July 18, 2008
Yesterday I spent some time with Sarah Lacy, a Silicon Valley BusinessWeek reporter, Yahoo Tech Ticker host and author of the new book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0. She was visiting Washington, DC as part of her user generated book tour.
Sarah spent time on the AOL Dulles campus in the morning. I sat on a panel with her discussing Web 2.0 Startups to a crowd of AOL Commerce and Shopping employees moderated by Michael Tolosa of DC Tech TV. It was a lot fun as we talked about her book and exchanged various startup stories. In the evening we headed to DC for her user-generated book tour which visited the DC Twin Tech Party hosted by iStrategyLabs which SOMEWHAT FRANK and TECH cocktail help sponsor.
I captured a few photos and video clips which make-up episode 34 of SOMEWHAT FRANK TV. You can check out episode 34 of SOMEWHAT FRANK TV featuring Sarah Lacy (below).
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June 30, 2008
Watch and interact live over the Web! Today at 6 p.m. EST, I am chatting with Washington, DC local marketing/PR guru Rohit Bhargava the author of the new book, Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose Their Authenticity And How Great Brands Get it Back.
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June 28, 2008
Intel I got a chance to visit Intel this week as I was selected to the "Intel Insider" advisory board as the leading microprocessor chip maker anchored in Silicon Valley looks to make some changes in the way they reach out to their customers. What does this mean? It means that Intel has embraced social media and has pulled in a dozen bloggers, video bloggers and social media/community experts to pick there brains on Intel's brand strategy. It means I will have the scoop on products and new developments at Intel. As an Intel Insider I will be a part of the conversations related to leveraging social media at Intel and lend some brand association for my own personal brand to Intel.
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June 3, 2008
Filtrbox, a Boulder-based startup which was founded about a year ago as part of the first TechStars program, will soon be launching a self-service business-grade keyword driven alerts product. Filtrbox offers keyword driven media search which includes the blogosphere & mainstream news.
I was intrigued by the five person filtrbox team when they demoed at TECH cocktail Boulder back in March 2008. I recently got a more thoroughly overview of the private beta product as they approach a public beta launch and I wanted to share my thoughts on the product.
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May 16, 2008
I just spoke at the Social Rockstar Workshop at Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. about Social Media & Blogging. It was a great conversation and thank you to everyone that attended. I have uploaded to docstoc the online document sharing site for anyone that would like to take a look at the presentation.
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April 19, 2008
You have probably seen the Lijit search widget on a number of sites around the Web. It has been the search option for SOMEWHAT FRANK and TECH cocktail for sometime as it offers some great site search analytics in a manageable and easy to digest format. I even get a weekly statistics email from Lijit keeping me updated as to how search is performing every week and what people are searching for.
Frank Gruber as a lijit search widget When I visited Boulder, Colorado back in March 2008 for our first TECH cocktail Boulder I got a chance to visit the Lijit Networks headquarters and I captured it on video. Thanks to Tara "Tarable" Anderson for the impromptu guided tour and for turning me into a Lijit search widget (shown to the right).
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April 2, 2008
Taking a page out the Netflix and Amazon playbook, outbrain, a New York-based startup, officially launched yesterday to offer a ratings and recommendations widget for content. With outbrain bloggers, news, media, magazines, rss readers and other publishers/aggregators can add a rating and personalized content recommendation widget to their blogs and sites easily and free.
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March 29, 2008
The adoption of Twitter, which I covered previously a number of times , appears to be acceleratingly since March 6th, as I have seen my followers double in that three week period. My friend Gary Vaynerchuk recently started to do a daily "thoughts on life" video podcast and gave his thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook...kinda. So in response to his video I wanted to make a quick SOMEWHAT FRANK TV episode 18 with my thoughts on Twitter (mainly) as well as a few comments about Facebook.
