April 18, 2013

Demo Mobile: The revolution is at full throttle

Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures at Demo Mobile on Wednesday (Photo by JD Lasica).

Startups show disruptive potential of mobile tech

As regular readers know, I straddle the social media marketing and tech startup worlds, and increasingly I’ve been drawn to events focused on the disruptive changes wrought by the mobile revolution.

I stopped going to DEMO events a while back, given the richness of the Launch and TechCrunch Disrupt startup conferences, but yesterday I attended DEMO Mobile and came away impressed by the fervor and tumult evident on stage and off.

Here are 27 photos I took yesterday in this Demo Mobile set on Flickr.

As always, let me begin with a disclaimer that I didn’t attend to provide a comprehensive blow-by-blow of all the speakers, all the sessions or all the entrepreneurs in the Demo room. Instead, here are a few takeaways and highlights that struck me as particularly interesting with a focus on startups and entrepreneurs — to be sure, a decidedly small slice of Demo Mobile. Continue reading →

March 7, 2013

Launch Festival: ‘We live in the future now’

The panel of judges/venture capitalists at the Launch Festival (Photo by JD Lasica).

Conference brims with innovative tech startups

Target audience: Entrepreneurs, startups, businesses, tech sector executives and employees, anyone interested in innovation.

After three days of the Launch Festival, where 5,000 attendees jammed into San Francisco’s sprawling Design Concourse, one can be forgiven for believing that, through some cosmic event involving gamma rays and worm holes, participants were given an exclusive glimpse of what’s just around the corner. (So this is what tomorrow looks like!)

There’s no longer any doubt: Launch and TechCrunch Disrupt are now unquestionably the top startup conferences on the planet. They used to be one event, under the banner TechCrunch 40 (which launched Mint) and TechCrunch 50 (which launched Yammer), before the co-founders went their separate ways. This week I overheard more than a few attendees say that Launch — which has a mega-personality in founder Jason Calacanis where TechCrunch Disrupt now lacks one — has become the most essential gathering of its kind. Continue reading →

January 14, 2013

Best advice on starting a new business

Target audience: Businesses, entrepreneurs, startups.

If you’ve ever tried to start a business, you know that you get thrown into a world of unknowns. Most of us are dependent on mentors and others to guide us through a realm where we’re bound to make tons of mistakes.

At The Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco, I asked attendees and presenters, “What’s the best advice anyone ever gave you about starting a business?” We edited down our favorite answers to create a video of the best crowdsourced advice on starting a business. Continue reading →

December 13, 2012

Latest trends powering the Innovation Economy

Tony Perkins, organizer and founder of the Venture Summit Silicon Valley.

Target audience: Startups, mature businesses, technology innovators, funders and venture capitalists, marketers.

I‘m just back from the Venture Summit Silicon Valley (“where Big Ideas meets Big Money”). And so here’s a short report from the frontlines of the key players — entrepreneurs, firms and investors — powering the Innovation Economy.

“There is no little kid hoping there’ll be a laptop with Windows 8 under the Christmas tree.”
— Jay Samit of ooVoo

Let’s start with this Flickr set of 51 photos — you’ll recognize some of the speakers, like TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins (the conference’s impresario) and other notables from the tech world.

The 250 to 300 folks who turned out at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay were a mix of business executives, VCs and startup founders. I was here to report some highlights for Socialmedia.biz as well as to soak in some wisdom around social data for the geolocation start-up I’ve begun working on, Placely. Continue reading →

June 20, 2011

MyMic: Leave an audio comment on Facebook

If you’re launching a startup today, your best bet is to build on top of a widely adopted platform — Facebook, anyone? — rather than try to rally users to a completely new site.

That’s the smart course LeaAnna Hernandez took with MyMic, a still largely undiscovered app (2,797 Likes) that lets anyone on Facebook record a message that you can post to your own wall or share with a friend. (The first 20 seconds are free.)

MyMic won the best startup award at Latino 2, a gathering of 160 thought leaders, chiefly from the Latino community, on June 11 in Mountain View, Calif.

I caught up with Leanna, creator of MyMic, toward the end of the conference.

Watch, embed or download the 5-minute video on Vimeo

“I would love to be the audio version of YouTube,” LeaAnna says.

Coming next: a mobile MyMic app and a MyMic website, where users will be able to record audio files and share them with anyone, whether or not they’re on Facebook.

August 18, 2009

5 quick tips on using LinkedIn to start up

Today I was reminded that many entrepreneurs don’t fully appreciate how LinkedIn can shrink the business cycle in their favor, so here I’ll recount a hallway conversation in the hope that it will help you, too. Although the context is “starting up” an entrepreneurial venture, the same principles apply to job search — and for the same reasons. Entrepreneurs and job seekers all have burn rates and the need to find people with specific problems who are ready to act on the solution that the entrepreneur or job seeker proposes.
Continue reading →