AllThingsD » SXSW

BlogHer to WSJ: Here's the Rest of the Story About Blogging Business Trips

Elisa Camahort Page — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:00:42 +0000

Image copyright llaszlo

Sadly, my co-founders and I didn’t get laid at SXSW this year.

Last month, Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins and I headed to Austin for our eighth annual SXSW sojourn. Our better halves were home watching the kids (or in my case, cat), and we didn’t avail ourselves of the Bang With Friends app, so we went without. I’ll admit that, despite massive peer pressure, we didn’t get drunk, either.

Given the ubiquitous coverage of SXSW as Spring-Break-Meets-Geeks-Gone-Wild, it may surprise you that what we did do this year (as we do every year) is a lot of business. Collectively, we networked with an endless stream of customers and clients and would-be strategic partners, spoke on a panel, gave a social commerce presentation, appeared on Fox Business News, mentored five attendees as part of SXSW’s new official mentorship program and got whisked away to one private dinner at an unmarked social club by a national magazine. We did all this surrounded by massive brand sponsorship presence, carousing attendees and media attention that swings wildly from hailing SXSW as the trend-spotting event of the year to deriding the event as having jumped the shark and being all about the parties and swag.

SXSW and its image may seem so last-month by now, but it’s relevant given the swirl of controversy over Wall Street Journal reporter Katie Rosman’s recent article “The Mommy Business Trip.”

In the article, Katie specifically pursues an angle on women-focused blog conferences as outlets and opportunities for women who are mostly at-home otherwise. According to her write-up, the chardonnay-infused disco just never ends at these events, where every blogger is a mom getting her due: A girlfriend getaway while Daddy feeds Baby forbidden foods.

I spoke to Katie while she was preparing the article, and she was up front about her thesis that there is big business in providing that outlet. We went into the conversation knowing her focus. That didn’t mean that I didn’t do our usual evangelism of the very real and serious business that goes on at every BlogHer event, and year-round as part of the BlogHer Economy. We did because BlogHer is a big and very serious publishing business: Our startup has paid 5,000 premium quality content creators and social media advocates more than $25 million over the last four years. Most are women, but a handful are men. And as the world’s largest event for women in social media, BlogHer is like CES: Deals get done. I cited book deals and businesses born at BlogHer conferences. I mentioned appearances by Martha Stewart, Katie Couric, Soledad O’Brien, Indra Nooyi and President Barack Obama.

Perhaps most importantly, I introduced Katie to Katherine Stone, one of the most serious and substantial examples of bloggers changing the world (via postpartum legislation, among other initiatives aimed at new parents) that we could think of.

But none of that changed Katie’s angle. Then again, since Katie actually attended BlogHer ’11 and moderated a panel, she may be speaking from her own authentic experience:

To say that our community is chapped over Katie Rosman’s article is an understatement — Katherine Stone included. The question is: Why? Because I think we can all agree that wild nightlife is a part of every conference in every industry. This is my fourth career, and I’ve attended hedonistic after-parties in every single industry of which I’ve been a part.

The answer is that the Journal has published the umpteenth article dismissing women who blog — even as we are using our expertise across social media not just to develop our own brands and businesses, but to symbiotically develop some of the hottest new companies in the startup economy (Pinterest, anyone?). MilitaryMoneyChica nails it in her post, “If Mom Bloggers Lean In Any More, They’ll Just Walk All Over Us. Thanks a Lot WSJ.”:

As I said myself on Twitter yesterday morning:

Women who blog have trouble getting proper attention paid to our work and our accomplishments. Not just because we’re mostly women, but because this community of creators and influencers represents an alternative to traditional media and publishers as a source of information and as a growing channel for marketers, the life-blood of media companies. So how, exactly, is it in the best interests of any of the outlets who have merrily mocked and dismissed us over the years to give us the kind of coverage we think we deserve?

It’s hard to combat that double whammy.

That, however, is the unique beauty of our industry. We do not have to be defined by The Wall Street Journal, or any other outlet. We can (and have, over the last 24 hours) tell our own stories about what we get out of attending conferences.

Yes, for some of us conferences are about connection and fun (including karaoke and line-dancing to “All the Single Ladies,” you know who you are) and … stuff. And that’s okay.

For some of us conferences are about learning and skills development. And that’s okay.

For some of us conferences are about networking and business development. And that’s okay.

And some of us live up to our reputation of Multi-Tasking Masters and do all of the above.

Which reminds me: We discussed it, and next year Lisa, Jory and I are definitely going to be hauling our partners to SXSW. If we’re going to be Multi-Tasking Masters at that conference, it appears that we better line up our booty calls now. Noted.

Big Media Flexes Its Muscle, and Justin Timberlake Sells a Lot of Music

Peter Kafka — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:00:56 +0000

From the Big Old Media Still Has Some Legs file: Justin Timberlake sold 968,000 copies of his new album in the last week.

That kind of first-week sales stat used to be no big deal for the music industry, back when people routinely bought music. In 2000, the year sales peaked, Justin Timberlake and the rest of ’N Sync sold more than two million copies of an album in a debut week, and people like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys would put up similar numbers.