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March 27, 2008
Looking for free licensed content to be able to use on your own blog or website? Voxant Newsroom looks to help by distributing and promoting content from licensed content sources for free. Voxant offers publishers a place to find and embed licensed video, text, and photos from over two hundred news sources from a variety of providers. Voxant places advertising in the its embeddable content to monetize the content making it possible to keep the content available for free to users.
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March 25, 2008
With the melting of the polar ice caps a lot more focus has been placed on the environment lately. Going green has been a popular topic, one that I have written about before as I compiled a list of green Web 2.0 sites. Well, I just found another worth taking a look at in emPivot. emPivot, a Washinton, DC based startup, is like YouTube for "Green" videos as it offers a video sharing site specifically for "Green" media.
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March 19, 2008
Microblogging has made it easy to share but with a number of services available one can get overloaded with options making it difficult to keep them all updating the time. Rather than have to stick to one service you can post to a number of services at one time with the help of Ping.fm. Other services like socialthing! and HelloTxt offer similar functionality but I thought it was worth mentioning yet another service as we all look for the ultimate one stop shop for managing all our microblogging needs at once.
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March 18, 2008
CBS Television stations today announced the launch of the CBS Local Ad Network as it looks to get into the advertising distribution game by connecting with local bloggers and social media Web sites.
At first glance, I thought CBS was looking to incorporate blogs and other social media content into the local CBS news sites but after reading on that is not the case at all, it turns out CBS is just leveraging bloggers looking to generate some revenue on their blog or social media content. Network participants can place what CBS is calling a widget (with a huge skyscraper ad unit) on their sites and in return receive a rev-share. Nothing new here. It might be the right program for bloggers or social media content producers looking for a way to monetize and not sell ads though I have no idea what the rev-share looks like and it would be worth a look before jumping in and giving CBS ad impressions.
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March 18, 2008
The Tribune Company, an old newspaper giant, has just announced an iPhone compartable version of one of its flagship properties, the Chicago Tribune. As a former Tribune employee it gives me great joy to see my old hometown paper now viewable on my iPhone at this URL: chicagotribune.com/iphone.
They have not enabled an auto redirect to when I am viewing ChicagoTribune.com from my iPhone but do promote the iPhone option instead. I figure the auto redirect on the iPhone will be coming soon. Congrats to the Tribune on embracing the new device. Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing it out.
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March 15, 2008
Brica Brica What? BricaBox, the social content platform which I covered previously here and here, that launched a few weeks ago offers users the ability to display structured content with social features. After many attempts I finally got a chance to sit down with BricaBox founder and CEO Nate Westheimer while attending FOWA Miami 2008 which is the latest SOMEWHAT FRANK TV episode.
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March 12, 2008
Alltop, a new startup creation founded by Guy Kawasaki, just announced a simple landing page product for those looking for the top feeds for a number of different vertical categories. Taking inspiration from popurls which aggregates the top urls on the Web, Alltop offers pages filled with feeds on a various topics.
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March 8, 2008
On a clear, crisp evening in Boulder, Colorado over two hundred technology enthusiasts piled into The Foundry Billiards Club to better connect and amplify the technology signal of the region. The event, TECH cocktail Boulder in partnership with DEMO, showcased five startups from the local area. The event was sponsored by Boulder-based Lijit and Chicago and soon to be also Boulder-based skinnyCorp - thank you both!
Since TECH cocktail is one of my own creations with co-founder Eric Olson, we were really enjoyed the evening getting to hangout with some of the technology "movers and shakers" in the Denver/Boulder area. For more details check out the official TECH cocktail Boulder 1 photos and event wrap-up article. Read on for more on the startups that demoed at TECH cocktail Boulder.
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February 28, 2008
If you are a motorcycle or political enthusiast than listen up because you are going to like this. LOUD3R, a network for niche enthusiast offerings, has launched a couple of different aggregation sites. FAST3R the motorcycle site and VOT3R the political site are pulled together by leveraging a semantic publishing engine used in combination with natural language processing and human intelligence the engine selects and publishes the best and most interesting content to the network. Users can also contribute content and comments to the site.
