SOMEWHAT FRANK

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!

AllFacebook Launches Facebook Page Stats Tool

It appears that people will no longer be in the dark as to how well fan pages are doing on Facebook as AllFacebook has launched Facebook stat pages. Nick O'Neill, a DC blogger, friend and closet programmer, has been working furiously the last month or so to roll out the page tracker system that keeps track of over 620,000 Facebook Fan pages. The tracking pages offer charts like the one to the left that upon hover offers users to pinpoint specific cross sections on the chart.

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!

Aviary Unleashes the Birds With Public Beta

Today I was pleased to see that Worth 1000 the New York based startup has launched Aviary the suite of online design tools I previously previewed into  public beta. Aviary's public launch offers a refreshed look from that of the private beta and currently consists of Peacock (visual laboratory), Phoenix (image editor) and Toucan (color swatches). Aviary also offers an upgraded version which includes Raven (vector editor) and Talon (screen capture) for only $9.99 a month. This is a pretty powerful set of online tools for designers and artists.

LEAP Ajax Server Webtop Launches

Though servers and hosting is a necessity for any Web business I have to admit the topic really does not excite me at all. I don't wake up in the morning thinking about how I am going to access my hosting. But I may need to eat those words at some point. Imagine if your blog, site or web product is down at 3 a.m. and aside from a call to support, all you have is the tools provided by your hosting company to try and save it. While I know there are lots of hosting options out there, SingleHop, is a Chicago-based hosting company I have grown familiar with that is trying to provide fresh and helpful tools to help its users manage their hosting with ease.  SingleHop has just launched a new Ajax-based environment for managing your servers called LEAP.

Swurl Your Life Together Online

Swurl, a San Diego-based startup, offers a very smart aggregation of all your favorite services that makeup your social footprint online. Swurl is a place to bring all the things you do online together to share in a blog-like format.

Video: Zembly 'Wikipedia For Social Apps'

There are a number of developers creating social applications leveraging APIs which can cause developers to recreate common components. Zembly recently launched to help facilitate collaboration among developers. I spoke with Zembly founder Todd Fast and he said he wants to "be the Wikipedia of social applications." What he means is that he wants to create a development community with Zembly where collaboration runs rampant thus saving rework and time. I think Zembly is a great idea and could save developers from novices to experts a lot of time while facilitating collaboration.

Matt: Twitter From Multiple Accounts

Do you have multiple twitter accounts that you are constantly flipping between to post messages? I do. It is pretty annoying to keep having to logout and then log back in. The Carsonified team made it a challenge to help remedy this problem with their four day development sprint which is similar to the hugs they created last year. With the creation of Matt, which stands for Multiple account twitter tweeter, you can now post to multiple accounts from one place. Simple but brilliant - thank you Carsonified. Personally, I love the design - lots of fun! :)

The Carsonified team created the application in just four days and for around $10,000. They also blogged and captured the creation process on video, including a time lapse video of Day One.

Video: Dash Express Web Connected GPS

The days of fumbling over a map while driving a car appear to be a parting memory as GPS systems have grown increasingly popular of the past few years. The iPhone and other mobile devices have adopted GPS for navigating your way through life. Some newer vehicles are adding GPS as a standard option. Portable GPS devices by Garmin, Tom Tom and other have continued to roll out improved devices. But there is a new GPS startup that is taking what Garmin and Tom Tom have been doing well and taking it a step further. 

Dash Navigation, a Sunnyvale, California startup, has launched a product called the Dash Express which not only helps you find your way it also hooks to the Internet for real-time interactivity. This connectivity can be leveraged to offer real-time traffic data based on anomous Dash users. The connection also hooks users up to Yahoo Local search to find local business and other destinations. A new open platform also means that users will be seeing more and functionality and applications offered but some of the notables currently include Twitter which sends your current location to Twitter as well as other applications like WeatherBug which offers real-time weather information based on your current location.

Graphing Social Patterns East 2008: I'm In

Social networking and media have been quite a hot topic for the last few years. I think humans are generally social in nature so the social networking phenomenon online plays into human nature as social networking tools have evolved online. For example, there have been a number of "white label" solutions like Ning, Userplane, Drupal and Kickapps just to name a few that offer out of the box social networking solutions.

I will be moderating a panel at the upcoming Graphing Social Patterns East conference next week discussing white label social networks with some of the leaders in the space in a session titled, From Zero to Community in 60 Seconds: White-Label Social Networks.

The panel includes:

Alex Blum - CEO of KickApps
Michael Jones - CEO of Userplane
Sean Roach - CEO of Got Access

If you have a question you would like me to ask the panel please submit it in the comments section below.

Kirix Strata: Web Browse Your Data

At the heart of just about every web application is a database. Getting at and manipulating that data is often done through SQL statements which involve a level of database understanding. Kirix, a Chicago-based startup, is looking to help change that by exposing your data in a Web browser experience with the launch tomorrow of Strata. Strata is a powerful set of tools that enables anyone to access, browse and manipulate data from a Web browser.

Mashup Open AIM For Cash Prizes

For all you developers out there that like to create mashups, there is currently a developer contest being held with cash prizes called the Open AIM Developers Challenge. All you have to do is create a mashup that leverages the Open AIM APIs and submit it to dev.aol.com. There will be 29 winners with prize allocations from $10K to $500. Scoring is based on a number of criteria but 20 percent is based on usage so the sooner you get a mashup submitted the better your chances are to win.

Video: Sociality Talk With Thomas Vander Wal

I am a taggaholic. I love to tag items in Flickr and across the Web. I even find myself sometimes tagging other peoples photos and online content. This would not be possible without "folksonomy" and recently got to watch Thomas Vander Wal present at AOL as part of the AOL Developer Network Speaker Series. Thomas Vander Wal invented the word "folksonomy" and knows a thing or two about the social web. It's more than just today's social networks - it's layers of interactivity, circles of sociability, reputation and identity. He also shared his thoughts on the spheres of sociability, social objects, and the path to get users to fully embrace creating and sharing social objects.

I got a chance to talk with Thomas after his presentation and it is episode 20 of SOMEWHAT FRANK TV.

Evernote Helps Remember Everything, Anywhere

There are so many things to remember these days that it can be somewhat difficult to keep track of everything. While notes in a moleskin, sticky notes, emails to yourself and photos of things you want to remember might be a few ways to remember things - all these methods seem to scatter reminders all over the place. Evernote, a Sunnyvale, California based startup, looks to offer a place to send, store and retrieve all of the things you need to remember.