Since then, of course, music sales have fallen apart (though the decline may have stopped). Just as important, the idea of a media monoculture — where everyone watches or listens to or reads the same thing — has atomized, courtesy of Facebook and Twitter and 500 channels on TV and an infinite number on YouTube, etc.

So, at a minimum, the success of “20/20” reminds us that, on occasion, lots of people are still interested in the same thing.

Especially if that thing comes out on a big label — Sony’s RCA — and is supported by a promotional blitz that includes a David Fincher-directed video, a “Saturday Night Live” appearance, a week-long stint on “Jimmy Fallon”, a Target campaign, a Bud Light campaign, appearances at Super Bowl and South by Southwest events, etc., a huge push from radio, etc., etc.

Wait a minute, though. What about Alex Day, the YouTube star with no record label and no Big Media promotional support, who beat Justin Timberlake on iTunes?

That was the story James Altucher wrote up on TechCrunch last week. And it’s a pretty great one, in part because Day is a great interview and in part because Altucher is a great writer.

But it’s not exactly true.

There was indeed a point in time where Day ranked ahead of Timberlake on the iTunes U.K. album charts. But the thing about iTunes music charts is that they don’t tell you how many units anyone has sold in aggregate, or even over a week or a day. They just provide a snapshot of how different acts are performing, relative to each other, in something close to real time.

That is — at some point this month, Alex Day was moving more units than Justin Timberlake. For a couple hours. Or maybe even longer.

But not much longer. Timberlake’s album hit the top spot on the U.K. chart within a couple days of its release. I haven’t seen anyone spit out an iTunes sales number for either artist, but so far this year, he’s sold more albums in the U.K. than anyone else.

Which again, isn’t to diminish what Day has done. His unsigned-ness has now become part of his story/marketing, but there’s nothing wrong with maximizing your assets.

And lots of artists who do break on the Web end up signing with a big label anyway, so more power to Day for making it work on his own.

But sometimes it also helps to have a giant label and an even bigger marketing apparatus working on your behalf. Ask Justin Timberlake.

Samsung's Galaxy S4, Cisco's Gender Mea Culpa and YamTrader's SXSW Troll: The AllThingsD Week in Review 3/10/13 -- 3/16/13

Eric Johnson — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

In case you haven’t been hammering the “refresh” button on AllThingsD this week, here’s a sampling of what you may have missed — our Top 10 stories from the week of Mar. 11:

1.) Samsung Galaxy S4: Bigger Display and Bolder Software — But Is It Better Enough?

2.) How Apple Gets All the Good Apps

3.) Telling Employees He Hasn’t “Walked the Talk,” Cisco’s John Chambers Leans In on Women in the Workplace Issue

4.) LinkedIn to Buy Pulse Newsreader for More Than $50M (and here’s what they could do with Pulse)

5.) How One Boring Company Pulled Off the Perfect SXSW Troll

6.) Crowdfunding for a Cause: Nonprofits Can Now Hold Fundraisers on Crowdtilt

7.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

8.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job

9.) Nokia: A Microsoft Surface Phone Could Screw Us

10.) Outbox: Yahoo Mail Head Sharma Leaves Company (Update: And he has now joined Disney’s online parks division)

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

How One Person Captured 10,000 Photos at SXSW

Lauren Goode — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:40:43 +0000

Most of us are hitting our numbers if we produce a handful of sepia-toned Instagrams throughout a conference.

Not Oskar Kalmaru, the Swedish co-founder of the Memoto life-blogging camera. Kalmaru and the company’s CEO, Martin Kallstrom, brought the tiny device with them to Austin and have been taking a photo every 30 seconds since last Thursday.

This wearable square device got its early buzz late last year, when it hit crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The five-megapixel, eight gigabyte camera has a two-day battery, an accelerometer, a compass and built-in GPS.

Memoto raised more than $550,000 through Kickstarter to fund production of the $279 camera. It is currently set to ship at the end of April or early May. It’s being manufactured in Taiwan, after early samples were made in Stockholm.

When I asked Kalmaru today how many SXSW photos he now has stored on his laptop, he said it was around 10,000, which would take up 14 gigabytes of memory (Kalmaru cleared the camera during the festival).

Considering the frequency of shots, plenty of these were off-center, blurry, dark or black photos. Others were cool images of SXSWers crossing Sixth Street in Austin, with the sun bouncing off buildings and crisp blue skies in the background.

That’s where the Memoto software comes in, Kalmaru says: The subscription-based, photo-storage service smartly organizes your photos in a timeline, and chooses the best photo from a moment or an event. Tapping on that photo in the Memoto mobile app will reveal the collective photos from that event, but they’re not all cluttering your feed.

But Memoto could also face a privacy firestorm when the wearable camera does come on the market. One of the use cases Kalmaru gave me for the camera was meeting your significant other for the first time. Most people don’t have a memento or photo from this event; with this camera, you could. A better use case for the camera might be when you lean over to look at your new child for the first time, or when you’re on vacation and seeing a new landscape.

However, it’s hard to imagine a person you’ve just met would be comfortable with their photo being taken every 30 seconds. It could be terribly obtrusive during business meetings. And I’m guessing even friends you know really well would sometimes ask that you ditch the camera.