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February 26, 2008
BricaBox, the NY-based structured content platform I previously reviewed, publicly launched today to enable anyone to create access and create these rich content experiences with ease. Funded sole by its founders BricaBox has been refered to a "wiki" on steroids (don't tell MLB or Congress) or "WordPress for structured content" as it offers a way for publishers tools to better display listings and such. It should also be noted that BricaBox offers social capabilities to enable community and sharing features which are sometimes confused with those of Ning or other social networking platform options.
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February 25, 2008
I got word this morning that TheMarker, Israel’s prominent business magazine and Haaretz, one of Israel’s largest newspapers, featured SOMEWHAT FRANK in a spread titled "The Blogs That Every Israeli Startup Should Know."
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February 16, 2008
Have you ever taken a photo or seen a video and wanted to immediately share it with your friends while on the go? Obviously you could upload it to Flickr or Facebook or a number of other sites but more than likely times you probably would fire off an email to your friends to share it with them. Your friends would then get your message at various times depending upon when they actually go to check their email which means you are not instantly communicating with your friends.
Movial is looking to help make sharing easier with the recent launch of Movial Social Communicator. Social Communicator offers a desktop client and mobile application that syncs all your mobile phone contacts and empowers users to send videos, photos and news directly to their friends at their current location.
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February 13, 2008
Techmeme, the popular news aggregator, just released a new feature today which will allow anyone to keep up with the news as it flows into Techmeme called the Firehose. In the past Techmeme has only released feeds for items that were above the fold on the site (maybe 20 to 30 most popular items from a day). With firehose, Techmeme and all its vertical brands, WeSmirch for celebrity gossip, ballbug for baseball news and memeorandum for political news, will offer a constant stream of news from every headline and discussion link that ever appears on the site. As explained by Gabe Rivera on his blog:
"Any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which exclude "Discussion" links) will appear in the feed within 5 minutes. This means well over 100 headlines per day for Techmeme Firehose, so casual news readers will want to use the Main feed (i.e. the previous, standard feed) instead."
Gabe has also put the firehose to Twitter so you can monitor the pulse of news on the go and as it comes in. This is great news for the tech, celebrity, baseball or politic news obsessed! TechCrunch also has more on the new Techmeme stream.
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February 12, 2008
The latter part of last year, AOL resigned a number of its channel offerings including News, Sports and Money & Finance in an effort to increase engagement and traffic starting with AOL News in June 2007. According to a recent release by AOL, it appears that these changes are paying off. The redesigned offered a cleaner design and more blog-like social platform than before which might have contributed to increases key metrics like Page Views and Unique Visitors.
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February 7, 2008
If you are looking for something funny to watch online you now have another place to look, thanks to launch this week of Independent Comedy Network TV. ICN.TV, a Santa Monica, California based startup, looks to offer unique comedy programming with 5 original scripted series.
ICN.TV is comedy but different than the Will Ferrell project, Funny or Die, as ICN.TV offers actual comedy series rather than just random shorts, skits and improvisations.
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February 6, 2008
BlogTV, the personalized TV platform which I use for streaming live split-screen video interviews, has just made it possible to watch all those videos from your mobile phone while on the go. Now with BlogTV offers all its live streams for free, without any installation of software for all major mobile carriers. But they are still waiting on the iPhone to be able to play these types of videos.
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February 5, 2008
Super Tuesday! Did you get the load of election action you were looking for? If not, you might still be able to catch some thanks in part to a map mashup that TechCrunch reported Google teamed up with Twitter to provide. The Google Maps Twitter mashup is similar to Twittervision but for political related twits (a twit is a Twitter message) so you can track the today's Super Tuesday elections on real-time on a map.
