SOMEWHAT FRANK

Wolfram Alpha Co-Founder Interview

Last week I traveled to the Midwest to Champaign, Illinois to speak to a group of entrepreneurs about building brands and social media as covered by the Champaign News Gazette and to host another TECH cocktail. The event was sponsored by Wolfram Research which is based in Champaign and has been creating products like Mathematica for over 20 years.

Wolfram Research recently received quite a bit of buzz on TechCrunch, GigaOm Network, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable among others for the launch of the consumer facing product called Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a the computational research engine that helps to find anwsers to questions that don't exist on the Web.

I got a chance to visit with Co-founder, scientist and author, Theodore Gray and discussed the lastest from Wolfram Research. He was a joy to talk to as his office was filled with a number unique items which all had an interesting scientific story behind them. Theodore also created periodictable.com and authored the book Mad Science - Experiments You Can Do At Home But Probably Shouldn't. Check out the video interview with Theodore Gray (above). It is episode 82 on the SOMEWHAT FRANK Video Adventures Podcast which is available on iTunes.

Filtrbox Launches Hot Twitter Influence Tool

How important is influence on the Web? My friend Micah Baldwin recently called Influence the New Hotness. I agree, Influence is hot and it is nothing new though the currency has changed. Just a few years back the most important currency was incoming links to your website, now it is real-time re-tweets via Twitter or "likes" on Facebook's news feed. The social tools today are enabling people to influence the Web via real-time communications.

With Twitter being a hot tool that is empowering people to influence others, I was curious to see just how influential I am on Twitter. Thanks to Filtrbox you can now answer that very question by simply entering your Twitter username and clicking submit. Filtrbox just launched the Twitter Influence Checker today and I got chance to give it a try. It turns out my Twitter account @frankgruber has a Twitter Influence score of 8 out for 10.

When.com: A Hyper-Local One Stop Shop

What? Where? and When? That is precisely what you can find out when you visit When.com the fairly new hyper-local site created by AOL. When.com can help you to cut through the clutter and pinpoint restaurants, events and activities in your neighborhood. It also offers the ability to buy tickets and save on dining out with dining deal offers. When.com enables anyone to add an events to extend city event coverage. For example, check out the listing for TECH cocktail DC 5 in Washington, DC today. I recently got a chance to talk with Abha Dasgupta about When.com in episode 78 on SOMEWHAT FRANK adventures in personal technology. Also check out the full TECH cocktail DC 5 preview.

Crowdsourcing Discussed With GeniusRocket

I got a chance to talk with Peter LaMotte of Washington, DC based startup GeniusRocket this past March right after the much debated "Is Spec Work Is Evil?" panel session at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. We discussed GeniusRocket's mission and take on crowdsourcing. GeniusRocket also has an interesting crowdsourcing story about the creative video that SXSW used this year which Peter will also share.

This video interview with Peter LaMotte got lost in the SOMEWHAT FRANK video queue but I just found it and wanted to share the video as episode 76 on SOMEWHAT FRANK. I hope you enjoy our pre-coffee talk at the Crepery in Austin, Texas about crowdsourcing.

My CES 2009 Experience Recap

Last week, I previewed my trip to the Consumer Electronics Show as I had just touched down and was getting ready to experience my first CES. Well, I am back from CES and to be totally frank, all I can say is "Wow, that was a good time!" Unfortunately, it took me until today to decompress and get enough sleep to be able to spill details about all that I experienced last week at CES. First things first, a big thank you Intel for sponsoring my trip out to CES as an Intel Insider. It was an unbelievable experience.

So how did the party I co-hosted at CES on Thursday night go? I would have to say it was a success but you can see for yourself by checking out some of the photos taken by Brian Solis (this set of photos & photo below)

Wm. Marc Salsberry also took some super pictures (this set of photos & photo below).

We had the entire Sportsbook Bar & Grill at the Palazzo which was formerly the 40/40 Club owned by hip hop star Jay Z, so as you can imagine we felt like kings in the palace of a hip hop legend. It was pretty amazing and the attendees were top-notch. I never thought as a corn-fed Northern Illinois sixth grader attending a junior high sock hop wearing what I equated to MC Hammer "hammer pants" (which are rather baggy pants) that I would years later host a CES kickoff party in Vegas that MC Hammer would attend. I guess you just don't think about stuff like that as a 6th grader growing up in a small town. Oh and we both wore regular pants to the event.

 

Setting Up Roku for On-Demand Netflix To Your TV

Roku For Netflix To Your TV On-Demand from Frank Gruber on Vimeo.

For a holiday gift this year, I gave out a couple of Roku gift packages which included the Roku Netflix Player. The Roku Netflix Player enables a Netflix user with unlimited videos (currently $8.99 a month subscription) to watch videos on-demand to the TV. Users can choose from the selection of over 12,000 videos that currently are released to watch instantly on the Web. Roku even has new firmware to handle HD videos. To help with the adoption of the new gadget I decided to set it up and documented it in episode 60 on SOMEWHAT FRANK (wow-wooh-eee, can you believe I did 61 SOMEWHAT FRANK video adventure episodes this year!?!). Tune in as I share in the adventure of setting up the Roku for the first time in the video (above).If you have setup a Roku share your experiences in the comments section, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the device and the easy of use.

