Traveling Geeks

Founders, funders, entrepreneurs, investors, and men who can all tell a damn good story are gathering in Dublin Ireland this weekend for two technology conferences, demonstrating that it’s not just the yanks and most certainly not just Silicon Valley geeks who can come up with successsful start-up ideas.

Skype founder and now Atomico Niklas Zennstrom sponsored the kick off F.ounders dinner last night, the invite-only event co-organized by Paddy Cosgrave. The event, dubbed ‘Davos for Geeks’ in Dublin, is spread over a 2.5 day period.

It runs along side with the Dublin Web Summit, which has managed to pull 600 attendees, all registered for a series of ‘sessions’ that ranged from developer tools and social media best practices to digital marketing and advertising today and successful company case studies. 

Both events are extremely well organized and have a number of high-touch elements to them, including a private whiskey tasting, sit down dinners, book signings (@vanessafox has a new one out called Marketing in the Age of Google), pub crawls and walking tours.

American and European technology visionaries flew in for the event as well, giving talks at both events while holding media interviews with the local press. Jack Dorsey of Twitter (and Square) was on local TV and Jack, together with Directi founder Divyank Turakhia, Niklas Zennstrom, YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Bebo founder Michael Birch were photographed for the Irish Independent and the Irish Times.

What’s with the visionary GLASSES guys? No doubt, it must have been a fun one to shoot I’d imagine. Love the lighting in the hard copy newspaper that people still read in Ireland.

READING was a notable difference here – very few entrepreneurs had their Twitter handle on their business cards and I discovered countless people reading books, magazines and newspapers in Dublin’s St. Stephens Green (which dates back to 1663 btw) NOT on an iPad, iPhone or a Blackberry, even in the drizzly rain.

Dublin’s mayor who apparently is one of the few in office who use Twitter regularly, gave a talk at the opening dinner as well. Niklas followed before we all did a ‘ching ching’ (with an Argentinian Malbec) before, during and after salad, soup, a main course of chicken, potatoes, string beans and squash. Dessert? Berry tart with powdered sugar and ice cream of course, what else?

Immediately before dinner TechCrunch Europe’s Robin Wauters interviewed Chad Hurley in a small but crowded standing-room only room. Funnily enough, they had English quartered sandwiches and American beer by the bottle (I guess that’s what the after event pub crawls are for since there have been plenty of yummy Guiness, stouts and ciders for the taking on every corner).

Three out of four panelists in the “Life as an angel: Seeding Innovation, Culture, Clashes & Funding” panel were yanks: TechStarts Tom Keller, Dave McClure and Jeff Clavier (okay, so he’s French, but he lives in the Valley which impacts perspective), and Reshma Sohoni from Seedcamp (based in London).

Everyone else outside the states has an inferior complex someone threw out there and “doesn’t need to.” Says Jeff regarding lack of capital, “you don’t need that much. You just have to be really smart about getting $50K, then you can bring on sales, then you build a real business, then build cash flow, but just start somewhere…..raise $50K and take off from there. The whole premise of having to raise a ton of capital to build a real business is not necessary. Build a business that produces cash flow.”

Others agreed and McClure told Irish investors and entrepreneurs that they better invest here at home because if they don’t, developers and creators will go to the states or get funding from somewhere else. He says, “if any of you own a car that is worth more than $25K, you have money to invest.”

There is increasingly more activity in the angel investment sector than there is with traditional VCs and it’s continuing to grow, particularly in the states. Companies simply don’t need the kind of capital they did, even five years ago, to build a company that is sustainable and profitable.

Take a look at Mike Butcher’s TechCrunch post on the event.

What I love about his events (and no, I don’t work for him 🙂 is that he pulls together passionate people who know how to tell stories rather than pitch them or throw insights out on a panel of the “same ole same ole” topic with the “same ole same ole” people. Let’s face it, life is about storytelling. Branding is about storytelling. Kids are about storytelling. Money is about storytelling. And when we perk up and pay attention, its because of a really good story, one with passion and authenticity behind the ‘voice.’

I wrote about some of the ‘characters’ who participated in the LA event in a post last week.

And in the same week, I posted a number of videos of many of the heartwarming storytellers, entertainers and performers who spoke in LA. Just search for 140 conference or 140conf on the We Blog the World YouTube Channel to find them all.

Finding and sifting through content after an event is overwhelming isn’t it? It’s overwhelming because A) there is simply too much content out there, B) search is not perfect nor is it customized for the way we (humans) think and C) there are simply too many ‘channels’ and social media outlets where things are posted.

In an effort to get more organized and save time searching, browsing and reading, Pearltrees can be a useful way for you to organize and curate content the way you want to see it. Why count on a generic, broad search engine or a geeky bookmarking service to display your world of interests and passions?

Below is the Pearltree I created just for the 140 Conference in Los Angeles, which includes customized pearltrees for each of the categories I decided to curate. In other words, I created a Pearltree for just women attendees, another for speakers, one for entertainment tweeters, educators and moms who are using social media in interesting ways and so on.

