Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi is very ambitious. And is not shy to show it. The summit was held at a brand-new futuristic hotel built on top of a Formula-1 race track. Abu Dhabi has established the Abu Dhabi Media Company (with an unlimited fund for investments) and twofour52 to become a media center. Recent investments of ADMC include the very promising Vevo (Hulu for music videos, with Sony Music Entertainment) and Gazillion (which holds the rights to all Marvel Comics characters).

Carriers

Carriers are very afraid. Not from competition or government regulation. They are very afraid that they won’t be able carry all the upcoming heavy bandwidth from mobile web and smartphones with streaming media.

Smart carriers like Korea’s KT sees the solution with dumping off as much load as possible to WiFi, so they will play nice with WiFi. Not so smart ones will see WiFi as the enemy. Even LTE won’t help, as it had collapsed already once in Korea under very heavy load.

Asus

Watch out for Asus. Their ‘Less is More’ philosophy paid off big time for them, as they took over the netbook market. After watching their Chairman Shih at the conference mention MIT’s “Sixth Sense” technology over and over again, I am very excited about the possibility of walking into a Best Buy one day soon and picking up an Asus Sixth Sense device. They are very innovative and will win.

AMD

AMD CEO mentioned they will go for the PC and tablet markets and will completely abandon the mobile market. His words were ‘we will go for the larger screens and will not compete in the small screen market’. With their acquisition of ATI, and NVidia going big for mobile with Tegra 2 and similar chipsets, I don’t know if this focus is a good thing or will end up very bad for them.

News Corporation

Rupert Murdoch’s keynote: Copyright is top priority, creativity needs to be fostered and funded. Middle East is key. Moving some of his international TV stations from Hong Kong to Abu Dhabi, along with his global online advertising unit.

Who will pay for news?

Undecided. Many panels, many speakers, lots of discussion, many ideas, no consensus. All ideas but one will fail. The market will decide which model will win. The only consensus was that the winning business model will come from a startup.

The upcoming Media Industry/ISP battle

There will be a huge battle between the media industry and the ISPs. Media Industry is hell bent on bringing the non-working three-strikes rule to the US from France. In France, it doesn’t work (piracy is up in France after the law). File sharers find other ways ( darknet, freenet, direct-download sites – which can’t be tracked) if bittorrent is tracked.

Media Industry needs a Plan B. Technology will get around their courtroom ambitions. Again this area is ripe for startup innovation and disruption.

Eric Schmidt

Google CEO apparently gave his Barcelona Mobile World Congress speech verbatim. Nevertheless, key take-away was “Think Mobile”. Google engineers now start with a mobile-focused approach to every new app. Google Buzz for Mobile is a fantastic example of this. A thin mobile web front-end coupled with cloud computing is the future, as Mark Suster has been talking about recently. And one last thing, of course Android tablets ARE coming (Chrome OS or Android wasn’t made clear by his comments though).

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Check out my video discussion with Dries below (make sure to watch in HD!). We talk about SXSW, the upcoming Drupal 7 release and the Drupal Gardens product. Drupal Gardens is a service provided by Acquia. Drupal Gardens is basically a hosted Drupal service similar to the Wordpress.com hosted service.

Dries notes that the Drupal 7 release has a focus on usability (they hired usability experts to help make the product stronger). They are also making lots of improvements for developers – including better APIs and better database abstraction layers. The Drupal 7 release is in alpha and they are hoping to get it out in public within the next few months.

Interestingly, AOL now allows you to post status updates to AOL along with the other services you select. AOL Lifestream also allows you to follow places and find updates related to a place. So if you are interested in a certain hotel, bar, etc. you can subscribe to that location and any updates will hit your stream. To make these location pages very valuable, AOL will need to aggregate additional services including Yelp and even Google results (blog, web, news, etc.).

Similar to Google launching Buzz inside of Gmail to gain an instant audience, AOL Lifestream has the same instant audience as the new version of AIM includes the Lifestream product.

I asked Shawn about the comparisons to FriendFeed, his response is worth listening to.

Check out the video demo below.

If you were at the conference, what’s your take? What were the best moments? What could the conference improve on?

It’s the squid! Scott Beale from Laughing Squid


I beat Jeff Pulver at pool – he’s cool.

