Monday, March 10, 2008
Socialthing Invites
I am good friends with the founders of Socialthing as a reader of this blog knows from my posts about Techstars last summer. I have 10 invites available on a first come basis. They were featured on Techcrunch today and are getting a lot of good buzz. Don't post a comment here but email me at Derrick AT doien Dot com if you want one.
Hiatus
Busy Startup + A Very Busy Travel Schedule + A Large Young Family = No Blogging.
Sorry. I hope that something changes but I have to say that business is great and the family is a blast and unfortunately my returns to blogging will be getting the short end. I have a couple of things today to post about so I thought I would start with this.
Sorry. I hope that something changes but I have to say that business is great and the family is a blast and unfortunately my returns to blogging will be getting the short end. I have a couple of things today to post about so I thought I would start with this.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Barcelona Redux aka MWC 2008
I returned from Spain last Thursday. I was very impressed by the scale and quality of the conference. It was amazing to see how many people they could get to pay 600 Euro compared to a similar number of CTIA attendees at $50 a pop. There is probably a lesson in there for the CTIA.
I didn't have a whole lot of serious takeaways other than one over arching thing that I couldn't shake. The overarching thing was that the music is playing and everyone is looking for a chair and this is making for some strange bed fellows. Witness Microsoft buying Danger, Sony releasing a Windows Mobile device, etc. I think there is a lot more of that sort of thing to come.
For our part we announced a partnership with Bebo, one of the largest social sites in Europe, that you can see here as well as a with Moko which is a leading mobile only community in the UK which is here.
I didn't have a whole lot of serious takeaways other than one over arching thing that I couldn't shake. The overarching thing was that the music is playing and everyone is looking for a chair and this is making for some strange bed fellows. Witness Microsoft buying Danger, Sony releasing a Windows Mobile device, etc. I think there is a lot more of that sort of thing to come.
For our part we announced a partnership with Bebo, one of the largest social sites in Europe, that you can see here as well as a with Moko which is a leading mobile only community in the UK which is here.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Travels and Talks
I am in Los Angeles for most of this week for a variety of meetings and am hoping to catch up with some friends. After the LA stop, I will be heading to Spain this weekend for 3GSM. If you want to grab a nice cold cava in Spain let me know.
At the end of the month, I will be speaking at the Wharton Business Technology Conference. Details here. Shortly after that we were invited to speak at the Microsoft sponsored Mix08 conference in Las Vegas. Link here. Details pending.
At the end of the month, I will be speaking at the Wharton Business Technology Conference. Details here. Shortly after that we were invited to speak at the Microsoft sponsored Mix08 conference in Las Vegas. Link here. Details pending.
The Industry Standard Lives!
Holy Bubble Batman! The Industry Standard has relaunched. It is now more of a game theory / marketplace of people speculating on Internet happenings. Do check it out. My sense is that this one is gonna last longer than the previous one. Don't get me wrong, I am/was a huge fan of the original.
The Rabble Tribe
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Travels and Sex::Tech
This week is the first travel week of the year for me. While I have already been to San Francisco and Los Angeles, I don't think of those as travel days since they are short trips. This week includes a trip today to Seattle, down to San Francisco later this evening, an appearance at a conference called Sex:tech and then a journey out to NYC.
The Sex:tech conference is going to be interesting for me in that it is not the usual speaking engagement. When Shawn or I are out it is usually to talk about the mobile industry, or social networking or something that is more business focused.
Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in an Aspen Institute conference that was focused on social implications of mobile technology. I was one of the industry folks in attendance along with Steve Chen from Youtube as well as a lot of people from the non-profit sector.
One of the interesting people I met at this conference was Deb Levin who heads up ISIS in San Francisco. Their mission (or at least my interpretation) is to get out information around sexual health to youth in a manner that is authentic and focused on places where the kids are. Our discussions led to me discussing what we are seeing with Rabble in our community and some of the interesting findings that we have encountered as a result.
While I don't usually talk about these things for competitive reasons, I will be discussing some of those findings tomorrow with Anastasia Goodstein from Ypulse (A blog I love) and Janet Kornblum from USA Today. I have a light deck that I will post a link to on my blog tomorrow. It should be interesting and am I excited to meet Anastasia who I am a fan of.
