WebInno19 – Recap

It’s been a busy month for local internet technology events, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Monday night I was at the Boston Web Innovators Group meeting WebInno19. There was a huge turnout of local web and mobile entrepreneurs and technologists. Several local startups gave informal demonstrations of their company’s product at side tables located throughout the auditorium. You can check out a couple of snaps that I took on the trusty iPhone. Three of the companies gave formal product demonstrations to the assembled group at large:

• Givvy, a charitable management system. Call me a selfish Grinch, but I just don’t see this getting a lot of attention, nor making any serious money.
• Pixily, an online service for storing paper documents as digital files. Pixily won the Audience Choice award for the night. Voting was done by sending a text message from your mobile – pretty clever.
• Brring, a free ringback service that lets you personalize your ringback tone by uploading an audio file. Of the 3 demos given, I thought this was the most compelling. They showed how you can upload your audio file, see it get transcoded, and then edit the file’s timeline to pick the parts you want to use.
  

  Brring demonstrates its thing at WebInno19

  After the 3 “main dish” product demonstrations were completed, the event turned to an informal social mixer. There was a great crowd of young, talented, and eager people from both the business side and the technology side of the house. I was pleased to meet a bunch of people, including:

• Gautum Gupta of General Catalyst Partners. GC is a VC firm with a slightly different take. Rather then load up on MBA/Ivy League/Wall Street types, they focus on building their firm with people who are honest to goodness entrepeneurs and have a “been there, done that” type of resume. I really liked talking to Gautum. GC has both PermissionTV competitors Brightcove and Maven Networks in their portfolio. Clearly, they’ve made good choices.
• Anthony Hand specializes in User Experience Design and Usability of Mobile Applications. We didn’t get to talk for too long before the main dishes started up, but I was impressed with his focus of UX + Mobile. Clearly a sign of the times.
• Joe Baz, Principal at Above the Fold, a boutique web design and online marketing firm located in downtown Boston. As someone who used to run Embarc, a local interactive agency, we traded some war stories. Best of luck with your future plans, Joe!
• Ariel Diaz is Co-Founder and CEO at YouCastr. Ariel describes his product as the destination site for coverage of local and/or second-tier sports (i.e. fencing, water polo, etc). TechCrunch describes YouCastr as a sports version of Justin.TV. Ariel and I talked a bit about how the execution of his product roadmap. Like PermissionTV, YouCastr employs an agile (little A) development methodology. We shared some pains related to “cowboy coding,” and I let him know that Agile Project Management with Scrum has been working for me at PermissionTV. Thanks for the LinkedIn invite, Ariel!
• Neil Costa, of Stimulate Solutions was meeting with client and WebInno19 “side-dish” presenter Tune Rooms. Stimulate is a social media marketing company with a focus on developing an analytics-driven product to measure ROI of campaigns across all social media platforms. Very interesting idea, I’ll be following them closely. . . .

Overall, I was very impressed with the event. Everyone there seemed to be sharing a similar mindset of building a profitable web or mobile-based product company that utilizes the latest technologies. No jokers or hacks allowed. If you were in attendence, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the night in the comments.

Next up – MITX Video Series: The Ins and Outs of Making Money from Online Video, sponsored by none other than PermissionTV, coming up the night of Wednesday the 17th . . .

Ignite Boston 4 – Recap

Last Thursday night, I went to O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 4 with 2 of my engineering colleagues from PermissionTV. For those of you who don’t know about the Ignite Events, they are part social mixer and part product demos from local technology companies. Here’s how the format works:

Ignite is a user-generated event. If you’re interested in speaking, then submit a proposal for consideration. Presentations must:

• Be no longer than 5 minutes
• Be on an innovative topic (no sales pitches, please!)
• Be viewable on a PC [a MacBook Pro with Powerpoint and Keynote, and PDF] with standard AV equipment
• Did we mention, no Sales Pitches.

Overall, I was not impressed with the quality of the speakers. The event logisitcs made them hard to hear, and the speakers themselves mostly sounded under-practiced and not comfortable with public speaking. I guess that’s what happens when you ask local technologists to speak at a bar.