Kalmaru said Memoto has carefully considered this and has made the camera “pretty visible,” despite its small size. “We didn’t design it like it was some sort of spy camera. That was really important for us,” he said.

He also said the final version of the camera — which currently doesn’t have an on/off button — will turn off when you place the Memoto face down.

Which might be a good thing to do as you’re headed into the bathroom.

Pay Up! Vimeo Adds Rentals, Downloads.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:28:49 +0000

Vimeo is a much smaller video site than YouTube, so it tries to compete in other areas. It tends to emphasize videos that are artier and more ambitious than dogs on skateboards, for instance. And it has very few ads.

Newest selling point: It is giving video owners the ability to sell their work.

There are lots of places to buy or rent videos on the Web, including YouTube, but here Vimeo is trying to stand out in a couple different ways: Its service is designed to let any kind of content owner — not just the big studios — hawk their stuff. And it is giving content owners a bigger cut of each sale.

Most video sites usually let content owners keep 70 percent of each sale, but Vimeo is offering 90 percent. The catch here is that the 90 percent comes after Vimeo handles credit card/PayPal fees, which means the real split will be something less than 90 percent.

So, what’s the real number? That’s going to vary a bit. But I asked Vimeo to sketch out the fees for a hypothetical $4.99 sale: They estimate transaction costs of $0.33 — 6.6 percent, which leaves $4.66 to split. If the owner takes 90 percent of that, it’s $4.19, or 84 percent of the gross.

So here you go, David Carr and friends: If you want to sell or rent the gag reel from your SXSW presentation this weekend, instead of giving it away, you can do it!

Meantime, everyone else should watch this, because it’s pretty great:

Geeks Telling Jokes from Gabe on Vimeo.

Move Over, Grumpy Cat: Honey Badger Comes to SXSW

Lauren Goode — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:15:05 +0000

It’s hard to buy the idea that the Honey Badger meme is still a thing more than two years after the original video went viral on YouTube.

But at a discussion titled “Why We Still Love the Honey Badger,” the industrious little endangered species packed the room and burrowed its way back into the minds of SXSW attendees.

Animal-rights activists can breathe easy, by the way: Unlike Grumpy Cat, the actual Honey Badger wasn’t put on display. “Randall,” whose campily effeminate voice is dubbed over the now-infamous National Geographic footage, showed up instead. He wore dark shades, a plaid jacket and a five-day beard, blending right in with the SXSW crowd (with the exception of that voice).

“Contrary to popular belief, I don’t have Honey Badger with me today,” he said. “I got a call asking if I was bringing one. Like, are you [expletive] out of your mind? Like the TSA would let a honey badger through.”

The conversation was pretty loosely focused, spanning topics from the virality of the video to consumers’ video-viewing habits to Randall’s ambitions to narrate more than just animal videos.

Randall, who attended (and later dropped out of) an exotic-animal-management training program, said his original intent with the Honey Badger was both to be funny and bring awareness to the animal.

The first narration, he said, “was dry as toast on a hot summer’s day in Austin. You couldn’t even butter it. I said, I have to do something about this.”

“I actually got scared of the badger while I was doing it,” he continued. “I love animals but, like, nothing can really stop this animal. The fact is, this thing eats a cobra, passes out and then bounces back up. Like they’re flapjacks.”

Despite the meme’s immense popularity, however, Randall never made any money from the YouTube video, he said, due to the fact that Nat Geo owned the rights to the footage. “I care more about working with animals than I do about making nine cents a click,” he said.

Still, for Randall, animal videos on YouTube are where it’s at. “People like animal videos. No one ever says, ‘Have you seen that video of grandma going into the retirement home? She didn’t want to go. It was so funny.’”

Shaq's Favorite Things at SXSW, and Why He Thinks Google Shoes Could Have Helped His Game (Video)

Lauren Goode — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 18:32:01 +0000

Former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal was an early investor in Twitter, and has amassed more than 6.8 million followers on the service.

Now, in collaboration with video-snippet-sharing site Tout, he’s looking for the next big thing in tech at SXSW.

I had the chance to sit down with Shaq — literally sit down, as my other option was to stand on a crate — in Austin yesterday, and got to chat with him about all things tech. Some interesting tidbits: He has never used an Android phone, he has spent $5,000 on apps in a single month, and his favorite home gadget isn’t that different from what non-NBA players might use. Also: He thinks Google Shoes could have helped his game.

Check out the video below for more:

[ See post to watch video ]

Mission to Mars

Voices — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 06:59:22 +0000

– Elon Musk, speaking at South by Southwest about his desire to travel to Mars

Still No Home for Firefox on iOS

Beth Callaghan — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:01:39 +0000

Mozilla has no plans to resume development on Firefox for iOS, according to Jay Sullivan, vice president of product for the company. Speaking on a mobile browser wars panel moderated by CNET’s Seth Rosenblatt at South by Southwest Interactive yesterday, Sullivan said that his company can’t build the browser it wants to for the platform, and won’t try while iOS users are forced to use its own Safari as the default browser. Mozilla pulled its Firefox Home from the App Store in September, and has more than a dozen carriers lined up for its Firefox OS, though the U.S. likely won’t see any of those devices until 2014.

