SOMEWHAT FRANK

My Thoughts on the State of Entrepreneurship

Today I attended the Kauffman Foundation State of Entrepreneurship address in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club. The event was packed with range of bootstrap entrepreneurs like myself to high ranking government officials. Kauffman President and CEO Carl Schramm addressed the crowd with a wealth of statistics on entrepreneurship which included the following:

• 36 percent of entrepreneurs reported reductions in head count in the past year; only 8 percent have added employees.
• Nearly two-thirds have seen their sales volume and their profitability decrease.
• 71 percent of entrepreneurs do not expect to add any new jobs in 2010.
• 61 percent of entrepreneurs think the economy is on the wrong track.

I covered the event on TECH cocktail (here). I also covered the event real-time on Somewhat Frank Tidbits (here).

TECH cocktail DC 7 Showcases Six Startups

This past week we had a super showing at TECH cocktail DC 7 which was previewed in the November issue of DC Magazine. It was great to be able to showcase another handful of local start-ups. With the holidays right around the corner it was great to be able to catchup with a crowd of a couple hundred DC area tech enthusiasts and share in a holiday cocktail.

The event was sponsored by Winamp which has been around awhile but is making a resurgence with it's latest offering. I remember using Winamp back in my fraternity house when we hosted events and festivities (think Animal House but in Indiana). It's great to hear it is continuing to improve the media player experience and platform. As an Intel Insider for going on two years I was also excited and thankful for Intel's support as a sponsor. Intel also kicked off a contest to win a HP Envy Beats laptop over on TECH cocktail. Good luck to everyone that enters, contest ends December 17th at midnight EST.

The DC Nationals' Social Media Opportunity

With baseball in it's final series of 2009 I wanted to share some of my thoughts on baseball, branding and social media, thoughts that have been brewing for a while. I currently live in Washington, D.C., a plane ride away from my favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, and within driving distance of the two teams with the worst records in baseball this past season, the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Nationals respectively. They both lost a lot of games this year (98 and 103) which only makes me miss my hometown Cubbies even more but let's not forget they have been nothing less than disappointing for over a century. Even in 2003, where I was five outs away from doing Wrigley Field victory dance by heading to the World Series they found a way to break my heart. But every season, I still come back with even more resilience that it could be the Cubs year.

That said, due to my social technology and media background (my baseball skills probably didn't hurt either), I was invited to meet with the Washington Nationals executives last month at Nationals Park. I was honored to do so and in meeting with Stan Kasten, Bob Wolfe and others I realized that they are just a three year old start-up that spun out of what was the Montreal Expos organization. Call me an optimist but I think they have an almost clean slate, branding-wise, that offers them a huge opportunity to create a strong following both online and off. 

Demo Day For Alpha Labs Pittsburgh Start-ups

This past year I have attended several demo days and covered Launched Box Digital in DC and Dream It Ventures in Philly among others. Yesterday was the demo day for another local incubator, this time it's in Pittsburgh. Yes the "Steel City" has more than just steel these days, as six new start-up companies showed off their stuff as part of the Alpha Lab extensive six-month start-up business incubator program. AlphaLab provides funding, free office space, expert business advisors and services during its biannual program in Pittsburgh. Alpha Lab was created by Innovation Works a seed stage investment firm.

Crush It Music Video For Charity (I Have A Cameo)

Today is the big day for my friend Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV, or GaryVee as many of you know him on Twitter, as he published his first business book Crush It: Why NOW Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion. This is Gary's second book overall, as his first book was about wine. I look forward to reading it. While Gary was writing it I sent him examples to use for various sections and feedback so I am interested to see how it turned out. Congrats and best of luck to Gary, I hope he sells lots of books! I bought it today.

It's great to see Gary come so far so quickly. I first met Gary via email when he wanted to send wine and sponsor our first TECH cocktail DC event, which we are very thankful for. Then we spoke together on a panel discussing social media at the New New Internet Conference in DC. We shared good times and joy by pulling together a flash mob wine party at SXSW in a matter of minutes. I even had Gary visit my hometown to speak in Woodstock, Illinois at the historic Opera House last year. There are many additional memories over the last few years but I don't want to bore you. All I can say is, It's been fun.

Nine Startups Demo at TECH cocktail Chicago 11

On Thursday night, Eric Olson and I hosted our 11th TECH cocktail in Chicago. Since we started in Chicago we have seen the event grow from the simple idea of hosting an event to bring together the community and showcase the local start-ups into a premiere event where we can't even find a big enough venue anymore. TECH cocktail 11 had close to 700 paid attendees. We were rather surprised as this is the first event we charged attendees $10 to attend so we thought the event numbers might see a slight dip in attendance. But, this doesn't seem to be the case at all, in fact the stellar attendance further validates what we are doing.

Check out this quick video that gives a (12 second) look at what it was like at the event.

TECH cocktail Chicago 11 on 12seconds.tv

Nine new startups from the local Chicagoland area showed off their latest technological creations. 