Tim O'Reilly speaking at IgniteBoston4

Tim O’Reilly himself was present and gave a longer than 5 minutes talk split into 2 parts. The first part focused on exploring the topic on everyone’s minds: “The numerous reasons why O’Reilly Press is great.”  What was that about no sales pitches? In his second part, Tim transformed himself into an Al Gore-esque clone and chastised the room for focusing all our considerable technological talents on building frivolous (yet profitable) iPhone applicatioons like the iPint. Instead, he wants us to focus our talents on “solving the worlds most challenging problems.” Easy to say after you’ve struck it rich. In all fairness to Tim, I believe he was trying to energize the crowd and rally behind some important topics. But, it all sounded far too preachy for me. At the slide titled “solving the problem of predicting the future”, I stopped listening and grabbed a beer.

After the speeches and demos were concluded, the social mixer got into high gear and I met some interesting people:

• David Chancogne is co-founder of Traackr, “the only online tool that can accurately measure your online influence across all major social media sites.” Egosurfing meets Web 2.0. I love it.
• Palle Pederson is a serial entrepeneur who’s currently CIO at RealCME, an online continuing education website for medical professionals. We had a good talk about the uses of online video 2.0 in an online CME setting. Thanks for the LinkedIn invite Palle!
• Rich Tibbets, Chief Architect and Co-founder of StreamBase, whose product specializes in Complex Event Processing, “a technology for low-latency filtering, correlating, aggregating, and computing on real- world event data.” Of all the people I’ve met recently, Rich and his company StreamBase are clearly the ones who have decided to solve a definitively complex problem that requires real web engineering. Web hackers need not apply. Oh, did I mention it’s Java?
• Demetrious Harringon told us about his work at E-Ink Corp, the company that makes the product that is used by the Amazon Kindle. Was great to talk to someone who is a real engineer that makes something you can actually hold in your hands.
• Last but not least, I talked a length with Ivan Kirigin, co-founder of TipJoy, a Y-Combinator company. The other co-founder is Ivan’s wife and they’re currently working and running the business out of their home. That’s courageous in an of itself. But looking beyond the blurred lines between work, life, business and marriage, TipJoy is a cool idea with some cool features. Essentially, TipJoy provides a widget for your blog where users can leave tips for you based on their level of sastisfaction with your content. Recently, the founders have augmented that product offering this summer by releasing “a new platform API for Web applications that will let them share tips with users who contribute content.” I signed up, but unfortunately I’d have to switch to self-hosted WordPress.org in order to use their widget.

Check out more pictures of Ignite Boston 4.

VideoNuze’s VideoSchmooze – Recap

Last night I and a few folks from PermissionTV attended the VideoNuze VideoSchmooze in Boston, hosted by Will Richmond. It was an informal affair / mixer at a swanky bar, with no speakers or topics on agenda.

Grainy iPhone pic of Will Richmond addressing the crowd at the VideoSchmooze

Here are some highlights:

• I met Will Richmond and thanked him for organizing the event. Will is a great guy, very engaging and intelligent.
• Catherin Frederico is starting an online video destination site around Nutrition and Nutrition consulting. I thought of Gary V, Episode #1. Gotta start someplace.
• Stephen Shenefield is working on a consumer electronics device that consolidates all sources of media (tv, phone, internet) and “transforms the home technology experience.” Sounds cool.
• Interesting conversation with David Carver about his former life working on engineering high speed video delivery network servers.
• Met Emily Gannett whose founder of Klickable.TV a 3 person startup that is somewhat competitive with PermissionTV. We had a drink and shared some war stories. Online video can be tough!
• Dan and Rich from Collegiate Images were up from Florida and decided to swing by. Collegiate Images is “the centralized licensing and rights clearance agency of video and still images for colleges, universities, conferences, bowl games and broadcast rights.” Great niche, well executed, and great content to work with all day long!

