Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Friday, May 26, 2006

Stalking the Supernova speakers (part 3 of 3)

Here’s the third and final part of a series of posts that have taken far too long to string together, thanks to the non-stop activity of Supernova 2006’s speakers. My searches are surely inadequate to track the full scope of what these folks have been up to for the month of May, particularly in cases where they’re heads down in projects that haven’t been publicized.

• Selina Lo appeared in a CNBC interview coinciding with her appearance at the Lehman Brothers Worldwide Wirelines and Wireless conference in New York, spoke about the different requirements for WiFi access in a municipal environment, inked a deal to distribute her company’s products at French electronics retail, and a Stevie Award.

• Robert Levitan secured second-round funding of $7 million for his startup, launched a P2P file-transfer service that aims to make it easy to email around large files, was interviewed by Tom Taulli, and was written about by fellow Supernova 2006 speaker Om Malik.

• Saul Klein obsessed over Skype’s buzz lead versus VoIP, promoted the launch of Skypecasting, gave an “eye opening” talk at Said Business School, and publicized the launch of Skype’s translation services.

• Amy Jo Kim was interviewed for the Women in Mobile series, took a break from work to blog about teen subversion of an anti-teen technology, pointed to a Business 2.0 blog post that wonders whether slow game sales might be the result of growth in social applications like MySpace (a point of view in concert with her interesting ETech06 presentation on the same topic), and proffered a few more reasons why mobile game sales are stagnating.

• Rajesh Jain celebrated his fourth year of blogging with a post on how he’s managed to blog so consistently for so long, strings together five posts on entrepreneurship (handling failure, convincing others, his bets, entrepreneurialism as a card game, and the entrepreneur’s life).

• Joichi Ito reflected on the wisdom of Rob Pardo (lead game designer for World of Warcraft), took a field trip to Undercity, and changed his mind about global warming.

• Dan Hunter debunks a flimsy co-branded debit card scheme that Project Entropia’s marketers foisted (mostly successfully) on unquestioning mainstream press, a debunking that had the CEO of the scheming company sending nasty emails to Hunter, some of which he subsequently published.

• Bradley Horowitz warned that “Social networking isn’t a product or, God forbid, a company, but a feature that lives in service of some other mission,” talked talking shoes, and (I presume) is enjoying the fact that the 1% rule he wrote about back in February is picking up steam as a meme.

• Mary Hodder spoke at an OnHollywood panel about consumer generated media.

• Umair Haque blogged about categories of business evil, called LinkedIn the new Friendster, and requested that VCs become more clueful.

• Seth Goldstein‘s been publishing threads (on attention and productivity, on attention and mirror neurons, on the relationship between the attention economy and ADD, on attention-tracking technologies, on attention in the age of Tivo) from his appearance at the ETech06 conference. He’s also been the focus of responses from many corners of the blogosphere for suggesting that strong bloggers don’t link.

• Dan Gillmor answered questions from BBC readers on the ways in which the journalism trade is changing, spoke about the principles of journalism at the annual Hearst New Media Lecture at Columbia University, paid $50 for two minutes of parking in downtown San Francisco, called on the Wall Street Journal to deputize shareholders in the hunt for backdating options grants, and noted the curious lack of mainstream newspaper coverage of Warren Buffet’s bearish remarks on the newspaper business.

• Esther Dyson‘s conversation with Vint Cerf in the Wall Street Journal is still generating links, though it’d be best for everyone if her advice for marketers were widely linked instead.

• Leila Boujnane completed a 50k marathon and chaired a mesh conference session on creating viable Web 2.0 businesses (notes here and here).

• Jeff Belk informed an Investor’s Business Daily story on wireless market potential.

• Jeremy Allaire inked a big deal with Tivo that’ll result in Brightcove distributing online video content to DVRs, keynoted Streaming Media East 2006 (MP3 preview, and poo pooed viral cat videos.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Stalking the Supernova speakers (part 2 of 3)

The middle of the alphabet appears to have more people who write more frequently, if the Supernova speakers list is any indication, because today’s post took twice as long to compile as part 1 thanks to the prolificacy of some of the people on it.

• Robert Scoble admits to the Miami Herald that he spends “almost every minute of the waking day thinking about [his] blog.” No surprise, then, that he’s posted 89 items in the month of May, on subjects ranging from rumored (and now debunked) Windows Vista delays, the gulf between geeks and advertising types, doing a Paddy Brown, HD’s effects on Discovery, his 100-site blogroll, Microsoft marketing mistakes, how his son got booted from Second Life, and how lack of podcasting support will hurt Windows Media 11. And that’s just the stuff he’s been writing. The links back are equally prolific; if I don’t move on he’ll have another five posts up before I’ve finished my one.

• Chris Sacca is speaking (maybe even right this moment) at the Red Herring 2006 conference going on in Monterey, California. He also gives conference organizers some badge layout advice, and spots more evidence of a housing bubble.

• Philip Rosedale attended and keynoted SDForum’s mixed-reality “Virtual Worlds—The Rules of Engagement” conference, won a Wired Rave Award (category: business), fended Second Life from denial-of-service attacks, and cut a check funding a student project designed to transform virtual objects into real ones.

