Microsoft BizSpark is a proud sponsor of the Web 2.0 Expo LaunchPad. The LaunchPad is an avenue for startup companies to pitch their ideas to the Web 2.0 Expo audience, which includes press, investors, corp-dev folks and others. Of the several submissions that were made by startup companies, my co-judges Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Matt Marshall of VentureBeat picked five finalists to present their ideas. What we will be looking in a winner is how a product can focus on what is essential and transformational in today’s market.

Each of these companies will get five minutes on stage to pitch:

	80legs provides a web-scale platform for content discovery and analysis.  Developers will use 80legs to analyze the Internet at blazing fast speeds (2 billion pages/day on a 50,000-node supercomputer) and very low costs ($2.00 per million pages crawled; $0.03 per CPU-hr).  With 80legs, the Internet is yours.
	zeaLOG is a place to collect and visualize personal data.  Users graph their data alone or in groups, tracking everything from weight and exercise to drinking habits, mileage, movie watching, even sexual activity. Collaborate, compete and measure up. If you can quantify it, you can zeaLOG it.
	Created by Nitobi at iPhoneDevCamp 2008, PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building mobile applications with JavaScript. With PhoneGap, you can author apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of native mobile device capabilities like geo-location, camera, vibration and sound. PhoneGap applications run on iPhone, Android and Blackberry.
	Bantam allows business teams to create secure social workspaces to share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships inside and outside the organization. Status updating, auto-posting, following, notifying, messaging, and profile pointing features weave purposefully into business workflow objects (activities, CRM, events, project management, etc.) for users to become aware and interact with their colleagues and contacts.
	DUB gives you a simple, smart way to exchange contact information from your mobile phone. Your contact’s info loads directly into your existing mobile address book and is automatically updated whenever your contact changes their information (phone, email, address, etc.). Create your mobile business card with DUB at www.dubmenow.com.

The LaunchPad will be held in the keynote room on Thursday, April 2 at 1:15pm and will be emceed by John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO of Federated Media and Program Chair of Web 2.0 Summit. See you there!

"ai"

[ad]

I’m off to Palm Springs this evening to attend DEMO09. The BizSpark team will be there, so feel free to come by our booth if you want an invite code, or if you want to play with Live Mesh or some of our other technologies.

Which one of these  companies do you think will win DEMOgod status (list borrowed from Brian Solis):

7 Billion People, Inc.; Austin, TX
Always Innovating, Inc.; Mountain View, CA
AppZero Corp.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Asurion Mobile Applications, Inc.; San Mateo, CA
Avaak, Inc.; San Diego, CA
BitGravity, Inc.; Burlingame, CA
bluBuzz, LLC; Holland, MI
Cc:Betty, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA
Citrix Online, Goleta, CA
Coveroo, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
deskNET, Lausanne, CH
Document Depository Corp., LLC; Wayne, PA
eFormic, Ltd.; Stuttgart, DE
Ensembli, Ltd.; Sheffield, Great Britain
Evri, Inc.; Seattle, WA
Gazaro, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
HAM-IT, Inc.; North Andover, MA
Home-Account, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
HowSimple, LLC; Huntington Beach, CA
Jadoos, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA
Kutano Corp.; Burnaby, BC, Canada
Liquid Media, LLC; Arvada, CO
Ontier, Inc.; Portland, OR
Primal Fusion, Inc.; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Promptu Systems Corp.; Menlo Park, CA
Purewire, Inc.; Atlanta, GA
Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. San Diego, CA
Qubes, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan
Silverstone Solutions, Inc. San Francisco, CA
Skout, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
SmartyCard; San Mateo, CA
Symantec Corp.; Mountain View, CA
Technicopia, LLC; Carmel Valley, CA
Transformyx, Inc.; Baton Rouge, LA
Vokle, Inc.; Santa Monica, CA
Xandros, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
XMARKS; San Francisco, CA
Zipadi Technologies, LLC; Bluffdale, UT
Zuora, Inc.; Redwood City, CA

“ai“

Startup2Startup is an event Dave McClure (now at Founder’s Fund) puts together here in the valley. I first attended this event several months ago, and fell in love with the format, the caliber of the speakers, the content and the attendees. S2S is more than just a networking event, it’s also a great learning opportunity. Past speakers have included Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn and Matt Cohler from Benchmark Capital, Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider from Automattic, Naval Ravikant from VentureHacks, James Hong from HOTorNOT among others. The attendees comprise of entrepreneurs, press, corporate development folks, lawyers, investors etc.