Overall, it was a nice little mixer that focused on the local Video 2.0 space. Check out a few more (poor quality) pictures that I took with my iPhone. It was nice to meet everyone there. For those that I wasn’t able to give business cards to (after I ran out), feel free to drop me a line in the comments below and we’ll connect.

Twitterrific for iPhone updated, fixes TwitPic rotation bug

Twitterific for iPhone Updated

Late last week, IconFactory released Twitterrific v1.1 for the iPhone.  For an ad-supported free service, the complete list of bug fixes and new features included in this release is impressive. The release notes indicate that the eagerly anticipated fix for the TwitPic rotation bug has made it into this release.

In the very small world of iPhone applications used to update Twitter status, Twitterrific continues to be the best combination of features, usability, and price.

Other options include Twinkle (from Tapulous the creators of the wildly popular game Tap Tap Revenge), Twittelator, and Twitterfon.

Remembering FlashForward 2008

It’s been a busy past couple of weeks at PermissionTV. I was fortunate to be able to go to Flash Forward 2008 to represent our company at our booth in the exhibit hall. I had twitter’d most of the event, but here’s what happened on the flight down, while I couldn’t connect to the internet:

2:23  – I’m out of the office and the journey to San Fran begins. I miss Beantown already.
3:00 – Car parked and check in at Terminal B on one of those fancy automated check-in machines. Took me a long time to find my tracking number, which is different from my iternary number, which is different from Expedia’s confirmation number.
4:20 – Call from Jon – dinner at Todd English’s Bonfire. Grated cheese on my fries and mashed potato on my burger? wild!
5:00 – Greg North joins us for dinner. iPhone party!
5:50 – Dinner over and we head to the gate where we meet up with JZ. Team PTV has assembled.
6:10 – Greg is getting impatient. when are we boarding? never imagined he would be a guy to be worried about timetables.
6:30 – On the plane. JZ is a ways away. JB is 2 rows up.
6:35 – final call home to let everyone know that I’m about to take off.
7:15 – Take off!
7:37 – Guy in front of me reclines the seat. What kind of evil person reclines the seat on a 6 hour flight when the guy behind him is 6′7″? The shortest guy on the plane – that’s who.
7:47 – Trying to write a few blog posts to have in the tank. It’s pretty hard to keep the blog up to date 1 post at a time.
7:52 – It’s pretty easy to tell who’s going to Flash Forward. Like the young guy wearing the sunglasses on the plane. When you’re cool, the sun shines on you 24 hours a day (and indoors apparently).
8:04 – Right about now, kids are in bed and my wife is not long to follow. I wish I was with them instead of staring at the back of this guy’s reclined head.
8:15 – 1st unwatchable in-flight tv show ends – New Adventures of Old Christine, a repeat.
10:30 – finished watching 3:10 to Yuma on ye ol’ laptop
10:42 – Recliner boy mercifully moved his seat up, but the old lady next to me fell asleep (passed out) and is sprawled onto both of the seats on either side of her. I can barely fit the laptop on my lap to type. My ass hurts from the awful position I’ve had to maintain. This flight needs to be over.
10:55 – Just got back to my seat after a quick walk up and back the cabin and talk with JB about some web page layouts I asked him to bring on the plane. Never an off position on the genius switch!
11:18 – Working on a blog post. Laptop battery still alive with 19% / 1 hour to go. After that, I guess I’ll be forced to watch “Made of Honor” inflight movie. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
11:26 – typed of a list of bands I’d like to review on indiewind.com.
11:39 – finished first of eight blog posts I hope to write on this trip. Can’t fight with the laptop anymore though. Time to shut down and listen to tunes.

Compelling stuff. The rest of the action can be found on Twitter.