Ride-Sharing Service Lyft Gets Literal at SXSW, With Piggyback Rides

Lauren Goode — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:16:46 +0000

Uber, SideCar, Getaround and Lyft: These are just a few of the services you may have heard by now, all of them attempting to disrupt the transportation industry with car summoning through mobile apps or peer-to-peer ride-sharing options.

Many of them, of course, have also faced cease-and-desist orders or other obstacles from local governments that have expressed concern about liability — and legality.

So, Lyft, probably best known for the giant, hot-pink mustache emblem that drivers slap on their cars, has come up with a SXSW stunt that gets them a little bit of attention without getting into legal hot water in Austin: Free Lyft piggyback rides.

The startup has dispatched around 20 ride-givers — some of them semiprofessional rugby players — to give conference-goers a literal lift around the town.

If you’re not lucky enough to run into one of these pink-mustache-wearing men on the street, as I did today, you can request a Lyft piggyback ride as a temporary option from within the Lyft mobile app. (The full version of the Lyft mobile app, which connects you with real-people drivers willing to use their own cars to give rides, is currently only operating in San Francisco and Los Angeles.)

John Zimmer, co-founder and COO of Zimride, the company behind Lyft, says the piggyback rides were mostly just about having a little bit of fun in Texas.

Lyft isn’t the only one getting creative in Austin, where taxis, pedicabs, and limousines are tightly regulated. SideCar is making all rides free during the fest, and Uber, which primarily hooks users up with town car service, is offering pedicab rides around the city.

Automattic's Matt Mullenweg on the Importance of Working Remotely

Mike Isaac — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 21:38:28 +0000

As we’ve seen unfold over the past two weeks, not everyone is into Marissa Mayer’s workplace ideas.

That includes Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, the company behind the giant blog-hosting platform WordPress.com. Unlike Mayer’s recent mandate “asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices,” most of Mullenweg’s employees work from home, spread out all over the world.

“130 of Automattic’s 150 employees work outside of our San Francisco headquarters,” Mullenweg said in conversation with Kara Swisher at the South by Southwest conference on Saturday. “Why are so many companies stuck in this factory model of working?”

To be fair, Mullenweg’s company is much smaller than Yahoo, which employs thousands in different offices around the world. And he readily admitted, “Are there some things you can’t do remotely? Sure.”

But Mayer isn’t being as flexible as she could, Mullenweg said. The rule was company-wide, and makes it much more difficult for many who may now face time-consuming commutes or reduced time spent at home with their families. The issue struck a national chord, going viral across the Web in a matter of days.

Mullenweg’s approach: “We focus on two things when hiring,” he said. “First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.”

Words sometimes easier said than done. We’ll see if that scales as you keep hiring, Matt.

Ready, Set, Collaboratively Design a 3-D Printed Rocket

Liz Gannes — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:00:33 +0000

Crowdsourced space technology company DIYRockets, 3-D design collaboration platform Sunglass, and 3-D printing marketplace Shapeways are working together to get people excited about something that’s inherently pretty exciting: 3-D printed rocket engines.

The three are kicking off a contest today with $10,000 in prizes, plus free printing, for the best open source designs, to be judged by inventor Dean Kamen and others.

This will be announced tomorrow in Austin at SXSW. There’s actually a surprising amount of content about space exploration at SXSW this year, including a keynote by Elon Musk, and at least six sessions about NASA.

This Year at SXSW, the Next Killer App … Maybe Isn’t

Lauren Goode — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:34:30 +0000

In recent years, the annual SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, has become a hive for new platforms, with early tech adopters buzzing about the latest and greatest apps, sending some of them into flight.

But this year, the next big app is … well, it isn’t clear. After asking nearly a dozen of the hippest, smartest, earliest-adopting people I know in tech, media and digital advertising, the consensus is:

No idea.

What — no new killer app?

Of course, SXSW will still go on and will probably even be fun, even if there isn’t a new app that “wins” the event. And here’s why:

SXSW Interactive was never really a launchpad for apps. With the exception of Foursquare — which the social location company hustled to finish in the few weeks leading up to the 2009 conference — most noteworthy apps haven’t actually launched during the conference.

Twitter didn’t, despite popular mythology, although its numbers did swell during the 2007 SXSW conference. And some articles that year ventured to say that SXSW was a “tipping point” for the newish microblogging site. But the first tweet? It came a year before that.

Also not new-kids-on-the-block were the messaging apps that were all the rage in 2011. GroupMe, now owned by Microsoft, launched the August before; Beluga had been around long enough to get acquired by Facebook just before SXSW that year.

The hype machine is broken. Last year’s pre-conference predictions were over the top. Remember Glancee, Highlight and Sonar? These were hot. They were changing the world! In theory, these apps were taking geolocation services to the next level. Some call this SoLoMo. Others call it MoLoSo. (I get these confused and it hurts my head.)

In any case, users quickly ran into battery issues with their smartphones, since these types of apps constantly track and ping users when other app-happy friends are nearby. And by the end of that week, AllThingsD writer Liz Gannes reported, a good SXSW icebreaker question was asking which apps people had deleted during the event, not downloaded.

