Junto Boyz: May 2006

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

SF BAY AREA HOUSING CRASH CONTINUES?

Great post by 'Patrick' on how the "SF Bay Area Housing Crash Continues." Solid analysis and data which was very interesting to read since Christine and I just bought a new house in Palo Alto. (Crap!) Anyway, I believe "crash" is too strong of a word because the market is still seems to be a seller's market. It is slowly becoming a buyers' market, but the majority of houses still get sold at or above listing. Anyway, here is an excerpt:

1. Prices disconnected from fundamentals. House prices are far beyond any historically known relationship to rents or salaries. Rents are less than half of mortgage payments. Salaries cannot cover mortgages except in the very short term, by using adjustable interest-only loans.

2. Interest rates going back up. When rates go from 5% to 7%, that's a 40% increase in the amount of interest a buyer has to pay. House prices must drop proportionately to compensate.

3. 82% of recent Bay Area loans are adjustable, not fixed. This means a big hit to the finances of many owners every time interest rates go up, and this will only get worse as more adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) get adjusted upward. Nationally, about $2 trillion of ARMS will adjust their rates to much higher levels this year and next. (full post)

ARTHUR SULZBERGER CONFIRMS NEW YORK TIMES BIAS

HatTip to Rich Karlgaard. New York Times Publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, confirms his left-wing bias at a recent commencement speech for graduates of the State University of New York at New Paltz. More from Rich's blog:

Conservatives will take glee. Sulzberger confirms every bias suspected of the New York Times. But what bothers me is not Sulzberger’s 60s-leftism – heck, Martin Luther King, Jr., was a 60s leftist and he’s a hero … so are many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, such as Steve Jobs. No, what I find appalling about Pinch’s speech is his unremitting pessimism. What a poor way to send college grads into the world.

More from Sulzberger [add whine for effect]: “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You weren’t supposed to be graduating in an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, be it the rights of immigrants to start a new life, the right of gays to marry or the rights of women to choose. You weren't supposed to be let into a world where oil still drives policy and environmentalists have to relentlessly fight for every gain. You weren’t. But you are and I am sorry for that.” (full post)

Thursday, May 25, 2006

BUSY DAY FOR SOCIAL NETWORKING

Bebo.com gets $15 million and probably proving how the world will not only be a MySpace world.

Google shuts down some crazy Orkut groups in Brazil.

MSN Spaces become the largest blogging service in the world. This is another reason why you cannot count out the Evil Empire. Their reach is everywhere through Hotmail, Windows, mobile, etc.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

ASHISH MAKES US BLUSH... CALLING GOINGON "SPECIAL"

Yes, I lot of my recent posts have been tooting about GoingOn or something related to our startup... can't help it since we're focused on our beta launch :) Well, our head developer and co-founder of Tekriti Software, our strategic partner, is tooting about GoingOn too :)

Why is GoingOn special?

Most of the projects that we do in Tekriti are special to me, as one of the selection criteria is their coolness and utility value. This criteria is one which is very important as it allows us to be very upbeat and excited about the stuff we do. But I will single out 2 projects currently for a special mention - GoingOn and PeopleAggregator.
.....
As the text on the site says: “GoingOn is a growing network of corporate, media, nonprofit, and individual brand networks that share on a common weblog publishing and community management platform”

Few of the points, in no particular order, which makes the system special are:

* First complete meta-network: GoingOn is the first system which lets you create social networks on the fly. You can choose the name of the network, specify a URL, upload the logo and banner images, specify the network categories and tags, choose the layout in terms of number of columns, choose the color themes, etc. It also maintains a network directory, which is used to discover more networks of a particular interest. We provide a single sign-on to all the networks, where ‘Joining a Network’ is pretty straight-forward.

* Hosted social network, with a subscription model for paid networks: The business model for the platform revolves around hosting the social network for you. So, whether it’s a basic (free) network or one of the paid networks, GoingOn hosts the network for you - so that you don’t have to worry about maintaining it. If it’s a paid network, you just have to pay a monthly fee which depends upon the type of network you are creating.

