I visited each website from the list of Demo finalists.
Boy, do they suck. Really, really suck.
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By Tom Foremski - September 7, 2008
I popped in to see Pat Phelan and pals on Sunday evening because of the Techcrunch50 (TC50) conference this week. Pat is one of Ireland's top entrepreneurs and CEO of Cubic Telecom and the MaxRoam service, a disruptive mobile company (new info tomorrow). Pat and a few others have rented a house in San Francisco for the week and had a bit of a house warming with a few dozen people.
In addition to TC50, the DEMO conference also starts start this week. And although DEMO is in San Diego and TC50 is in San Francisco, there are a lot of people in town because of these events, and a lot of chatter about the merits of the two conferences.
Some people say that it's not right that DEMO, which selects presenting companies, as does TechCrunch50, charges $18,000 per company for the opportunity. But if you factor in travel costs, accomodation, and tickets to the conferences for your teams, there is probably little difference between the two when each company's costs are summed up at the end of the week.
My opinion is that there is room for both conferences and this rivalry is just plain old link baiting and tiresome.
Also tiresome is Robert Scoble's attack on the web sites of nearly all the companies presenting at DEMO. He criticized their web site design and thus their marketing.
Startups: your web site sucks
I visited each website from the list of Demo finalists.
Boy, do they suck. Really, really suck.
This is just Robert trying to be controversial and it seems to be backfiring badly. The people I met with yesterday and today were universally disdainful of his approach. He spent much of the weekend trying to put out the fires online.
Scoble’s rant reflects badly on him, not the 72 companies — Alec Saunders SquawkBox
Moving to San Francisco: Gabe Rivera who runs the popular Techmeme news aggregator is now living in San Francisco in the "Dog Patch" neighborhood in the south of the city. He moved up from Menlo Park about three weeks ago. I'm trying to persuade Gabe to host a loft-warming party.
Also new to San Francisco is Bobbie Johnson, from the UK newspaper The Guardian. He is living South of Market and trying to decide on which neighborhood to live in. "Our closest correspondent is in Los Angeles, which is not close enough for covering Silicon Valley," he said.
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Richard, you could very well be right... But it seems to me that the chances of pushing through so many changes in regulations and creating private markets has a small chance of succeeding given the level of mistrust towards Wall Street. We don't want to be completely out of SOX, but we need a SOX that isn't such a burden on young companies. It would go a long way towards improving the IPO flo
Tom - Think you have called this one wrong. The SEC under Cox tried to reform SOX. It was likened to "catching javelins from Senators." The recommendations are actually quite clever - they seem to be advocating choice which is what we used to have before Regulation NMS homogenized the market (the NYSE was an auction market back then and NASDAQ was a dealer market). We need more choices to s
Albert, you make a good point but is the point of SIlicon Valley really about the weather? I live in San Francisco and my district has unremarkable weather. I've never heard anyone tell me they come out here for the weather. Surely people come here for the opportunities, the chance to do something on a global scale.
About the Quarterly Results Show Plunging Print :
is it god or bad when fell 29.6 percent compared to the period a year earlier ?
I cant believe that they mean it very seriously
"sign of an improving economy and that fourth quarter losses should be lower than in the most recent quarter."
I would it call self-caused
:)
On that point of the weather, you wouldn't have to worry about Hawaii because it is inconvenient to live so far away from everything else, so the weather is overshadowed by that negative. And if you've ever lived in florida, you'd know that the weather there is utter crap -- always humid with no seasons. Silicon Valley weather is so much better.
Laura, often the embargo is determined by the print side. For example, the New York Times newspaper first run is published at midnight or 9pm Pacific time. That's a common embargo time.
I ditto Diane's comment. I think the issue is really surrounding the emergence of real-time and even uber-short lead times of bloggers and websites that can break the story much quicker than a print outlet can. What's the protocol there?
I've never been able to understand the contradiction of being smart and independent, and yet somehow completely (not just partially) smitten by the dreams and fantasies conjured up in branding. The latter appears to cancel the former. But I may be wrong.
Ktyson: Yes, exactly. Between the two of us we could come up with way more interesting trends and issues than the man helming the world's largest and most interesting Internet company. What the heck is going on?
Thanks Meredith, some excellent points...
"There is more to be gained from developing an unique editorial stance than there is from pressing the publish button a few minutes earlier than anyone else."
I agree. Sam Whitmore talks a lot about this as well, and the point really speaks to a media organization as a business. In PR, we push our clients to differentiate themselves from their competitors... and media companies really a
What about the spread of 3d environments in more normal work and play spaces online?
What about the growing irrelevance (except as annoyance) of operating systems?
What about the replacement of the os with a universally standardized browser functionality?
What about real AI?