Highlight creator Paul Davison said the company never sought out that kind of attention. “We had a lot of visibility after SXSW, which was great,” he says. “But after coming back, we said, ‘Okay, we really need to spend some time building out infrastructure and optimizing battery life. We need to make this a long-term product, not a festival product.’” Highlight has just released a new version of the app, hoping to take a second stab at success at SXSW this year.

There are too many apps. App fatigue isn’t a new theory, but it’s one I’ve heard mentioned a lot more in recent days. “I think it might be more difficult for newer companies to launch things there now,” says Tristan Walker, entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, who was part of the early days of Foursquare. “There are only so many new apps you want to download, and you’re not going to benefit from having 16 of them on your smartphone.”

Venture capitalist Bill Tai echoed this sentiment: “There are so many apps, the barrier is harder to break through.” But Tai, who has backed a brand-new app called Posse that he hopes will gain traction at SXSW, added, “I do think some app makers still see it as a good place to launch.”

Exciting hardware is stealing some attention away from apps. It’s hard to imagine SXSW becoming the next CES-like miasma of gizmos and gadgetry, but the New York Times’ Jenna Wortham highlights a hardware trend in her piece this week, with keynotes coming from Tesla’s Elon Musk and the founder and creator of the Ouya gaming console, as well as plenty of 3-D printing sessions to go around.

SXSW isn’t just about apps. It’s about the networking … at the parties. And the non-digital, real, live, human-to-human connections you’ll make … at the parties. And the interesting keynotes and panel sessions … followed by parties. So, if you’re looking to get value out of this year’s fest, you might want to consider this piece of advice, courtesy of Ad Age: Stop looking for the next big app.

Also: Get to a party.

(Feature image: Rondo Estrello / Flickr.)

Artificial Intelligence, Al Gore, Modern Blogging and More: Where to Find ATD at SXSW

Lauren Goode — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:40:47 +0000

Time again for app-flicking, party-hopping, BBQ-eating and, somewhere in between all that, panel-picking.

The interactive portion of the SXSW festival — known as “South By” to hip conference goers — kicks off Friday in Austin, Texas.

And speaking of panels, members of AllThingsD will be moderating a few key ones throughout the fest that you won’t want to miss. (We promise not to call you out if we see you hungover and sleeping in the back row. Just come.)

First off, nobody knows more about blogging than the boss, Kara Swisher, who has literally made liveblogging Yahoo’s earnings calls an award-winning venture. So on Saturday, March 9, at 12:30 pm local time, she’ll be interviewing Mr. WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, about the current state of blogging. More details here.

Later that afternoon, AllThingsD’s other boss, Walt Mossberg, will interview former vice president and New York Times bestselling author Al Gore about his new book, “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change” — described as “a frank and clear-eyed assessment of the emerging forces that are reshaping our world.” That panel takes place at 3:30 pm local time.

Early risers, reporters who snoop and sources who snitch should add Peter Kafka’s panel to the calendar: At 9:30 am Saturday, he’ll be joined by panelists Ed Lee of Bloomberg News, Greg Galant of MuckRack and Joe Ciarallo of Salesforce.com (formerly of Buddy Media) to discuss the shifting dynamics between reporter and source in the age of social media. Here are the details on Peter’s panel.

And on Monday, March 11, I’ll be moderating a panel on artificial intelligence — think robots, “smart” calendars and natural-language search apps — with Dror Oren, executive director at SRI International; Raj Singh, founder of Tempo AI; and Nadav Gur, co-founder and CEO of Desti. That panel takes place at 3:30 pm.

And, of course, if you see us elsewhere — at the Mailbox/Dropbox/Highlight cocktail hour Sunday, at the Path/Spotify/A-Grade party that same night, at the Funny or Die + Team Coco’s Comedy Climax Party on Monday, or just hanging around the GroupMe Grill — come say hello.

(Feature art courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.)

Hangtime Launches Event-Finding App to "Map the Social Future"

Liz Gannes — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:53:38 +0000

Karl Jacob has founded and led six companies, including Dimension X (acquired by Microsoft) and Keen (acquired by AT&T). He’s a serial serial entrepreneur by now.

At this point, there’s a pretty solid option to lean back and enjoy your yacht and advise companies like Facebook and Path in the earliest days (which he did). But no, Jacob’s next startup is called Hangtime, and it launches today. It’s a mobile app for finding events.

“The nice thing about having been around the block is you start focusing on bigger trends,” is how Jacob put it.

The big idea at Hangtime is “mapping the social future,” Jacob said. So the app (iPhone, Facebook and mobile Web now; Android coming) crunches data (right now, from Facebook) about what events might be interesting to a particular user. The idea is that RSVPs are too structured, and check-ins come too late to join in. On Hangtime, users can privately tell their friends they are “interested in” an event, which Jacob said feels more flexible and natural.

As you might have guessed by now, Hangtime is launching in time for SXSW this weekend, and it’s already loaded with 1,700 events during the festival in Austin.

Karl Jacob

There are a ton of ways to find events, so I’m a bit skeptical that this one will stand out. I will say that it has some neat design elements — for instance, a header bar in the app that depicts the changing position of the sun from day to night to give an ambient signal of when each event starts, as a user scrolls through a big list.