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February 4, 2008
FeedHub, the Pittsburgh-based startup created by mSpoke, has just announced an update aimed at improving the relevancy of its personalized feed creator. I covered FeedHub when they launched back in September 2007, since then they have received a lot of user feedback which they used to plan and execute on this latest update.
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February 4, 2008
AOL has just announced the acquisition of Goowy Media, a San Diego-based Flash startpage, widget and desktop application startup. One of Goowy's bi-products is yourminis a slick startpage that I previously reviewed and named one of the best beta products of 2006. It is pretty rad.
Goowy's widgets can be distributed to just about any page or social network on the Web (as shown below) which is comparable to offerings by ClearSpring, Widgetbox and Gigya, which have also been getting buzz in the widget advertising space. These distribution capabilities will come in handy on myAOL as well as helping to syndicate AOL network content. Goowy also offers widget metrics in a dashboard that closely resembles the feed metrics dashboard of FeedBurner which was acquired by Google for $150 million.
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February 2, 2008
This past week at DEMO, I bumped into social media expert, blogger and co-author of the business blogging book Naked Conversation, Shel Israel. He had just announced his new video gig working with Robert Scoble to build up a video network called FastCompany TV. Shel was testing out some HD camera equipment and I was actually wearing a head cam so I sat down to chat with him on camera for five minutes about his new show GlobalNeighbourhoods TV (GNTV) which he recently explained on his blog.
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February 1, 2008
Mapping mashups have become almost a dime a dozen these days as the release of open APIs by just about every major online mapping site and and development tools has lowered the barriers of entry. That was not always the case though and as recently as 2005 trailblazing mashup like HousingMaps.com (a cross between Google Maps and Craigslist housing listings) and ChicagoCrime.org (a crossed Google Maps and Chicago Crime data to display crimes on a map) developers actually had to reverse engineer JavaScript code to create mashup. This all changed with the release of Google Maps API and most of the major mapping sites on the Web have since followed suit.
It was recently announced that due to some server issues and overlaps with another new mashup the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism award winning early mashup ChicagoCrime.org will be redirect to - EveryBlock. EveryBlock, launched recently, is also mashup of sorts created by Chicago-based Adrian Holovaty the developer that produced ChicagoCrime.org. Everyblock is a news aggregator site for Chicago, New York and San Francisco that looks to help you answer the question:
“What’s happening in my neighborhood?”
The site compiles all the openly available public records and then slices and dices them so that they are easily accessible by zip code, address or neighborhood.
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January 29, 2008
After an evening mixer last night which helped to get everyone together DEMO08, as its name implies, was filled with lots of demos. Rather than review every single company that launched a product today I will give you a brief overview of each one. Overall, I was impressed by a couple of pen-like gadgets, a few enabling technology sites, a couple video sites and of course mobile products.
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January 26, 2008
Now is Gone so you had better get ready to embrace a new media. I previously chatted with Brian Solis about, Now Is Gone, a book he helped Geoff Livingston author. I sat on a panel discussing social media with Geoff at the New New Internet conference this past November, when he announced his book. So I was happy to finally be able to chat with him about it.
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January 25, 2008
Seesmic, a startup founded by European entrepreneur and blogger Loic Le Meur, has been in closed alpha since October 2007 has hopes of creating a video conversation platform online. Seesmic creates an dashboard for anyone with a web cam to quickly create a video. Videos can then be published to a website or social network page as well as responded to within the Seesmic community.
My first impression of Seesmic was that is reminded me of slimmed down version of BlogTV which I use regularly for video interviews. But it appears that Seesmic is aimed at creating more a short form or Twitter-like video communitywhere people can interact around both user generated and professional content.
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January 24, 2008
Microblogging platforms have been springing up like crazy these days as bloggers look for easier and shorter form ways to quickly express themselves online. Lifestreaming to these platforms also become more prevalent as an aggregation of online activities. I am a big fan of microblogging platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and Soup.io. They offer a light but powerful platform for self-expression. But there is not a one size fits all solution for every blogger. Chyrp (found deceptively at chyrp.net) offers an open source blogging platform that is more of a medium weight blogging solution.
