With Thanksgiving and the holiday season fast approaching, it is a time for reflection and gratitude. I thought it would be the perfect time to share with you a product I have been working on which is focused on spreading happiness through gratitude. Personally, this year has been full of change which is sometimes tough to handle, so "feel good" projects have helped me to focus on the good things in life.
Continue reading "Thankfulfor: Spreading Joy Through Gratitude" »
With baseball in it's final series of 2009 I wanted to share some of my thoughts on baseball, branding and social media, thoughts that have been brewing for a while. I currently live in Washington, D.C., a plane ride away from my favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, and within driving distance of the two teams with the worst records in baseball this past season, the Baltimore Orioles and the Washington Nationals respectively. They both lost a lot of games this year (98 and 103) which only makes me miss my hometown Cubbies even more but let's not forget they have been nothing less than disappointing for over a century. Even in 2003, where I was five outs away from doing Wrigley Field victory dance by heading to the World Series they found a way to break my heart. But every season, I still come back with even more resilience that it could be the Cubs year.
That said, due to my social technology and media background (my baseball skills probably didn't hurt either), I was
invited to meet with the Washington Nationals executives last month at Nationals Park. I was honored to do so and in meeting with Stan Kasten, Bob Wolfe and others I realized that they are just a three year old start-up that spun out of what was the Montreal Expos organization. Call me an optimist but I think they have an almost clean slate, branding-wise, that offers them a huge opportunity to create a strong following both online and off.
Continue reading "The DC Nationals' Social Media Opportunity" »
Continue reading "New Focus on Entrepreneurship at Purdue" »
In an effort to help increase transparency and communication in the Nation's Capital, the National Journal Group is launching 3121, a social network and directory for people that work on Capitol Hill. If you have a valid Senate or House Committee email you can request a beta invite. The site was designed by DC interactive agency Jess3.
Social Times just called 3121, "LinkedIn for Congress Members" and I think they nailed it. This could become a very useful tool for anyone working on the Hill. The hope is that it helps communication and collaborative efforts between congressional members and staff. The official launch will be in September, but until then you can follow the 3121 blog for updates.
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).
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!
Conversations are being sparked in a number of places on the Web these days from Twitter to Facebook to blogs. AdaptiveBlue's product called Glue takes a different approach by enabling conversations and sharing on sites that you visit via the browser. Glue is an browser plugin that appears on your current page to show you friends who looked at the same things and what they thought. It brings your social network to the content pages that you visit rather than integrating directly into various web sites.
Check out the quick video (above) and GetGlue to try it out if you haven't already as it just launched a new release. The new release contains the following (as described by Glue):
Also you can connect and spread the Glue love a number of different ways on the Web.
SocialVibe allows you to "Get Sponsored" by your favorite brands on your social profiles while earning points for the reward of your choice. Though based in Los Angeles but I got a chance to talk with Sarah Townsend from SocialVibe for a quick impromptu interview at South By Southwest Interactive. Check out episode 74 of SOMEWHAT FRANK as we talk about SocialVibe and how it can be used for social good.
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.
Continue reading "AllFacebook Launches Facebook Page Stats Tool" »
The past few years I have posted a comprehensive list (here and here) of all the social media, web/tech, design and marketing conferences in an effort to help my readers better determine just which events to attend. I have decided that due to all the events that a single blog post is not the ideal format for displaying them all. So I have been keeping track of upcoming events and adding them as I find out about them to this event calendar (in the top navigation). You can view the upcoming conference schedule and bookmark it by going here:
Web/Tech, Social Media & Marketing Conference Calendar
If you have any specific questions about a conference please let me know by sending me an @ reply on twitter: @somewhatfrank
Finally, if you are interested in having SOMEWHAT FRANK cover your conference or event or to submit a conference or event please contact us.
Happy Conferencing in 2009!
Google Friend Connect debuted this past spring as it rolled out to a few different sites as part of a private beta program. The idea is pretty simple as it offers an easy way to connect with people on your site via a Google Gadget thus bringing community to a previously community-less site. I like to call it adding a party to a page. Wait a minute this seems like deja vu! Back in November 2006 MyBlogLog offered a similar widget that could be added to your site to help connect everyone in the blogosphere. MyBlogLog was quickly scooped up by Yahoo and has been slowly rolling out new features.
With Facebook starting to allow sites to add Facebook Connect which allows Facebook users to sign in on 3rd party sites and post comments which are then published back to Facebook, Google finally launched Friend Connect publicly just a few weeks ago. I just added Google Friend Connect to SOMEWHAT FRANK. So now SOMEWHAT FRANK readers can connect on the site (see the right rail).
Yesterday I kicked off the Specialized Information Publishers Association (SIPA) in Vegas conference with a keynote discussing social media and my somewhat obsession with the shiny new objects of the Web. I shared my thoughts, antidotes and social media stories in hopes to help both explain and motivate the crowd into taking action. I also mentioned a number of products that I like to use and refer to as "shiny objects of the Web."
After barely sleeping at all last night due to the Vegas oxygen rich air and just sheer excitement about the speaking event I was pretty pumped up and tried to wake up the crowd with a number of little ditties including singing Wheels on the Bus go round and round, sharing some fun stories and having everyone scream OPRAH at the top of their lungs! It was a BLAST! Below is some instant feedback I got via Twitter from one of the attendees.
Be sure to check out the video (below) for clips from the address. Finally, you might find the extensive list of "shiny objects" in the lower portion of this post to be extremely useful. Bookmark it, share it or print it out and put it on the refrigerator or make it into a paper airplane but most importantly have fun while doing it. Social media is life.
Blip.fm is "Twitter for music" as it offers a microblog platform for users with the ability to search, upload and share music. Your blip.fm stream is then playable. You can also discover music from other Blip.fm users and give them props if you like a song they played.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
