eBiz Tomorrow by Chris Salazar

Finally, I’m fulfilling my role as a full time web/community marketing enthusiast. In my opinion, conferences are one of the best ways to network, learn more about your industry, and figure how you can add value to your company.

Yet, I’m both excited and nervous. Nervous b/c its difficult to both soak everything in AND brand yourself. I plan on attending these events on a regular basis, mostly because its an interest of mine that happens to compliment my role at HDS, but its not all about listening to speakers; its also about being able to network with other professionals around the area.

I believe in the network of ONE - this is finding at least 2 other people who are experts in something DIFFERENT than me…this will make me valuable as I take this network from job to job.

Soon I’ll be posting some tips on how to make the best out of a conference and how to brand yourself at a conference…Until then, please check back on Saturday for my notes and pictures.

SPECIAL THANKS TO JEREMIAH - he’s awarded me with a ticket to the Community Viral Next Conference!

Update: View NetGear’s Lunch 2.0 photos here …including some that I took as well!

I like going to Lunch 2.0’s. Everytime its a new experience and I’ve really become comfortable with meeting new people. Its starting to come more naturally now, which is GREAT! I even brought along Michael Sykora, one of my highschool friends, a recent grad at SJSU, so he can join the fun!

So the food was good, and the aprons were even cooler! Although, I liked the live demonstration, I was too busy taking pictures of everyone’s reactions.

I had some good conversations as well, which is important. Lots of them were around social media, while some were on other things like chocolate since Brian Stephens is the chocolate blogger! In fact, all the chocolate talk got Lisa and Michael both craving some dessert! Even Jeremy Pepper provided his two cents and told us that dark chocolate is a girl’s thing (although, Lisa likes milk-chocolate the most). Either way, Jeremy is a very energetic and entertaining guy…check out his pics! I also met Robyn Tippins for the first time, that was a surprise. I’ve only talked with her through blogging, but seeing her in person was great.

Ah, I cannot forget about bubilicious team who I even got a chance to talk with. Take a look at the video below, I’m on around the 5:15 minute mark and lead to just about the end…please visit here.

What a fun day! Im looking forward to the next lunch 2.0 event in June! And I hope to see you there as well!

…oh! pictures to come soon, I just misplaced my camera…ill find it!

I’ve been talking about Social Media lately, now here’s an awesome opportunity to meet Mario Sundar and his team at LinkedIn for Lunch 2.0 on May 23rd

My last lunch 2.0 event was at Hitachi Data Systems, where Jeremiah hosted the unforgettable Web Expo + Lunch 2.0! So I’m excited for my next lunch 2.0 experience.

Here’s the details on the upcoming lunch 2.0 party at LinkedIn:

Location: LinkedIn
Address: 2029 Stierlin Court, Mountain View, CA 94043
Date: Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007. 12:00PM - 1:30PM

Please RSVP here or you can use Upcoming

Bring your digital and video cameras! I hope to see everyone there…I’m sure some of you will be live streaming!

 Can we say “Lunch 2.0 May Madness”?

Not one, but two lunch 2.0’s this month. First, we have LinkedIn, and second we have NetGear’s Lunch 2.0

What interests me about NetGear is I haven’t really seen them reach out to the community and the blogosphere. So I’m anxious to see what they have in store for us.

Here’s the details:

Location: Netgear, Inc.
Address: 4500 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, CA 95054
Date: Wed, May 30^th 2007
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm

It’s been told that we will have an opportunity to see some of their new products as well as being treated with some good BBQ!

Please RSVP here

I hope to see everyone there at this NetGear Expo! Who knows you might even get interviewed or be caught on candid camera since PodTech will be there taping all the action!

Update:  Jeremiah is going to lunch 2.0…he’ll probably be the one streaming live video!  You can’t miss it! 

After reading a very interesting article by Andy Dickinson titled “Tools or Behaviour” he provoked an important point that I think many people miss. He cited Kevin Anderson from the Guardian, who argues that YouTube is not popular because of the video, but there’s something else intriguing about it. Do I agree?

This really comes down to understanding the customer. I’m sure the YouTube guys realized that video was big, but whats even bigger is “Community.” Yes, sure its been a broken record as many many bloggers constantly talk about community…but the reason why they talk about it is not because its buzzy, but because its worthy of a conversation.