I wasn’t able to get into the auditorium, where all the good stuff was, but I got frequent updates from everyone I met, including:

• Sean The Flex Guy: Someone we’ve followed on Twitter for awhile. Nice to put a face to name.
• Tony MacDonnell: Is CTO and Lead Developer at Teknision, a company we’ve worked with in the past. Tony and I had a good discussion of how to implement Scrum in a project-based dev shop. I think we ended up agreeing, but can’t be sure. It was getting toward the end of the night and we had a few adult beverages at that point.
• Caleb Haye: An RIA superstar who is also a former FlashForward presenter (Austin, 2006). Caleb was working at an empty exhibitor table when he saw me walking by and asked about PTV. An ironic twist on the “exhibitor pitching the floor” routine.
• Lance and James, Flash Developers from the Air Force 367 Training Support Squadron. “The Fightin’ Flying Flash Developers?” (couldn’t resist)
• Gregory Sogorka, Director of Surrealist Operations at Nabbr, wins Best Title in the Room award. Nabbr is a cool platform that distributes video content across a massive network, targeting “Gen-Y.” Darn those kids are so kewl.

Most of the people I talked with didn’t like the format, didn’t like the magician, and thought some of the presentations sound vaguely familiar to last years’. Overall, the vibe was – not as good as 2007, which wasn’t as good as 2006. With those criticisms aside, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and enjoying their time in San Francisco.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth to say Hi!

Heads Up Tech: FriendFeed vs. SocialThing!

With the rise of Social Media, people now have several websites where they track their status and keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. Earlier this year saw the rise of the Lifestreams – web sites that serve to aggregate the inputs and outputs of a single person’s myriad social media sites. When I saw these sites begin to take hold, I’ll admit I wasn’t a believer. I watched the Instant Messenger Wars play out years ago, and I was skeptical that companies with established user bases would ever allow a 3rd party to have access to that userbase or the rich data that it held. This walled garden approach is what sunk ICQ. In short, I didn’t believe that social media or microblogging sites would ever have a truly open API.

Glad to say I was wrong on that one. The post children of the Web 2.0 craze are social media sites and their open APIs. For every micro-blogging site like Twitter, there is a 3rd party AIR app like Twhirl that is built on its API. There are applications like Digsby that are mashups of “old” IM and “new” social media. And now there are Lifestreams – services that are successfully built around the goal of aggregating the streams of information from all these social media sites into one simplified view.

The king of the hill in the Lifestream community is FriendFeed, which launched privately in 2007 and opened a public beta in Feb 08 with a $5 million Series A funding. FriendFeed was covered mightily by the l33t bloggers at TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb. At first, I thought it was mostly because it was more because of the founding team of 4 ex-Google execs. I suppose that’s with good cause. There’s a fraternity of ex-Google employees that have gone on to fortune and glory. Sergey & Larry and Google are the 2000’s version of Jack Welch and General Electric.

The speed with which FriendFeed integrated profiles, statuses, and all other rss feeds it could lay its hands on changed my opinion of the service. Their product development methodology firmly guided by their Google background, FriendFeed put together a very simple design and then focused entirely on the product functionality itself. FriendFeed quickly added the most popular services in the all the major categories – microblogging, video blogging, photos, status, news, and music. They cleverly added RSS feeds from sites that you wouldn’t think of as 2.0 – Amazon’s Wishlist and Netflix’s favorites. That’s a mashup of sorts. In early 2008, FriendFeed had clearly focused on the aggregation of services, ballooning to 43 services at the time of this writing. Functionality exists to post to the aggregated Lifestream through a simple “Comment” feature, but in my opinion that’s not a useful service. Here’s why – if your friend uses Pownce for micro-blogging and you comment on that post in FriendFeed, your comment doesn’t become a Pownce update. After some pressure, FriendFeed did add an option to make FriendFeed comments become tweets, but that’s the limit of integration with other services from an update perspective. Recent feature additions include the concept of “rooms” and the integration of FriendFeed comments as part of blog comments. Like their chatroom namesakes before them, FriendFeed Rooms are essentially a group of people discussing a specific topic – using FriendFeed comments of course. The blog comment mechanism came to be as plug-ins for WordPress and Movable Type, where you can see FriendFeed discussions as part of your blog commentary.