And, notice that I have embedded the Pearltree inside my blog post, which was as easy to do it is to embed a YouTube video. Copy and paste the code baby and you’re done. It takes seconds to share it with an audience! Imagine the branding opportunities here.

140Conf LA

To give you an idea of how easy it is to customize and share, below is the Pearltree I created at the Los Angeles event that contains only ‘women tweeters/attendees’, making it a great way to keep tabs on people’s activity in one central place.

You can bounce from pearl to pearl faster than you can from web browser to web browser, getting quick updates at a quick glance. It also helps you find content quickly and readily and is a helluva lot more compelling to look at than a long geeky bookmarking list. I did the same thing for speakers.

140CONF WOMEN

Below is a Pearltree I created for the entire 140 Characters Conference, which includes links to the schedules of other city-hosted events Pulver plans to have or has had, i.e., Boston, San Fran, Detroit, London and so on.

140 CONFERENCE

Below is a screen grab that I took to show you how you can organize your Pearltrees within greater folders/or pearls if you like. My 140 Conference Pearl is within a Pearltree I call Conferences & Events, but you can slice and dice it however you choose, since you, are the curator and organizer, not Google. Refreshing isn’t it?

The Pivot Conference, a new conference dedicated to branding, marketing and social media is coming up from October 17-19, 2010 in New York.

The event singularly focused on marketers who target the 18-34 demographic — their attitudes, technologies and preferences – and the media and marketing that addresses them.

Today, the brand marketers’ job is made even more difficult by the rapidly changing media and the flood of new technologies and tools. Pivot is designed to help marketers sort through these issues, to better understand their customers and the environment, and to come away empowered to create a successful brand strategy and market more effectively to young consumers.

Speakers from Arianna Huffington to Evan Cohen and Doug Rushkoff (who says “Pivot looks to become the TED of marketing conferences”), will share their ideas and experiences and provoke ‘Aha!’ insights among attendees who are targeting the largest, most unique and influential demographic we’ve seen in 50 years.

Pivot partners Magic Sauce Media and We Blog the World are able to extend special pricing to attend for only $995. Please use the discount code MPPC401 when registering at pivotcon.com.

Highlights of the agenda include:

• Who Are You? Profile of the Always-On Consumer

• Mind the Gap: Measuring the Divide Between “Us” and “Them”

• Motives and Motivations: What Drives the Always-On Consumer

• Media and Advertising at a Crossroads

• The New Marketing Organization

• New Rules of Engagement: Listen, Engage, Measure

• Social Marketing: The Grand Experiment

Alexia shares the Pearltrees’ visual curation of the event, which allows you to relive the three day information hurricane on your own terms by clicking through any of the available “pearls” or data nodes. Embedded Pearltree below so you can do your own navigation.

techcrunch_disrupt_sf

Answers.com, just announced its first iPhone application: blufr, a social trivia game based on information from Answers.com.

The app is currently available for free and is downloadable from the Apple iTunes Store.

blufr has been designed to include social and location-based features. By offering registration through a Facebook or Twitter ID, blufr adds a competitive social dimension to the experience: players are ranked among their friends from those services, with the ability to earn awards or badges in their own social circles.

The game offers thousands of edgy, bizarre facts in categories including pop culture, sports, history and more, and challenges players to guess whether the trivia is true or false.

Trivia, or ‘blufs’, include:

• Coffee originated in Ethiopia.

• Lady GaGa’s real name is Sarafina Angelica Giamonti.
• Actor Jake Gyllenhaal’s bar-mitzvah was held in a homeless shelter.
• Boxing champion Mike Tyson has a tattoo of tennis star Arthur Ashe.

Players can rank on the leader board by location, among friends, or within categories. A real-time challenge component is planned for future iterations. blufr is currently available on the web and iPhone, with a Facebook app in development. 

Motribe, goes live today, a South African start-up which has created a platform to enable users, brands, agencies and publishers across the world to build and manage their own mobile social communities.

Talk about a speedy execution; founders Vincent Maher and Nic Haralambous built and launched Motribe in just under 6 weeks.

They are targeting the overlooked and neglected developing world market, where they’ll offer a customized mobile payment plan. People using the Internet on their cell phones will be able to build and own a fully-featured social network optimised for the mobile Internet.

Motribe will be able to activate plugins for their network including blogs, photo sharing, real-time chatrooms, user rankings and customizable HTML snippets amongst various other plugins. Various themes will be available to premium account holders for their networks as well as the ability to take earn revenue from advertising within a community.

Below: Maher and Haralambous

Motribe will launch to over 150 countries across the globe from day one. The rapid growth of mobile Internet in Africa and the desire from users to create and maintain networks on their phones has led to the creation of a niche and innovative product emerging out of South Africa.

While many companies have chosen to ignore the developing world market, Motribe is taking that market as well as the developed world head on and providing practical solutions to their social networking and communication needs.

The technology being offered up by the company is globally applicable and relevant. Users, brands, agencies and customers from across the world, in any and all markets will all find a use for a Motribe community and immediately see the value of the product.

With very little knowledge or Internet experience everyone from the man on the street all the way through to the most sophisticated advertising agency will be able to build, manage and generate income from their very own mobile social networks.