Wolfram Alpha Co-Founder Interview

Last week I traveled to the Midwest to Champaign, Illinois to speak to a group of entrepreneurs about building brands and social media as covered by the Champaign News Gazette and to host another TECH cocktail. The event was sponsored by Wolfram Research which is based in Champaign and has been creating products like Mathematica for over 20 years.

Wolfram Research recently received quite a bit of buzz on TechCrunch, GigaOm Network, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable among others for the launch of the consumer facing product called Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a the computational research engine that helps to find anwsers to questions that don't exist on the Web.

I got a chance to visit with Co-founder, scientist and author, Theodore Gray and discussed the lastest from Wolfram Research. He was a joy to talk to as his office was filled with a number unique items which all had an interesting scientific story behind them. Theodore also created periodictable.com and authored the book Mad Science - Experiments You Can Do At Home But Probably Shouldn't. Check out the video interview with Theodore Gray (above). It is episode 82 on the SOMEWHAT FRANK Video Adventures Podcast which is available on iTunes.

MIDs Reviewed While Traveling to Computex Taipei

Today, l’m traveling to Computex Taipei, the world’s largest computer exhibition in Asia and second largest in the world just behind CeBit in Germany. I’m traveling 18 hours to Taipei from Washington, D.C. stopping just once in Tokyo, Japan before heading on to the island of Taiwan as part of the Intel Insider program (a brand ambassador program) that I have been a part of for a year now. I will be attending a number of the Intel events in Taipei as well as meeting the Asia Pacific Intel representatives as I look to assist them as they get their own version of the Intel Insiders program started in Asia. I am honored to be attending such an important global industry event, as it offers a super opportunity to see lots of new shiny gadgets and devices. It also affords me an opportunity to dust off my somewhat virgin passport, getting some International ink along with cultural growth.

Since I have a lot of time in transit, I decided to use some of it reviewing two new Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, which I recently received: the Yukyung Viliv S5 and the BenQ S6. In this article I will share my perspectives on the two mobile Internet devices.

TECH cocktail DC 5 Coming Soon

I am happy to share that I will be co-hosting another TECH cocktail in DC. In case you missed the last DC event it was well covered by the Washington Post and other media outlets. Check out photos from TECH cocktail DC 4. This is our 5th event in the Nation’s Capital and I hope you can make it out to the fine venue, LeftBank digital bistro in the Adam’s Morgan neighborhood of DC. 

TECH cocktail will offer a handful of start-ups an opportunity to show off in an expo-style to the rest of the community.

Here is the important information:

When: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 - 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST

Where: LeftBank in Adams Morgan (venue photos)

What: A “cocktail of TECH people”

If you are interested in supporting TECH cocktail please sponsor our events as we cannot put them on without your support. If you are interested in demoing a product or service please comment on this article or reach out to us at TECH cocktail. Look forward to seeing you there.

Intel Sponsors "Geeks" The New Rock Stars

Intel launched an new video campaign yesterday (above) that celebrates what makes Intel different than a lot of other companies. Intel supports culture, personality, heroes and this new video titled "Sponsors of Tomorrow," exemplifies this point. As an Intel Insider brand ambassador, I am pleased to say that Intel has helped support my geekdom, curiosity and general pursuit of happiness. Intel has helped change the world for over 40 years and knowing what Intel is working on in the areas of health, environment and science I am sure that it will continue.

Crowdsourcing Discussed With GeniusRocket

I got a chance to talk with Peter LaMotte of Washington, DC based startup GeniusRocket this past March right after the much debated "Is Spec Work Is Evil?" panel session at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. We discussed GeniusRocket's mission and take on crowdsourcing. GeniusRocket also has an interesting crowdsourcing story about the creative video that SXSW used this year which Peter will also share.

This video interview with Peter LaMotte got lost in the SOMEWHAT FRANK video queue but I just found it and wanted to share the video as episode 76 on SOMEWHAT FRANK. I hope you enjoy our pre-coffee talk at the Crepery in Austin, Texas about crowdsourcing.

Talking Start-ups, Bootstrapping & Lifestreaming

It was a pleasure as always to get a chance to sync up with Greg "The Trend Junkie" Cangialosi the CEO of Baltimore-based Blue Sky Factory in San Francisco today. I had him swing by to do his Thursday afternoon live show BlueSkyFactory.tv from the Bebo office.

We discussed a number of topics including start-ups, shiny objects of the Web, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, building community anywhere, TECH cocktail, SOMEWHAT FRANK and my recent work at AOL as part of the People Network group which includes AIM, Bebo, ICQ and Socialthing and life-streaming products. We are also were joined by Jean-Paul Cozzatti the Development / Product Engineering Lead at Bebo to talk about the updates for Bebo that went live this past December and February as well as a hint as to what is to come in the coming months.

Tune into the video above to watch episode #7 of Blue Sky Factory TV (above).

