SOMEWHAT FRANK

A Social Media Discussion Lifestreamed

How can you engage your client community via blogs and social media? Last Thursday, I spoke on a panel at The New New Internet Conference to discuss this very question. The panel consisted of Gary Vaynerchuk video blogger at Wine Library TV and Director of Operations at Wine Library, Geoff Livingston blogger at The BuzzBin and author of Now Is Gone and Rohit Bhargava blogger at Influential Marketing and author Personality Not Included and myself blogger at Somewhat Frank, co-founder of  TECH cocktail a community-building event startup and product manager of myAOL. If you want to find out about social media you best watch the video and learn about blogging, engaging social media and hustle 2.0!  

WooMe Takes Speed Dating Online

Have you ever wanted to do speed dating but didn't want to actually attend an speed dating event? Now you can do it from the comfort of your home as WooMe is looking to take speed dating online.  WooMe, a startup which I saw demo at TechCrunch40, has moved into a private alpha phase and I got a chance to check it out.

Ruckus Aims Free Music At College Kids

Ruckus Networks, a Herndon,Virginia-based startup, has been making some noise on college campuses across the US. Ruckus is a college-only multimedia service offering free ad-supported downloads to college students.  After some initial bad reviews, Ruckus seems to be making moves and gaining traction. Ruckus has over 3 million music tracks available and just recently launched a Facebook application, extensive social networking capabilities, and an improved video service just in time for the new school year.

TECH cocktail Boston Was Wicked

TECH cocktail Boston took place last night in the shadow of Fenway Park and brought the Boston tech scene together. With about 400 people in attendance, TECH cocktail Boston brought together a number of startups, entrepreneurs and technology enthusiasts for an evening of food, drinks and passionate conversations. It was pretty wicked!

SplashCast's Shiny New Player

SplashCast Media, a Portland-based media player startup, has launched an update to its exisiting SplashCast media player. SplashCast has added a number of features to the player as it continues to improve the product that launched earlier this year.

Planypus Group Plans Site Gets Funded

Planypus (planyp.us), a startup co-located in Chicago and Washington, DC, offers friends and family the ability to create collaborative plans. Think of it as a wiki for your social life. Today Planypus announced the closing of its Series-A financing.

Organized by my events, my city and my friends, Planypus makes it easy to keep track of local events. From movie night to simply meeting up to catchup with friends, Planypus makes it easy to plan meetups with groups of friend or family. Planypus also displays events, movies, restaurants, and happenings in your local area.

Fonts Dance In Adobe Flash Video

Have you ever seen fonts dance like this? To the sound of Obadiah Parker's covering Outkast's "Hey Ya!", Brian Shaler leveraged Adobe Flash typography animation technology to create this video that make fonts dance.

Anymails: Visualize Your Email Inbox

I have written several times about my love/hate relationship with email. So I am definitely on the lookout for email management applications and I just came across something interesting. Anymails, a project created by Carolin Horn as part of her thesis, allows you to visualize your received emails as microbes. The objective of this Flash-based project is to offer the user another type of email experience. Unfortunately, it only currently works on a Mac.

TECH cocktail In Beantown Sign-up Now

Last week I mentioned that TECH cocktail, an event I co-founded with Eric Olson, was coming soon to Boston and now I am pleased to announce that you can now sign-up for TECH cocktail Boston.

KnockaTV Is Coming But What Is It?

KnockaTV is coming, according to the vintage "I want my MTV" style video that is playing on the site (go to the site to see what I am taking about). I just signed up for a beta tester account for KnockaTV last night and this morning I noticed TechCrunch also is looking at the video service but we both have about the same amount of information. Founded by the inventors of ICQ instant messenger, they plan to build a democratic online TV station that is hyperactive, creative and social. KnockaTV is looking for producers to help with the site and moderate the content that will be presented in a professional TV broadcasting style. I think and this is only my own speculation, that KnockaTV will use a process similar to Digg where videos are submitted and then the community votes on and then the highest rated videos will rise to the top and be broadcast on KnockaTV.

