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.