SOMEWHAT FRANK

Goodbye Aol. Hello Entrepreneurship In 2010!

This year my New Year's resolution is to be bold and what better way to do that than to start the year off by leaving the solid paycheck, benefits and comfort of a job at Aol. Today is my last day as an Aol employee as I have decided to move on to pursue some of my own entrepreneurial endeavors. It has been just over 3 years since I joined Aol to help bring some "Web 2.0 & social media" perspective and expertise to the Aol team. In Internet years that is about 10 years. My first task was to join the product development team responsible for the myAOL triple threat including a personalized homepage, a feed reader with bookmarking and an innovate recommendation engine. We then went on to launch it in 28+ countries before it turned one. More recently with the launch of AIM Lifestream I saw about 18 months of planning and strategy come to fruition which included work on AIM buddyupdates and the acquisition of SocialThing. I have racked up a lot of airline miles bouncing between DC and the West Coast. It has been a good run and a great learning experience working in a large organization and I have met so many great people along the way. I am proud of our accomplishments at Aol. As anyone who has ever worked at a large company can attest, it is not easy to launch a product in a big organization and I did it a few times in just three years. 

What will I be doing? 

Thankfulfor: Spreading Joy Through Gratitude

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.

With the help of my partner Jen Consalvo and our agile development team I recently launched Thankfulfor.com, a social online gratitude journal providing a forum for expressing gratitude routinely as a foundation for happiness and well-being. People come to the site and post what they are thankful for to their personal journal of thanks. People can also choose to send each Thankfulfor post to their social network on Twitter (each post starts with the #thankfulfor hashtag) extending the good vibes far and wide.

New AIM with Lifestream Launches

Since joining AOL in 2006, I have worked on the product direction and strategy of two AOL products. The first of these was the myAOL personalized start page, which I covered previously when it launched in 2007 and was rolled out to 78 countries. The other product I have worked on is AIM.

AIM has been around a very long time - launched in the 1990’s it assembled the first viable social graph with the AOL buddy list. So I was excited to jump on board with a team of internal AOL thought-leaders in January 2008 to map out the future of myAOL and determine how it could interact with AIM to offer users a streamlined social utility. During this process we identified that real-time data or the “lifestream”, is a necessity to any social experience on the Web. AIM had a similar "lifestream" concept since 2005 called AIM Buddy Updates which I covered previously, as we relaunched it on the Web in the summer 2008. We concluded our work and learnings from the project and proposed a direction and then went on to acquire SocialThing, which I connected with AOL via TECH cocktail Boulder 1 to join the AIM team and contributed to the effort. Being involved from its original ideation till now, I am pleased to see the new AIM with lifestream come to fruition.

DreamIt Ventures' Ten New Start-ups In Philly

Philadelphia is known for it's fine dining, cheese steaks and the Liberty Bell but recently has been developing start-ups through the support of DreamIt Ventures, a local summer incubator program. DreamIt Ventures had their second demo day on August 14th and ten new start-ups were unveiled. Like many incubators the second year's class of startups seems to be slightly improved than the previous year.

LaunchBox09 Demo Day Shares 8 New Start-ups

Today I attended the Washington, D.C. start-up incubator Launch Box Digital, where I saw eight new start-ups show off their stuff to a crowd of local investors and media outlets. I attended the event last year and shared my thoughts. No disrespect to last year's class but this year the pitches seemed to be more polished and offered better business models overall.

Here is the full list of the start-ups that launched:

Social Collective - a browser-based service targeted at event marketing and the enhancement of the event experience for both attendees and sponsors.

KeepFu - a simple note-taking and organization tool to help manage consumer-defined “projects” like trip planning, event planning, and important purchases.

SECWatch - offers investors, bloggers, journalists a platform and tool set for digging deeper into SEC filings.

unblab - attack the email overload problem by answering the question “What emails should I be reading”?

Keen Guides -  platform for delivering download-able audio short-format, video and audio tours.