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January 19, 2008
Somewhat Frank Weekly Video: This week I got a chance to sit down with AOL's Kevin Lawver who is very well respected at AOL and in the web development community. He has worked at AOL for 13 years and worked on everything from AOL search to conceptualizing and developing Ficlets.
We sat down and discussed a new book Adapting to Web Standards : CSS and Ajax for Big Sites which he helped Christopher Schmitt, Robert Cherny, Meryl K. Evans, Mark Trammell and Kimberly Blessing author. The book is devoted to helping experienced developers to better understand the changing web standards landscape and somewhat frankly, adapt. Kevin wrote chapter 7 which focuses on AOL's move into the online space with the relaunch the new AOL.com in 2005. The chapter discusses managing "corporate swirl" and "combating the waterfall" methodology. It even explains how web development is an art and craft (not witchcraft though).
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January 15, 2008
If you have ever looked for concert, theater or sporting event tickets then you probably have heard of TicketsNow and Ticketmaster. TicketsNow an online tickets site founded in the Chicago northwest suburb now based in Rolling Meadows and Crystal Lake, Illinois has just announced it was acquired by InterActiveCorp’s Ticketmaster for $265 million as just reported on TECH cocktail.
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January 12, 2008
Somewhat Frank Weekly Video: Tantek Çelik recently discussed open Web standards and data portability at an Open Media Web Meetup. Tantek believes writing on the Web is like "writing in sand" since it all could be wiped out when the next wave of technology comes through. Tantek also speaks about data formats and how content data formats expires content over time. It is an interesting perspective from an innovation leader and long time advocate of open standards efforts like microformats.
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January 11, 2008
With the U.S. terrorist threat level at orange airport security lines can sometimes be big time consuming. If you are a frequent traveler like I am you probably are not a big fan of waiting in lines while unexperienced travelers realize they have to take all the liquids out of their carry on bags and take off their shoes. Clear, a New York-based identity verification startup founded in 2003, looks to speed up airport security checkpoints by pre-screening travelers.
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January 7, 2008
Lifestreaming has made great strides in the past year as Justin.TV strapped a camera on his head. Robert Scoble, Sarah Meyers and a number of others including myself have participated in one way or another in the lifestreaming video movement leveraging tools like UStream.TV, Mogulus and Blog.TV.
With CES taking place in Las Vegas this week and the unfortunate fact that I was unable to attend (due to my day job) I am going to take full advantage of my friends lifestreaming videos to get the feel of the conference. There is a new tool called Qik that might make lifestreaming even easier than before. Qik is an alpha product that has sprung onto the scene to enable users to stream live video directly from their mobile phone.
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January 5, 2008
Somewhat Frank Weekly Video: The Web has connected and empowered humans - but what does the Web look like? Today, thanks to my friend Jesse Thomas, I found Space Collective.org which is a cross-media information and entertainment channel for post-ideological, non-partisan, forward thinking terrestrials. That's a mouthful. Basically, Space Collective has created a number of videos, channels and projects devoted covering a number of space related topics. I wanted to showcase a video called" We Are The Web" which helps to visualize the Web.
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December 26, 2007
Looking to record split-screen multi-user videos via your web camera? I am. While there are a number of video platforms that offer single web cam video recording, I recently set forth on a quest for find the ultimate online video product for recording multi-user web camera videos. I came across a site called Tjoon. Tjoon, a startup created by Suite75, offers an easy way to record split-screen multi-user videos via a web camera.If you know of a better solution for recording split-screen multi-user video please let me know.
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December 21, 2007
Lifecasting, the process of broadcasting the events in a person's life through digital media, has become popular as more people become comfortable with expressing themselves online. Mod My Life puts an interesting spin of lifecasting by allowing you to control what a particular lifecaster is doing thus democratizing the lifecast.
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