On Tuesday night, MySpace hosted a dinner at Frisson with the International Press Club. With press attending from publications such as the Economist, Stern Magazine, The Financial Times Deutschland, Wirtschaftswoche, Le Nouvel Observateur, Nikkei, Ubergizmo, L’Expansion, Time Magazine and Silicon Valley Watcher, it was a great turnout with top notch press.

President of the club Jean Baptiste of L’Expansion rallied members to hear MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and other top executives discuss international strategy over dinner. The table I sat at discussed everything from underground Japanese music (check out Phil Keys blog Challenging Sushi) to the future of the mobile industry to MySpace’s developer platform.

Towards the end of the night everyone mingled amongst tables in order to speak to new people.

Tom Foremski wrote a post about the dinner too, check it out here.

-Amy

CNET has just published its list of the 300 finalists for the 2008 Webware 100 Awards, and I’m happy to announce that six Spark clients, past and present, have been nominated into five of the ten Webware categories. Finalists include: Blinkx (Video), Farecast (Commerce & Events), Jaman (Video), Last.Fm (Audio), LiveJournal (Social), and Technorati (Search & Reference).

This year, the 300 finalists were chosen by the CNET editors from more than 4,600 Web 2.0 services – up from about 2,000 nominees in 2007. The editors did the dirty work culling through the thousands of sites, and now it’s our turn to decide which services are the Webware 100 winners. User voting begins today a noon on the Webware site and runs until March 31. The winners of the Webware 100 – the top 10 products in the 10 categories – will be announced on April 21.

A very cool addition to the voting process this year – users are now able to cast up to three votes in each category to encourage users to vote not just for obvious front-runners in each category, but for less-trafficked sites as well.

So get out there and exercise your right to vote! You can vote for your favorite company on the Webware site, or click on the links below to vote for the following companies:

Blinkx

Farecast

Jaman

Last.fm

LiveJournal

Technorati

Thanks!
Jacqueline

Last night, Azure Capital Partners hosted a round table at Postrio Restaurant in San Francisco, with no other agenda than to chat with folks about what’s coming up in 2008.

Over cocktails, the Microsoft-Yahoo news was definitely a buzz, with the general and obvious consensus being that the deal will go through. Ciena recently acquired Azure portfolio company WorldWidePackets so there were many congratulations and discussions regarding the investment and the space.

I also caught Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher, (rather he caught me!) with his new Flip camera from the recent MySpace Developers Party. Great branding on MySpace’s part as he kept referring to it as his “MySpace camera!”

Although the table ended up being rectangular, not round, there was great dialogue between everyone present, and opinions for what’ll happen in technology and investing in 2008 were freely flowing. Everyone livened at the chance to project their tech winners for the upcoming year.

I chatted with Janet Rae-Dupree about LiveScribe’s launch at DEMO. She raved about the intelligent writing system which includes an innovative smartpen and dot paper bringing traditional paper to life. With audio recording and translating available, the paper-based platform aims to change the way people capture, use and share information. I might plan a trip to Paris just so I can use the translate function.

Some other great snippits that I caught were Mike Kwatinetz chatting about the evolution of standard e-commerce models, with a shift in focus from CPM “clicks per 1000 visitors” to RPM “revenues per 1000 visitors” using examples like Education.com (which recently launched a new School Finder service at DEMO), EzRez, Rooftop Comedy.

In the open source world, often seen as less sexy than the web, I overheard Cameron Lester was engaged in a great discussion about the open source community. He’s observed a great divide between the open source idealists and those aiming toward monetization.

Every now and then the economic forecast for 2008 came up, but was outshined – with cautious optimism – by the fact that technology is still on the rise and will become a strong focus in the US and global marketplaces. What an exciting time to be a part of the hustle and bustle that is Silicon Valley!

-Jacqueline

We just wrapped up at DEMO 08 in Palm Desert and couldn’t be happier for our two clients at the show, Education.com and Skyfire.

Education.com launched its new School Finder feature, a next generation tool that helps parents explore, compare, and evaluate over 100,000 public, private, and charter schools nationwide, and took home a coveted DEMO God award. The launch of School Finder was covered in the San Jose Mercury News, Webware, PC Magazine and more. The Wall Street Journal’s, Walt Mossberg was overheard saying, “There is nothing more important that what you all are doing!”

Skyfire launched its company and product, a mobile browser for smartphones, which captivated attendees with its speed and PC-like browsing. Skyfire’s launch was covered in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and more. PC World’s Harry McCracken said Skyfire “was spectacular–I felt like weeping with joy when I saw how good PCWorld.com looked on it, and how quickly it loaded.”

But we weren’t only captivated by our own clients. 77 companies presented and though there were certainly a few duds, there were a number of exciting new companies and products that we’ll be watching closely. Despite its undesirable second day afternoon time slot, SiloBreaker, won us over during the search category. The slick site provides a slough of features for the news junkie with a thirst for analytics. Check out the Network feature, it’s brilliant.
It has been a while since we could say we’ve been excited about a pen and paper, but two companies — Leapfrog and LiveScribe — have radically different applications for the same base technology. Leapfrog has a new line of books that use a pen interface to help kids learn to read, while LiveScribe has an audio recording pen that aims to help us adults remember what the heck happened in meetings. This is over simplified, but written words on LiveScribe’s proprietary paper act as tags for audio recorded by the pen. Tap he written word and the pen plays back the corresponding audio.

For our clients, DEMO proved a great launch vehicle this year, but it’s not for everyone. Complex Web services and applications struggled to effectively (and interestingly) showcase their product in the brutal six minute format. That said, it’s a great exercise for any company to learn how to pitch their company or product in six minutes or less.

-Nick and Marni