Social Media & My Somewhat Obsession With The Shiny Objects of the Web @ SIPA in Las Vegas

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.

Social Media & My Somewhat Obsession With Shiny Objects from Frank Gruber on Vimeo.

Tropicana Helps Track Twitter Election Tweets

Watch election 2008 related twitter activity today thanks to the Tropicana micro-site that launched just in time for the election called An Orange America. Check out the live twitter analysis of proposition related information plotted with arches (above). Oh and don't forget to vote and tweet about it today.

Wattzon: A Personalized Energy Tracker

"It's gettin' hot in herre, so take off all your clothes." from the popular Nelly song, Hot In Herre

Rather than shed all your clothes you might want to first determine why it is getting so hot in here - on the planet Earth. Climate change is definitely something that has take center stage as the Earth is heating up. But we all can help to lessen our individual impact on climate change. Something as simple as unplugging your coffeemaker or toaster after use can help to save energy and reduce your negative impact on climate change. I find it is difficult to measure the various things I am doing to impact climate change. WattzOn recently launched to create tools to help us all determine our energy consumption.

Video: Fantasy Football Aggregator

With the NFL football season just getting underway there are lots of fantasy football junkies placing their bets that they have the best team on the Web this year. Keeping track of a fantasy football team can be difficult sometimes due to the distributed nature of the information and tools related to managing your players and teams. Ultimate Football Network, a fantasy football social aggregator product, just launched this week and I got a chance to chat with founder Jonathan Joseph at TechCrunch50 conference.

Check out video episode 45 on SOMEWHAT FRANK (below) as we talk fantasy football.

Video: MyDropCard SMS Business Cards

I have previously questioned if technology will replace business cards as well as explored some printers taking fresh approaches to keep business cards alive. Recently a couple of text or sms message business card providers like  TextMarks and a few others have emerged to help you ping your information to anyone by text message. Just this week a new product emerged called MyDropCard which offers users the ability to send a nicely formatted email of your contact information all with a simple text message as the initiator. It just takes about 30 seconds to create an account online and then you can start sending dropcards to new contacts you meet. It also keeps track of all your contacts for you too.

MyDropCard was a product of the most recent incubator DreamIt Ventures which had its investor and demo day this week in Philadelphia. Check out video episode 43 on SOMEWHAT FRANK as I explain MyDropCard.

MyDropBin: Gives Online Storage Control

Online storage has been something that I have been a little skeptical of over the past few years as certain storage sites have come and gone leaving users without access to their stuff. With solving this problem in mind, DC area blogger Jimmy Gardner decided to write up some specs and financed the creation of a new set of online tools. MyDropBin was launched to help users save and share stuff online. 

Make Money Selling Your Photos With Photrade

When design firms are looking for images for projects, they typically go to Getty or other more traditional stock photo sites. When bloggers need an image, they use their own  or likely go straight to Google or Flickr.  If all goes well, they find an image they can use legally.  In other cases.... well, let's just say there are a lot of pictures being used today that violate the owner's copyright. Photrade, a new site still in private beta, is set on protecting photographer's rights while changing the way bloggers and online publishers find images in hopes of creating a win-win environment for the publishers and photographers alike.

Yep, It's True, AOL To Acquire SocialThing

A few weeks ago Mike Arrington gave me a call asking me if, my employer, AOL, had acquired SocialThing. Though it struck very close to home, I had to bite my tongue since the deal had not yet closed and did not comment on the matter. Now that is has been officially released, I can. It is true, AOL has entered into an agreement to acquire SocialThing, the Boulder, Colorado based social aggregating lifestream startup. The terms are not disclosed and the acquisition is still subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions.

I met founders Matt "indiekid" Galligan, Ben Brightwell and the team as they demo'ed at TECH cocktail Boulder on March 6th. Matt is originally from Illinois, like I am, and moved to Boulder to create SocialThing as part of the TechStars incubator program. I got a preview of the SocialThing private beta at TECH cocktail (shown in the video below) which was a few days before they launched at SXSW Interactive and were written up favorably on TechCrunch as being easier to use than FriendFeed. I was impressed by what this startup had created as it offered a wrapper for all your social activities making it easy to post to multiple networks at once. SocialThing is integrated with 13 social media properties including Facebook, Twitter, Digg and Flickr and is currently still in private beta.

I Want To Capture Video On My iPhone!

Video streaming via mobile devices can now be done thanks to services like Flixwagon, Kyte and Qik. These services have come out with a number of ways to use the services on Nokia and Samsung phones and stream video content live to the Web. It is pretty amazing technology. Flixwagon and Qik have both come out with ways to use its services on "hacked" or "unlocked" iPhones but currently there is not a way for these services to create a legitimate  iPhone  application with video capturing capabilities as TechCrunch explains. This is a total bummer.

I want video capture capabilities on the iPhone!

I want to be able use my iPhone to capture video while on the go. I would even go as far to say I would be ok with just the capturing functionality to start with and could hold out a bit on the streaming capability. Come on Apple what gives?