Hangtime has raised $3.5 million in two seed rounds from a lengthy list of investors: 500 Startups, Charles River Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Freestyle Capital, Greylock, Intel Capital, Interwest, Ignition Venture Partners, Science Inc., SV Angel, Tugboat Ventures and Webb Investment Network, and angel investors Mark Goldstein, Tim Kendall, Steven Lurie, Dave Morin, Matt Ocko, Mark and Ali Pincus, Ben Smith and Michael Tanne.

At SXSW It’s All About How You Arrive, Startups Hope

Lizette Chapman — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:12:31 +0000

At South by Southwest it’s not just about mingling with hoodie-sporting digerati and beta testing their latest apps, it’s equally important how you arrive. At least that’s what startups like Silvercar, SideCar and Tagged are hoping.

Banking on transportation as the great equalizer of the week-long music, film and technology conference that starts next week in Austin, Texas–namely, the need for every attendee to get from the airport to the conference and dozens of venues–a handful of startups are offering new services or extended existing ones in their quest to woo early adopters as users, and (they hope), ambassadors.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

SideCar Buys an Austin Competitor -- Let the SXSW Ride-Sharing Wars Commence

Liz Gannes — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:30:19 +0000

Both of San Francisco’s leading on-demand ride-sharing startups, Lyft and SideCar, are setting off to conquer cities across the country this year by signing up swarms of local drivers to run a sort of alternative cab service that hooks up riders using their smartphone apps.

Today, SideCar is making its next outpost clear, with the announcement that it is acquiring the assets of another, similar, company called Heyride, which is based in Austin, Texas, and had only launched there so far.

The deal is well timed for SXSW, the annual Austin-based conference/festival/boondoggle that has become an early-adopter petri dish and PR machine for mobile apps.

Ride-sharing in particular seems a perfect fit for overcrowded Austin in early March, where on-the-fly logistics are a constant issue.

Back home in California, Lyft settled its differences with local authorities late last month — as did Uber, which said it was thinking of adding ride-sharing to its existing licensed driver system.

SideCar, however, didn’t settle. SideCar CEO Sunil Paul declined to elaborate on what exactly happened, but said his company was unwilling to concede to the ride-share terms the California Public Utilities Commission set for the other two startups.

SideCar plans to launch in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Austin this week, and soon in Chicago, New York, Boston and Washington, D.C.

Lyft and SideCar (and Uber even more so) have significant venture backing, despite their ongoing regulatory troubles. SideCar recently raised $10 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Google Ventures, while Lyft/Zimride raised $15 million led by Founders Fund.

Napster, the Movie

Peter Kafka — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 00:18:58 +0000

Thank you, Techmeme, for pointing out that one of the films debuting at South by Southwest in a couple months is “Downloaded,” a documentary on Napster. Here’s the trailer:

Based on that clip, at least, this looks like a pretty straightforward retelling of the tale, made with the cooperation of co-founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker (recall that the two of them did a whole lot of press last spring before they launched Airtime).

But even if the movie turns out be a down-the-middle documentary, it’s probably still worth watching. In 2013, it may be hard to recall just how revolutionary Napster was, how badly it decimated the music industry, and how deeply its ethos has saturated the Web, even though the service/business itself is long gone.

Bonus points: Archival footage of Parker with frosted hair, new MOG/Project Daisy CEO Ian Rogers with long hair, and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich explaining his lawsuit against Parker and company at a news conference. (Last month Ulrich and Parker announced that they had become business partners.)

Extra bonus point: The movie is directed by Alex Winter, better known to many of us as “the guy who was not Keanu Reeves in ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.’”

"Something Ventured" Set to Air in January: The Risky Dudes Who Wrote the Checks That Made Silicon Valley

Kara Swisher — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 14:17:58 +0000

“Something Ventured: Risk, Reward, and the Original Venture Capitalists” is a documentary that celebrates — pretty much without a lot of criticism — the very first venture capitalists who were behind the tech giants launching companies like Apple, Intel, Cisco, Atari and Genentech.

Starting in January, “Something Ventured” is being aired on public television stations nationwide.

The film — which premiered at SXSW last year — focuses on the key VCs, including investor Arthur Rock, Kleiner Perkins’ Tom Perkins, Sequoia Capital’s Don Valentine and New Enterprise Associate’s Dick Kramlich. It’s full of great stories from them and others, such as remembering the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s proclivity to not worry too much about showering.

And there are some tasty quotes, too:

Perkins: “I don’t know how to write a business plan. I can only tell you how we read them. We start at the back, and if the numbers are big, we look at the front to see what kind of business it is.”

Rock: “Steve Jobs is a national treasure. He is so visionary, and so bright. I had to fire him, though.”

Valentine: “I’m not interested in entrepreneurs who will do it our way. I’m not interested in entrepreneurs who think there’s a dress code. I’m interested in entrepreneurs who have a vision of doing something consequential –preferably that becomes big.”

And from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, where Jobs once worked: “They (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) offered a third of Apple Computer for $50,000, and I said, ‘Gee, I don’t think so.’ I could have owned a third of Apple Computer for $50,000. Big mistake.”

Indeed.

Here’s the trailer.