Microsoft BizSpark is a proud sponsor of Startup2Startup. Through our partnership, we get two free passes* for startups that are registered BizSpark companies to attend the dinner in Palo Alto, CA. The next event is coming up on January 29, 2009 and Amy Jo Kim from ShuffleBrain will be speaking. If you are a BizSpark company and are interested in attending the event, shoot me an email at anand.iyer [at] microsoft.com. The first two interested parties to reply will be allocated the passes.

And as always, feel free to email me at anand.iyer [at] microsoft.com if you want a code to join BizSpark.

“ai“

* – The free passes do not include transportation costs to/from the event or lodging.

I attended the Crunchies on Friday the 9th of January, 2009. The Crunchies is kinda like the Academy Awards for the technoverse. The event was hosted by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm and Silicon Alley Insider. The atmosphere was surreal, it really did feel like everything I’ve seen on TV with other awards ceremonies. By now, you’ve probably read TechCrunch’s and VentureBeat’s coverage of the event and the winners. Our (Microsoft’s) very own Live Mesh won the award for the top Technology Innovation and Ray Ozzie, our Chief Software Architect, and David Treadwell, VP of Live Services, attended the event and accepted the award from Steve Gillmor.

I was reading Dan Farber’s report from the event, and I found the following excerpt extremely interesting:

"The most surprising winner for the evening was in the Microsoft’s Live Mesh, which won in the category best technology innovation/achievement. The competition included Facebook Connect (the runner-up), Google Friend Connect, Google Chrome, Swype and Yahoo BOSS.

Given that Microsoft is often vilified by the Web 2.0, start-up community, and the stellar competition in the category, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft won without a little help from the Crunchies Committee. On the other hand, the Microsoft community is large and mighty and perceptions are slowing shifting to be more positive about the openness of the giant software company. In any case, it’s a deserved award, which was accepted by Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect at Microsoft, and David Treadwell, who runs the Live Services Platform."

I found the bit about "perceptions slowly shifting" to be extremely welcome – as you know, this is something my team has been working on actively for the last few years. Our community is growing and is excited about what we’ve been working on with them, and I was delighted to see the likes of Dan Farber acknowledging this.

Here’s a video I qik’d of Ray Ozzie accepting the award at the event:

"ai"

This week, TechCrunch reinforced itself as the most powerful tech blog on the planet. TechCrunch50 was everything it was made out to be. Startups, press, speakers – these guys were the crème de la crème of their respective contingents. The TechCrunch50 crew received over 1000 applications from startups wanting to demo their product at the event.

My favorite startups

Most of the companies that made the 50, were consumer facing software products. Here are 3 of my favorite startups (when I was picking these, I was thinking of products that I could use right away):

My favorite talk

Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban has been my hero for over a decade. I wish I had some specific highlights from the talk I could talk about, the whole talk was quite memorable and amazing. Cuban also stopped by our booth and I had the chance to have a pretty good chat with him about the Surface and applications we could develop for it. We talked about practical applications of the Surface for fans in the stadium, or maybe even for coaches to analyze game data.

[Mark Cuban at the MSFT Booth]

Here’s Mark Hendrickson’s report on the chat.

My favorite moments

1. During Mark Cuban’s chat with Jason Calacanis, Cuban said, “when I die, I want to come back as me”.
2. Ashton Kutcher mentioning the Microsoft Surface as the most exciting thing he’d seen at TC50.
3. Of course, Cuban stopping by the Microsoft lounge.
4. And, last but not least, this:

[MC Hammer]

It’s hammer time!

“ai”

Ashton Kutcher launched his new startup, Blah Girls, at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco this week. Ashton walked by the Microsoft lounge several times, in and out of interviews as you can imagine. From Ashton’s most recent blog post, I think he liked the Microsoft Surface we have on display here:

“The coolest thing I’ve seen so far is Microsoft Surfce. Its a coffee table thats like a giant iphone.”