Gabe Rivera from Techmeme (m), Robert Scoble (l) and some other person I don’t know

Mashable had this neat ground sign outside their party – I enjoyed their party as it combined some games of skill and a general party area.

Here’s Jenae from Girl In Your Shirt – clearly I need to learn how to take photos at night!

The new Austin light rail (technically commuter rail) begins service next week.

Darren described Cliqset as a real-time conversation and aggregation service.  Currently they aggregate content from a variety of services from their users. Comparisons to Friendfeed are included in every Cliqset review although now that Friendfeed development has stopped, Cliqset could take over the tracks and move forward. Darren noted that their goal is to be more user-friendly than Friendfeed was.

Darren noted that the Florida-based Cliqset team is working hard to organize the social web. He also mentioned that they are looking to move to the valley soon. I think this is a smart move – when you are attaching yourself mainly to Twitter and/or Facebook, being closer to these companies is a smart move.

The company recently partnered with Evernote and the Cliqset application is available in a browser, as an Air app and also on the Boxee Box.

In terms of the Cliqset roadmap, Darren noted that they are working on a tighter integration with Twitter. The integration will become visible over the next few months. For the balance of 2010, they are focused on content people are interested in. I assume this means we will see more mashups like the SXSW mashup noted above along with pulling in additional content outside of content provided by Cliqset users.

Darren shared that they have 50,000 users and 85% of those users have created accounts since November 2009. Their overall goal is to create a place that works for both the bigtime sharers like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble while still providing a place that is comfortable for the average Facebook user.

(also note Darren’s awesome Voltron shirt – just like Voltron brought together the cats, Cliqset brings social services together. Darren wouldn’t comment regarding if there is a way to form blazing sword)

I recorded the session that discussed Google App Engine and the video is below. You can also download all of the “code labs” which are simple tutorials on how to use a variety of Google APIs and services including Google App Engine.

While waiting to get into the Mashable party, I caught up with Jason to find out how 99designs is doing a year later. Check out our brief discussion in the video below. The big news out of 99designs is the launch of their logo store. Designers who have won at least one competition on 99designs can then create stock logos and place them in the logo store. Companies and small businesses can quickly select a logo for $99 with non-exclusive rights (or they can pay $300 for exclusive rights) and then the designer will customize the logo with the company name, etc. in 24 hours.

Jason also shared some current stats related to 99designs. He noted that 500-600 projects are uploaded each week, a new design for a contest is uploaded every 7 seconds and they hand out $600,000 a month to the contest winners.

Today I am seeing more “cloud” services that aim to make building websites easier. Most of these tools are web-based and are very easy-to-use. About 18 months ago we covered the launch of SnapPages (which at SXSW launched a new developer service).

Launching at SXSW, Lifeyo is a new website builder that co-founder Betsy calls the, “people’s website builder”. They have lots of themes, easy to use blog tool, ability to add multiple pages, etc. I like how you edit the pages in place and the drag-and-drop elements which requires no code knowledge. You can edit the code directly if you prefer as well. Betsy uses Lifeyo to manage her RazorBlonde blog.

The service is free (including hosting) and they will be offering paid upgrades in the future including the ability to create a custom domain.

With all of these new website builder tools on the market, it’s amazing how many small businesses still have websites that look like they were built in 1995.

Here’s Betsy explaining how Lifeyo works and how they are different than the other website builders on the market. This is my first video uploaded as HD so be sure to select the HD option when viewing. Make sure to watch the part from the two-minute mark as she shows how the editor works – it’s pretty slick.

• Lifestreams, Neuroscience Marketing, Privacy and Content Strategy – Weber Shandwick
• Mojito Internet device video demo – Information Week (my post)
• I Don’t Do SXSWi – Jeremy Pepper (I agree with him)
• Lost in Translation: Nuances of European Social Media – Peter Bihr
• Boyd Calls Out Google and Facebook for Abusing Users’ Privacy – GigaOm
• New Version of Digg Revealed – Mashable

If you aren’t interested in SXSW posts and/or event coverage, Darren has put together a website, Not In Austin, that lists posts from the top tech blogs with no SXSW posts listed.

DO NOT FORGET TO MOVE YOUR CLOCK FORWARD ONE HOUR!

Leave any links you’ve found related to SXSW in the comments and I will add them to the post.

There are multiple companies that provide simple webpage creators (SnapPages and Lifeyo). And lots of musician and music management apps are showing off their wares.