BandsInTown - automatically plugs into music players such as iTunes, last.fm, Pandora and other sites to learn your artist preferences, and then lets you track your favorite artists (and related ones) and receive alerts when events of interest are coming to your area. Also looking to sweeten the relationship between ticket buyers and sellers.

TapMetrics - a tool that brings together sales data, user feedback, software metrics, and other information into a consolidated dashboard for mobile apps to allow developers to manage a portfolio of applications quickly and easily.

LegalRiver - offers a free platform to help connect lawyers with clients and clients with lawyers.

Here is a quick video about the LaunchBox09 startups.

Who was my favorite? I don't have one but I do have a little to say about each of them. I like Social Collective since it made SXSW a breeze last year and should help again this year. I also have been using BandsInTown since meeting them a few years ago in Boston at a TECH cocktail event. They have helped me to not miss my favorite bands when they come to town. I think SECWatch and LegalRiver are going to do great since they both seem to be fixing a problem that has not seen a lot of love from consumer facing apps in the past, so they have a pretty open field to grab online real-estate and mindshare. TapMetrics is going to help LOTS of iPhone app developers better understand the metrics side of the game, which will prove to be very important. KeepFu could be interesting if it helps to organize the apps I already use but I will have to test it out further to better understand the power of it. unblab is looking to help fix your email inbox and could be very popular especially if they are able to break into the enterprise space. I am looking forward to testing out the unblab iTriage iPhone application. Keen Guides has a very intriguing business around distributing audio and video tour guides which taps into the travel category and has a very passionate vision focused on helping those with disabilities.

For another take check out what TechCrunch had to say. Finally, it takes a lot courage, determination and drive to start and run your own business so congrats to all the startups and LaunchBox Digital on another great year! 

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.

Washingtonian Names & Unites DC 100 Tech Titans

I just got back from an unbelievable experience in the Washington, D.C. technology scene as Washingtonian Magazine recently assembled a list of the 100 DC Tech Titans, and tonight gathered them to celebrate. The group is lead by innovators like Steve Case, Ted Leonsis and Vint Cerf among others and I was happy to be included as part of the group. It was brought to my attention that Ted Leonsis was overheard referring to Nick O'Neill, Jen Consalvo, myself and a few others as the "future of DC tech." It was a rather memorable, flattering and humbling moment as I got a chance to rub shoulders with some of the mothers and fathers of technology as we know it. I feel I still have a lot to offer to the advancement of technology so please stay tuned as I share the adventure on SOMEWHAT FRANK.

I had an enjoyable time at the event and thank Washingtonian Magazine and Garrett Graf for writing the 100 DC Tech Titan article. Also fellow "titan" Shashi Bellamkonda from Network Solutions had his camera and snapped these photos (below).

Nick O'Neill & I talking with AOL founder Steve Case & NHL Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis.

Nick O'Neill and I with Ted Leonsis (and Steve Case over my right shoulder).

Check out a few of the videos (below) I captured while attending the event.

Headed to the DC 100 Tech Titan Event from Frank Gruber on Qik.

Hanging at the DC 100 Tech Titan Event from Frank Gruber on Qik.

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.

Talking Start-ups, Bootstrapping & Lifestreaming

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).

Aggregated Weblogs For the Topics You Love.com

What do you love? I love breakfast. I love beaches. I love guitar. I love the Chicago Cubs and I am a fan of Dave Matthews. Love.com launched recently, somewhat under the radar, as a lightly branded AOL product, to help connect you with the topics you love. Love.com is not a dating site but a search engine with aggregated result pages looking to get you a snap-shot about any given topic.

Grant Cerny, VP, MediaGlow Entertainment Products with AOL's MediaGlow, had this to say about Love.com:

"Love.com topic blogs celebrate the diverse passions of all people with hundreds of thousands of profiled blogs and the capability to create new blog topics on the fly.  It organizes topics based on topical heat or velocity so that love.com can provide a central view into what the world is loving now."