[photo courtesy: magerleagues]

Now, it would have been icing if Ashton had called the iPhone a small Surface ;)  His comment’s understandable, the iPhone is a consumer facing device that has gained immense popularity.

We also had some other celebs come by the booth – I’ll be blogging about those experience later.

“ai”

I’m pretty damned stoked about TechCrunch50. I spent most of today setting up the Microsoft lounge area at the venue. The idea for the lounge started when I was sitting with the Qik team brainstorming ways in which we could partner to do some fun things at the event. In the midst of that, Michael Arrington calls and says, “get a Surface Table [for TechCrunch50]”. And so, we did.

Aside from the “Big Ass Table” (which, by the way, has been getting “ooo”s and “aah”s from everyone who has stopped by, including Ashton Kutcher), we have a couple of XBox’s with Halo and RockBand set up. We are also going to be using the FlotZam application to show off Tweets, Flickr photos etc. about the event. By the way, here’s a Qik video of Megan Asha using shot at our lounge:

I also got a sneak preview of some of the products that startups will be demo-ing tomorrow and I was really blown away by what I saw. What I can tell you is that the Tablet PC being developed by TechCrunch is not one of the 50 startups demoing tomorrow. And neither is Ashton’s Blah Girls.

If you are at TechCrunch50, be sure to stop by our booth. I plan on (almost live-)blogging, twittering, flickring and qiking from the event, so, stay tuned for more.

“ai”

I’m in Boulder today at TechStars’ annual Investor and Demo Day. The energy level is high, the startup teams are knocking their demos out of the park, and the who’s who from VC-land is here. And I’m sitting next to one of the most prolific bloggers, Don Dodge, which leads me to want to do this pseudo-post of sorts. I’m live blogging twittering the event:  http://twitter.com/anandiyer. Alternately, you can watch for the keyword ‘techstars08’. Come join the conversation.

“ai”

Photo courtesy: Andrew-Hyde

Today at OSCON, Sam Ramji announced that Microsoft will become an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The ASF provides support for the Apache community of open source projects. There are over 60 top-level projects at the ASF that are characterized by an open and pragmatic software license. We have a firm commitment to interoperability with open source and increasing our outreach with the open source development community. As a supporter of open source I am excited that Microsoft has decided to support the ASF.

Sam also announced

• contributions to the PHP community specifically the ADOdb project ADOdb (written in PHP, ADOdb provides an abstraction interface for PHP applications to access many different types of databases). This contribution will enable ADOdb to interoperate with Microsoft’s native SQL Server driver.
• our commitment to interoperability by extending our Open Specification Promise (OSP) to over 150 additional protocols, including protocols built into Windows Server and protocols that are part of the .NET Framework. The OSP guarantees freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols.

“ai”

I’m suffering from a serious case of blogger’s block. If you’re wondering, yes, it is like writer’s block in a lot of ways. I’ve also been extremely busy and suffering with some (professional) issues. But aside from that, everything’s been peachy. In a few lines here are some things I’ve wanted to communicate :

• MIX08 was awesome in many many ways.
• I was at SxSWi. Loved it! It was my first time, and I think I can easily say that its my fave conference yet.
  • Along with my Chinese-American friend Vivian, I caught the world premiere of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. I recorded some bits of the Q&A portion of the premiere and plopped it on youtube : video1 and video2. (ps : someone in the movie dies)
• We launched Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 in SF last week. I had the privilege of doing portions of the keynote with Bob Kelly.
• I got the chance to attend the Under the Radar conference for startups at our campus in Mountain View. That was pretty cool. You can catch all my tweets on it.
• I’ve been twittering a lot. So far, so good. It’s an interesting evil, this Twitter. More on that later.

Here’s what’s coming up :

• I’m helping organize and I’ll speaking at our DigiGirlz event tomorrow (3/25). As many of you know, I love working with kids, and this is the part of my job that really gets me going.
• Next week (4/1) the famous Code Trip swings around to NorCal. We’ll be doing some exciting things up here – stay tuned to the website for details.
• I’ll be speaking on a Web 2.0 panel on 4/14. Wanna come?
• We’ll be bringing some of the MIX magic to the valley. We’re calling it ReMIX and it’ll be held on 4/17 at our Mountain View campus.