First-Episode Clips From "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley" -- Dave McClure Is "Disrespectful" (For Doing His Job)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:45:54 +0000

Here are two clips from the first episode that Bravo has put up about its new and controversial-before-it’s-aired reality television show, “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley.”

The cable program chronicles the ups and downs of a group of young entrepreneurs in tech, and some have decried it from simply seeing the promo sizzle reel that featured lots of partying and pool-hanging.

No frolicking here in a short clip, as super angel investor Dave McClure looks over a pitch deck of brother-and-sister team Ben and Hermione Way for their health-and-lifestyle start-up, apparently called Ignite.

With that reality show rut-roh music playing in the background, Ben inexplicably says he thinks McClure was “slightly disrespectful, him going through the whole thing and making his own judgments.”

Which is, of course, an investor’s job, going all Judge Judy on entrepreneurs. And, in my experience, McClure was awfully polite about grabbing the deck.

And alls I can say is that Ben is very lucky he managed to avoid bringing his pitch deck near me.

There’s also one that seems a lot more reality-show, with Hermione arguing over a botched event with another person on the show, Sarah Austin. There is mention of “making out” with Ben and SXSW.

In any case, the show looks interesting enough to take a gander when it airs on Monday, November 5 at 10 pm.

Here are the video clips:

Great App-pectations: When Innovation Leapfrogs Phone Capabilities

Liz Gannes — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:00:23 +0000

As comic Louis C.K. would say about technology: Everything is amazing and nobody is happy.

Nowhere is that more true than in the world of smartphone applications, as app developers push the possibilities of how to use our smartphones’ location awareness and reach well beyond what our mobile data plans and battery lives seem to be able to support, especially in densely populated spaces.

It’s kind of sad, because for a while the release of new devices has set off rushes of creativity, with developers using touchscreens and accelerometers and other sensors in ways that seemed to make science fiction real.

With every available power outlet in use, a popular FedEx promotion brought a "human charging station" to the street. Thankfully it didn't enlist homeless people.

We see great stuff like phone cameras being used for everything from detecting heart rates to translating paper menus from one language to another. We watch serendipitous location-sharing tools go from typing in an address five years ago (Dodgeball), to linking with a crowdsourced database three years ago (Foursquare), to ambient awareness this year (Highlight).

The disconnect between app dreams and phone reality was particularly evident at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin this past week, where official attendance hit nearly 25,000, up 27 percent from last year. Combined with everyone else in the hip Texas town, including many SXSW partiers without passes, that made for phone network overload.

And when our phones are constantly searching for a signal or tracking our locations, their battery life tends to suck. Literally.

As most did, I had a hard time getting mobile data during all five days I was in Austin, with ongoing weak 3G service on my iPhone 4 on the AT&T network. AT&T wouldn’t give me a comment on its SXSW performance beyond a map of its event service plan, including 220 Wi-Fi hotspots and a couple of “COW” (cellular on wheels) trucks.

Other outlets also reported that bad data access at SXSW 2012 was a problem for many people. (Although not everyone and not every device had issues: Walt Mossberg was pulling down 18 Mbps back in his hotel room on his new Verizon LTE iPad that he was testing.)

Here’s the problem: SXSW has become a place where app developers come in the hopes that they can persuade a dense, social audience of early adopters to try their shiny new way to find what’s going on and where. Hundreds of start-ups lust after the idea of “winning SXSW,” following past examples of Twitter and Foursquare, and, to a lesser extent, GroupMe.

There was much debate, egged on by tech bloggers, about who would be crowned the SXSW winner this year. I think the consensus was that nobody won, although Mophie battery packs for the iPhone and sponsors who brought charging stations should get an honorable mention.

But I’d argue that one of the reasons it was impossible to “win” in 2012 was that these location and communication apps were hindered by poor service and battery life impact.

Foiled again! My repeated attempts to check in on Foursquare distracted me from yet another scintillating panel.

Also, as aged as they are in comparison to the newborn location vampires, Foursquare and Twitter still dominate SXSW. There were 755,373 total tweets with the keyword or hashtag “SXSW” during the Interactive portion of the festival, according to PeopleBrowsr. At one point, I had the 3,702nd concurrent Foursquare check-in at the Austin Convention Center.

“Foursquare’s part of the fabric of SXSW,” said Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley in an onstage interview at the event. I think he’s right.

But then Crowley took it a step further: “Foursquare in Austin at SXSW is like Foursquare of the future. It’s going to be everywhere.”

If that’s the case — and I’m not sure it is — I don’t think the future sounds so great. Because using Foursquare at SXSW was actually a total chafe. It often took four tries to send my Foursquare check-ins to the server. The error messages were constant.

More daring apps like the new Highlight — which constantly tracks users and pings them when they are near people with common friends and interests — had even more problems. One morning when I loaded up Highlight, the app told me that I had been in close proximity to 10 people the night before between 1 am and 2:30 am, over on the other side of the river from where I was staying.

Boring as I am, I was home in bed by then.

When I asked Highlight co-founder Paul Davison why the app messed up, he said Highlight had been experimenting with using mobile cell towers to locate users, because GPS has such an impact on their batteries. The cell tower had apparently retained my location while I was sleeping across town, not having opened the app and sent it an updated location.

