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Posts Tagged ‘Steve Gillmor’

CrunchUp Starts Off With A Bang Tomorrow With Twitter COO Dick Costolo

Tomorrow’s Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco is going to be a blast. It’s an all day event absolutely filled with the thought and business leaders in the space, as well as a whole slew of newcomers launching new startups.

And we’re starting off with a bang. Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on stage first for thirty minutes of cold war style interrogation by Steve Gillmor and me.

And we want your help.

Let us know in the comments what questions you’d like us to ask. We can’t promise that Costolo will answer those questions, but we can guarantee that we’ll ask them. And if your proposed questions are good enough, you can get into the event. We’ll give up to five passes (the last seats in the house) to anyone with deeply insightful ideas. Just make sure to use your real email.

Don’t limit yourself to Twitter-related stuff, either. If Twitter is willing to give advice to Rupert Murdoch on how to run his newspapers, then absolutely anything goes.

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone tomorrow in person, if not at the event then at the party afterwards. See you there.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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CrunchPad is ’steamrolling along,’ will cost between $300 and $400

We’re not super familiar with the term “steamrolling along” as it applies to device launches, but apparently it’s good news for Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad tablet. Mike dropped the news on a recent episode of Steve Gillmor’s “Gillmor Gang” podcast (like “Gilmore Girls,” but with less inter-generational drama), saying that he’s not sure where the rumor of cost being too high came from, since costs continue to come down. The “$300 to $400″ price range he’s quoting is a bit higher than we’d heard previously, but it still sounds pretty good for a 12-inch touchscreen device. He also made mention of “soft revenue” and “sponsorships” on the device, akin to the revenue Firefox gets from its Google search box, and added that it won’t impact the user experience. Outside of those tidbits Mike says they’re working on making it “perfect,” and that there should be some big news about the device coming shortly. Video is after the break, CrunchPad discussion starts at the 39 minute mark.

[Via UMPCPortal]

Continue reading CrunchPad is ’steamrolling along,’ will cost between $300 and $400

Filed under: Handhelds, Tablet PCs

CrunchPad is ’steamrolling along,’ will cost between $300 and $400 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Announcing The Realtime Board And Our Next CrunchUp on November 20

One of the benefits of covering new technology and startups on a daily basis is that you can see trends as they begin to swell and repeat themselves. One shift we’ve been keeping a very close eye on is the rise of realtime streams, and how they are fundamentally altering the way we communicate and interact with one another.

We are not the only ones who think this is a big deal. Back in July, TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I organized a Realtime Stream CrunchUp. It was the first major realtime conference (there are a bunch of them now), and the response was overwhelming. It attracted 650 people and ended up as a launchpad for about 20 new realtime products, from Seesmic’s Web client to Pubsubhubbub (PuSH) to Brizzly (read more here).

A lot has happened since then: Facebook bought FriendFeed, Twitter raised $100 million, Google Wave launched in private beta. So Steve and I thought it would be a good time for another Realtime CrunchUp. The next one will be an all-day-event on November 20 in San Francisco. I don’t want to give away too many details just yet, but mark your calendars, and we’ll start to release tickets next week.

For our first event we simply wanted to establish that the realtime phenomenon is in fact real and spreading widely beyond just Twitter. There is no question about that now. The next Realtime CrunchUp will take a deeper dive into where these streams are taking us. But here is what I’m really excited about. To help us think through these issues and guide us as we put together the themes, panels and people for our November Realtime CrunchUp, we have assembled a Realtime Board. These are all heavy-hitters making big bets on realtime. The inaugural members of the board are:

Marc Benioff, CEO and founder Salesforce
John Borthwick, founder/investor betaworks
Paul Buchheit, founder FriendFeed
Lili Cheng, GM of FUSE Labs, Microsoft
Ron Conway, angel investor
Chris Cox, VP of Product, Facebook

Borthwick and Conway are the preeminent investors in realtime startups today. Benioff is leading the charge to bring realtime social streams into the enterprise. Cox oversees all products at Facebook and is responsible for its heavy emphasis on the stream. He was also instrumental in the recent $50 million purchase of FriendFeed, which Buchheit co-founded. (Buchheit also started Gmail when he was at Google). Cheng was recently named the general manager of Microsoft’s new Future Social Experiences Lab under chief software archietct Ray Ozzie. And that’s just the Bs and Cs. We are tremendously honored to have such a distinguished group give us their time and energy to help shape the realtime debate.