The Sex:tech conference is going to be interesting for me in that it is not the usual speaking engagement. When Shawn or I are out it is usually to talk about the mobile industry, or social networking or something that is more business focused.
Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in an Aspen Institute conference that was focused on social implications of mobile technology. I was one of the industry folks in attendance along with Steve Chen from Youtube as well as a lot of people from the non-profit sector.
One of the interesting people I met at this conference was Deb Levin who heads up ISIS in San Francisco. Their mission (or at least my interpretation) is to get out information around sexual health to youth in a manner that is authentic and focused on places where the kids are. Our discussions led to me discussing what we are seeing with Rabble in our community and some of the interesting findings that we have encountered as a result.
While I don't usually talk about these things for competitive reasons, I will be discussing some of those findings tomorrow with Anastasia Goodstein from Ypulse (A blog I love) and Janet Kornblum from USA Today. I have a light deck that I will post a link to on my blog tomorrow. It should be interesting and am I excited to meet Anastasia who I am a fan of.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Football
I think I had a little more restraint this year in talking about football than I normally do. So if you don't like football stop reading now. This is more of a mental marker for me than anything else.
This year, like last year, I participated in 3 fantasy football leagues. I know, nerd.
I am in a redraft league, a keeper league and a dynasty league. Without getting to much into it, a redraft league is where everyone starts with nobody and we draft our teams from scratch. In our keeper league you can keep up to 4 players from a previous year according to a scheme where a players draft position is cut in half from the previous year. For example a 10th round pick this year will be a 5th round pick next year.
In our dynasty league, we keep up to 18 players from the previous year and then have our annual draft right after the real NFL draft. The Dynasty league is sick and I predict it will become the primary format for fantasy football nerds in the future.
In terms of performance, I won my redraft league, came in 4th in my keeper league and came in 7th in my dynasty league. In dynasty, which is in our second year, I took a long term view and took a bunch of rookies the first year which insured my last place finish the year before. Next year, I am a contender.
In terms of real football this was a fascinating year. To see a team go undefeated was really impressive. To have 3 of the 4 teams I care most about in the playoffs has been great. To have two of them playing against each other next week, is depressing but unavoidable.
Beyond all of this though, my personal highlight was last week when I was able to assist as a runner for a friend of mine who is a photographer on the sidelines of the Titans Chargers game. The picture here is from the game. I can only say that it was amazing to be that close to the action.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Pedigree Technologies - Update
Back in December of last year my brother in law's company Pedigree Technologies, was selected as a Top 100 company in the M2M space. Link here. It's been fun watching him build his company in an almost parallel time frame as we have been on at Intercasting. I wanted to send him some props for hard work recognized.
Happy New Year
I usually post a retrospective post from the previous year but opted not to out of mostly laziness. 2007 was a great year for me. Family life was hard, especially with the amount of traveling a do, but the kids got a lot easier and a lot more fun. Professionally I couldn't be more excited and I expect 2008 to be a very big year for both home and work. Best of luck in the coming year.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Happy Holidays
We had a wonderful Christmas and are enjoying the time together away from work. I hope to make a couple of posts this week but I am not promising anything. :-)
I posted a ton of pictures on Flickr but here are some of all the kids in case you are lazy.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Triplet's 3rd Birthday
Last Friday our triplets turned 3. It has been an amazing three years and it has gotten more easy and more fun by the day. I will post some new pictures on Flickr later this week.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
EG07
As I mentioned in my last post I was given the opportunity to attend The Entertainment Gathering or EG in Los Angeles earlier this week. When asked if I wanted to attend I hesitated because I had a board meeting, a very important business development meeting and was generally way behind at work at the time.
In retrospect, if I had missed it, it would have been a tragedy that I would have never understood.
One of my former colleagues at MP3.com, Brian Dear the current founder of Eventful is a frequent attendee at certain conferences that I never truly understood. Where I understood trade shows or conferences like the CTIA or Digital Hollywood, I wasn't clear on the value of a multidisciplinary gathering of smart people where there isn't an obvious thread or theme. One of my investors, Steve Tomlin, when reflecting on the conference and my obvious enthusiasm at having attended described it as a mental spa, which I think is an apt description.