Looking to create the perfect page for whatever you love, Love.com aggregates items from a few different sources. In performing a search for Chicago Cubs and love.com pulled in basic news stories, YouTube videos, images, relates websites, Twitter messages and related items for sale. The news stories are pulled real-time via Relegence, a company that AOL acquired in November 2006. Love.com is built on top of the blogging platform Blogsmith, the same platform that powers a number of popular weblogs, with the ability to spin off infinite sub-domains based on the popularity of a topic. Since MediaGlow has a number of popular content properties, Love.com can help recirculate their content through these infinite topical blog pages via search engines.

Love.com also offered recommendations for related topics things I might like which included baseball, Cincinnati Reds and New York Yankees. This makes sense since the Chicago Cubs are a baseball team. I assume it pulled in the Cincinnati Reds because the Cubs are currently playing the Reds and there are news stories that relate them. I am not sure why New York Yankees was also offered as a recommendation other than that they are another the baseball team.

IsraelWebTour 2009: This Week in Silicon Valley

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!

Glue Connects You With Friends On Sites Visited

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.

Glue 4.2 Overview from AdaptiveBlue on Vimeo.

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):

1. Connected Conversations: Glue enables web wide contextual conversations around books, movies, music and other everyday things. Now users can discuss the things they like with their friends regardless of which sites they all visit.
2. Smart Recommendations: Glue automatically aggregates friends activity from across the web so that users can instantly see what books, music, and movies their friends like the most. Simply by using Glue, users implicitly recommend things to their friends and benefit from friends recommendations.
3. Web Wide Top Lists: Glue features web wide top lists of popular books, music, movies and other everyday things. These lists are calculated based on the aggregate weekly activity of all Glue users. The lists reveal what things users are paying attention to as they browse the web.

Also you can connect and spread the Glue love a number of different ways on the Web.

SocialVibe: Get Sponsors For Your Cause

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.

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC & How The Web Affects Society

We Live In Public Film Screening at SXSW from Frank Gruber on Vimeo.

Have you recently updated your Twitter or Facebook status, posted a photo on Flickr or posted a video on YouTube or Vimeo? I have. This kind of lifestreaming online behavior has become mainstream as the Web 2.0 movement empowered anyone to become an online content creator, trading privacy for a little taste of online fame and a connection with people. 

While I was down in Austin, Texas for South By Southwest (SXSW), I got a chance to see the film screening of WE LIVE IN PUBLIC which took home the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The film focuses on the adventures of early dot-comer Josh Harris as he experiments to predict the effects of the Web on society. Ondi Timoner directed the film which documents what happens when the Web takes a stronger hold of our everyday life. The movie takes place mostly in New York and includes appearances by Jason Calacanis, Julia Allison and Meghan Asha (who appears on SOMEWHAT FRANK videos here and here). WE LIVE IN PUBLIC is a must see as we all become more tied to our devices and the Web.

Check out episode 73 on SOMEWHAT FRANK adventures in personal technology as I recorded a couple of short clips from the Q&A session with Director Ondi Timoner after the film and even got to meet her afterward. Also be sure to see the film WE LIVE IN PUBLIC when it is released as it really makes you think how we all live our lives and share so much online. Oh and you can follow Director Ondi Timoner on Twitter too.

Photo of Director Ondi Timoner and I by Jen Consalvo.

Web 2.0 Expo This Week In SF

Web 2.0 Expo is this week in San Francisco from March 31st - April 3rd. This year at the Web 2.0 Expo there are 3 new components which include:

1. A new Government 2.0 Joins the Web 2.0 House track for anyone looking to explore how technology is being integrated into the government.
2. Sunlight Labs Hackathon where attendees build an application that promotes transparency
   in government. You can vote now for the application you want to build (or think needs to be built).
3. Revion3 Tekzilla LIVE at Web 2.0 Expo as Patrick Norton and Veronica Belmont bring you hands on reviews of the latest gear, tips and tricks that improve the tech you already own, and conversations with the most informative experts around.

Use code websf09trt5 at online registration for 30% off any registration package.

Finally, I will be giving away my extra ticket this week to the lucky reader. Hope to see you there!