* Micro-content creation using Structured Blogging as the default publishing platform: The content publishing platform not only lets you create blogs but other micro-content like Reviews, Events, Audio, Video... (full post)

SALESFORCE.COM INTEGRATION AND OTHER NOTES

(initially post at GoingOn's homepage here)

The GoingOn team is pushing hard towards our beta launch. Our list of ToDos for ourselves and our development partner, Tekriti, only seems to get longer not shorter every day, which can seem like a bad dream. The beauty of software as a service is that now and after our beta launch we will continually be improving our platform for our users and customers every few days.

Whether it's improving our user-interface (UI) design or integration of one of our technology partners, we want to create the best experience for all our users. So recently we began to integrate Salesforce.com into our platform. If you use the popular CRM software, you can export your GoingOn connections into that account. It's not fully operational yet, but you can see what we're working towards if you go into your "edit" settings, visit the "professional" profile page, and check off the Salesforce.com icon. On your Member Page, you should see a Salesforce.com icon which you can click on where it will take you to a dummy account at this time. Later it will be your own Salesforce.com account if you have one.

I guess a quality of being on the GoingOn platform before our beta launch is that you see all our "ugly" and how it will change into something that is useful and hopefully a great experience for you on the GoingOn platform.

Thanks for your patience and all your feedback!

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

GATHER HAS GOT IT GOINGON?

Adrian, our social interaction designer, just sent me a note to see the changes at Gather, a citizen journalism startup. I was suprised to find the site completely changed with a new emphasis on community elements and lot of features that look like GOINGON! What da? I knew they struggling to increase their user posts and activity since they send me email notices every week about some writing contest (hundred here and few hundred there), but I guess that route didn't work out.

So this change of positioning and the whole design of the site can only make me wonder if they visited our site, GoingOn. I'm willing to bet a few steak dinners on this one :)

Monday, May 22, 2006

CATCHING UP WITH SOME OLD AND NEW LINKS

Is Silicon Valley Taking Over Hollywood? (Interviews by Geek Entertainment TV at OnHollywood)

Jesus Christ as Poached Egg (by Steve Bainbridge, Professor of Law at UCLA)

Politicos propose new action on Net neutrality
The push for new laws mandating Net neutrality principles appears to be gaining steam on Capitol Hill.

RSS Feeds Provide Untapped Advertising Audience (good report from Pheedo)

Mark Fletcher presentation at Startup SIG (informative presentationfor entrepreneurs by the Bloglines founder)

Untangling the Web: Man Plus Machine

"AUDIOCODES PAYS $85M FOR NUERA"

Only reason I'm posting this is because our advisor, Bruce, is the former president of AudioCodes. Bruce has been a great and active supporter. He's been so involved lately I almost feel as if he's part of our executive team. A little bit on Bruce:

Bruce has been an investor and advisor to several startups. He has been with two companies from early stage to successful IPO. For GoingOn, Bruce is advising the company on its sales efforts. He has successfully established national sales organizations, national sales channels and major OEM technology and sales distribution agreements in his past roles.

As President of AudioCodes Inc., Bruce was responsible for building AudioCodes business presence in North American and helped it towards its IPO [NASDAQ: AUDC] in 1999. During his five years at AudioCodes, Bruce introduced key VOIP and Media Server technologies and was on the forefront of VOIP products for enabling key services. As Vice President of Business Development at Sourcecom, he was responsible for developing the sales and channel strategy for the Sourcecom's Innerware routing technology which was "implanted" in OEM and end user products. Sourcecom was a leading provider of routing technology to the earliest of DSL trials and early deployments...

INVESTMENTS IN THE SOCIAL SOFTWARE SPACE... A SMALL WORLD INDEED

So The Weinstein Company, the production business of Bob and Harvey Weinstein, has invested in aSmallWorld. aSmallWorld was built by our crazy advisor, Marc Canter, and Carl Wescott, our CTO. I heard aSmallWorld wanted to rehire Carl, but not Marc so Broadband Mechanics left the project soon after completion. Then Marc and Carl were working on GoingOn with Tony and I, and after a few months Carl decided to leave Broadband Mechanics for personal reasons. We were then fortunate enough to have Carl join our team at GoingOn Networks late last year. Carl is a stud... he built Schwab.com :)

Another connection in all this is that my close friend at Goldman Sachs led their sizeable investment into The Weinstein Company. A small world indeed...