So before I talk about the amazing speakers, I think one other thing needs to be mentioned, the amazing attendees. In the first session I was seated a row behind Jeff Bezos, who was showing some friends his kindle. Robert Metcalfe the inventor of Ethernet and Metcalfe's law was there along with Steve Wozniak and Matt Groening. Seeing this early on, and realizing that this conference was something that these people were spending three days of their time wading through gave me a strong respect for the expected quality of the event. It certainly didn't disappoint.
There is a blog on the EG2007 website that you can see a good slice of the speakers and the program. My condensed bullet point of the conference follows:
Rob Glaser from Real Networks spoke about his non profit activities around branding Progressive as a positive message to potential voters.
Jim Citrin from Spencer Stuart spoke about his new book and parallels of excellence between people in business and sports and the difference between amateurs and professionals as a function of disciplined practice and time.
Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of Amateur, railed about the erosion of quality and the tension between the religion of technology and it's impact on media.
Brewster Kahle spoke about the efforts around the Internet Archive and archive.org to create a library of everything on the Internet.
Don Katz spoke about his time as a journalist and as an executive of Audible, the audio book file company. I know Don from a previous life and it was great catching up with him.
Brian Greene gave the audience a 20 minute primer on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.
Paul Horowitz spoke about some of the math and timelines involved that underlie some of the assumptions that drive the efforts behind things like Seti which he is involved with.
Keith Schwab hit some of the same highlights as Brian Greene but also talked about the implications of quatum mechanics for code breaking and the development of objects at a larger than quantum scale.
Marvin Minsky spoke about his new book on Artifical intelligence and his position that emotions primarily manifest themselves as a switching of of certain rational components of our mind. (Which was meant to be a positive as I understood it).
Pablos Holman showed some of his amazing hacker techniques and tricks.
Caleb Chung, the inventor of the Furby, showed off his newest toy/robot the Pleo. I can guarantee you will both hear about and want one of these little lifelike robot dinosaurs in the next month or two.
Frnas Lantig, the famous naturalist photographer gave a mind bending presentation of his recent collection of photos from around the world of nature accompanied by a soundtrack by Phillip Glass and a poetic narrative from his partner.
Yves Behar talked about design as a concept and walked through some of the examples created by his firm including the Jawbone headset, The Herman Miller Leaf lamp and the design for the One Laptop Per Child project.
Nicholas Negroponte followed with an overview of the One Laptop Per Child project which I have to say was among my favorites both in terms of what the endeavor to accomplish and in how amazing the device is that they have come up with.
Tim Kring the Executive Producer and Creator of Heros spoke about how the show came to pass which was a compelling personal story.
That was the first day for me and I omitted the segments I unfortunately missed. I will hit my second day in a brief follow up post later.
In retrospect, if I had missed it, it would have been a tragedy that I would have never understood.
One of my former colleagues at MP3.com, Brian Dear the current founder of Eventful is a frequent attendee at certain conferences that I never truly understood. Where I understood trade shows or conferences like the CTIA or Digital Hollywood, I wasn't clear on the value of a multidisciplinary gathering of smart people where there isn't an obvious thread or theme. One of my investors, Steve Tomlin, when reflecting on the conference and my obvious enthusiasm at having attended described it as a mental spa, which I think is an apt description.
So before I talk about the amazing speakers, I think one other thing needs to be mentioned, the amazing attendees. In the first session I was seated a row behind Jeff Bezos, who was showing some friends his kindle. Robert Metcalfe the inventor of Ethernet and Metcalfe's law was there along with Steve Wozniak and Matt Groening. Seeing this early on, and realizing that this conference was something that these people were spending three days of their time wading through gave me a strong respect for the expected quality of the event. It certainly didn't disappoint.
There is a blog on the EG2007 website that you can see a good slice of the speakers and the program. My condensed bullet point of the conference follows:
Rob Glaser from Real Networks spoke about his non profit activities around branding Progressive as a positive message to potential voters.
Jim Citrin from Spencer Stuart spoke about his new book and parallels of excellence between people in business and sports and the difference between amateurs and professionals as a function of disciplined practice and time.
Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of Amateur, railed about the erosion of quality and the tension between the religion of technology and it's impact on media.
Brewster Kahle spoke about the efforts around the Internet Archive and archive.org to create a library of everything on the Internet.