Here are things in the pipeline that I plan on writing about in the near future :

• pedanticism (I know it’s not a word)
• "children of the world"
• why is craigslist so popular?
• sometimes yes, sometimes no (I may combine this one with the one on pedanticism)

Shout-outs :

• Shout-out to my buddy Kurt Brockett. This guy is cooler and awesomer than the Fonz. Kurt gets it. He’s always been the life of every party that I’ve been to. And above all, I have immense respect for him because of all his personal accomplishments. He’s a model 27 year old, and I admire him for it.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned, yo. Tah!

now playing : Virginia Moon by Foo Fighters, featuring (s)Norah Jones

"ai"

PS: I, too, have jumped on the bandwagon and joined FriendFeed. You can see catch my "lifestream" at http://www.friendfeed.com/anandiyer.

• Online Marketing Summit 2/21-2/22 : San Diego, CA
• Entrepreneurship Weekend 2/22-2/29 : Stanford – Palo Alto, CA
• Search Marketing Expo 2/26-2/28 : Santa Clara, CA
• MIX’08 3/4-3/7 : Las Vegas, NV
• SXSW 3/7-3/11 : Austin, TX
• Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 Launch 3/13 : San Francisco, CA
• Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 Launch 3/25 : Santa Clara, CA
• Microsoft Technology Summit 3/26-3/28 : Redmond, WA
• VSLive 3/30-4/3 : San Francisco, CA
• Code Trip 4/1-4/5 : Silicon Valley, CA
• Web 2.0 Expo 4/22-4/25 : San Francisco, CA
• Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 Launch 4/24 : Fresno, CA
• JavaOne 5/6-5/9 : San Francisco, CA
• Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 Launch 5/22 : Reno, NV
• Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 Launch 6/3 : Sacramento, CA

Events I think I’ll make it to :

• MashupCamp 3/17-3/20 : Mountain View, CA

Events I wish I could’ve made it to:

• SVASE Crossing The Chasm Web 2.0 2/21 : Microsoft Campus, Mountain View, CA
• SDWest 3/3-3/7 : Santa Clara, CA
• ETech 3/3-3/6 : San Diego, CA
• Graphing Social Patterns 3/3-3/4 : San Diego, CA
• EclipseCon 3/17-3/20 : Santa Clara, CA
• Open Source Business Conference 3/25-3/26 : San Francisco, CA

Not to mention that I have to somehow squeeze two weddings in to this schedule.

I wonder if there’s a tool that automatically updates my Dopplr when I subscribe to an event in Upcoming or Facebook. Anyone know of one?

"ai"

More companies, more demos :

LiquidTalk

The name gives you very little information about what the product is about (I’m not sure if LiquidTalk is the name of the company or the product). LiquidTalk’s product gives mobile employees of a company to stay engaged with their companies. If there are internal training videos for example, LiquidTalk gives these mobile employees a convenient way to access these videos.

Voyant

I was pretty impressed by this product and demo, but I ask myself how many users will actually use all the things this product has to provide? This JRE based tool is a DIY financial planning solution. The business model was apparent – there are relevant ads that show up in a smartclient desktop app that you will use for financial planning. The question is, who will buy these guys out? ;)

Acesis

This Flex3/Adobe AIR based app is a HealthCare technology application. The demonstration was very swiftly, very well done. Once you get past figuring out how to pronounce the name, you’ll see that the application is a way to manage details in a very efficient way from incoming patients at the point of care. The tool seemed easy enough for anyone to use, and that was very impressive.

Blist

Probably the best demo this afternoon. Seattle-based Blist, short for weBlist, claims to be the world’s simplest database. This Flash based app has a visual query interface and helps anyone build a list (database) very easily. It is designed for mainstream users and even if someone doesn’t know what a database is, they can easily latch on to the concept.

Cellspin

San Jose based CellSpin helps you publish media or text content from your phone to your favorite websites like eBay or Facebook very easily. I caught up with the founders of the company and asked them about their compeition, ShoZu for example, which I use on my phone. Their response was that CellSpin was designed with simplicity in mind, which I totally get! I’m actually going to download CellSpin right now and give it a whirl.

