You may recall Bode Miller, the USA Olympic silver medalist skier and 2008 Alpine Skiing World Cup Champion, apparently he is doing more than just skiing these days as he has teamed with PathConnect to create SkiSpace, a social network for skiers and snowboarders. SkiSpace, not to be confused with MySpace, launched in December 2007 and offers a place for skiers and snowboards online.
Continue reading "SkiSpace: Bode Miller's Skiing Social Network" »
Are you a celebrity news junkie? If so, you might want to check out Fafarazzi and put your celebrity tracking habits to use. Fafarazzi, a Massachusetts-based startup created by Eastland Media, offers place for celebrity news lovers to go head-to-head via celebrity fantasy sports leagues.
Gary Vaynerchuk, the host of WineLibrary.com's video blog Wine Library TV is a pretty entertaining guy. I got a chance to see Gary's energy in action a few months back when he both demo'ed and sponsored at TECH cocktail DC 1.
Gary's love for wine and charismatic personality has created quite a following on the Web which has resulted in being profiled by the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine and now he has landed spot on Late Night with Conan O'Brien on Wednesday night (August 1, 2007).
Aside from the Wine Library TV video blog, Gary also commands a family owned wine empire which recently acquired the Corkd wine lovers online community.
Check out Gary in action tonight on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and also watch his latest video blog post (below) where he breaks the news about getting on the popular show. Tune in to cheer Gary on. Good luck Gary!
Editor's Note: If you like my insights and perspective in this article please join my inner circle here.
Which celebrities do you look like? AOL may be able to help answer that question with its recent launch of an innovative facial recognition technology, similar to that of Riya and MyHeritage, created by AOL Labs in collaboration with Oxford University and Caltech University. Thus far the technology has been used in a fun little site called FindMyCelebrityLookAlike.com. AOL Labs is the technology research group of AOL responsible for delivering insight and capabilities to build the next generation of services for the company.
By submitting a photo by either uploading an image or by submitting an URL to the photo you can search celebrities for a match. Users can tweak the search results by limiting them to a particular gender. In addition, users can find additional information about the celebrities that they look like. So find out who you look like. I decided to look for both male and female results and turns out I look like singer Jesse McCartney, actor Elijah Wood, actress Keira Knightley and actor Adam Brody. What do you think about the results? I am kind of close to the situation so it is difficult for me to judge. 
If you like my insights and perspective in this article please join my inner circle here.
Do you remember the movies EDtv and the Truman Show? Justin.tv launched just seven days ago to mimic these past reality-based movies by broadcasting Justin Kan on the web 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Justin Kan is formerly of the Ajax calendar startup, Kiko, which was funded by Y Combinator before it was eventually sold on eBay for $258,100. Justin.tv is also an Y Combinator backed venture with the long term goal:
"...to create an affordable live mobile video platform they can use to recruit other live bloggers."
The site streams Justin live, offers live chat and features some of its most popular archived content. It is no surprise, Justin.tv has been creating quite the buzz thus far as it taps into the masses general love for people watching. Unfortunately, it hasn't been all fun and games for Justin and his crew as their North Beach apartment has been subject of number of pranks.
Check out this interview with Justin below - are you watching Justin.tv?
We’ve all heard of the game “Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon.” It’s simple: start with a celebrity, say, Selma Hayek and connect her through movies to Kevin Bacon.
And there’s the concept. Now take the game, and do some good with it through SixDegrees.org.
Launched by none other than Kevin Bacon himself, in partnership with Network For Good, an AOL, Yahoo and Cisco Systems backed charitable organization, celebrities advocate their favorite charities and encourage others to do the same – and that includes non-Hollywood types. It’s a great vehicle for awareness as well as fund-raising, as Bacon has promised to match the top six non-celebrity fund-raisers with a $10,000. Check out the video below for Kevin Bacon’s perspective on the charity.
Echoing the ever-growing role of the web as a social network, SixDegrees.org rallies us all around a great purpose that evolved out of a simple grassroots game. I never really considered myself a particularly huge Kevin Bacon fan, though Footloose rocked my world back in 1984, I have to say that I think a lot more highly of him now.
You can donate and add a badge to your web site, social network page or blog. Additionally, you join the Six Degrees AIM Pages Network or buy Six Degrees swag on eBay to show your support.
Special thanks to Kyle Bradbury for assisting with this article.
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Like.com, a product created by Riya, launched today (November 8, 2006) to offer what appears to be the first visual image recognition search engine in a consumer facing application. The site offers the ability to search by photos to identify similar items. Like.com applies this functionality to shopping to help shoppers to find items like shoes, watches, and handbags. Like.com could really help the loads of celebrate crazed, "I gotta have one if they have one" types find just what they are looking for online. For example, take this photo below of Mike Arrington sporting a sweet watch at the ONA conference in Washington, DC. Soon, you will be able to use Like.com to be Mike.
On the Like.com site a highlighted area which contains an item, in the photo above a watch, returns similar watch search results. Currently, Like.com does not offer Mike Arrington photos for search though but you can search for items worn by other celebrities. Within the next month Like.com will let users submit photo uploads to apply the same type of technology.
How does Like.com do it? Like.com applies learnings from photo recognition site Riya to enable Like.com to converts each image into variables that map to contextual meta-data which is then used to perform the search to match shape, texture and a number of other characteristics.
TechCrunch recently provided more information and some videos here.
Bottom-line: Sounds pretty innovate, not to mention helpful in finding a similar watch as Mike Arrington.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