Take a look at this snapshot of YouTube’s Community section…they are on to something:

Video has been around for a long time, take News stations (like ABC News), they’ve had News videos for years. Take MTV, they’ve had music videos since before I was born. So, Any is right, its not about the Video per se, and perhaps its not too much about the advertising. What its really about is the users (community) have complete control over what they see, share, save, and post on their own sites (myspace, xanga, blogs, etc). Adding a YouTube video to MySpace is practically dummy-proof…and with even more time, saving a YouTube video into an mpeg file is just as easy.

So where has this concept of sharing evolved? Well, from the earliest signs of sharing, back in the Napster file-sharing days, it became apparent that users want control over what they do online and IF they find something they like they want to send it to their friends, colleagues, family, etc. It’s not about the video, or the blog, or even the podcast…its about empowering the user.

I’d argue that today’s success with community tools and social networking sites is about EMPOWERMENT! The 2000’s era, should be the era of EMPOWERMENT…the years when users were in control, when users formed communities, and when users took over the internet!

Michael Arrington from http://www.techcrunch.com

“What’s next for web apps: building tomorrow’s Flickr”

(note I will have pictures of Michael’s Winner’s and Loser’s soon..)

Shared Attributes of Winners

• Passion for what they are doing
• Doing Something Extraordinary (Purple Cow)
• Removing serious friction
• Great Founder Dynamics (”higher slow, fire fast”)
• Never Raised Big Money or Raised it After They Won
• Perfect Revenue Model Not Required
• and…launched their company with a post on TechCrunch (hahaha!)

Shared Attributes of Losers

• Poor Founder/Team choices
• Lifestyle/Ego Entrepreneurs
• Raised Too Much Money
• Spent Too Much Money
• Don’t Over business-planned
• Forgot about scaling (Friendster)

What Server Platform? What Client Platform

• PHP = popular server
• AJAX = popular client
• Sleeper = Adobe Apollo

Market Saturation

• Avoid
  • Social Networking
  • Social Bookmarks
  • Video
  • Photos
  • Blogging/podcasting platforms
  • Portals
  • Feed Readers
• Big Potential
  • Platforms
  • Desktop Apps
  • Office Efficiency
  • Cloud Storage –> Microsoft, Google, Box.net, Omnidrive coming soon
  • Identity
  • Developer Tools
  • Market Destruction
  • ENTERPRISE = important

I am currently blogging live from the Future of Web Apps Conference in San Francisco with Jeremiah Owyang who is also blogging live. I am providing you with this information in real time from my first web conference! The most recent information will be at the bottom of the page. Please check back!

There are even some participants from Lunch 2.0, which Jeremiah and Hitachi Data Systems hosted just yesterday!

SPEAKER: Dick Hardt, blogs at http://blame.ca/dick
Representing http://www.sxip.com

Emerging Age of Who
What is Identity?

• Past behavior predicts future behavior
• Digital identity = yahoo, flickr, google (vitamin), delicious
• Identity 2.0 = users in charge from centralization (easy to manage identities), allow identities to be cross compatible with other sites (bring ebay reputation throughout the web)
• Ebay = separate accounts, no sign on across like yahoo

My Thoughts

Dick’s presentation was very energetic, fast paced, and “different” (which is great for a preso to start off with). He used some analogies that were different including pain killers, vitamins, and Viagra. Identity 2.0 is emerging and I am anxious to see how online identities will integrate, that’s if they do.

SPEAKER: Kevin Rose from http://www.digg.com

• What is digg? How did it start?
  • October ’04, experiment with $2000 (developed project spec, basic utilitarian design, $99 hosting plan
  • New site, everything is created and promoted by users, users can “digg” stories, customize homepages, track users
  • My profile has own associated RSS feeds (sites I’ve dugg, commented on, friends page, etc)
• Feature Decisions
  • No advertising, all word of mouth
  • Tools for self expression
  • Stay away from “me too” features (adding tags, etc) – what benefit does the feature has? (tags to online banking = bad idea)
  • Simple and rewarding – one click (comments and buries)
  • Destroy the garbage
  • Experiment – stack, swarm, bigspy, activities of users
• What’s Next? Digg Labs à Stack & Swarm (Awesome!) + Diff Effect
  • Real-time activity of users
  • Graphs, charts, analytics
  • Learn how users are gathering around stories
  • Provides real time info of the new stories that are being digged
  • Learn more about users interests from stories that are digged
• Story suggestions and friend suggestions (like Amazon)
• Connecting users with other users b/c of interests (different from Friendster, Myspace, etc)
• Stats à 500k users, 10M pages per day, 1M daily users
• Tip for scaling = PDF “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend”
• Will be an open API coming soon
• Custom feeds through search (search for apple with 500 diggs)

