Startup Demo Theme: The Future of Media

Startups demo throughout the venue, all night long. Stop by to check them out! Here’s the list of participants:

Doochoo
Doochoo is much more than just another application think tank — the Doochoo project is about revolutionizing the way opinions on the web carry meaning, starting with some applications, followed by a proprietary platform that will give opinions on the web tangibility and critical weight.

Envolve
Launching at SF Beta! Envolve lets you have topical group chats, private one-on-one conversations, and can do real-time translation in over 50 languages; all of these give your visitors an engaging experience that promotes your brand while increasing time-on-site.

Cisco Eos
Cisco Eos is a hosted software platform that enables Media & Entertainment companies to more economically deliver and effectively monetize social entertainment experiences around branded content.

Reachoo
Reachoo is a revolutionary, free, video classifieds website that connects the local community and assists sellers and buyers within the community to make transactions with ease.

Spreaker
Spreaker is a social service which lets anybody create his own radio show (talk, music, entertainment) and broadcast it live on facebook, mobile phones and internet-enabled radios. Listeners can enjoy single streams or create their personal radio station stitching together several shows.

LazyFeed
Lazyfeed is a unique service that provides a super-lazy way of blogging by actually “feeding” you stuff to talk about. Just follow any topics you want, and watch Lazyfeed deliver all the articles, videos, and photos related to those topics. Never worry about running out of inspiration. Endlessly talk about everything you love.

Diffbot
Diffbot is a seed stage web startup focused on leveraging statistical learning algorithms to achieving the holy grail a truly personalized newspaper that is not limited to structured data sources.

Loudcaster
The future of radio is online, not satellites or towers. Loudcaster enables anyone to create and DJ a interactive on-line radio station. We believe the next generation of broadcasting will come from giving people the power to easily create radio and interact with their audience.

SF Beta is San Francisco’s largest and longest-running startup mixer. Hundreds of founders, developers, investors, and geeks are joining us. Will you?
Our loosely structured event attracts over 350 people from across Silicon Valley. We provide tasty gourmet appetizers and a full cash bar, along with live demos from startups throughout the night.
Details:
• 21+ venue; no minors admitted
• Free appetizers from 5-6pm. (Early birds get the worm — or in this case, the hummus)
• Tickets are non-refundable, but can be transferred
• No formal presentations or talks. Instead, startups give demos at tables across the venue, throughout the night.
• For more information, visit our website at www.sfbeta.com

Ever wonder how people are using the internet? Who is using it the most? Thanks to Jesse Thomas, we not have that answer!

By September 2009, there were 1.73 Billion internet users worldwide! Are you as shocked as we are? Check out the video statistics below, and let us know your thoughts!

By Julie Blaustein

There were a number of great speakers the first day of the SuperNova Conference, but Chris Anderson made it most clear to the audience. The theme for the conference is “Networks are central instruments of the changes sweeping our world… and networks themselves must change to address novel demands.” The first day of this 3 day conference focused on Changing Networks: The evolving infrastructure.

Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired Magazine and well known for his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. He also has a degree in physics and has conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. As he sees it, “The past decade was about finding new post institutional models on the web. The next decade will be about applying them to the real world.”

Having recently released his book Free which examines the rise of pricing models which give products and services to customers for free, he spoke about the democratization of tools from the web that make this possible. He talked of how 3D printers started out at about $7,000 and can now be purchased for only about $700. But he really hammered home his point that the web has been democratized and enables all kind of  new possibilities when he talked of his latest company. DIY Drones works with folks that build amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Its a company with no infrastructure, no office and when Chris was seeking a partner, the most qualified, talented candidate found via the Web turned out to be a 19 year old from Tijuana!

If you are unable to make it to the conference, you can tune into USTREAM‘s SuperNova Channel or join the conversation at their Twitter Hashtag #sn09.

Chris Anderson, Speaker at SuperNova Conference

A Forum for Change in the Network Age

Founder Kevin Werbach, Bradley Horowitz of Google, Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard and Werner Vogels of Amazon

By Julie Blaustein

Past Panelists Robert Scoble, Nick O’Neill, Justin Smith and Dan Farber

SNAP Summit: FailCon is a MUST for this fall calendar! A full-day conference on social web development and startup culture that will be held at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco on October 27, 2009. And we have a 15% off for our readers!

15% Discount for Bub.blicio.us Readers!

In its fourth year, SNAP Summit was founded in 2006 by entrepreneurs Christian Perry and Cassandra Phillipps. Over 250 folks are expected to attend including independent developers, executives, investors, marketers, up-and coming startups, companies looking to get in on the next big thing and the most well known bloggers from the Web 2.0 and Social Web sphere.

This year’s SNAP Summit: FailCon is focused on startup failures, the trials faced by entrepreneurs every day and the exteremely challenging recovery from it. Hear how major players in the industry including Lane Becker, CEO of GetSatisfaction, Mark Pincus, CEO & Founder of Zynga, Kavin Stewart, CEO of LOLapps and Ron Conway, Angel and Partner at Baseline Ventures and more…Learn how they have dealt famously with startup troubles, recovered, and kept a positive, tenacious, and energetic attitude through it all. This is a must to attend for anyone considering business or web 2.0 fields as you WILL encounter these problems and make the mistakes presented at the Summit. Come join us and learn to prepare from those who have overcome them.