Upstart SocialThing! launched in beta after securing $300k in “early stage” funding in the Fall of 2007. From the start, SocialThing! has attempted to avoid direct competition with the larger and more popular FriendFeed by claiming that they’re a different breed of Lifestream that’s not competitive at all. There’s a lot of truth to that. Where FriendFeed focused on pulling together all the RSS it could lay its hands on, SocialThing has focused on 2 way integration with the services it supports. SocialThing’s design more closely mimics others in the Web 2.0 space, which stands in contrast to FriendFeed’s mimimalistic user interface. FriendFeed comments require a FriendFeed reader (website or AIR app) to view. SocialThing caught on earlier about that major drawback. When you post a response to someone using SocialThing, it posts directly to the service, not to itself. Additionally, when you make changes to your profile or add/remove friends on other services, these changes automatically occur in your SocialThing account. This makes SocialThing more heavily reliant on 3rd party API, which is risky. But, the risk outweighs the benefits to AOL, who recently decided to acquire SocialThing earlier this August. AOL probably has desire to pair SocialThing  with Meebo, a web-based IM client that it has a significant investment stake in.

In summary, the top 2 Lifestream services both offer RSS and social media stream aggregation. FriendFeed focuses on aggregating as many streams as it can, where SocialThing focuses on a more complete 2-way integration with each of the services it supports. With the acquisition by AOL, SocialThing’s product roadmap is in doubt. The future for FriendFeed seems focused on slowly turning the discussion from Tweets and Pownces to FriendFeed comments.

You can find me on FriendFeed and SocialThing. Add a comment below if you’d like an invite to the SocialThing beta. More importantly – I’d be interested to hear how you’re using either or both of this services.

My Interview at SummerMash Boston

Earlier this month, I attended SummerMash Boston with a few folks from PermissionTV. The folks at Stickam were holding interviews with attendees and streaming live on Mashable. Well, they’ve finally gotten through the backlog and have posted the recorded sessions on their site. Below is the discussion that I and Craig Daniel, my cohort in the PTV engineering team, had regarding our favorite Video 2.0 company – PermissionTV. I  think that the PermissionTV video player is better than Stickam’s, but I guess I’m just a “company man.” What do you think?

Evernote – A scrapbook for your Web 2.0 lifestyle

This guest post is written by Milo Caruso, a full time .NET web developer at Convention Data Services in Bourne and freelance designer and developer. He has worked on a variety of attendee registration sites ranging from small (under 100 regstrants) to large (90k+ registrants) during his time at CDS. His freelance work has ranged from staightforward brochure style sites for small businesses to custom, membership based web application development. Milo and his work have been feature in the Boston Globe.

SummerMash Boston 08

I and a contingent of PermissionTV rabble-rousers attended Mashable.com’s SummerMash Boston event. We wanted to meet some folks and maybe spread the world on what our company has been up to. Here’s what the $21 ticket got us:

1. A live, streaming interview of us discussing PTV, that was shown on the Mashable.com homepage during the event.
2. Some crazy photos of the PermissionTV Team with Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, and another one here.
3. An intro to Chris Brogan, local Social Media hero who’s now following PermissionTV.
4. An intro to Adam Ostrow, Mashable Editor in Chief, who told us the secret to getting covered in Mashable – “Have an interesting story to tell, that’s not being covered anywhere else.” Eureka!
5. 5 new followers of PermissionTV.
6. Coverage from Marcel Moreau (aka Combusting Boy) at Summermash Boston 2008 Roundup.
7. Free food and two free drink tickets. w00t!
8. A dancing Owl
9. The most ridiculous picture of the PermissionTV Crew known to man.
10. Best Job Title of the Evening – Saul Colt, Head of Magic at FreshBooks.

All in all – it was a good event, I’d say! I met a lot of interesting people and had good fun along the way. For anyone else who was at the event, I’d love for you to share stories and links to pics in the comments below!

Update: Looks like the owner of the Flickr stream turned their pictures private, so some links above might not work properly. You can see all the fun pics here.

Ping.fm

I’ve added yet another social media app to my arsenal – welcome Ping.fm