My Thoughts

First off, Kevin is really young! It’s amazing to hear the story of how he created Digg and what’s next in Digg Labs. The analytics available is very web 2.0 and fun! I am not an avid user of digg, but I think I will take another look at it.

10 things you didn’t know about RSS

• 1. No correlation between click through rate to HTML site and number of subscribers, very erratic and fluctuate
  • Reason people go from a feed to the site is worth looking into to, something happening that cannot be explained
• 2. Consumer devices can drive the market, the power of releasing a device like RSS and iTunes + iPod supporting podcasts (people didn’t realize they were using RSS)
• 3. More text in the feed, gets more TOTAL traffic
  • Adding more text, increases subscribers to feed because the feed audience is different from daily browsers
• 4. Podcasts are more evenly distributed across categories than text RSS feeds
  • But, text feeds will soon become more distributed
  • 15% of podcasts are video, so video is growing, video will eclipse audio podcasts in a year
• 5. Different feeds and different types of content have different breakdowns about how they are read on feedreaders
  • RSS is a global phenomenon, more blogs in Japan and China than N. America and Europe together, RSS has become bigger than blogs!
  • In consumer feeds, aggregator breakdowns are from mass media mediums like yahoo
• 6. There over 3,000 RSS clients out there
• 7. And a LOT of bots
  • Click on content and find relationship between RSS feeds
  • The average click through rate of an RSS item is 7%, ALL BY BOTS, be careful when reading stats on who is a real person and who is a bot
• 8. MyYahoo! leads by a large margin for subscribers in RSS
  • Personalized homepages like MyYahoo are large subscribers, Firefox trails
• 9. RSS is being read on Mobile
  • 2,900 mobile user agents reading RSS feeds
  • Top clients = Nokia podcasting client, Sony Ericson, LG, Sony, Motorola
• 10. Publishers are making money with RSS
  • Using RSS to drive traffic to their site, but they will find that these are separate audiences, people reading feeds are those who can reached on daily basis (they like to read feeds), but average browser is a different audience

Mor Naaman representing Yahoo! and demonstrating “ZoneTag”

Demo of ZoneTag Mobile Client

• Use mobile devices to help create, find, discover, share media = future of web apps
• ZoneTag Basics
  • 2-click upload, smooth experience
  • Photo uploaded with location and time metadata
  • Can set privacy settings, title, and add tags
• ZoneTag Advanced
  • Tag/annotate your photos from the phone: easy with tag suggestions
• Where do these tags come from?
  • From the user, users friends, other people who visit the same location = user generated!
  • Stuff around you, upcoming.org, from RSS 2.0 feed (Calendar, hangouts)
• Where do tags go?
  • Back to the orginal RSS items (Upcoming.org)
  • Action Tags
    • Trigger a call to a web service
    • Command Line - from your phone
• ZoneTag for all
  • runs on Nokia Series 60 phones
  • Available as a prototype API - put it on a plaform

“How we built Google Calendar” http://www.google.com/calendar

• Designed to manager your own personal schedule and share it with others
• Requests to build calendar from customers, started off with a vague idea, then started the plan
• “If you are in marketing, you are doing your job IF you are spending money and talking to customers” — quote from Carl (it made Jeremiah laugh)
  • talked to college students at Stanford, student leaders, professors, working couples to see what they were using to coordinate their activities
  • performed a “diary setting” of open ended questions, but found that some students did not keep calendars even though they were busy…good information for research!
• Key Themes emerged:
  • People said calendars werent necessary b/c they were a pain to keep up to date especially when it combined others (friends, family) = big investment of time –> Google wanted to create something that was painless and saved time
  • Recognized that people have a personal connection to a calendar –> the look and feel of it is necessary because they have a connection to it
• 4 things the calendar must do
  