• Greg Richardson‘s Civitium continues to steer the deployment of municipal WiFi (TechConnect) in San Francisco.

• Vivek Ranadivé joined “Chairman’s Committee” of the Computerworld Honors Program, where he’ll help that organization recognize companies that “have leveraged technology for the betterment of society.”

• Sean Park can’t help but point out that we’re another step closer to the fiction of AmazonBay. He also spotlights the underbanked, questions IT spending in the Securities and Investment Industry, and follows developments in the area of weather derivative contracts.

• Beth Simone Noveck‘s been designing a peer-to-peer patent system for the USPTO, and wondering whether the cutting edge of virtual worlds is getting dull.

• Craig Newmark debated “net neutrality” with former White House spokesman Mike McCurry in the Wall Street Journal, is nominated to have his name affixed to UCSD’s sixth (currently nameless) college, agreed to speak at the Innovative Marketing Conference next month, hopes to develop a community journalism initiative, has his eponymous company named “one of the 50 content companies that matter,” is profiled by the Times Online, and is thanked for prohibiting animal sales on behalf of animal shelters and rescue groups across the Bay Area.

• Om Malik writes about building a bullet-proof startup, watches the Vonage IPO, monitors the YouTube clone invasion, dissects the “free calls” initiative from Skype, kenoted Mesh (Canada’s Web 2.0 conference), jumps on the Web 2.0 hand-wringing, and covers the launch of Doppelganger, a virtual world with MySpacey aspirations.

• Rebecca MacKinnon attended We Media Global Forum (summary: bloggers vs. journalists… again), attended Beyond Broadcast 2006, warns us not to trust our phone companies (that whole NSA debacle), and challenged Skype to respond to Chinese censorship accusations (Skype passes the buck).

Tomorrow, I’ll finish up the rest of the confirmed speakers list.

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Stalking the Supernova speakers (part 1 of 3)

Before beginning regular blogging in the lead-up to the conference, I figured I’d get up to speed on what the confirmed speakers for Supernova 2006 are thinking, talking, and writing about in the weeks prior to the conference. I ran the list through a few searches to procure the following clues as to what they’ve been up to in the month of May (publicly, anyway).

• Michael Zyda is quoted in a story about how struggling Ohio towns might benefit from a flattening world in which jobs can be located anywhere, thanks to technology.

• David Weinberger spoke on web taxonomy and the progress of his upcoming book, Everything Is Miscellaneous at last week’s Syndicate conference. He was also quoted in an explainer on how organizations are using collaborative tools, as well as an article on monetizing user-generated content. Of course, he’s been characteristically prolific on his own blog.

• Esme Vos informs coverage of Philadelphia’s evolving plans to set up a muni WiFi network and continues to organize the MuniWireless Silicon Valley Conference (scheduled just prior to Supernova 2006).

• Werner Vogels expounded upon service-oriented architectures, iterative development, and Ph.D. sabbaticals at Amazon in an interview with ACM Queue magazine.
  
  

• Mena Trott participated in a roundtable on the topic of “extending social networks into social search,” transcripts of which are woefully unavailable.

• Jonathan Taplin appeared at the OnHollywood Conference and spoke on the issue of net neutrality, prompting ZDNet bloggers to take a crack at the suggestion that the net neutrality debate will decide who controls TV distribution.

• David Sifry summarizes the state of the blogosphere in a widely linked-to report, talks about the real value in RSS and the big picture of syndication at the Syndicate conference held earlier this month.

• Dan Shine published a special edition of the AMD 50x15 Newsletter for WCIT 2006, where AMD CEO Hector Ruiz spoke.

• Tina Sharkey opened AOL’s CEO (Chief Everything Officer) event honoring the heads of families.

• Jonathan Schwartz sparred with Gartner analysts who asked him to show them the money at the Gartner Symposium he keynoted last week; likened Java to lightbulbs, shipping containers, and rail lines; took McNealy’s spot on “most overpaid CEOs” lists (McNealy’s joke, not mine); and gave Forbes his plan for the next 100 days as new CEO of Sun.

Because the list of confirmed speakers is so long (and because the speakers themselves are so active), my report is out of date by the time I’ve finished Googling just half the people in it. I’m breaking this post up into three, lest I curse myself with the Sisyphean task of writing a never-ending blog post.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Early Registration Discount Ends Friday

There are only a few days left to save $300 or more on registration for Supernova 2006.  If you’re planning to attend, be sure to sign up now for the early registration discount!

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Party and Networking Reception -- May 18 at Mighty in SF

The pre-Supernova 2006 networking party will be at Mighty in San Francisco, on Thursday, May 18, 5:30-9:30pm.

Everyone is welcome; please RSVP by or at:

http://snparty.wetpaint.com

There’s no charge to come, and we’re serving free (hearty!) hors d’oeuvres, thanks to our sponsor, Blish.com.  As usual, we’ll have a fantastic mix of tech industry luminaries, innovative entrepreneurs, and other interesting folks.  It should be a perfect springboard to Supernova next month.