SOMEWHAT FRANK

The New New Internet Is Coming Soon

What's new new on the Internet?  If you are looking for a conference to help you find out you might want to check out this years The New New Internet Conference on November 1, 2007 in Reston, Virginia (northwest of Washington, DC).

I am pleased to be among the a solid list of speakers for the sessions which include (in no particular order) Om Malik, Ted Leonsis, Brad Feld, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk and Ryan Carson among others. The speaker list continues to grow everyday as additional sessions are locked down. As a preview to speaking at this years conference on a panel about "Blogging for Business," I was recently interviewed by ExecutiveBiz.com, check out the Executive Spotlight Interview here.

Email Woes Getting You Down? Perhaps the Post Office Can Help

Email used to be so hip. Now it is such a pain in the ass. I have written about email management and liberating my email inbox before, but being on the road the last 19 days has turned my inbox upside down. Om Malik wrote a great piece today about email bankruptcy which starts by saying:

"Email sucks."

I agree. I have thousands of messages and I cannot get through them all. I am hoping to get to them soon, but even on a U.S. holiday (July 4th) emails continued to flow in like a river of hell. These days I am finding myself looking for more interesting ways to communicate, whether it be via the notes or comments on Flickr photos, Facebook status, wall or other messages, SMS or Twitter.

All this pondering reminded me of the good old days when getting mail from the post office, that’s right, “snail mail" was the way to communicate. So I did a little poking around and found that there are a couple of products offering users the ability to easily send “snail mail” from the Web.  If you think your email inbox is cluttered, now your kitchen counter and office desk can be cluttered too!

Postful offers users the ability to have any email sent via the post office for the charge of $0.99 for the first page and $0.25 for each additional page. Postful's mission is to be the bridge between the digital and physical worlds – thus making easy to send emails as letters to grandparents and other non-email users.

Easy Post, a Canada startup, offers users the ability have mail sent directly from the Web to Canada addresses. Easy Post is free anywhere in Canada.

eSnailer offers users the ability to send any letter over “snail mail” via the Web. eSnailer is free because it is supported by ads and free offers that are shown after you write your letter. Users must accept a free offer in return for the service.

If you want to go the other way and turn all your "snail mail" into email you should check out Remote Control Mail which was highlighted previously on TechCrunch.

Bottom-line: Information overload is a problem regardless of the medium, we can take ongoing measures to defense the problem.

Google Acquires DoubleClick, 10 Hot Startups, Social Aggregators, FoundRead Born & Web 2.0 Expo Is Upon Us

Photo of the week: This San Francisco Trolley photo taken by, friend and co-founder of TECH cocktail Eric Olson, was the first photo I found on Flickr related to the Web 2.0 Expo this week in SF.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.15.07

The Web 2.0 Expo Is Upon Us
I just arrived in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo. It should be an exciting week of sessions, demos and launch parties in the city by the bay. If you are in town and want to meetup tonight (Sunday) check out this little meetup but keep in mind, this is NOT a TECH cocktail event like the one we just hosted in Chicago - it is just a meetup in SF.

Google Spends $3.1 Billion To Acquire DoubleClick
Makes sense as Google is truly an advertising company. Google announced that they have agreed to acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash. Microsoft was reportedly in a bidding war with Google for the company. That is a lot of cash. Rumor has it they are buying the Internet just after the 2016 Chicago Olympics. :-) 

Birth of the Social Aggregator
Social Networks, Blogs and Startpages have long been treated as separate categories of web-based applications. According to Widgify, it is about to change. 

10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups To Date
Rev2.org lists its take on the most successful web 2.0 startups. With FeedBurner’s domination of the feed management space I would probably add them to this list. But you probably know already I am a FeedBurner fan.

New RSS 2.0 spec site deployed
Dave Winer has been working on a project to "future-safe" the Harvard site that houses the RSS 2.0 spec. Yesterday, he redirected from the old site to the new one. Congrats Dave on the new site! 

Search for People Across the Social Network Sites
yoName is a search engine that allows you to search friends (not just) on these 6 big networks. 

Introducing FoundRead
GigaPapi GigaOm is at it again as he has launched FoundRead, a shared resource, where anyone can contribute, either through their posts, or experiences or comments. You can choose to contribute freely or anonymously. Great idea Om, congrats on the launch. 

Hot Startup Checklist: Spam A Lot?
An interesting chart of Valleywag (masters of the pie charts, graphs, slides, etc.) highlighting some of the most promising startups.

Niche Job Boards Galore: Here's One More

There have a been a flurry of niche job boards developed recently to help connect employers with the right niche employees. Paul Stamatiou has previously highlighted the job board boom and had this to say:

"In a nutshell, these small job boards are great places to start looking for your next career or find your next employee."

