crunchies award winners were revealed Friday night at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. This was the third annual Crunchies Awards ceremony put on by TechCrunch, along with its partners GigaOm and VentureBeat. For a third straight year Facebook took home the Best Overall Startup Or Product Of 2009 award. Mark Zuckerberg was on hand to accept the award:

Zuckerberg also sat down for an on-stage interview with TechCrunch Founder and Co-editor Michael Arrington. They discussed Internet privacy and how Facebook has been aggressive on that front. They talked about the future of Facebook Connect and Zuckerberg said that this year Facebook will focus on making it easier for users and developers to use Facebook Connect because “much more is going to be developed outside of Facebook then inside.”

Arrington asked Zuckerberg if Facebook will get more aggressive on acquisitions, in which Zuckerberg commented on the motivation behind Facebook’s past acquisitions. He said the acquisitions “have been primarily to get great people to join the company” and then he went on to talk about each. Watch the full interview here:

And one of my favorite parts of the evening was the Richter Scales performance. Their performance was highly entertaining and lots of fun:

Like last year’s Crunchies Awards, the evening ended with a celebration at the Crunchies Awards after party across the street at San Francisco City Hall’s rotunda. Check out the pictures from the ceremony and after party: Crunchies2009′s photostream.

To see all the nominees, runner-ups, and winners, head on over to TechCrunch; and to watch the recording of the Crunchies head on over to the Crunchies page or TechCrunch’s Crunchies Ustream channel.

Follow me on Twitter: @MiikoMentz

Disclosure: In addition to being a contributor to Bubblicious, I also work at FutureWorks. FutureWorks was the video sponsor for the Crunchies and I was part of the video crew for last night’s ceremony.

Related Links:
GigaOM: DropBox, Foursquare, Facebook Winners at The Crunchies
TechCrunch: The Crunchies Photo Gallery
VentureBeat: Crunchies: Google Voice is coming to the iPhone “one way or the other”
VentureBeat: Crunchies: Zynga’s Mark Pincus sees a future for socially-conscious virtual goods
Bubblicious: A night of reflection and celebration at TechCrunch’s 2nd annual Crunchies

This week (tomorrow) is the San Francisco Music Tech conference which is a must attend event for anyone that loves music and/or technology.  The event brings together entrepreneurs, developers, musicians, investors, and service providers for a full day to talk about how the music industry is evolving and how technology is playing a role in that evolution.

The speaker lineup this year is also quite impressive, here are just a few of the folks that are going to be in attendance:

• Stephan Jenkins, Third Eye Blind 3eb!
• Tom Conrad – Chief Technical Officer, Pandora
• Zahavah Levine – Chief Counsel, YouTube
• Tim Quirk – VP of Music Programming, Real Audio / Rhapsody
• Dave Ulmer – Sr. Director, Multimedia, Motorola
• Jeff Yasuda – CEO & Founder, blip.fm
• Jean Cook – Interim Executive Director, Future of Music Coalition
• Michael Masnick – Founder, TechDirt

As you can see it’s going to be quite an eclectic event with a lot of interesting discussions.  I’m really interested in the back story behind a lot of the companies such as Pandora and Blip.fm so hopefully I’ll get time to chat with both Tom and Jeff.  We can see that the music business is greatly evolving.  With the evolution of sites such as Youtube, Blip.fm, Pandora, and Imeem; the indy artists now have a chance at stardom.  We are also seeing a huge difference in how musicians are interacting with their fans, many of them are actively engaging on sites such as twitter interacting and building relationships with people that love their music.  None of these things were possible even a few years ago.  Legal is also a hot topic in the music business as more and more people are starting to download their music for free on the web.  These are just a few of the interesting topics that are sure to be covered.

Here is a full schedule of the event and here is a full speaker lineup.

These are the details on the time and location of the event:

Hotel Kabuki
1625 Post Street
San Francisco, CA
Monday, December, 7 2009
9am – 6pm + cocktail party

Brian has graciously offered a discount of 15% for all the readers of BUB, thanks Brian!

