Weekly Sparkpr Missive
Week Ending March 5, 2010
What Tongues are Wagging About
- iPad Available in US on April 3
- Sources within Apple are claiming that the iPad will be in stores starting March 10 in order to give employees and employees only, plenty of time to get up-to-speed with using the new tablet device, ahead of its official launch.
- Apple iPad may delay transition to SSD, say hard drive makers
- Application companies are just coming out of the woodwork to say they will create apps for the iPad and are busy porting existing mobile apps to the new device.
- Gimmicky apps such as Foursquare, which have proved to be very popular due to their addictive gameplay quality, have been experiencing a backlash in the press for not being useful enough.
- Dave McClure is now in DC with a group of delegates for his StartUp Visa campaign – read more here: VCs Push Startup Visa Act (BusinessWeek) – http://bit.ly/aDhOLu #startupvisa
- ViPR seems to be getting a lot more attention as a technology now that conversation has shifted to next steps for implementation
- Paperless Post is the latest evite / socializer –type service to appear, and suddenly a lot of folks are using it. It’s really cute.
- Klout has reached the US. They feature a list of the UK’s top influencers, as measured by Tweets that you might enjoy checking out
Events:
- Mayfield and First Round teamed up to discover unfunded entrepreneurs in the US and Canada. Their efforts culminated with an event Monday at Orson with 175 attendees. We believe this was a smart move for Mayfield, since First Round seems to get unfair dealflow of many hot nascent startups (Like Angus Davis’ Swipely).
- Process: Kamini (former Sparkster) created a simple form where entrepreneurs had to explain their idea in 10 words or less. 700 entrepreneurs applied and 100 were selected as ‘winners’, invited to the event. Winners won coaching sessions with Mark Pincus, Gina Bianchini, Ross Mayfield, and a few others – six companies were randomly selected by lottery. Of the companies we met with a few stood out:
- Skill Addiction, a King.com competitor based in Syracuse, NY
- A Mobile payment iPhone app for in-store purchases (it’s way cooler than I am describing it)
- Custom Google maps – ZeeMaps
- Technology to help companies like PeoplePerHour wade through myriad consultants and offer the best choices to businesses (RentCycle)
- Notable attendees included:
- Jay Adelson from Digg
- Jared Kopf, who is on his 3rd or 4th startup
- The founders of Foodzie who are working on locally sourced food, and spent a fair amount of time talking with Jonathan Abrams – founder of Friendster who is now focusing his attention on Socializr
- Last Friday’s party hosted by Tim Ferris (author of 4 hour work week) that was on a battle ship used to film parts of the movie Titanic. Paula Abdul was there (random),also @ev, CEO of @zappos, @kevinrose, two founders of paypal (kenny & luke), founders of Stumbleupon & Imeem, Dave Mcclure, Scoble, etc. Also met founders of a startup called Foodzie, Tim is one of their advisors…Definitely a talked/tweeted about party, lots of successful people on one boat!
Press Riffs:
- The Economist Technology Quarterly – Everything from designing oil rigs to sexing chicken embryos http://news.economist.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eCBuO0WfMcu0Mo0GRba0Ew
- The Wall Street Journal is launching “Digits,” a weekday online video series associated with the “Digits” technology blog. Contributors include online technology editor Julia Angwin, personal technology columnist Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD.com co-editor Kara Swisher and MarketWatch multimedia producer Stacey Delo.
- Forbes.com – David F. Carr has been appointed Business Intelligence Columnist at Forbes.com, focusing on information technology issues for small to midsize businesses.
- Wired.com – Daniel Dumas has been appointed Reviews Editor at Wired.com. He will continue to cover gear and gadgets.
Awards:
Upcoming Events/Speaking Opps:
- Sparkpr has 11 clients going to CTIA, March 23-25 in Las Vegas– double the amount from the last CTIA. Seven of these are mobile apps companies. For the first time this year, the show will feature an “Apps World” show floor, much like MWC had this year in Hall 7. Companies like Samsung, Opera, RIM and the global meetup org Mobile Monday will have a presence on the floor. Client GetJar is also purchasing booth space for the first time.
- SXSW Events
- #thePARTY @SXSW (March 16-17, 2010)
- Game Development on Social Platforms at GDC (Wednesday, March 10, 2010)
- Flash Gaming Summit (Monday, March 8, 2010)
- The Official SXSW Interactive Kick-Off, Sponsored by Ustream (Friday, March 12, 2010)
- Social Developer Summit (Tuesday, June 29, 2010)
What Tongues are Wagging About Now:
- SouthWest Airlines Twitter PR Crisis: Kevin Smith, a chubby comedian with 3,000+ Twitter followers caused a huge news event when SouthWest booted him off his plane for “endangering the flight” (euphemism for not fitting into his seat). He tweeted incessantly and most major tv stations picked up the story. SouthWest Air had to issue three formal apologies.
- Tragic Tesla flight crashes, killing three execs and wiping out all power in Palo Alto today. It crashed into a power line and a house that was also a daycare! Nobody on the ground was hurt but everyone is really stunned.