If you want to launch a realtime product at the CrunchUp or have an eye-opening demo, please contact us at realtime [at] techcrunch [dot] com.

The CrunchUp also gives us a great sponsorship platform for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Stay tuned for more details soon!

(Photo by Marc Salsberry)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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RSS isn’t Dead (Just Ask Executives)

It’s become fashionable among a certain set to declare that RSS is no longer the foremost pipeline for news and information on the Web. Steve Gillmor and innumerable others have said they’ve abandoned their RSS readers in favor of Twitter. Twitter hiring Feedburner’s CEO seemed to compound this trend towards dismissing RSS as old hat (though headlines shouldn’t always be taken literally).

The usual suspects, such as Dave Winer and our own RSS geek, quickly jumped to the defense of really simple syndication. But where was the data to back them up? And what do businesses think about RSS? The McKinsey Global Survey on Web 2.0 in business came out yesterday, and out of the almost 1,700 executives they talked to, 42% said they see a measurable benefit from RSS. That’s 24% more than those who see any benefit from microblogging (i.e. Twitter).

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A big part of the disillusionment techies are feeling with RSS may be misdirected. Gillmor and the boys over at CNET both spent a lot of time talking about the failures of Google Reader to deliver news that matters in a timely fashion. Many of the complaints are problems with Google Reader, not with RSS. Entire businesses have been built on improving the creaky interface of Reader.

Gillmor isn’t the only one to confuse RSS with the apps that deliver it. The definition McKinsey provided to execs was “RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an application that allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other online information.”

As Winer puts it so well, RSS is how the news flows. But both the public Web and enterprises are using RSS, which is embedded in numerous applications, to do more than just news gathering on items that would be Twitter-worthy.

McKinsey Quarterly’s survey was conducted online in June of this year, and garnered 1,695 responses from executives working in a wide range of regions and verticals. The aim of the survey was to ask “about the value they have realized from their Web 2.0 deployments in three main areas: within their organizations; externally, in their relations with customers; and in their dealings with suppliers, partners, and outside experts.”

The specific technologies McKinsey asked about included everything from wikis to mashups and prediction markets. 69% of respondents said they’re seeing measurable gains from these types of technologies both internally and externally.

RSS racked up quite a bit of support from the executives, coming in third after blogs and video sharing sites. While Steve Gillmor and others may have kicked RSS to the curb in favor of Twitter and other tools, people outside the sphere of early adopters are getting a lot of rewards from RSS still.

Discuss

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The Would-Be FFugees Shouldn’t Pack Up And Find A New Home Just Yet

Following Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, a lot of users in that community were up in arms. Basically, everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that FriendFeed, as we knew it, was dead. And with the comments immediately following the deal, the parties on both sides did little to change that line of thinking, basically saying things along the lines of “we’ll see.” Many users were threatening to leave the service immediately, turning them into yes, FFugees.

Well, now that the FriendFeed team is successfully in their new Facebook office and working to get up to speed on their new site, Steve Gillmor got a chance to catch up with FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, and to ask him some of the questions that Mike didn’t touch on too much during his interview with Buchheit last week. Warning, the video below is quite long (over 50 minutes) and free-flowing at points, so I’ll summarize some of the key things said first.

Of note:

• FriendFeed was in between large new internal projects when the Facebook deal came along, so the timing was good for it. That said, they were working on a new feature to allow you to pipe FriendFeed feeds into FriendFeed Groups. While you could import pretty much any feed previously, you couldn’t import an entire FriendFeed feed into another feed. The service was working on that and still plans to launch it, but Buchheit says he wasn’t running point on it, so doesn’t know the timing details.
• Buchheit has a lot of trouble pronouncing PubSubHubbub. He also talks a bit more about their SUP implementation to speed up the gathering of information.
• Buchheit is not aware of a conspiracy on Twitter’s behalf to slow down their feed coming into FriendFeed post-Facebook deal.
• While FriendFeed had switched from Twitter’s XMPP feed to the newer HTTP-based feed a few months ago, Twitter recently requested that they update again to a newer HTTP feed called “Birddog”. Birddog is the name of one of the restricted feeds of Twitter data, you can read more about it here.
• With regard to the old FriendFeed team’s focus right now, Buchheit notes that for the time-being it’s dedicated to the issues Facebook is facing, and learning now Facebook actually works.
• That said, while new FriendFeed development may stop during this transition period, maintenance that needs to get done to FriendFeed will get done still indefinitely.
• Buchheit notes that the FriendFeed team is still using FriendFeed to talk internally about their new projects at Facebook.
• Buchheit notes that Facebook had shown interest in FriendFeed basically since they launched the company in 2007. But FriendFeed was never interested in an offer from them until they actually started talking to people on the Facebook team recently and saw their vision for where they want to take the product.
• He jokes that the whole “has Facebook been copying some of your [FriendFeed's] features” thing helped the FriendFeed team actually see that they were at least interested in the same goals in some regard. (Something which, ahem, I pointed out in my first TechCrunch post.) Buchheit notes that a couple years ago Facebook was just profiles and games, now it’s much more.
• Buchheit likes the idea of FriendFeed clones popping up. Their new API allows you to do a lot of things, and offers much of the functionality of actual FriendFeed, and he hopes people keep building cool services on top of it. The APIs will live on.
• He still believes that long term, all of these status and information streams should be more federated in some way, much like how email is. Of course, Facebook is known now for its lack of openness in that regard, but Buchheit cites Facebook’s unique security issues as being a reason to take it slow. Still, he sees a future where Facebook is much more than just a website, where it’s more of a platform for the web, and he believes that is what Facebook wants to be as well.
• Buchheit notes that the Facebook inbox is not his favorite feature, but that it was born out of the long history of email where people have expectations like subject lines and signatures. (Buchheit was instrumental in creating Gmail for Google.) He notes that direct messages, like the kind used on Twitter and FriendFeed, are much more efficient for messaging now.
• There won’t be a literal dropping in of FriendFeed code to Facebook because that wouldn’t work well.
• On the topic of the fears some FriendFeed users have about still using the service because their data may just disappear if FriendFeed does, Buchheit notes that if anything, the Facebook acquisition has lowered the chances of that happening. He says that in the big picture, it’s so little data, and takes very little to support. And Facebook is a huge, secure company now. (He is, of course, alluding to the fact that FriendFeed was in a much less stable position in the market.)
• Buchheit reiterates again that he is not worried about FriendFeed vanishing. And he believes that some features may start to appear in other forms on Facebook that users will like. And there may be some experimentation with that relatively soon.

Those are many of the key points, but again, if you’d like to watch a nearly hour-long video on this fine Saturday, please be our guest below. Hopefully much of this will further put to ease the minds of would-be FFugees.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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If Jason Calacanis Is Against Apple, Who Can Be For It?
It is the end. Jason “The Animal” Calacanis is thinking about maybe quitting using Apple products, reporting that the company has gone all corporate and mainstream and that Steve has lost his hippie, dippy LSD edge. Look at this language, people:

Years and years after Microsoft’s antitrust headlines, Apple is now the anti-competitive monster that Jobs rallied us against in the infamous 1984 commercial. Steve Jobs is the oppressive man on the jumbotron and the Olympian carrying the hammer is the open-source movement

For folks in the tech industry, this is not a new discussion. Another radical visionary, Steve Gillmor, has been hosting this discussion since Apple’s draconian iTunes updates led smart people to *downgrade* their software. Think about that mind bomb for a second: people downgrading their software to maintain their freedoms–is this a William Gibson novel?

Steve Jobs is on the cusp of devolving from the visionary radical we all love to a sad, old hypocrite and control freak–a sellout of epic proportions.

This is not the thought process of a well man. Perhaps Jason spent too much time next to his Tesla roadster or maybe the stress of running Mahalo has finally gotten to him but someone needs to send Jason an iPod Shuffle STAT. Intra-cardial insertion of the Shuffle, much like the needle in Pulp Fiction, has been known to snap anti-Apple zealots out of their madness.

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