IsraelWebTour 2009: This Week in Silicon Valley

It's true, SOMEWHAT FRANK was once named a "must know" blog for any Israeli startup as I have covered a number of them in the past. Every year a dozen or so, of these startups tour Silicon Valley as part of the IsraelWebTour, an event organized by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Last year, I was able to attend the demo day and I was impressed with a number of the Israeli companies and shared this video. It's that time of the year again and I wanted to highlight the 10 Israeli Web startups participating in the 2009 tour (listed in alphabetical order) below:

Conduit
Conduit provides website syndication solutions for web publishers by creating a direct, always-on connection between publishers and subscribers. More than 180,000 publishers have joined the Conduit network worldwide, including Fox News, Lufthansa, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace, TechCrunch, Softonic and organizations in 180 countries around the globe.

ContextIn
ContextIn's proven proprietary multi-lingual semantic algorithms significantly increase relevancy and targeting to deliver the most valuable, targeted advertising inventory and traffic quality. Our algorithms have been proven to maximize both relevancy and monetization for Ad Networks, Advertisers and Publishers alike for increased ROI.

EyeView Digital,
EyeView is transforming online conversion through the use of rich-media content combining compelling rich-media content with a world-first rich-media conversion platform. The result is a proven and significant increase your website’s conversion rates. EyeView’s solution is ideal for a wide variety of websites and online industries such as: Gaming, Online Forex, Travel, Credit Cards, community, Software and eCommerce

Footbo
Footbo is the place for football/soccer lovers world-wide. Headquartered in London, UK, Footbo is the leading international social media platform with an exclusive focus on soccer. It combines the concept of social networking with the world of soccer to provide fans with a one-stop platform for all their soccer needs.

SemantiNet
Semantinet is pioneering the development of “Top Down” Semantic Web technologies. SemantiNet’s Headup Semantic Web plugin, currently available as an addon for Mozilla's Firefox browser, presents you with textual and rich media content related to the objects and terms it identifies on the pages you browse. Headup not only identifies these objects but has a basic understanding of the relationships between them.

SundaySky
SundaySky enables publishers to quickly, easily and cost-effectively infuse their website with video clips. SundaySky’s DynamicVideo™ Platform allows mass generation of always up-to-date video content, while leveraging existing content repositories. Videos are personalized for each user, interactive, and are intricately linked the site the user is viewing, even if that site is totally dynamic.

Superfish
Superfish has developed a unique, first of it’s kind, 3D object recognition engine to bring high-accuracy visual matching, browsing, and comparison into the world of search engines. The company’s unique IP puts together machine vision, machine learning and advanced search algorithms to allow for users to intuitively find similar objects visually.

SweetIM
SweetIM is focused on delivering fun content and self-expression tools. SweetIM products are intended to allow users to upgrade their social engagement, by offering fun content and an add-on for IM, webmail, and social networks that is easy to use. Through these tools users are sending daily over 6M flash animations, games and video to each other.

Triond
Triond offers a new approach for user generated content. Triond publishes, distributes and monetizes users' content over a network of niche websites. This way users get to focus on the content creating process, while leveraging the service in order to get more readership, recognition and revenue than they would if they were to publish individually.

WorkLight
WorkLight enables businesses to reach customers, employees and partners securely in the places they frequent. The flagship product, WorkLight Application Platform, securely syndicates enterprise applications in a multitude of consumer online channels, such as widgets, social networks, personalized homepages, iPhone applications, blogs and RSS feeds.

This year I will not be in attendance but it looks like another great set of startups. Good luck, safe travels and enjoy the tour!

NYC Breakfast: Social Web Tech Discussions

I was in the Big Apple today so I decided to do a little breakfast meetup/tweetup event this morning. The event was open to anyone and we had a handful of folks brave the blizzard-like snow storm this morning to meetup. Aside from Comfort Diner in Chelsea having some very sturdy coffee mugs and solid waffles, bacon and eggs the breakfast discussions were very thoughtful and interesting.

The breakfast was made up of the following @innonate, @ceonyc, @noreaster, @msg, Ian Costello and myself (@somewhatfrank) and we did a couple of live streamed videos (via Flixwagon) about lifestreaming, backup, chat and other products and services. Oh we also explained how awesome Mom's are! If you were unable to attend please check out the two videos (below).

NYC Breakfast Intros & Shoutouts

NYC Breakfast Lifestreaming, Backup & Chat Discussion

Thank you to everyone that came out to have some breakfast and give their somewhat frank opinions about social media and technology while I was in NYC!

2009 Social Media & Web/Tech Conference Cal

The past few years I have posted a comprehensive list (here and here) of all the social media, web/tech, design and marketing conferences in an effort to help my readers better determine just which events to attend. I have decided that due to all the events that a single blog post is not the ideal format for displaying them all. So I have been keeping track of upcoming events and adding them as I find out about them to this event calendar (in the top navigation). You can view the upcoming conference schedule and bookmark it by going here:

Web/Tech, Social Media & Marketing Conference Calendar

If you have any specific questions about a conference please let me know by sending me an @ reply on twitter: @somewhatfrank

Finally, if you are interested in having SOMEWHAT FRANK cover your conference or event or to submit a conference or event please contact us.

Happy Conferencing in 2009!