- “Secret London” stunt — Greg Marsh, Tiffany and an army of engineering volunteers pulled off the launch in a single weekend!
- iPad Developers scared to talk: Rumor is that the iPad is not a strong device, and Apple is strong-arming developers even more than usual.
- Sarah Silverman got in a little battle with Chris Anderson over her raunchy TED comments and ultimately Steve Case got into the fray. Funny.
VC and Portfolio Cos
- SXSW MSFT BizSpark Startup Winners listed here
- Mimecast podcast ran on the Cloud Computing Show as part of their announcement outreach
Notes from Mobile World Congress and Barcelona
- MWC is off the charts this year. Apps have arrived, there is a whole hall dedicated to it and the whole mobile advertising community is out in force
- Introduced Waze CEO to Juha Christensen who is on board of VirtualLogix. Meeting lots of app bloggers.
- The INQ booth is just gorgeous! Like an art gallery! They have a “pop shop” which is on the avenues and the full bar/cafe as a stand so two major booths. INQ is also sponsoring the Duran Duran concert
- Symbian was cracked on hard, as usual.
Conferences on our Radar
- PaidContent Conference– watch the livestream here
- CTIA Speakers delayer due to the snow but the lineup was announced today
- Official Pre-GDC conference 3/8 aty Bloodhound hosted by Spark
While most clients understand the value of social media to develop a direct connection with customers and build community around their brand, we do occasionally talk with folks who question the value of social media for their business.
For example, I was recently in a new business meeting with a company selling high-end analytics services to Fortune 500 execs. The VP of sales asserted that “the people we’re trying to reach aren’t on Twitter.” I replied, “that may be true, but the people WE’RE trying to reach are on Twitter.”
The fact is, media and analysts (and many of the rest of us) now get much of our news from social media sources.
A recent survey by Cision and Don Bates at GWU University backs up this claim: they found that an overwhelming majority of reporters and editors now depend on social media sources when researching their stories. Among the journalists surveyed, 89% said they turn to blogs for story research, 65% to social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 52% to microblogging services such as Twitter. The survey also found that 61% use Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia.
Click here to read the full article on MediaPost – many eye-opening stats on where today’s stories really come from.
- Posted by Leyl Master Black (@mktgalchemist)
What Tongues are Wagging About:
- Owen Van Natta ousted at MySpace. Yikes!
- Google Buzz Backlash (plenty of analysis on this – stirred up privacy concerns, some erroneously reporting that they may remove it – lots of confusion!)
- New report: about $1.4 billion will be spent on social network advertising in 2011
- Zynga acquired Serious Business (Sparkpr client)
- TED conference – the question is whether this was as big a deal as usual. Jamie Oliver talk on what people are feeding their kids generated lots of buzz. What do you guys think?
- Facebook, Twitter Grow More than 100% – MarketingVOX story
- Huge snowstorms on East coast
- Stewart Butterflield, Flickr founder, took the wraps of his new project Glitch. It’s a massively multiplayer online game that hits alpha this week and is set to launch before the end of the year. People are calling it the next Farmville. (Disclaimer: Spark client)
- FourSquare adds Conde Nast and Marc Jacob deals to HBO, Time Warner, HBO etc. Sounds like they’re on a roll!
- Google finally announces it bought Aardvark for $50M (even though everyone knew about it months ago)
- Apple App Store breaks 150k apps
VC and Portfolio:
Press Riffs
- Went to the Thrillist party at Bloodhound on Wednesday. They sponsored an open bar and the party was packed, Thrillist is doing really well and expanding to San Diego where they will soon have a newsletter.
- The Economist’s Matthew Bishop launched his book this week titled, “The Road From Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top”. Unfortunately, the launch party was cancelled due to the inclement weather here in New York. Hopefully we’ll have some news whenever it is rescheduled.
Awards
Conferences
February 24, 2010 | Mobile World Congress 2010 Debrief: All the info, none of the travel
Yesterday at TED, The Economist’s Global Correspondent, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, announced the “Ideas Economy” event series that will run throughout 2010 and aims to bring together top thinkers from around the world to discuss and debate the most important ideas of our time. The inaugural event will take place at UC Berkeley on March 23 and 24 and is called “Innovation: Fresh thinking for the ideas economy.”
This first Innovation event has a stellar line-up of tech visionaries from the Valley, including:
- Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder, Acumen Fund
- Ray Kurzweil, Founder, Kurzweil AI
- Andrew Kuper, President, LeapFrog Investments
- Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO
- Ed Catmull, President, Pixar and Disney Animation Studios
- Mark Bernstein, CEO, Xerox PARC
The full program, list of speakers, and details can be found here: http://ideas.economist.com
If you’re interested in expanding or overturning established thinking about what innovation is, where it comes from, and how to make it work, you should definitely consider registering for this conference. Attendees will experience hands-on design, strategy, and problem solving with some of today’s leading industry leaders and innovators. The goal is that folks leave the event with tangible ideas for how to disrupt their industries, and ideas for their next breakthrough product or company.
Let us know if you’re attending and we’ll look for you there!
- Jacqueline
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