If you want to register for the event visit the registration page and enter in the code “bub” to receive the discount.

Hope to see all of you there!

connect with me on twitter @JacobM

January 2010 brings an exciting event to San Francisco’s Girls in Tech event roster – The Catalyst Conference held at the Commonweath Club in downtown San Francisco.

Aimed to catalyze the career development of women working in high-tech, The Catalyst Conference offers high-level keynotes and discussions from successful women at the top of their game alongside workshops led by experts in innovation and collaboration. The event, which Bub.blicio.us is a main media sponsor of,  enables & propels women to take the next step, whether they’re launching a new venture, making waves in the corporate world, looking to join an innovative startup, or building their online and digital-media media brand.

Catalyst Conference will bring over 250 passionate, creative women together to fuel new relationships and ideas. Come prepared to share concrete technology and business tools and tactics, meet energetic leaders and entrepreneurs, and develop your own business ventures. This conference is for women at the top of their industries as well as those leading their first ventures, and will guide them all in discussions of strategy and success.

Attendees of the Catalyst Conference will also be able to:

• Understand industry trends, what models are working and what models aren’t working
• Promote your ideas and your company to a group of very targeted women in tech
• Learn how you can create change by using the web tools and platforms available for developing nations
• Participate in the Girls in Tech + Vator.tv pitch contest

This event is WOMEN ONLY for all attendees! Sorry boys! All interested women, please go here to register. Rates will go up closer to the event date, so purchase soon!

Event details:

9am – 6pm, January 26th, 2010
Commonwealth Club
595 Market Street, 2nd Floor

BlogHer, in my mind, was going to be a blogging conference – a conference about blogging. Because we were all bloggers, and therefore not tech newbies, I expected a little more emphasis on the technology that makes it all work. A little more social media, a little more blogging, and a little less recipe sharing and parenting.

I attended several sessions and I spoke on a panel and well, BlogHer was chock full of surprises for me.

I was really interested in some of the Geek Lab sessions, and sad to find they were only 30 minutes each. Not only that, there were multiple GeekLab sessions running at the same time, in the same room, which was divided into giant cubicles. I had the experience of attending sessions led by one sweet girl who had no projection to her voice at all. That means that although I was in GeekLab session A, I was hearing GeekLab session B in the next cubicle, taught by someone with no fear of projecting her voice. For a blogging conference, I was sort baffled that this is how the tech would be treated.

The one exception to this was a good panel on Advanced SEO & Stats. Why this one session was led in a full conference room and the others were not, well, I don’t know.

The Tech vendors, such as Microsoft Bing, Intel, Best Buy, and Nokia were not on the expo floor. In fact, they were in a tiny created hallway at folding tables on the way into the Geek Labs. I don’t know if this was their idea or BlogHer’s idea, but I would have liked to talk more with these folks  – Nokia, in particular – without talking over or under the labs in the next cubicle. (Microsoft, at least, managed to score a suite they called the MicroSpa in a different area.)

There are some brilliant women out there who speak on social media and technology in general that weren’t a part of BlogHer. I was thrilled to see Corvida on a panel, which was also supposed to include Laura Fitton (who had to cancel at the last moment). Outside of those two, I didn’t notice names I’d have liked to see represented. Where was Kathy Sierra? How about Kara Swisher or Gina Tripani? There are a lot of great ladies in tech and social media right now (just look at any of Brian’s photo posts). I would have loved the opportunity to learn from them.

By saying that, I’m also sort of dissing myself. I was on the Food Blogging in the Recession panel (with my Wine Blog). It was eye-opening for me. I always thought of food blogging (and wine blogging is a subcategory) as people who ate food and wrote about it, whether it was in their own kitchen or in Thomas Keller’s restaurant. I always considered (and still do) restaurant bloggers to be legitimate food bloggers. This was a room of folks who wanted, for the most part, recipe tips. We talked about leftovers, freezing things, spices, but very rarely did we touch on actual blogging or other types of food blogging beyond cooking (live blog). I had really wanted my panel to discuss how we’re handling blogging itself in the recession, with an emphasis on food & wine. I did not expect it to get into coupons and leftovers. Obviously, I wasn’t accurately prepared for my audience and that is my own fault.