On a separate note It turns out Bobby Singh and Marcos Klein are both ex-Cisco. Marcos and I were even on the same team. Small valley!

FlyPaper

Another very impressive demo! FlyPaper is a Flash based app that lets you make presentations easily. You don’t need to know Flash or Powerpoint, but the app gives you templates using which you can customize your data into a presentation fairly easily. The demo was rather whiz-bang!

Redux

Redux helps you meet new people. It’s not necessarily a dating site, but it could be. The site analyzes who you are multiple levels, including finding out things like which events you’re attending (by aggregating this data from event sites like Upcoming etc.) thereby providing a nice matrix.  My opinions are a little tainted considering I’d read this TechCrunch review on Redux just a couple of days ago. If I hadn’t read TechCrunch’s review, I’d be asking myself how Redux is different from these dozen other facebook apps that help me meet friends, and friends of friends.

TubeMogul

TubeMogul helps you publishes your videos to multiple video sharing sites, like YouTube, Y! Videos etc. What’s really impressive about this tool is the analytics it brings back. It can also give you detailed demographics information, and apparently there are 15,000 content creators using TubeMogul, including Romney and Obama.

VisibleMeasures

Another very impressive demo! VisibleMeasures gives you detailed analytics about your videos. It tells you how your video is being used. The demo really drove the point home. The tool measures the behavior of internet video audiences and how people are engaging with the content. With this information content creators can understand how they can better create and distribute content and how they can make money off of it. I’m guessing their business model involves having to charge large companies for this kind of information?

More later…

"ai"

I’d written about LeapFrog’s Tag earlier today. Here’s a video demonstration of Tag from Demo’08 :

"ai"

I’m at the keynote session here at Demo ’08 and I’m pretty stoked. Before you read on, a disclaimer : I’m pretty much typing this out, taking pictures, recording videos etc., live. So I apologize for typos, grammatical errors and things I would otherwise be pedantically aware of.

So how did these companies get picked to show off their application at Demo ’08? Several 100 companies submitted applications to "Demo", but only 77 were hand-picked based on industry trends and how they fit in to a wide array of ideas. BitGravity has been streaming the show live.

My opinions and observations  :

• Vertical Search – Custom search based on a certain vertical.
• Web-heavy – A lot of these applications are web-based. Even some applications that didn’t make sense to be run in a browser were running in a browser.
• Not everyone is a good demoer – Seriously, every startup that plans on demoing at one of these events needs to hire an evangelist. Seriously.
• Who will read this? I’m interested in seeing how many of these founders are going to Technorati/Blog Search their company after Demo’08. I remember Jeremy Stoppleman from Yelp reaching out to me after reading some of my blog posts. That’s a sign of a great CEO, keeping his finger on the pulse.
• I like Demos! I like the no-slide demo-heavy nature of this conference. Demos are not more than 5 or 6 minutes long.
• Lot of the demos were being run off of ‘localhost’ on a PC.

Here are some companies who demo’s this morning (in NO order) :

TimeTrade Systems : TimeTrade was the first to go, and introduces the concept of including a "Schedule Now" button inside of an email. A web interface then helps you figure out the best time for the two (or more) of you to meet. The system syncs with Exchange, Google Calendar etc. I wasn’t super impressed.

Iterasi : How do you bookmark a link to a dynamic page? How do you bookmark dynamic content? Iterasi demo’d their application using housingmaps.com as an example. The demo was impressive because it even saves your dynamic web content. The question though is whether this is anything more than just a toolbar? Iterasi can seem to do a lot lot more, but is this a simple tool that is trying to do something that a simple browser-plugin should be able to handle?

Liquid Planner : This is a web-based project management tool. Clearly this tool one ups Microsoft Project by filling in some deficiencies on the client. With all this talk about "managed certainty", where is this information being stored?

CitiPort : The first application this morning that is running ASP.NET. Me happy :) CitiPort gives you localized user-generated information about a certain city. Thus far there is information about over 100 cities from 50 countries on the site, all user-generated. The user interface needs a MAJOR face-lift. The concept seems nice, but I’m concerned about local business trying to cannibalize the site. The site also lets you "create your own itinerary" based on businesses or locations you choose from the site if you are visiting a certain city.

