SOMEWHAT FRANK

Gladwell's Book Examines Success of Outliers

Is it just fate, genius or a random factors that give certain people a little more of an advantage and helps to lead to their success? I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success as it searches for factors that might contribute to successful outliers. The book examines Canadian hockey, geniuses, innercity education and even looks at Malcolm's own heritage while searching for factors that might make the success of Outliers a little more understandable. I enjoyed the book and particularly the passages that examined Bill Gates as it showed how his success can be somewhat attributed to help he got along the way. In doing so Gladwell helps redefine an Outlier.

GeoEye Office Visit & Tour Video

GeoEye Office Space Adventure from Frank Gruber on Vimeo.

GeoEye, is a satellite imagery company that has been in the news quite a bit lately, as they launched GeoEye-1 on September 6, 2008 via a rocket into space. GeoEye-1 is the first commercial satellite offering high resolution imagery. GeoEye-1 is also the exclusive provider of imagery for Google Earth and Google Maps.

I recently got a chance to visit the GeoEye headquarters in Dulles/Sterling, Virginia to speak with Mark Brender, VP of Communications and Marketing at GeoEye. He showed me around the office as we discussed their recent successes and future objectives. This is episode 55 on SOMEWHAT FRANK in HD adventures in a personal technology lifestyle, this time looking down from space thru GeoEye.

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.

Video: TECH cocktail DC 2 Community Builder

TECH cocktail DC 2 the community builder event that took place last Thursday evening in Washington, D.C. showcased six startups from the local area. The event united over four hundred guests for an evening of tech conversations and fun.

This is the last event before the upcoming TECH cocktail CONFERENCE which will unite all the various TECH cocktail cities for a full day conference in Chicago on May 29th. The list of speakers is pretty amazing and the focus of the conference is to help anyone in business to take a more "no nonsense" approach by leveraging technology and the Web (i.e. running a "real" business rather than one setup to simply attract as many users as possible with no real monetization strategy in mind).

AOL Buys Sphere For Content Recommendations

My first day working at AOL back in the fall of 2006 I had the pleasure of having lunch with Sphere CEO and founder Tony Conrad as he was visiting to start working with the AOL. Since then, Sphere which I covered previously when it launched in May 2006, worked with both AOL News and myAOL Mgnet Recommendations to offer related content recommendations. It is a pleasure to see that AOL has finally acquired Sphere for an undisclosed amount.

Video: TECH cocktail Earns CityLIGHTS Award

The Illinois I.T. Association CityLIGHTS 2008 Awards Gala took place in Chicago, Illinois on Thursday, April 3, 2008. The event was held at Union Station which you might recognize from the epic scene from the movie The Untouchables where Kevin Costner saves a baby carriage while also shooting up the Al Capone gangsters on its marble steps. While did not save any babies TECH cocktail, the community building startup that I co-founded with Eric Olson, was nominated for the CityLIGHTS Award for its positive impact in connecting the Illinois technology community. I am please to report, that TECH cocktail took home the hardware. I was deeply humbled by winning the award as it serves as validation that all the long hours and hard work is truly helping to sculpt a better connected local technology community while helping to amplify that same community to the world.

SOMEWHAT FRANK Featured As 'Must Know' Blog

I got word this morning that TheMarker, Israel’s prominent business magazine and Haaretz, one of Israel’s largest newspapers, featured SOMEWHAT FRANK in a spread titled "The Blogs That Every Israeli Startup Should Know." 

AOL Gets Goowy, Acquires Widget Startup

AOL has just announced the acquisition of Goowy Media, a San Diego-based Flash startpage, widget and desktop application startup. One of Goowy's bi-products is yourminis a slick startpage that I previously reviewed and named one of the best beta products of 2006. It is pretty rad.

Goowy's widgets can be distributed to just about any page or social network on the Web (as shown below) which is comparable to offerings by ClearSpring, Widgetbox and Gigya, which have also been getting buzz in the widget advertising space. These distribution capabilities will come in handy on myAOL as well as helping to syndicate AOL network content. Goowy also offers widget metrics in a dashboard that closely resembles the feed metrics dashboard of FeedBurner which was acquired by Google for $150 million.