I’ve seen some tweets rudely stating that if you didn’t like BlogHer, then you should stay home. Other tweets and posts have implied that if you want tech, you should go to technology conferences. But here’s the thing – BLOG is in the title and even the New York Times called it a technology conference. Next year I hope they add a Technology Track. Not just a Business Track, but a full-fledged tech track that happens inside larger conference rooms and not cubicles.

__

Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

by Julie Blaustein

The SanFran MusicTech Summit at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco this past week was perhaps sprinkled with voodoo magic to ensure all the attendees, logistics and sponsors involved would show up and do their thing. Rather, its success was truly due to the magic of Brian and Shoshana Zisk who oversaw every detail of the conference along with Todd Tate who secured over 20 sponsors (including Bub.blicio.us). Perhaps it was also due to lessons learned as this is their fourth Summit produced in less than two years. Over 600 attendees came together including entrepreneurs, lawyers, activists, artists and musicians seeking to make money and make sense of the rapidly changing world in the music industry. Many in the audience could have  easily been one the incredible speakers representing the industry.

The following statement sums up the continued quandary that the music biz finds itself in and continues to face. As stated in January of 2008 in the arstechnica site, “…music isn’t on its deathbed yet; in fact, people are listening to more artists than ever before, on more white earbuds than ever before, in more places than ever before. They’re just not paying as much.” Its the SanFran MusicTech Summit that provides the ideal place for all the players to come together  to seek out the solutions.

The sessions spanned topics ranging from Social Networking Technologies to Improve Monetization, Music Activism, The Future of the Music Industry, Mobile Apps and, oh, so much more. CLE credits were offered along with their program that included an interesting discussion of the future of music licensing on the Internet. According to the official site , the most  popular sessions attended were Social Networking & Music, The Future of The Music Industry and Monetization – Idealism in Practice. As I was also taking pictures during the Summit, I noticed there was standing room only in the rooms, indicating additional interest in the many other sessions offered. I even overheard attendees lament that it was hard to pick which session to attend. Networking abounded throughout the day in the hallways, during lunch and at the sponsored breaks that provided coffee, sweets and other vitals to keep folks alert and energized.

There was plenty of Social Media coverage of the Summit including photo coverage by me, Mona the Cocktail Photographer, Ustream who live video streamed the sessions, along with many others. Overall the sessions were lively and full of heated discussions such as during the Social Networking & Music Session when the moderator, Dave Allen of Nemo Design tied his question to a company’s transparency. He appeared to put Geoff Ralston, CEO of LaLa on the spot when he inquired about patents that he had applied for recently. At first it appeared Geoff was not going to be transparent with the audience, but he then elaborated his view in full detail, revealing that it was part of a group of 15 patents that had the DRM title in it that caused the stir.

As usual, the Summit’s grand finale was a packed banquet room full of networking, food and all types of beverages. Food was served, High Flyer poured wine, panty melting Love Potion #9 was offered and positive moods were in abundance. Another great day in San Francisco full of learning, negotiating, partnering, music and lots of new friends for all.

Reaching Fans Session

Social Networking & Music Panel: Ali Partovi of iLike, Chuck Fishman of Cisco and Anthony Batt of Buzz Media

Krystyl Baldwin, Maddie Mat Mat & Laura Wiggins - the gals who kept it all running smoothly

Standing Room Only

Matthew Gonzales Sharing the SanFran MusicTech Experience

Local Music Vibe who power a national network of local music communities

Leon Rogers, Heather Rafter, Sean O'Connel and Brian Zisk

Cocktail Hour has arrives at last!

More pics at Julie B’s Flickr Site