Internet Week New York Archive

I’ve received the following notice from a few people – looks like the NY State Senate will be unveiling a new website and some other online initiatives tomorrow. I plan to attend and will grab whatever information I can. Here’s the full announcement:

Imagine a State where you could find out what your government is up to  with just one click of the mouse.

What if that State were New York That is the goal of the new New York Senate’s website http://NYSenate.gov.

Though we live in the 21st century, most government bodies remain  stuck in the technological dark ages. No longer. Under the leadership  and vision of Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, your New York Senate is  undertaking a series of reforms that will shift the way New York State  government operates. Rules reform was the first step and the goal of 
these reforms is to return government to the people of New York.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last month during NYC"s first Internet Week, Federated Media held their Conversational Marketing Summit. I was scheduled to cover the event but after Dave McClure offered me a speaking opportunity at the same time at Graphing Social Patterns, I had to pass on CMS. Luckily the Federated Media team has posted videos of the entire event and if you are into social media, internet marketing or the "conversation" – the videos are well worth watching. The audio is perfect for an iPod walk or for a train ride.

The videos aren’t embed friendly which is interesting because that’s limiting the conversation. Wouldn’t Federated Media want viewers to spread the videos and thereby share the conversation? John, do the smart thing and make the videos embeddable!

Anyway, there’s 16 hours of free videos from a group of industry experts – get your watch on!

Tonight Mashable held an expo which was really more like a party that had a few companies demo their goods. I liked the setup which had the demos along the outside wall which allowed for a pinch more movement throughout the club. It was great to meet even more CN readers, thanks ya’all! CafeMom wins the award for the best giveaway of 2008 – I won’t tell you what it is now, you will need to wait until I use it in an upcoming video. I will give you one hint… it has a magnet. Here are some photos with my captions (view all photos):

Pete is excited to touch the Magnify.net mascot (w/Steve Rosenbaum of Magnify.net)

Sanford Dickert (pictured in middle) learns that the 3G iPhone will be available next week

Joanne from Rocketboom asks this man which is the better blog: Mashable or CenterNetworks? You know what his answer was!

Brett Petersel of Mashable and his sister (unknown name)

Brian Solis of Future Works PR

Nicole Jordan of RubiconProject wasn’t smiling – I handed her a CN sticker and instantly she started to smile!

Michael Chin of KickApps

Sarah Austin of Pop17 and Andrew Baron of Rocketboom pimp Victor’s Cafe

Alana Taylor pulls a Calacanis and some unknown man makes Mahalo looking hand motion

Leora Zellman shows off what a $30/arse placement would look like

WellcomeMat man gets all the ladies (and no, that’s not iJustine)

Dani Horowitz of DaniWeb smiles with glee after learning she was the 1,000,000 visitor to CN today and won this cool sticker!

I bought Mashable Editor Adam Ostrow a few beers and then he was willing to pimp CN

Earlier today I had the chance to sit down with Rubicon Project co-founder and CEO Frank Addante. Frank is here with his team during Internet Week and will be part of the Mashable Expo on Friday evening. Frank is a serial entrepreneur, having started 5 companies. Two of the companies were acquired and one went the IPO route. Rubicon is very well funded, probably because of Frank’s past successes.

I am very into the online advertising and analytics space so I was very much looking forward to the conversation with Frank. The conversation didn’t disappoint. Sadly the online advertising market as a whole is still stuck in the late 90’s. I rarely see any innovation – and please don’t tell me that Facebook ads show innovation.

Frank explained that Rubicon is focused on "advertising technology innovation." The idea is simple — for publishers, the system offers you a way to make more money with less effort. Instead of managing multiple ad networks and trying to decide which order to route them in, when to show what, and having to deal with all of the paperwork, Rubicon takes care of all of that. The system can give you back many hours of frustration a week to instead use to grow your business. During their beta period they signed up 625 publishers and now have passed 1,000 publishers. He didn’t share actual active publisher numbers. Some of their largest clients include Slide, JibJab and eHarmony.

The Rubicon system is processing 250 million ads/day with 150 million unique users/month passing through their engine.

We discussed their "default killer" technology which is similar to PubMatic’s default optimization service. Frank says they have submitted patents on this techology. The idea is that the system knows when a "default" ad is displayed and can re-route accordingly. If it works, the idea is great as it would remove the need for "chaining" of ad networks.

Rubicon charges publishers 10% of any income generated from the ad networks served through Rubicon. In speaking with a few people today who have used the system, overall the feeling was that the system hasn’t increased their revenue enough to make them want to continue. And Clicky CEO Sean Hammons reported that the system was just a fairy tale back in February.