What's Google really thinking? Is this presentation of Schmidt's some sort of disinforma
What a joke. His predictions makes Bill Gate's "The Road Ahead" look like the book of Nostradamus.
I will bet that in 5 years, nobody is going to be talking about twitter. (for many different reasons. I have a feeling it's going to be a lot sooner than 5 years) Facebook will be around, but far far fewer people will be using it to the extent they use it today.
A Chinese equival
Mike Arrington is so arrogant. Everyone I talk to doesn't like that guy. Still Arrington walks around like he's a kingmaker. Someone at the web 2.0 conference told me that he treats people like shit and has burned all his bridges.
I recently heard that his partner Jason Calacanis won't even work with him anymore after being his partner for one year. It was also overheard from one
Kirsten, thanks for the update on the German scene. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see our digital bohos in McDonalds no matter how good the coffee :)
Yes, compete.com is not an accurate count. I know it is very low when I compare it to my server logs. But I'm assuming the *relative spread* between Mashable and TechCrunch is accurate.
I'm suspect of Compete.com having recently compared their traffic data with what was really going on with a client's server logs. So, I went to Quantcast to double check. When I typed in techcrunch.com it got the curious message that the site owner has hidden the data from Quantcast. Interesting...
Kirsten, thanks for the update on the German scene. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see our digital bohos in McDonalds no matter how good the coffee :)
Controlling immigration to save domestic jobs hasn't been working for a long while. You can just export the factories. And now the Internet does a great job in tunneling through any border barriers.
Yes, increasing our job skills is essential. Learning how to learn is the best skill to have. But you have to keep running ahead of technologies that seek to replace human skills and labor
Harry, yes, the Internet is a great if not the greatest competitive lubricant :) But it also means that few businesses are safe from its effects. Yes, you can continue to scramble up the value-add ladder but surely at some point, there are no more rungs. At some point we will reach a stage that not everyone has to be in a productive job for society to do what needs to be done. Do we create jobs
Good points you are making here. In fact I used to do the same when I was still living in Berlin. We call this phenomenon the digital bohemia ;).
Here in the french countryside I have been cut off this for two years. But now Mc Donalds started to sell decent cappuccino in their restaurants. No Mc Café yet but I saw an amazing shift in those couple of weeks. Before the music they played
Love the post. I've long believed that the Internet devalues everything it can touch. The truth is that as you take the friction out of the economic system pricing goes down - and the Internet is the ultimate economic lubricant. Jeff Bezos becomes a billionaire selling books and Borders teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Music retailers are toast and iTunes becomes the #1 retailer of music in
for some parts of your article i share your opinion but i think the infrastructure needs an optimization since... ever? or not? but realy cool that someone is starting to revive this stuff
I would hope that instead of trying to stop jobs from being exported, which would be the wrong thing to focus on as that drives competition and efficiency, that we instead focus on retraining people to do more difficult/higher value jobs.: things that make society more productive. We also must be reminded that a job isn't a right...you have to earn it. Keep upgrading your skills, take classe
Yes, the Internet enables huge amounts of value, I don't dispute that. But it also disrupts large numbers of businesses and jobs also. I'm interested in how our society will deal with that aspect of the Internet. And as for immigration laws, they exist because they protect jobs. What other reason is there? Since that's the case, won't there be some attempt to control the loss of jobs due to the
We are well into that golden age. The list of companies not devalued by the Internet is huge: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, EMC, Cisco, NetApp, Dell, IBM, Oracle, HP, Apple, Salesforce, Facebook, Samsung, eBay and on and on. The list is almost endless. Yeah...the content world is being disrupted, but business models are not guaranteed. They evolve over time, are destoryed, or they thrive. But to sa
The question this surfaces for me is how the onslaught of real-time, narrowcasting (read: one-to-one tweeting) changes the entire embargo paradigm, which is based on the established framework of sequenced broadcasting.
I am quite sure that Google can save newspapers, if they themselves are prepared to save themselves!
Google has created perhaps the largest metaphorical ocean and Facebook et al have created 'Countries' amidst those seas and as sure as Apple and Microsoft dominate operating systems, this landscape is almost certainly irreversible.
The Newspapers have resisted this by trying to c
Yes, there is tremendous value in talented journalists but look at the New York Times and its struggles to monetize the value its journalists create. Also, many of the "new" media sites are just barely making it and their costs of doing business are so much less than the NYTimes. Clearly, there will have to be other ways to pay for the things our society needs, which in this case is a vibrant m
Azeem, I agree with you that the Internet creates huge amounts of value but - we don't all get to share in the value created. Disruption is good. But at some point, not very far from now, we will be able to produce the vast majority of the products and services we need, for a fraction of the cost, and they will be many factors better than what was before. What happens when only, say, 10 per cen
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