  • had to be fast, visually appealing to the user
  • had to be drop dead simple to get info onto the calendar
  • has to be more than boxes on a screen, wanted to make sure the events put into the calendar add value (notifications, reminders,  and  easy to share)
  • important to design a product in a consumer oriented  world, where not everyone has the same needs and wants
• Invested time and energy on Google Infrastructure from 5 to 5 million users
• Focused on interaction and the operations of the calendar, then worked on the UI design (how to make it look good)
• Once you build the product, launching the product is difficult, but PRIVATE BETA testing is essential to get feedback before launching it live = IMPORTANT
• Insight #1 = Easy is the most important feature
• Insight #2 = Know your real competition
• Insight #3 = Visual Design Matters
• Insight #4 = Build products for people who don’t want to use them
• Insight #5 = Timing Launch Properly
• Insight #6 = Driving Usage

The Lunch 2.0 + Web Expo ended today at Hitachi Data Systems, but it was a success. I heard several people mention it was the biggest Lunch 2.0 yet! Robert Scoble even mentioned that he did not expect such a big turnout. Great thanks to Jeremiah Owyang and the HDS team for organizing the event.

This was my first big web event and I cannot wait for more opportunities. The opportunity to see several web companies, even some startups, was great. Listening to their ideas was interesting, especially seeing a preview of some new Zoomr tools from Thomas Hawk!

Here are some links to remember the event and/or experience it for yourself:

• Robert Scoble’s thoughts on Lunch 2.0
• Lunch 2.0 thoughts from Thomas Hawk
• Julio Garcia’s post on Lunch 2.0
• Flickr photos tagged with “Lunch20″
• Zoomr photos and Zooomr Blog

I took about a hundred pictures from the event so I can relive it each day as my FIRST web event. This is only the beginning, as tomorrow I will be blogging live from the Carson Summit Web Apps Conference.

THE FUTURE OF WEB APPS

This will be my first Web Conference so I am very excited! I may even try some live blogging, who knows!

This event will feature keynote speakers from the top web companies including: Google, Technorati, Wordpress, Flickr, digg, TechCrunch, Yahoo, Feedburner, and many more.

Find out how Google Calendar was created, how to build tomorrow’s next Flickr, the story behind WordPress, and 10 things you didn’t know about RSS, from FeedBurner’s co-founder.

When?

September 13th-14th from 10am-6pm.

Where?

Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
Lyon Street,
San Francisco CA 94123

For more information on this event and how to register, please visit here.

Web Geek Jeremiah over at Hitachi Data Systems in Santa Clara is planning a lunch 2.0 expo that will surely be filled with laughs, games, info, and tons of conversations! Everyone is invited from web geek to interns, just be ready for a casual lunch expo.

If you are still undecided, look on flickr to see pictures from previous lunch 2.0 parties. If that doesnt convince you enough, take a look at the companies who will be there:

• Topix.net
• Box.net
• Pandora
• Plaxo
• Podtech
• Riya
• SimplyHired
• Zazzle
• Zooomr
• Zvents

Some of the companies I have not heard of, which is exactly why I will be going! This will be my first lunch 2.0 event, so keep a look out for me…I’ll be wondering around the game area!

What is it?

Lunch 2.0 + Expo for everyone! Tons of people to meet, several web companies, and free food!

When?

September 12, 2006, from 12-2pm
Where?

Hitachi Data Systems, 750 Central Expressway, Santa Clara, CA

This is definitely a milestone in my life, being featured in a book. Ted Demoupolos is set to release his book titled ” What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting: Real-Life Advice from 101 People Who Successfully Leverage the Power of the Blogosphere” in November (pre-orders are now accepted on Amazon.com).

A few months ago, I had a friendly phone conversation with Ted about intern blogging. I had the opportunity to talk about how I have leveraged blogging to enhance my internship experience…all in hope that other intern bloggers will follow my lead.

I’m very excited to see the finished outcome! Especially, since I will be joined by some of the top bloggers in business, including: Dennis McDonald, Robyn Tippins, Debbie Weil, Easton Ellsworth, Mike Sansone , Martin McKeay, Dan Sweet, Tracy Sheridan, Shel Israel, and Jeremiah Owyang.

*patiently waiting for the official book release*