The truth is that if they are able to sign the largest publishers/applications to use their service, then frankly it won’t matter if small publishers see no value in using Rubicon. Frank wants his service to be beneficial for publishers of all sizes and he noted that Rubicon focuses on the publisher first. This is something we normally don’t see – most focus on the advertiser’s needs and could care less about the publisher.

Other companies in this space include PubMatic and YieldBuild.

The Rubicon Project team is located in Los Angeles and made up of about 50 people, up from 10 when they launched the beta in October 2007. We may test the Rubicon Project this summer and will report back on our findings. If you plan to test any of these new publisher ad maximization services, I’d suggest giving it at least three months before drawing any conclusions. So many factors affect ad revenue and using at least a quarter’s worth of data will provide some level of comfort in whether the selected system will work over the long-term. And to be honest, I’d test all of the services before selecting one and then pick the best one for your particular site or app.

I am glad we are seeing some innovation in the ad management area, now we need to innovate in the actual ad area. I still believe widget advertising will be huge once brands realize that for them, it doesn’t matter where consumers interact with their brands, as long as they do.

This week is Internet Week in NYC and many folks are here from out-of-town pitching their startups and ideas to the NY tech scene. This morning I met up with Phil Libin who is CEO of Evernote. Phil describes Evernote as an "external brain" and they built the system to give you a better memory. Going into this meeting, there were two big questions on my mind. First, why do we want a tool that will scrape content without giving anything back to the content publisher and what’s their take on data portability.

Before I get into my questions, Phil walked me through the application and let me just say that not only is it very slick, but it’s potentially ultra-useful. He showed me the demo he’s been using since their initial launch, in which he shows his flight information which includes lodging receipts and he also took photos of his airline tickets. Evernote reads the text off documents that are clipped into Evernote but also optically recognizes the content from images. So he can take a photo of his travel e-tickets and then refer back to them via a search for the cities, price, brand, etc. The visual search is quite strong, whatever we threw at it, worked.

Phil took a photo using his iPhone of my business card. Within 3 minutes the card was sync’ed between his iPhone, desktop client and Web interface. He was able to search for my name, company name via logo, phone or email and it appeared immediately. Phil says that Evernote has made business cards actually useful now. He takes a photo of every business card and then can reference them back later. Previously he says, he wouldn’t ever look at a business card to find a phone number or email address and this routine has changed for him with Evernote.

One of the things you can do with Evernote is to highlight anything (image, content, pdf, Web page, etc.) and it instantly becomes a "memory" inside of Evernote. My concern with this functionality is what happens to the content producer when the Evernote user moves the content into Evernote and outside of the original content source. For example, once it’s in Evernote, it’s no longer updated. Phil says this is the way they want it as it’s a memory of that moment in time. If it changes or keeps accurate, it’s no longer a memory. Let’s assume you clip some very useful document, perhaps a Japanese-English phrase list into Evernote from xyz.com. You can return to the clipped document hundreds of times without ever visiting the original source who spent time creating the content and monetizes it via CPM-based advertising. My concern is that once you clip something, you have no real reason to ever visit the source again and are basically "stealing" the impressions that the phrase list creator should be receiving.

Phil says that first, the Web site is linked on the Evernote content page. Second, he is committed to working with content publishers in a variety of ways as the tool moves forward to create relationships with publishers. One of my suggestions is to create a publisher control panel in Evernote so that anytime something from CN is clipped, I can add my logo, perhaps a note if that piece of content has been updated since it was clipped, and maybe an ad of some sort if I run ads on my site. Phil was very receptive to this idea and he has some other ideas that will be launching in the next few months. Evernote is the first company I’ve met to actually want to work with content publishers when they scrape content. Most don’t care (I won’t name names but you know who they are).

The last topic we discussed was data portability. If I am sticking potentially thousands of elements into Evernote, what happens if I want to get them out? Phil explained that they have full XML feeds which contain all of your data that you can take at any time. You can also export any of the images or other content. I was a bit shocked by just how much they’ve thought about data portability. In fact, they will be launching something soon (again he swore me to secrecy) that will take this to the next level – should be out in a couple of months.

Phil also shared a variety of upcoming additions to the service which he asked me not to write about yet. The news should be out in about 2-3 weeks. There is an API coming which will allow publishers to pull information out of Evernote and to extend the application.