Benefits of a full conference pass include:
* Admission to all Main Stage, Workshop, and Demo talks
* Complimentary breakfast, snacks, and beverages
* Free wifi throughout the venue
* Nifty schwag from our sponsors
* Networking time to meet with major players in the online companies and communities.

For more information go to SNAP Summit

StyleFeeder is a community-driven online shopping source that turns your shopping habits and bookmarks into feeds that can be used for personalized recommendations for others. This week the company sent out an announcement notifying the world of its profitably, something that’s rare in the web 2.0 startup scene.

StyleFeeder has only been around since late 2005, and raised $3.5 million in venture capital in 2007. With over 1 million registered users and only 6 full-time employees, StyleFeeder has remained lean in order to turn a profit in a relatively short amount of time.

A few main points to bring up regarding StyleFeeder’s ability to stay lean include outsourcing the company’s entire TI infrastructure over to Amazon Web Services. Freelancers were also brought in whenever possible in order to keep the developer staff small.

Equally as important, StyleFeeder also managed to leverage the Facebook platform just as it was emerging as a new trend. The Facebook platform enabled StyleFeeder to become much more social with less effort on building out its own social network. While StyleFeeder is essentially driven by user-generated content and has many socially-adept features that power its discovery tools among other sharing options, tapping into Facebook helped StyleFeeder delve deeper into social activity in order to grow its brand.

Even though StyleFeeder was among the lucky few to be catapulted into success thanks to the timing of the Facebook platform, there are other ways to still take advantage of Facebook’s large user base despite the decline in direct uptake or conversions through a Facebook application. A key highlight of StyleFeeder’s success through Facebook comes in the form of redistributed content spread amongst Facebook users. This can still be achieved with Facebook Connect, along with leveraging an established user base all the while.

StyleFeeder offers some good pointers on how to turn a web 2.0 profit. See here for details on Newsgator’s white paper, outlining even more ways in which to stay budget-conscious as a startup in a wary economy.

By Marissa Louie

The Advertising 2.0 Party at ad:tech SF

Take a handful of fun Skittles, mashup a little Web 2.0, and invite celeb co-hosts from ad:tech SF — sounds like a party jam!

This is the official ad:tech afterparty for Tuesday April 21.

At 8:30p, hop on over 1/2 a block to Hotel W *after* the evening’s events at Moscone Center West:

• ad:tech/SF BIG (6:30-8:30p)
• Affiliate Marketing Networking Party (5:30-7:30p)

Join Co-hosts and VIPs:

• Marissa Louie – CEO of AD-Village
• Aaron Sahagun – CEO of Alumwire
• Amanda Coolong – CEO of Beta PR
• Efren Toscano – CEO of Techzulu
• Julian Brass – CEO of Notable.TV
• Kamal Ravikant – Angel Investor
• Khris Loux – CEO of JS-Kit
• Kym McNicholas – Reporter, Forbes TV
• Shawn Collins – Founder of Affiliate Summit
• Steve Hall – Founder of Adrants and Adgabber
• Tom Bedecarre – CEO of AKQA
• Tom Foremski – SiliconValleyWatcher, ZDNet, and former Financial Times columnist

Platinum Sponsor:

• Sun Startup Essentials: Jumpstart your startup

Gold Sponsors:

• AD-Village: Access to high-paying ads across top ad networks
• JS-Kit: Rich, interactive features for your website
• Skittles: Transplant the Rainbow (Skittles, anyone??)

Media Sponsors:

• ad:tech (Official ad:tech blog writeup by Steve Hall from Adrants is here)
• Adrants
• Affiliate Marketing Summit
• Bub.blicio.us
• Techzulu

Badged ad:tech SF attendees only, please. Non-attendees, please add yourself to the waitlist.

**RSVP AT: http://ad-village.com/AD20**

See who’s coming on the Facebook event page.

Even in this Recession, we are helping Web 2.0 companies monetize with advertising revenue. We invite you to come celebrate the good times at The Advertising 2.0 Party.

Previously:

Launch Party 2.0 at Web 2.0 Expo on April 1 at Club Six (500 guests, plus TechCrunch, BusinessWeek, Lalawag, LA Weekly, SF Weekly) — we’ve barely recovered since..

Marissa is the CEO and Co-founder of AD-Village. It helps website publishers make more revenue from online advertising by recommending top ads in a simple ad recommendations interface.

She is a frequent conference speaker and has presented about online advertising most recently at O’Reilly ETech, REBarCamp, and the Microsoft Blogger Roundtable.

Marissa blogs at marissalouie.com, BusinessWeek blogs, and here at Bub.blicio.us.

Find her on Twitter: @malouie

Contact her at (510) 375-1941 or Email her at marissa@ad-village.com.

Post and video by Miiko Mentz

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.

Post and video by Miiko Mentz

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.