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.
PayPal is hosting it's first ever developer conference PayPal Innovate 2009 on November 3rd and 4th in San Francisco and I am excited to be heading out to take part in it.
The two day event includes a keynote by Tim O'Reilly keynote on Day 1 and GigaOm's Om Malik is doing a VC panel on Day 2.
The event is sure to be well attended by developers,
startups and entrepreneurs and more.
Today I joined Sudha Jamthe from the PayPalX team on BlogTalkRadio as she talked to Khurram Khan, Product Owner of Adaptive Payments from PayPalX
TwitPay founder Michael Ivey to discuss the upcoming PayPalX Innovate 2009 conference. You can listen to the discussion here.
This past year I have attended several demo days and covered Launched Box Digital in DC and Dream It Ventures in Philly among others. Yesterday was the demo day for another local incubator, this time it's in Pittsburgh. Yes the "Steel City" has more than just steel these days, as six new start-up companies showed off their stuff as part of the Alpha Labextensive six-month start-up business incubator program. AlphaLab provides funding, free office space, expert business advisors and services during its biannual program in Pittsburgh. Alpha Lab was created by Innovation Works a seed stage investment firm.
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.
It has been a busy last 30 days as we hosted three TECH cocktail events in Chicago, DC and Boston respectively. Starting in Chicago in early August we drew a humongous crowd and showed off 9 new Chicago area start-ups as I previously explained. We did not stop with just Chicago, we continued to plan and host TECH cocktail events the past two weeks in DC and Boston. Both events were very well attended and showcased 17 more start-ups. The events attracted over 1400 guests and showcased 26 startups in 30 days. Not bad as we roll into our fourth year, with the same mission as when we started of "amplifying the local technology signal in local tech communities" while "having fun doing it."
I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for coming out to support the last three events in Chicago, DC and Boston. We couldn’t do the events without the support of the local technology community and our fabulous sponsors which included AOL’s AIM & Going.com, BOALT, Saper Law, Jess3, Shiny Heart Ventures, TransFS, SproutBox, Total Attorneys, Chicago Micro, OVAL Vodka and iStrategyLabs. We also had 26 great start-ups demoing at the events.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I do a lot of multimedia work on my Mac Book Pro and with all the videos, photos and other content I am constantly trying to shuffle content to backup storage drives to keep from filling up my hard drive. I back up my computer via a portable drive which I carry with me as well as with the an Apple Time Machine. But I recently was concerned with the overall wear and tear and dependency on other hard drive devices. To help minimize the risk of data loss I decided to seek out a solution that uses the Web to back up my files. In doing some research and asking around a bit I found JungleDisk which I initially tested. JungleDisk is only $2 month and can hook to Amazon S3 to store all your data. It even encrypts your data if you so desire.
I also looked at Mozy, Box.net, Chronosync and a few others but I since I was looking for a simple interface for connecting to an Amazon S3 account these solutions were a little too feature rich and heavy for what I was looking to do. I wanted a little more control similar to an FTP client.
While I was testing out JungleDisk, my friend Jimmy Gardner suggested I giving, Transmit 3 by Panic for Mac OS X, a try. In doing so I found just what I was looking for. Transmit 3 allows a simple FTP interface for connecting to Amazon S3 storage. It allowed me to connect and drop 22 gigabytes of .AVI video files over in a matter of hours. The cost was only $29 for the software and then you pay Amazon directly for transfer and storage. My first bill was $2.31 for 22 GBs. Not too bad at all. So I think I found a solution that I will be able to use for clearing up my hard drive space from anywhere I can access an Internet connection. If you are in the same situtation I was in you might want to give Transmit 3 a try. This cloud solution works better with my on-the-go digital nomadic lifestyle than carrying a hard drive at all times.
I am curious, what products or services do you use for online storage?
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.
Apple will soon be launching of the iPhone 3.0 operating system and part of the new system is a push alert notification feature as highlighted at WWDC 2009 this week. Push Notification is the system developed by Apple to remedy the fact that the iPhone won’t allow third party applications to run in the background due to security, battery life
and performance concerns. Push notifications are will enable certain
tasks (like IMs) that come to your phone even when that application
isn’t running.
TechCrunch recently tested Push Notifications using AIM the new 3.0 iPhone software. Watch the video above to see Push Notification in action with AIM but please note the video makes it seem like there may be a delay between
an IM sent and received, but it’s basically instantaneous.
This morning I learned about a pretty slick new Linux open source project called Moblin. Moblin has been around for a couple of years now but the new 2.0 version is now in beta and today at Computex Taipei there was an executive summit (video below) which helped me wrap my head around the scope and direction of the project. Founded by Intel in July 2007, Moblin started as a project looking to enable a new class of devices based on the Intel Atom processor. With the 2.0 version, Intel has handed the keys over to the Linux Foundation to drive this project to the next level as an open source platform of mobile computing.
Moblin 2.0 offers an open platform that developers can build on and see instant gratification by plugging into the Moblin myzone dashboard. The platform and dashboard reminds me of the iPhone application platform but for slightly larger more powerful devices. The myzone dashboard that aggregator a bunch of widgets of information into a startpage experience that is anchored by a tool bar across the top. The dashboard includes social features by sharing a lifestream are which pulls in information from sites like Twitter, Last.fm and Flickr. It also offers a status message system that is said to push updates out to your various social sites that revolve around status updates. Moblin also positions your videos, photos, music and calendar on your startpage.
Today, l’m traveling to Computex Taipei, the world’s largest computer exhibition in Asia and second largest in the world just behind CeBit in Germany. I’m traveling 18 hours to Taipei from Washington, D.C. stopping just once in Tokyo, Japan before heading on to the island of Taiwan as part of the Intel Insider program (a brand ambassador program) that I have been a part of for a year now. I will be attending a number of the Intel events in Taipei as well as meeting the Asia Pacific Intel representatives as I look to assist them as they get their own version of the Intel Insiders program started in Asia. I am honored to be attending such an important global industry event, as it offers a super opportunity to see lots of new shiny gadgets and devices. It also affords me an opportunity to dust off my somewhat virgin passport, getting some International ink along with cultural growth.
Since I have a lot of time in transit, I decided to use some of it reviewing two new Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, which I recently received: the Yukyung Viliv S5 and the BenQ S6. In this article I will share my perspectives on the two mobile Internet devices.
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.
I am happy to share that I will be co-hosting another TECH cocktail in DC. In case you missed the last DC event it was well covered by the Washington Post and other media outlets. Check out photos from TECH cocktail DC 4.
This is our 5th event in the Nation’s Capital and I hope you can make it out
to the fine venue, LeftBank digital bistro in the Adam’s Morgan neighborhood of DC.
TECH cocktail will offer a handful of start-ups an opportunity to show off in an expo-style to the rest of the community.
Here is the important information:
When: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 - 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST
If you are interested in supporting TECH cocktail please sponsor our
events as we cannot put them on without your support. If you are
interested in demoing a product or service please comment on this
article or reach out to us at TECH cocktail. Look forward to seeing you
there.