I was extremely impressed with Phil’s openness to my suggestions about his application and on our discussion about content publishers thoughts on his application. I look forward to watching how he implements many of the tools and ideas he has for Evernote. It’s the action I want to see.

Yesterday I attended a panel discussion on the "Future of Media." As a side note, it would be nice to stop using the word "future" as rarely do these panels ever actually discuss the future. This event was the same, it focused on today. Another note, several people made comments that apparently there are no women in the future of media as the panel was made up of all men. I’ve embedded the video below from GroundReport. The discussion around today’s media was relatively good.

Here are the panelists:

• Patrick Phillips, Moderator, I Want Media
• Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair media columnist
• Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch co-editor
• Kenneth Li, Reuters global media correspondent
• David Carr, New York Times media columnist
• Johnnie L. Roberts, Newsweek senior writer covering media
• Keith J. Kelly, New York Post media reporter

Opening the conversation, the panelists seemed to agree that music is the most hurt industry by online and that print was second. Michael believes that print will be gone within five years. Michael also goes off About.com as the source of traffic for the NY Times (which owns About).

Most of the conversation took place as a battle between Michael and David. Patrick did a poor job in giving equal time to all of the panelists. Not all people will want to talk over other panelists and the moderator’s job is making sure each panelist gets a chance to speak.

Johnnie suggested that Newsweek wants to tap into the blogger audience and that bloggers want to tap into the Newsweek audience. I can only tell you that bloggers already have the Newsweek audience.

Erick explained that while he loves the NY Times, the actual paper rarely gets to a story first, he normally reads it online first somewhere. He suggested that the NY Times strength is in their editorial. He also said that media is about a two-way conversation. Thanks to Erick for the CN shoutout as well!

If you are interested in four guys talking about how print is using online today, watch the video below. If you are looking for where media will be in five or ten years, don’t click play.

Next week (June 3-10) is "Internet Week" here in NYC. Below are the events during the week – I’ve noted the events CN plans to attend in bold.

Tuesday, June 3

• NY:MIEG – topic, "Shifting the Paradigm: Young Women with Cool Jobs Making a Difference in Digital Media and beyond" – 7:30am
• Applied Cryptography and Network Security Conference – all day
• Associated Content’s Ultimate Call for Content Contest – all day
• Columbia Business School New Media panel discussion – 12:30 – no link provided – it’s at the Columbia University School of Business
• Applied Cryptography and Network Security 2008 – Columbia – $500 – all day (tuesday-friday)
• EconAds: Economics of Ad Deals – $300 – 1:30pm – by the PaidContent people – should be good
• Drinks4Startups – Startup Mixer – CN is a media sponsor – 6:00pm-all night
• NY Tech Meetup – same one that happens every month – back at crappy IAC – 7:00pm

Wednesday, June 4

• Internet Marketing Conference – all day – $700
• Sun – Managing Identity – all day
• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: News & Politics – 8:00am
• Advertising 2.0 – full day (wednesday-thursday) – $875
• Future of Media – NYU – 1:00pm – looks good, some big name journalists/bloggers will be speaking
• Live Diggnation – 6:00pm – Brooklyn – you can watch Kevin Rose and the other guy drink beer and talk about what was on Digg
• Financing Your Internet Startup – put on by David Rose and the NY Angels – if you plan on getting funding, you should absolutely attend this event – $10 – 6:00pm
• Forum on Online Political Participation – 6:00pm
• Hatch Match – brings founders and advisors/experts/investors together – 6:00pm
• Red Bricks Media’s Panel on Media and Entertainment – 6:30pm
• Thrillist’s Information Superparty: Web 1.0 Awesomeness to the Maximum Extreme! – 7:00pm (rsvp asap)

Thursday, June 5

• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: Entertainment Culture – 8:00am
• Media Meshing – Mixer – 6:00pm
• Media: Overseas Conversations – panel on media as design – 6:30pm
• Hungry Man – donate your old electronics and join this "old" party – 7:30pm
• Internet and Film Collide: Watch – 7:30pm – at the IFC studios

Friday, June 6

• Time Warner’s Conversations on the Circle: Health – 8:00am
• Mashable’s Exhibit Hall – 6:00pm
• Sosauce Social – new NYC startup – party with the founders – 6:00pm
• NextNY Softball Match – Founders vs. World – 6:15pm

Saturday, June 7

• Wiimbledon 2008 – play Wii Tennis and win prizes – and let me just say, I will kick all of your arses. – all day
• Festival Travel Channel Beer Bash & Screenings – 7:00pm