Ok my fellow Young Grasshoppers, we need to fly. Let’s close deals, chomp on some revenue, and raise cold hard liquid cash. My Dot2Dot family and my NYC Nerdsters, I can be your connection to Silicon Valley who will get you in with the right people. But to actually cut the deal in SF, you need the right venue, with the right mixture of old school (for historical context), understated class, and worldliness (so you can think about the possibilities outside of the room). The point is to focus on the people at the table, the deal, and your future partnership together. Just be strategic about your bathroom breaks and watch your toes. Here’s where I’ve cut deals from $1000 to $24m.
Marissa Louie and Nalin Mittal at Cafe de la Presse, by David Gelles of Financial Times
Before you go, take a ride in the speed elevator while you watch everything beneath you shrink. Now take that soaring feeling straight into your meeting.
This is the social media, PR, and communications hub of SF, so cut your deals related to those arenas here. According to superstars @dgelles, @nalin, @rafer, @dayo, @dipw0nder, and more.
I took control of a client dinner where everyone was twice my age by talking about how consulting executives cannot sell, even though 90% of top executives have a background in sales. We got the deal, celebrated, and then I bumped into Gavin Newsom and Willie Brown on my way out.
It’s where my company, AD-Village, was born. I’ve taken that energy into cutting multiple deals, and have been a loyal customer for 2 years.
You’d think these would work, but they don’t for me:
They’re great dining places, but for me, the settings are uncomfortable, the people tend to stare rudely, or the waitstaff is stiff and awkward. The chi is just not right.
Marissa is the CEO and Co-founder of AD-Village. On the job, she handles, sales, PR, customer service, community relations, marketing, speaking at conferences, strategy, recruiting, coding, text messaging, Twittering, and returning calls and emails.
Today concludes our video coverage of Web 2.0 Expo with a final interview with IBM. Of course IBM is certainly not the first company you think of when you think Web 2.0, but like last year’s Web 2.0 Expo, the show was filled with many startups and sprinkled with a few big players. This year’s big companies were IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and a few others. And much of the buzz was around ‘doing more with less’ through collaboration and cloud computing.
Cloud computing is all the rage these days and IBM is trying to get in on the action. At the end of last month, IBM announced an initiative dubbed “Open Cloud Manifesto” that calls for open standards to promote cloud computing. There’s a host of companies backing the manifesto, but oddly, the pioneers and leaders in cloud computing are absent.
According to Reuters, Amazon is reviewing the plan, Google has decided not to support it and Salesforce.com hasn’t publicly spoken on the matter yet. Also, Microsoft has publicly criticized IBM’s efforts.
On a lighter note, Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell spoke with Kathy M. Mandelstein, marketing director at IBM Software Group, IBM Rational Software and WW Programs, Events and Web, about cloud computing, LotusLive, and Rational AppScan. IBM’s overall theme at Web 2.0 Expo was “Smart Work” and helping people and businesses to work smarter through collaboration and collective intelligence. Hear what Mandelstein had to say:
In addition to IBM, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed any of our interviews from earlier this week, check them out: ooVoo, MindTouch, Topix, chi.mp, and our Web 2.0 Expo highlight reel.
Chi.mp launched into public beta last week during Web 2.0 Expo, and in the true spirit of lobbyconing, we caught up with Chi.mp’s CTO in the halls of San Francisco’s Moscone Center where Web 2.0 Expo was held. Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell spoke with Anthony Eden, CTO of chi.mp, about their launch.
Chi.mp helps you manage your online identity and enables you to bring together your digital life into one place. So instead of having invite people to each of your online accounts, such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, etc., Chi.mp enables you to pull all those services into one place that’s owned by you under your own domain name. This makes it easy to share and control your online identity.
In addition, Chi.mp enables you to have different personas, such as one for work, one for family and friends, and another for the general public. This allows you to control what others see and helps you better protect sensitive information, such as your home address, or images that you may only want your friends or family to see and not your boss, co-workers or the general public.
To learn more watch our interview with Chi.mp’s CTO Anthony Eden and grab your free .mp domain name before somebody else does. See Eden’s .mp site at anthony.mp and if you want to check out mine, I’m at MiikoMentz.mp and I also grabbed Miiko.mp. Now I just need to decide which one to populate and promote.
In addition to Chi.mp, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed our other interviews earlier this week, check them out: ooVoo, MindTouch, Topix and our Web 2.0 Expo highlight reel. Stay tuned tomorrow for our final Web 2.0 Expo interview with IBM.
At Web 2.0 Expo last week, Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell spoke with Topix CEO Chris Tolles. Topix is a leading Internet news community that connects people on a local level to the news and events in their towns and cities, and it provides a place for people to discuss the news that matters most to them. With newspaper advertising shrinking and becoming less effective, local businesses are turning to other sources, such as Topix, to connect with customers.
Topix is becoming a great avenue for businesses that are dependent on local customers, such as restaurants, salons and spas, car dealerships, attorneys, doctors and other neighborhood-type businesses. However, many of these small business owners aren’t well versed in SEO practices or search advertising, but need to advertise online to drive customers into their stores, restaurants and local offices.
At Web 2.0 Expo last week, Tolles talked about Topix’s newly released services that are helping these types of businesses connect to a local audience in a local context. Check out our interview with Tolles:
In addition to Topix, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed our highlight reel or other interviews, check them out: ooVoo and MindTouch. Stay tuned all week for the full interviews with each company. Tomorrow’s video interview is with chi.mp.
In the spirit of Che Guevara, MindTouch rallied the crowd at Web 2.0 Expo last week with its social enterprise collaboration revolution. Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell caught up with the MindTouch team to learn about the newly launched MindTouch 2009, an enhanced developer platform for building rich collaborative applications and communities, and a new bi-directional message bus that further extends MindTouch’s powerful collaborative capabilities.
MindTouch Marketing Manager Sarah Carr explains how MindTouch is revolutionizing the way people and businesses collaborate using MindTouch’s open source enterprise collaboration platform; and MindTouch Sales Engineer Mike Diliberto talks about the new MindTouch 2009. Check it out:
In addition to MindTouch, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed yesterday’s video, watch our interview with ooVoo and our highlight reel. Stay tuned all week for the full interviews with each company. Tomorrow’s video interview is with Topix.
Disclosure: In addition to being a contributor to Bubblicious, I also work at FutureWorks where one of my clients is MindTouch, which I’ve chosen to include in my coverage of Web 2.0 Expo due to them being an exhibitor and fitting the focus of our coverage.
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