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 →

October 5, 2011

Real Americans don’t care much about A-list blogs

I had breakfast with John Bell of Ogilvy a number of years ago. He didn’t see the value of investing limited budget, time and resources on the long tail when those treasures would better be used to woo the high-fliers, professionals, top-cows and A-listers. That’s fair enough, and surely a common question, and a question we must address close to the beginning of every sales call we make at our agency when we propose blogger outreach to a prospective client.

The value comes from penetration, permanence, perseverance and persistence. There are only a finite number of members of every organization’s email list. Mashable and TechCrunch have a sizable but vertical (narrow) audience. When we reach out and pitch to thousands of bloggers, however small or niche, if they’re within maybe one but generally a handful of loosely defined topics, we always reach well outside of the echo chamber of a conversation that tends to get contained within the walls of a tech blog or mommy blog.

By reaching out ever further, we don’t assume that anyone outside of the five major urban centers are obsessed with the top five major papers or the top five major blogs. Doing so makes the critical mistake that if you get covered by the FT, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, you’ve got the world covered. In fact, I will use a newspaper analogy to try to illustrate my point. Continue reading →

May 26, 2011

Toyota launches a social network for drivers

Image by danielctw via Flickr

Is the car the ultimate mobile device? Toyota thinks so. With Salesforce.com, they’ve launched a social network for Toyota owners and drivers that keeps them connected to Toyota, to its dealers, and to other drivers. Time will tell if this takes hold, but you have to admit that the Internet-connected car is closer to reality than ever before, and even before we reach that state, we all have network-connected phones with is in the car. The question is, what do you do with that auto(mobile) computing power?

Vertical online communities, such as Caregiver Village, have always been with us in the form of communities of interest, communities of circumstance, communities of purpose, and communities of action. So, Ujala Sehgal of Fishbowl, N.Y., shares Toyota‘s go at it, Toyota Drivers Get Their Own Social Network.

Toyota announced that it plans to develop a private social network for its vehicle owners called Toyota Friend. The network, set to launch in 2012, will be developed with San Francisco cloud-computing company Salesforce.com, and will enable drivers to stay connected with their cars, their local dealers, and each other–using their car. “The car is the true mobile device,” Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, said recently, according to The Atlantic Wire.

Also check out Engadget’s reporting, Toyota to launch social network for people who like to befriend car dealerships.

My advice to Toyota is to hire as many passionate community managers as you can. Who love cars, yes, but more so, are passionate about catalyzing conversation, keeping the momentum after pouring in the energy to not only moderate but to be encouraging and empowering — essentially, someone who is trained in organizational development or hosting amazing dinner parties. For the first six months, it will be (or feel like) 100% Toyota staff or outsourced Toyota staffers (like the team at Abraham Harrison). The community will never be 100% self-perpetuating. The community will always need shepherds to keep the flock together. Though it will surely help, the passion of people about their Toyota will never be quite good enough, though I would recommend keeping the Tundra and Prius crowd sufficiently separated.

What do you think about the power of the private social network?

Continue reading →

November 2, 2009

Why I love public transportation and hate HP

Public transportation. Source: George L. Smythe

We all complain about public transportation. It’s slow. It’s crowded. It’s delayed. It’s boring. Public transportation can be miserable, but for me it’s not anymore. It’s not because San Francisco MUNI and BART got any cleaner or faster, but because they provided me with some information. They told me when the next bus is coming.

Using the NextMUNI or the Transit.511.org service, I can find information about when to expect the next bus. While it may be very costly or impossible to make trains and buses move faster, by letting me know where they are and then calculating an estimated wait time, it provides me with information to plan accordingly. I could take another bus line or grab a coffee and wait somewhere a little more comfortable than a bus stop. I actually enjoy taking public transportation because it gives me a chance to listen and watch podcasts on my iPod.

Restaurants do this as well when you put in a reservation. If they say 10 minutes before you’re seated, you’ll wait. If they say an hour, you’ll move on to another restaurant. By providing that little bit of information, restaurants are delivering great customer service. They’re empowering the customer with information to make an informed decision. They’re not leaving them in the dark. Continue reading →

May 16, 2009

UK startups suss out Silicon Valley

Web Mission: UK startups come to Silicon Valley from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Oli Barrett, co-founder of Web Mission, talks about the group of 20 small startups from the United Kingdom that recently visited Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, and what the participants took away from the trip.

The 7-minute interview was conducted on the top floor of Moscone West during the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Continue reading →