Vlogging Wine Expert's Conan TV Debut

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As I highlighted earlier this week, Gary Vaynerchuk of the popular wine video podcast Wine Library TV made an appearance on the NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien television program this week. In case you missed watching it on Wednesday evening you can watch it now thanks to YouTube. Check out the video of Gary's entertaining appearance above. Great job Gary on attempting to train Conan O'Brien's palette.

Gary The Vlogging Wine King On Conan

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! 

Indaba Music: Jam With A Virtual Band

Do you have dreams of being a rock star but are in need of a band?

This can be a common problem for many talented artists as they can jam like no other but don't have an official band. Indaba Music   makes it possible to create a virtual band to create music. Indaba Music is an online collaboration platform that allows artists to upload tracks, work without concern for location, and have an easy flow of information. Users can connect with others musicians to coordinate the creation of a virtual band by recording and sharing individual parts of a song to then be mixed and turned into a new song. Tracks can then be shared with the rest of the community. The Indaba Music community offers users the ability to create music sessions and then subscribe to watch the sessions as a collaborative effort to create a new mix. Check out a sample session here.

Launched by two Harvard graduates in their early twenties, Dan Zaccagnino and Matt Siegel  have continued to rollout improvements to their free offering. In April 2007, Indaba Music launched a free online production console, which allows its worldwide community of musicians and music professionals to work on tracks, edit, mix and access them from any computer in the world. In May, Indaba Music launched version 2 of the product, which included some substantial site design improvements. In addition, the (remove 'a') new production console has some major improvements, which included waveform graphics in the track views, LED level meters, adjustable volume changes over the timeline, moveable markers, and stereo mix-downs. Finally, the music player randomly plays finished session mixes in an application, which leverages Adobe Apollo.

Bottom-line: Musicians with platinum record dreams or just looking to meet others artists should give Indaba Music   a whirl to upload and mix music.

HeyCosmo Launches Free Interactive WebCam Collaboration Service

HeyCosmo, a product of Arsenal Interactive a Mountain View, California-based startup founded by Jason Im, launched into external beta yesterday to offer an interactive webcam platform with a host of collaboration tools.

I first met, HeyCosmo founder and CEO, Jason Im at Community Next in February and then hung out with him at the W Hotel in SF and got a preview of the product after the Web 2.0 Expo. In seeing the demo I could see HeyCosmo becoming extremely popular as it adds a "real" element to normal online interaction. It blends a Meeting Place or WebEx type application with the visual interactivity via a web cam. However, HeyCosmo does not appear to be positioning itself as a business application but more a fun way to sync up and have fun with friends online. With HeyCosmo you can have up to 10 live web-cam video participants and up to 50 people can listen, watch, and chat during a session. So imagine leveraging HeyCosmo to play a crazy game of poker online. You don't have to imagine too hard because HeyCosmo is already helping you to do it - check out the screen-shot below.

Since HeyCosmo is in beta it is only currently offered for use with Internet Explorer but I would expect that to change with time as HeyCosmo works out all the beta kinks. TechCrunch offers additional perspective on HeyCosmo.

Bands In Town Gets You Ready To Rock!

Are you ready to rock all summer long but don't know when you favorite bands are coming to town? Of course you could go out and search for your favorite bands sites and check each individually but now there may be an easier way. Bands In Town recently launched to help you keep better track of tour dates for your favorite bands.

Bands In Town offers the ability to pull in your favorite band information from Last.fm or you can manually save you favorite bands. Upon specifying a geographic location, Bands In Town serves up a huge tag cloud of bands that you might enjoy. Check out the screen-shot below.

Bands In Town also informs you when your favorite band is in coming back into town which saves you from having to keep track on your own. Rock on, you shouldn't miss a show again!