This impressive number comes only a week after Peartlrees announced $1.6 million in funding, which will be used to accelerate international development and growth.

As of July 2010, the Pearltrees North American user base has surpassed the French Pearltree community, which is where the service was launched last December. Global growth continues at a rate of 30% month-by-month and some organizations have already adopted Pearltrees, showing increased momentum and interest in the service.

This latest beta release, will significantly improve the user experience by increasing the speed and performance of the platform, by as well as adding new ergonomic features such as full screen video viewing, automatic updates of the detailed window and new meaningful animations.

Pearltrees supports all browsers so can be used on both PCs and Macs. Users can also embed pearls or whole Pearltrees’ into a website or blog with a simple button click, making it as easy to embed a Pearltree as it is to embed a YouTube video. Fans, readers and customers of a particular site or blog can discover a series of web pages and explore them in-depth without ever leaving your site. Users are exposed to a complete experience about a topic in one easy-to-navigate window.

Pearltrees transforms the process of discovering, organizing and sharing content people find on the web while enabling bloggers, journalists and other content creators to add a new level of depth and context to the articles they post online.

As Pearltrees expands in the U.S., new use cases of Pearltrees are sprouting up on various interests including food, restaurants, wine, travel, music and politics, to name a few. Below are a few examples of how people are curating content with Pearltrees:

• Check out a Pearltree showing a simulating iPod playlist to for working out

• Here’s a Pearltree for a special gluten free diet

• Find the resources a teacher needs

• Create a Pearltree to curate your favorite clubs in a city

• Build a guide of Buddhism

• Use Pearltrees if you are a label as a creative way to present your artist

• You can use a Pearltree to organize and curate your favorite wine experts

For example, you could create a Pearltree to share five recipes to make your brunch a success or where to find the best barbecue accessories, or even how to organize a whole meal – from wine and starters to main courses and dessert.

Take a look at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post yesterday in ReadWriteWeb and also at a Buddhism Pearltree below.

buddhism

Stribe was a finalist during TechCrunch50 2009 and won the last LeWeb European competition startup. More than 10,000 websites have asked to beta test the Stribe service since September 2009, and several hundred websites received an invitation code to embed the service.

More Traffic

Traffic acquisition is an issue for every website. Stribe now helps websites to connect with social media and with other websites sharing the same interests to get more traffic.
The entire installation process only requires sites to add one new line of code to their pages. Stribe designed viral mechanisms to let websites invite and connect with each other. All content generated by users will be indexed to improve SEO and drive more traffic to “stribed” websites.

All websites can look for communities, join them or create their own from Stribe.com to link with others and boost their visibility in a ring of similar sites. Most of Stribe’s features are free, however there are additional premium modules that cost, such as the back office functionality that allows websites to track key metrics of social activity and manage online communities.

He was born into a traditional Bedouin family in a poor Bedouin village in northern Israel, where he took us to during our trip in 2008. Take a look at some of the visuals from that trip to get an idea of his roots and what shaped him as a child.

His stories include his early days as a sheepherder and schoolboy “fights,” to his terrifying first forays into New York’s subway system, and later, his remarkable friendships with Jews and Muslims, religious and secular.

Ishmael has served in the Israeli Defense Forces, Defense Ministry and the Israeli Police before being chosen to join the Foreign Ministry. You can order his new book on Amazon.

Launch Pad is a program designed to spotlight new products or technologies to the Web 2.0 market and will take place during Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco at the Moscone West Convention Center, from May 3-7, 2010.

The five finalists were selected from over 80 submissions based on their innovation and value to market. Each finalist will present for five minutes in front of Web 2.0 Expo’s audience and judging panel of industry experts who will provide real-time feedback. Web 2.0 Expo’s panel of judges includes: Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, Dave McClure of 500 Hats and Ellen Pack of Elance. Brady Forrest, Web 2.0 Expo Co-Chair, will emcee the program.

The following five companies will present at Web 2.0 Expo’s Launch Pad on Wednesday, May 5, 2019 at 1:15 pm:

* AskYourTargetMarket.com: AskYourTargetMarket is a self-service target market research platform that includes a built-in consumer panel to answer surveys on demand

* Pearltrees: Pearltrees is a social curation tool that gives users a social way to organize, discover and share stuff they like on the Web

* Rhomobile: Rhomobile provides mobility solutions for the enterprise and creates cross-platform native applications for all major smartphones

* Strings: Strings is a social tracking and filtering platform to enable consumers to share and discover experiences that are meaningful and relevant to them

* Stupeflix: the Stupeflix Play platform transforms pages static content into engaging videos, on-the-fly

Additionally, Startup Weekend is an event where individuals come together to build a product and sometimes a company in two short days. A winner is chosen at the end of the event and this year’s Launch Pad will include that winner on stage along with the five selected Launch Pad finalists.

A People’s Choice Winner will be announced on-site at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. Audience members will be asked to vote for their top choice based on the demos. Votes will be tabulated in real-time and projected live on screen. All presenters are Launch Pad winners and benefit from the instantaneous feedback provided by the judging panel and the audience.