TicketsNow Sold To IAC’s Ticketmaster

If you have ever looked for concert, theater or sporting event tickets then you probably have heard of TicketsNow and Ticketmaster. TicketsNow an online tickets site founded in the Chicago northwest suburb now based in Rolling Meadows and Crystal Lake, Illinois has just announced it was acquired by InterActiveCorp’s Ticketmaster for $265 million as just reported on TECH cocktail.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Video Chat

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, sat down with TechCrunch co-editor Mike Arrington at the TechCrunch40 conference for a fireside chat. Mark talks about opening up the Facebook platform and announced the FBFUND is a $10 million grant fund from Facebook aimed at helping application developers. The grants range from $25K to $250K and Facebook takes no equity or debt.

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!

TECH cocktail Celebrates One

Last night I was in Chicago with Eric Olson co-hosting TECH cocktail Chicago 5 for an estimated six hundred guests at John Barleycorn near Wrigley Field. Eric and I co-founded TECH cocktail just a year ago looking to help foster a tighter and more amplified technology signal and community in Chicago. We have since looked to other underserved tech scenes to do the same. We are planning on having a second TECH cocktail in DC soon and then our first TECH cocktail in Boston.

TECH cocktail Chicago 5 was filled with green energy as guests were amped to celebrate the one year anniversary of TECH cocktail. In addition, guests who wore green clothing were given a chance to win some spectacular prizes from SingleHop, a sponsor that has been backing TECH cocktail since day one.

The three plus hour free event was sponsored by SingleHop, LinkedIn, Digital Bootcamp, Saper Law Office, Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, MK Capital, Origin Ventures, Chicago Micro, Fave Media and LiquidTalk.

Demos were performed by myAOL (a product I manage at AOL),  PollEverywhere, My Open Bar, Braintree Financial, Humanized and Fave Media. More to come on some of these soon as I take a closer look.

We are pleased with the aggressive progress in Chicago and look forward to future events in the Windy City. Thank you to all of our sponsors and supporters, we could not have done it without you. Cheers!

Check out the TECH cocktail Chicago 5 photos displayed in the slideshow below.

Company Could Win $50K At TechCrunch20

TechCrunch20, the TechCrunch conference coming up in September, is offering a platform for newly launching companies to present for free in front of an audience of hundreds of press, bloggers venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and potentially win a $50,000 prize. TechCrunch has been assembling an impressive and assorted list of judges which are listed here. Should be a good conference as the winning company/product will walk away a big winner! In addition, there will be other prize announcements and giveaways from conference sponsors. 

Stay tuned to additional updates on the TechCrunch20 blog.

Google Buys FeedBurner -- It's Official!

Congrats to Chicago-based feed management and advertising company FeedBurner for getting acquired by Google. The rumor that started  a few weeks ago has been confirmed by FeedBurner today (June 1, 2007). There are more details on Google/FeedBurner deal here. In addition, they are just a great group of people.

Being from Chicago, and I have the opportunity to get to know FeedBurner and just about all of their 30+ employees through either work or play in the last few years. FeedBurner was a big supporter of TECH cocktail, as Eric Olson works at FeedBurner and co-founded the event with me in 2006. They have been an innovator in both the feed management/metrics and advertising space.

Congrats to all parties involved. Keep those feeds burning - oh and please let me know if the Somewhat Frank feed traffic melts any of Google's servers! :)

Gabe Rivera's Week In Review

Is it just me or is Gabe Rivera turning up everywhere this week? It appears Gabe Rivera, the creator of techmeme and other news aggregator sites, had a very big week. I know Gabe is very modest, but I think the Mims song "This Is Why I'm Hot" might be an appropriate theme song for the past seven days - he has been all over the web.

First, BeetTV captured a rare video interview of Gabe where he reveals some of the details about the news aggregator platform he built and runs with his one man army.

Secondly, Mike Arrington pointed to this riveting video which leverages a Discovery Channel show format to capture a short video of Gabe in its natural habitat.

Finally, Gabe was interviewed for a piece in Wired. One of the great things about Gabe is that he is so down to earth. Though hounded by the media all week he took time out of his busy schedule to attend our first TECH cocktail in DC on Thursday night. Seems like a pretty good week to me.