LeapFrog / Tag : My favorite demo this morning! This demo was really all demo. Basically, Tag is a handheld unit (pen-like) for kids aged 4-8 that does word for word reading off of books. I’m voting for these guys! I’ll have a video up soon!

SkyFire : One of those companies that needs a better demoer/evangelist. The idea’s good and tries to tackle genuine issues in the mobile market. Skyfire claims to be a fully PC-like web browser on your mobile device. They demo’d ESPN.com and RockYou’s SlideShow facebook app running rather well on a PocketPC device. They also compared it to PocketIE, OperaMini and the iPhone, although I don’t think they gave Safari on the iPhone enough credit. SkyFire supports JS, AJAX and Flash. What about Silverlight, yo (that’s a rhetorical question, don’t try answering that, or questioning me about it). Skyfire looks very promising!

Fabrik / Joggle : Joggle’s an app built on Adobe AIR. Fabrik claims to have $250mils in revenue per year. It helps you find your content, aggregate it and share it very easily. They demo’d your Flickr content, photos from a USB drive, your iPhone Library all aggregated and presented in one single application – Joggle. This is one of the most useful apps I have seen so far, from a consumer perspective. I wonder if they plan on having an API so other content sites can be easily added and aggregated?

StepLabs : Another shot at the noise-cancellation market. The idea for this demo was great, but it was executed rather poorly.

NotchUp : I’d blogged yesterday about all the attention that I thought NotchUp was getting. NotchUp, in spite of some demo glitches, did manage to yet again get quite a bit of attention from the crowd here today. Apparently Me.dium, a Microsoft Startup Accelerator company is a client of NotchUp’s.

Education.com : I missed some of this demo, but this is another example of ‘vertical search’ in the Education market. I wonder how they will target the international audience?

800PBX : These guys seriously need better demoers. Both their guys on stage were horrible. The idea was GREAT, don’t get me wrong, but I get turned off by people who do not know how to speak up their product when really, that is what you are trying to do in front of a giant crowd that wants to evaluate your product. Basically, MyGenie (I think) supports 35 different application platforms and aggregates them – you can then voice control this portal of yours. And these applications are called "quickies" – nothing should be ever called a quickie. Their tag-line is to "bridge the internet with telephony". Good idea, horrible demo!

SpeakLike : SpeakLike tries to get language barriers out of the way in chat. The chat tool includes real-time translation and can also facilitate multi-person chat in different languages. I wonder how many languages are supported and if they plan on supporting an API so that other popular chat engines can plug in and use their service?

"ai"

I flew into Palm Springs today for Demo’08. The flight in was rocky to say the least – lets just say that the woman sitting next to me prayed during the last 15 minutes of our flight. Yeah.

I love these technology agnostic conferences!

On the way to the hotel from the airport, I shared a cab with Steve Larsen, CEO of Krugle, one of the leading search engines for source code. I checked in to the hotel and and met up with my fellow ‘softies to setup our booth.

Later, I ran in to Rafe Needleman at the reception event. Rafe’s everywhere!

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been hearing quite a bit about this company NotchUp. It started with some of my LinkedIn homies sending me beta invites and then I started to read about NotchUp on various tech blogs. I noticed that NotchUp actually has a booth here at Demo.

Loïc Le Meur‘s Seesmic also has a booth here. Seesmic has also been in the press quite a bit lately, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they have to show off.

I attended the NVCA dinner later and had one of the most interesting conversations with Giri Sekhar, MD over at FA Technology Ventures based out of Boston. VC spending is at an amazing high, and it was really interesting to hear from these VCs and to talk to them about where they were investing and why.

Funny enough, I also found out this evening that one of my colleagues, Beti Cung, is married to one of the co-founders of Android. Small valley!

Needless to say, a lot happened today. Anyhow, you can find my photo-stream on Flickr. I’ll also be doing some video interviews and I’ll post it on to my blog.

Stay tuned…

"ai"

If you’re going to be at DEMO ’08 next week, stop by the Microsoft booth to say hello. Or just call me at 415-430-7975. I’d love to catch up and hear about what you’ve been working on.

"ai"