SOMEWHAT FRANK

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! 

Widgets Going Wild on Facebook, Freewebs & Yourminis

Widgets are hot. Widgets are sexy. Widgets, widgets, widgets. I previously have covered the widget craze but widgets now have a few new promoters.

With the Facebook open platform announcement last week there have been lots of new widgets and applications added to Facebook each day. Personally, I have already added Flickr, Slide and Twitter widgets to my Facebook profile. Nick O'Neill, who helped bring TECH cocktail to DC, decided to launch a new blog called All Facebook which will be covering these widget updates and other Facebook news, so you might want to check it out.

Freewebs, the Silver Springs, Maryland-based company that offers an open web personal publishing platform, has added a Widget Bank to their catalog of website building tools. The Freewebs Widget Bank gives members access to thousands of widgets that can be embedded directly onto a web site. Widgets can be added into Freewebs sites without having to copy, cut or paste code. Widget Bank will constantly update its extensive collection and include games, clocks, RSS feed readers, maps, video players and much more.  Freewebs has created its own widgets but has also reached to third party sites like YouTube, Widgetbox, RockYou, Miniclip, Gizmoz and others.

Yourminis has also taken an interesting approach which I have previously covered but wanted to reiterate. Basically, they are offering widgets that work on your home page, are snaggable for your blog or web site and extendable to your desktop. It is a widget trifecta!

Here are a couple of other blogs that are good widget resources:

Widgify - by Hooman Radfer of the widget marketplace Clearspring
SexyWidget - by Lawrence Coburn of distributed rating RateItAll.com
Widgets Labs - by Derek Anderson
StickiWidgets 

The web is definitely widgetizing. Can you dig it?

Google Search Goes Universal, Microsoft Buys aQuantive, MyBlogLog Changes Coming, Enterprise RSS and TcDC1

Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of a video camera recording Sarah Meyers interviewing someone at the May 2007 Girls in Tech in SF.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.20.07

Watch TV Stations From Your Web Browser
More and more services are popping enabling users to watch full screen videos right from a web browser. They kind of all have a similar television look & feel. It even looks like some of them inspired by Joost style.

Google Launches Universal Search
Google announced yesterday its new search system intended to bring together all of Google’s broad assortment of searches into format that should be more convenient for users. Google’s vision is to ultimately search across all of googles content and to

Did Microsoft go lose it head over aQuantive?
Just how wacky was Microsoft’s $6 billion bid for aQuantive? GigaOm tries to illustrate it in this article.

Who Will Be America's First TechPresident?
This challenge to all candidates was made on the TechPresident site earlier this week.

Windows Live Gallery partners program
Companies and brands may partner with Microsoft to highlight their Windows Live Gadget offerings for preferred inclusion in the Live.com personal homepage, Windows Live Spaces sidebar, and the Windows Vista sidebar.

TECH cocktail Takes On the Capitol City
Bub.blicio.us reports on the night that was a TECH cocktail in DC.

Google's Defensible Trump Card?
Google is betting the farm on personalization.

Feed Crier climbs into bed with IMified
By becoming part of IMified, Feed Crier will be able to offer more features to our users. Maybe reblogging alerts directly to your blog from your IM client. Or subscribing to alerts from sources other than feeds (think Google Calendar, To Do list reminder, etc.).

Enterprise RSS - 3 Major Vendors Show The Way
Forrester has just released a new report on Enterprise RSS. Specifically it tackles the issue of information overload in the corporate environment, now that RSS feeds are an important source of information in the workplace.

MyBlogLog to Rebrand and Make Significant Changes
MyBloglog is really only known amongst the first adoptors and blogosphere but it appears Yahoo will soon be positioning it for the mainstream.

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. 

TECH cocktail Takes On Washington

A few hours ago, TECH cocktail completed its first event in DC at the popular MCCXXIII bar (1223 Club DC, for the non Roman-numeral types).  The event was packed with hundreds of guests mingling as the place rocked to music, wine, product demos and mingling.  Over 225+ technology enthusiasts, VCs, bloggers and entrepreneurs came and celebrated the evening together. Wine Library TV, AOL, AN Hosting, BuzzXYZ, and Blue Sky Factory helped to sponsor the event - thank you all for your helping getting TECH cocktail going in DC.