I couldn't agree with him more. Here a is a quick list of the various niche offerings and listing fees:

37 Signals Tech Jobs - $300 for a 30 day listing
Authentic Jobs - $250 for full-time (30 days)  $75 for freelance (15 days)
CrunchBoard - $200 for a 30 day listing
GigaOM Jobs - $200 for a month listing
Problogger Job Board - $50 for a 30 day listing
TECH cocktail Specials Job Board - $30 for a 30 day listing - FREE with code

With the design and development assistance of Phraction, Eric Olson and I launched a job board at our last event TECH cocktail 2. The goal is to help better connect our supporters with niche tech/biz  opportunities - or as we like to call them TECH cocktail Specials (techcocktail.com/jobs). Though the site says it is only $30 for a 30 day listing (about a dollar a day), I wanted to make it clear that we only are charging to help keep the riff raff (spam listings) off of the site and raise money to help support our TECH cocktail events. However, we have a promo code that we can give you and you can post as many job listings as you would like for FREE! Yes, you read that correctly, post your job listings for FREE!

If you have a job opening and would like to place it on the TECH cocktail Specials Job Board, please email us:

Frank [at] techcocktail dot com
Eric [at] techcocktail dot com

You are probably wondering why we would want to jump into such a competative, segmented market of niche job boards. Well, it is simple: after the first TECH cocktail event both Eric and I received a number emails asking us to help them connect with developers, designers and product gurus. So rather than play HR matchmaker, which could be a full-time job, we decided we would launch a job board. Eric and I really want to see this board grow to help better connect the tech/biz community. So please feel free to reach out to us for that promo code and post a TECH cocktail Specials job listing today!

Related Links:
CrunchBoard: Find A Job In The Valley
Blogger Job Board Launched

Widgets Live & Web 2.0 Week in SF

I just arrived in San Francisco after a long evening of traveling for a week of web 2.0 festivities. I am attending a widgets festival conference tomorrow called Widgets Live which I previewed previously. The conference was organized by Niall Kennedy and Om Malik (thank you both for pulling this together) and features a number of widget topics:

• Mobile widgets
• Hardware widgets
• Widget Aggregators
• Blog sidebar widgets
• Homepage widgets
• Desktop widget engines

If widgets are a new idea to you it might be a good idea to check out this article which tries to address the question, What is a widget? If you are planning on attending conference this week - drop me a comment or an email. I look forward to meeting you.

Though widgets have become a rather hot topic lately, Widgets Live is not the only dog and pony show related to the web in San Francisco this week.

Web 2.0 Conference/Summit is also taking place this week and is quite possibly the hottest ticket in town. It is an expensive and difficult ticket to secure as Chris Perillo has confirmed with this timely comic on bLaugh. Nonetheless, the Valley will be buzzing this week so I imagine there will be a bunch of product announcements - it should be a entertaining week in the Bay area.

Calling All Collegiate Coding Rockstars!

Are you a college student, computer programming superstar with dreams of being crowned supreme collegiate programmer of all the land? If so, you might want to sign up for the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge which is set to take place in San Diego on November 17, 2006. The event is being sponsored by AOL as part of the AOL Developer Network. I had a chance to talk to Duke Tunstall who has organized AOL's involvement in the event and he had this to say about the upcoming competition:

"I am really thrilled to be a part of this event.  I was originally a little skeptical about mashing developers with a sporting event, but when it all started to come together, WOW!  The excitement and level of competitiveness that these guys bring is incredible and I have only witnessed it online so far.  I can't wait to be side by side with the finalists in November."

Of course if you cannot make it out to sunny Southern California then be sure to tune into the Webcast which is being produced by AOL. Om Malik also has published his perspective on the competition. Finally, if you are looking for sweet full-time coding gig - AOL is hiring!

Widgets, Widgets Everywhere!

I recently highlighted the activity of widgets in the web 2.0 space. With the number of players jumping into the widgets space, I concluded the article by saying:

"An open standard development infrastructure which would allow a single widget to be plugged into any application and work properly seems to be something the widget movement is currently lacking – it may be a pipe-dream but I think it is worth wishing for."

It appears that I am not the only one with this dream. Ironically, I ran into Om Malik recently and he mentioned a conference that he was organizing focusing on widgets. Today, Niall Kennedy has presented the details of the first ever Widgets Live! conference which he is organizing in conjunction with Om. It is scheduled as a one-day conference Monday, November 6, 2006 in San Francisco. With all the movement and buzz surrounding widgets this conference is extremely timely and would probably worth your time.