Don Katz spoke about his time as a journalist and as an executive of Audible, the audio book file company. I know Don from a previous life and it was great catching up with him.
Brian Greene gave the audience a 20 minute primer on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.
Paul Horowitz spoke about some of the math and timelines involved that underlie some of the assumptions that drive the efforts behind things like Seti which he is involved with.
Keith Schwab hit some of the same highlights as Brian Greene but also talked about the implications of quatum mechanics for code breaking and the development of objects at a larger than quantum scale.
Marvin Minsky spoke about his new book on Artifical intelligence and his position that emotions primarily manifest themselves as a switching of of certain rational components of our mind. (Which was meant to be a positive as I understood it).
Pablos Holman showed some of his amazing hacker techniques and tricks.
Caleb Chung, the inventor of the Furby, showed off his newest toy/robot the Pleo. I can guarantee you will both hear about and want one of these little lifelike robot dinosaurs in the next month or two.
Frnas Lantig, the famous naturalist photographer gave a mind bending presentation of his recent collection of photos from around the world of nature accompanied by a soundtrack by Phillip Glass and a poetic narrative from his partner.
Yves Behar talked about design as a concept and walked through some of the examples created by his firm including the Jawbone headset, The Herman Miller Leaf lamp and the design for the One Laptop Per Child project.
Nicholas Negroponte followed with an overview of the One Laptop Per Child project which I have to say was among my favorites both in terms of what the endeavor to accomplish and in how amazing the device is that they have come up with.
Tim Kring the Executive Producer and Creator of Heros spoke about how the show came to pass which was a compelling personal story.
That was the first day for me and I omitted the segments I unfortunately missed. I will hit my second day in a brief follow up post later.
Monday, December 03, 2007
The Entertainment Gathering
For the next two days I am in Los Angeles for the Entertainment Gathering. I like to take the opportunity at least once a year to step outside my normal point of reference and work the mind. The year before last it was Gnomedex and this year it is this conference. Can't wait to report on some of the fascinating sessions scheduled.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Techstars Revisited
Over the last two months or so I have been at great risk of becoming an occasional blogger. Actually I have also toyed with blogging about cooking which has been something I have been spending a lot of time doing around the holidays. In any event, I miss posting and now that I have finally taken a VACATION, I endeavor to get back on track. One of the items that came up while I have been blog absent involves the company my friends started called Social Thing. I had posted before about Tech Stars, which I can't say enough good about. Link to my previous post here.
While I was busy, Matt, Brian and company raised an angel round! Their blog post here. (It's been a month already!). Congrats to them and I wish them the utmost success.
While revisiting my reminders to make this post, I went back to the Techstars site to see how the other teams have fared so far and I was excited to see that so far 4 of the companies I saw that day had raised money. Link to the most recent funding and list of other companies here. I can't wait to see how things play out for them and am very interested to see what the Tech Stars folks do in 2008.
While I was busy, Matt, Brian and company raised an angel round! Their blog post here. (It's been a month already!). Congrats to them and I wish them the utmost success.
While revisiting my reminders to make this post, I went back to the Techstars site to see how the other teams have fared so far and I was excited to see that so far 4 of the companies I saw that day had raised money. Link to the most recent funding and list of other companies here. I can't wait to see how things play out for them and am very interested to see what the Tech Stars folks do in 2008.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Another Year
I am 41 today. It seems like I turned 40 just yesterday. Sigh. What a great year last year was and I am sure next year will be as good as the last. A big thanks to my wonderful wife, kids and friends for making each day that much more special.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Digital Hollywood Podcast Interview
While at Digital Hollywood the week after CTIA I was interviewed by website Digital Podcast which can be found here. It is a longer version of what I said on the video interview posted previously. Link can be found here.
Intercasting/Rabble in USA Today
While I was in Rome we had a bunch of news. I will recap links later today as I catch up on email. Here is a link to the USA Today story which mentioned both Rabble and Intercasting.
Rome
This las week I realized a life long dream and got to take a trip to Rome with my wife. As a student of history, Latin and the history of Christianity it was everything I dreamed of. Not much else to say other than it was amazing. Pictures can be seen on my Flickr page which you can reach from here or you can click on the badge on the side.
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