Here are some photos from the expo hall – you can also check out my full SXSW photoset on Flickr.

Microsoft showing off their table touchscreen thingy


EndlessBeauty – Wellness products

Panasonic 3D Truck – now you can watch your tweets in 3D – exciting!

Stack up with UpStack

If you got too many tabs, maybe you are TabbedOut

Rackspace – we don’t always have nodes, but we got lots of water

How long did it take to roll all those t-shirts?

Come sit down, make a database with Oracle – the biggest tv I’ve ever seen

No idea what is going on here

The British are here again

Wow Winamp!

Hello Kitty USB Drives

Learn something new with O’Reilly

These are t-shirts!

You can see their ad below – pretty interesting. They use a Twitter bubble along with names of two popular bloggers: Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb and Robert Scoble from Rackspace. I first noticed the ad because the @marshallk caught my eye.

Instead of pushing the service on the ad, they push two of their popular users. The names may draw people to the ad and then to the site which could mean longer levels of engagement.

• SXSW: Social media marketing for business – Lost Remote
• 12 Tips on Live Blogging & Content Marketing at SXSWi (works for any conference) – Lee Odden
• Tech companies try to stand out at SXSW – Houston Chronicle
• What Google will do in China – RWW
• SXSW photos by Jeffrey Zeldman
• Staying Immune to the Hype Virus at SXSW – Harvard Busines Review

If you aren’t interested in SXSW posts and/or event coverage, Darren has put together a website, Not In Austin, that lists posts from the top tech blogs with no SXSW posts listed.

Leave any links you’ve found related to SXSW in the comments and I will add them to the post.

I decided to select one of two sessions in the Hilton in the first round of sessions, Friday at 2pm. I arrived 30 minutes early and, as you can see from the photos below, the rooms were both packed. A couple of people were wondering if the entire event will be like this. The last couple of years the keynotes were crowded, but the session rooms were sometimes full.

Since SXSW is still allowing people to register, is there even a capacity limit? If there isn’t, there certainly should be.

As I noted in an earlier post, it’s also interesting to watch SXSW become the NASCAR of tech conferences. It seems like they moved the registration to allow for more sponsor areas. So far I’ve seen huge displays for Pepsi and AOL – tradeshow-like displays.

If you are at the event, leave a comment on your take on capacity limits and if you feel like you are riding the 6 train at rush hour trying to move around the convention center and into the sessions.

Initially the group was focused on creating a vibrant entrepreneurship community within the Columbia population.  Now that the group has become increasingly institutionalized in the fabric of the university culture, the organization is now working towards fulfilling its broader community responsibility:  helping to build the startup ecosystem in NYC.

I’m very proud to announce, a major step in that direction, our first NYC-wide startup career fair for job seekers from any university.  We’re also very excited to take this step in conjunction with the NYU Venture Community (founded by Chris Gimbert).

Special thanks to AOL for hosting the event and to the event’s organizers (especially Alex Horn, Dave Whittemore, Mike Brown, Nick Hurley and Chris Gimbert) whom have worked hard to pull this together.

If you’re a startup seeking talent or a student seeking a job this is the event for you.  The details of the event are below. 

NYC Startup Job Fair
The Columbia Venture Community and NYU Venture Community are thrilled to present the first annual NYC Startup Job Fair. The fair will bring students, young alumni and startups together to connect bright, motivated individuals with exciting and innovative New York-based companies. Our hope is that the NYC Startup Fair will foster grassroots awareness for startups throughout campuses across New York City.

 Where: AOL HQ (770 Broadway)
When: Friday, April 9th 2010
What Time: 1:00PM – 4:00PM

The event will be opened to all students and recent graduates; please RSVP if you would like to attend.

If you are a local startup interested in participating in the fair, please fill out the following application and submit it to NYCStartupJobFair@gmail.com.  While we would love to accommodate all startups, we are unfortunately constrained by the size of the venue. Our goal is to have a diverse range of companies and opportunities available for job seekers.

For inquiries, concerns or if you would like to help promote the event on your campus, please email Alex at NYCStartupJobFair@gmail.com.

You can find the website for the event here: nycstartupjobfair.com.

Mark Davis is the author of Get Venture, a column designed to help entrepreneurs raise venture capital. He currently works at DFJ Gotham Ventures, a leading early-stage IT venture capital fund based in NYC.