(Although, to be honest, I don’t really want to share where I am while I’m sleeping — which is a very different concern.)

Thus, I found that a good SXSW icebreaker question was: “So, have you uninstalled Highlight yet?” In an unscientific but anecdotally significant number of cases, the answer was yes. Why? Almost always: Battery drain.

Davison said Highlight — which only launched in January — is working to improve accuracy and decrease battery impact. He added that he’s hopeful people will overlook these issues.

“For many, the ability to see profiles of the people standing nearby is so new and exciting that they want to try it out now, even if the location precision and battery life is not yet where they’d want it to be,” Davison said.

Foursquare’s response was similarly optimistic. As far as service goes, “things have gotten much better [at SXSW] in the last couple of years and are continuing to improve,” said a spokeswoman. “And battery life should be much better next year with the iPhone 5, iPad HD and new Android handsets launching.”

Everything might be exciting, but if your phone’s dead, you’re not using it. That makes me and many others unhappy.

Because while I’m sure better and more expensive services and devices will be on the market next year, I’m also sure SXSW 2013 will be even more jam-packed.

Jon Stewart Solves the Homeless-Hotspot Debate

Peter Kafka — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:59:44 +0000

Turning homeless people into human hotspots at SXSW was a terrible idea. But one of the bizarre features of our media culture is that some people feel compelled to argue otherwise. Luckily, our media culture also features Jon Stewart.

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Party On … And On … And On, Geek (But Not Much Else): A Newbie Reflects on SXSW

Ina Fried — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:00:50 +0000

Never having been to South by Southwest, I really didn’t know what to expect after I landed in Austin.

As I take off on a plane away from Austin, I have a few observations, many of which seemed to be shared by others I chatted with.

To be clear, I’m referring to the interactive piece of the event. I have far too poor taste in music and movies to pass judgment on those portions, nor did I stay for those parts.

The event is an incredible party.

SXSW Interactive is actually a conference surrounded by many, many small (and not-so-small) parties. But the parties are so numerous and so close to the conference that it is more like one big party than it is a discrete set of events.

It’s mostly a marketing and PR thing.

Marketing and branding are a big part of any event, but they seem to be the raison d’etre for this conference.

South by Southwest is a great place to try to identify your company as hip and edgy, and there are plenty of the kinds of folks in attendance who help decide those sorts of things. It’s also a good barometer for which companies have lots of money to throw around. (Full disclosure: AllThingsD hosted two parties, one for the launch of its new All Things Reviewed site — which was very lovely, if we do say so ourselves.)

It’s not a big place for news.

Folks looking for lots of interesting headlines were disappointed. As far as big trends, the closest thing I saw was the need for a breakthrough in battery life for all our digital gear.

While SXSW has been a place where apps and services have taken off in years past, most of those have been apps and services that help aid the sort of schmoozing that is the best part of the Austin event.

There were good discussions to be had, both onstage and off. I had good chats with people I knew and many people I didn’t.

It’s a terrible place for sleep.

Largely because of the fact that it is one big party, it is very hard to achieve downtime in Austin. There is literally always something going on, and with so much good food and music, even wallflowers can be persuaded to leave their comfort zones. The enforced insomnia was exacerbated by the fact that the event coincided with the shift to Daylight Savings Time, depriving conference-goers of one more precious hour of sleep.

I talked more about some of my experiences on Monday’s “Digits” show, as well as in an interview on Southern California Public Radio’s “Madeleine Brand Show,” discussing the trends from Austin:

[ See post to watch video ]

AllThingsD Takes SXSW by Storm (in Pictures)

Lauren Goode — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:46:17 +0000

SXSW Interactive is, thankfully, almost over. We came, we saw, we ate from food trucks. We stood in lines in the rain (grudgingly wearing branded ponchos), we strained our eyes and ears for any slivers of news that might come out of the panels, and we got more texts and buzzes and pings from our phones’ location-based and messaging apps than we thought was technically possible.

We learned that video games are good for you, that TV has ruined politics in the U.S. and that social media should fix it, and that Jimmy Fallon has different activities in mind when he thinks of “activity wristbands.” We learned how to be disruptive. We heard Google’s designers explain how they convinced their company to take on that infamous redesign.

We identified one of the worst marketing gimmicks in all of Austin (aside from this controversial one), and heard about all the crazy tasks SXSW-ers hired people to do for them. We learned that an impromptu Jay-Z concert will light up Twitter like it’s Arab Spring in Austin. We hosted not one but two parties at SXSW, announcing at the first event the new All Things Reviewed section of our Web site.

Since words can only say so much, we’ve put together a slideshow for you, below, and our full list of stories is below that:

The Homeless Defend Becoming Hotspots

Geoffrey A. Fowler — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:11:48 +0000

An experiment with letting homeless people make money by serving as wireless Internet hotspots raised plenty of eyebrows at this year’s South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

After igniting a media storm in its first three days, the organizers contemplated shutting down the program, which equipped about a dozen homeless people with 4G hotspot cards. Homeless participants, who wore t-shirts to identify themselves, were charging passersby to access their Wi-Fi connections at a conference where network access is in high demand.

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