It has been over a year since Eric Olson and I secured the TECH cocktail domain name and started firing up for these events. We were pleased to see such a great response in a new city as last night’s event was no different than the Chicago events that have become extremely big in the windy city.  Thank you to local blogger Nick O’Neill who helped plan the event - we couldn't have done it without you.

The event was well attended with a great mix of guests from a number of the local startups. It was great to see Gabe Rivera, techmeme creator, was in town from Silicon Valley and even dropped in. Demos were performed by the following companies:

BuzzXYZ powered by Blogdigger - helps track the buzz online
Clearspring - services for building, deploying and tracking widgets
Sportsvite - online community is bringing sports lovers together for on-the-field fun
PatentMonkey.com - fully search-able US patent text database
Wine Library TV - will be doing wine tasting and showcasing the wine video site

Though I am somewhat biased, TECH cocktail DC 1 went very well and was worth missing the finale of the Office to be there. I look forward to the next TECH Cocktail in DC and wherever else we choose to take it next.

Check out the photos tagged: techcocktaildc1. Special thank you to Raoul Pop for taking this awesome photo set at TcDC1 - this guy can take some pictures!

Wine Library TV Gets Cork'd

Wine Library TV, a popular wine video blog that shares the wine expertise of founder and host Gary Vaynerchuk, has announced it has acquired the wine social network Cork'd. In simple terms, Cork'd is site for a wine lover to share and rate wine. It seems like a great fit as Gary highlights wines that Cork'd enables users a way to suggest and keep track of the wine you would like to try - they have excellent crossover. I briefly highlighted Cork'd while showcasing wine and web 2.0.   

In chatting with Gary today over email, he offered this explanation for acquiring Cork'd:

"From the day I saw Corkd.com I knew they nailed it... to have the honor to take Cork'd to the next level and most importantly to give "THE PEOPLE" what they deserve is not only exciting but an honor!"

Gary also mentioned that there are plans to integrate OpenID and SMS functionality into Cork'd.

Wine Library TV is a sponsor and exhibitor at the upcoming TECH cocktail DC. We are extremely happy to have Gary showcasing Wine Library TV and Cork'd at our event. Cheers.

PollDaddy: The Big Papi of Polls?

Trying to figure out how to get a poll on your blog, myspace page, or other website?  Your search is over. PollDaddy is a great resource for quickly generating a poll to put practically anywhere on the web. PollDaddy is both flexible and free and it can be easily embedded on a page via JavaScript, Flash, direct link, widget or RSS.  One great feature of PollDaddy is that you can customize the style of the poll to match your site's design, using CSS, or select from a number of pre-configured designs.

We all want to get readers input and there is no better way to do it.  Also, thanks to a new feature called “WildFire” you can post your poll to your MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Freewebs, Xanga, or Hi5 account.  So if you want to post polls on the web, head on over to PollDaddy and find out what others are thinking.

Check out the poll below or visit it directly here. If you want to read more about the conferences then check out our previous roundup of solid 2007 web 2.0 and tech conferences.

Editors Note: Thank you to Nick O'Neill who writes a fine blog called TheWebpreneur.com for contributing this article to Somewhat Frank - come back anytime!  Nick is also co-hosting the upcoming Tech Cocktail DC with Frank Gruber & Eric Olson.

TECH cocktail Is Coming To DC

I am happy to announce that TECH cocktail is coming to DC in May! Coming off a great event in Chicago a couple of weeks ago we are excited to be co-hosting TECH cocktail DC 1 (TcDC1) on May 17, 2007 from 6 to 9:30pm at MCCXXII, a sweet venue in DC. Demo and sponsor details will be coming soon...as we still have a few demo & sponsor slots open, so if you are interested please contact me ASAP. 

The event is open and FREE to bloggers, technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and other business professionals interested in the technology arena in under served technology communities. Our goal is to help to amplify the technology and entrepreneurial signal in under served markets and have fun doing it.

Co-founders Eric Olson and I will be co-hosting TcDC1 with Nick O'Neill, a DC blogger, web developer and area native. Also special thanks to colleagues Jim Simmons & Omar Miskinyar for helping to coordinate securing the venue - that was huge!

If you are interested in attending please sign up now since you have to be on the guest list to be admitted to the event: http://techcocktaildc1.eventbrite.com
I hope to see you there!