Weinstein brothers invest in exclusivity
Most popular Internet communities, like Facebook or MySpace.com, measure their success by their ability to attract new members.

By Maria Aspan
The New York Times

A notable exception to this rule is aSmallWorld, an exclusive online community that is about to get bigger.

The Weinstein Co., the production business started by Bob and Harvey Weinstein after they left Miramax, has invested in aSmallWorld, the company plans to announce today. The Weinsteins, whose multimedia portfolio includes Miramax Books and a magazine publishing company, Niche Media, head a team of investors such as Robert W. Pittman, former chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner. The company declined to put a dollar figure on its investment, describing it only as "significant."

Weinstein was attracted to aSmallWorld by the community's social-networking and advertising opportunities, Harvey Weinstein said in an interview. This is the company's first investment in an online venture. (full article)

MORE: Friendster gets $3.1 million of new life. Definitely seeing activity on Friendster picking up. Wonder how this story is going to turn out.

Friday, May 19, 2006

A FEW GOOD LINKS

Friday leisure reading :)

Is India at the Tipping Point? by Dan'l Lewin (Microsoft)
The move India must make—from renting IQ to creating its own IP, and servicing clients overseas to leveraging technology to improve its own large-scale societal problems.

The Immigration Debate: Its Impact on Workers, Wages and Employers
from Knowledge@Wharton

Microsoft's Multiple Challenges: Is Its Size a Benefit or Burden?
from Knowledge@Wharton

Thursday, May 18, 2006

"TAKE OIL OF ME"

From the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (yes, i'm from the right and a liberal thinker;):

We've argued -- for example in this column -- for diversification of energy sources as a way to relieve American dependence on oil from such countries as Saudi Arabia (and Venezuela, for that matter).

We've never argued against conservation -- in addition to diversification. But perhaps we should have. The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto writes that a conservation effort, if achieved, would be counterproductive if the goal is to reduce the need for foreign oil.

"Basic economics tells us that a reduction in the demand for a commodity will lower the price," Taranto writes.

"What happens when the price of oil goes down? High-cost oil production becomes uneconomical, which means that low-cost producers end up accounting for a greater share of the market. The lowest-cost producer of all is our friends the Saudis."

In other words, conservation would make American more dependent on Saudi oil -- not less. Instead, let's remove barriers to making gasoline substitutes. Let's remove tariffs on foreign non-petroleum fuels (such as sugar cane-based ethanol). Let's work on removing barriers to the "gasification" of coal. Let's get more Flexible Fuel Vehicles on the road and more service stations that offer alternative fuels for them.

"HOW TO SET THE STRIKE PRICE ON STOCK OPTIONS"

For you entrepreneurs. Another informative and great post by Brad Feld.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

PROTEST AND CONTROVERSY SURROUNDS 'DA VINCI CODE' OPENING... THIS CHRISTIAN SAYS, "LIGHTEN UP!"

So there are some storms of protest throughout the globe on the release of the 'The Da Vinci Code' movie. I'm a conversative Christian and I could care less about the effect of a crappy movie. Why bring more attention to a movie when it might need some after the first week of its release? Even if it was a great movie, would the foundation of Christianity and my faith be shaken by this movie? Of course not, and I hope not for most Christians out there.

I blogged two years ago about my thoughts on the book ("DA VINCI CODE" DEFIES HUMAN NATURE & REASON) and how it simply didn't satisfy my basic logical view on human nature, which made it difficult for me to read through the second half of the book. For conspiracy theories to work for me, they have at least initial answer the question of motivation which Brown's book didn't do.

RANDOM NEWS QUICKLIST

"Bono Edits Viewspaper"

"Maxthon: the browser that rocks"

"Skype Goes for Broke"

"MTV targets music download market"

"Motorola's Q could ring by next week"

"Senate Rejects Bill on Border Security"

"Verizon Denies Giving NSA Phone Records"

"Iran rejects EU's country incentives"

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

MIKE TAM SPEAKING AT THE VANCOUVER USER EXPERIENCE GROUP

Mike, who's our designer, is speaking on "Enhancing the User Experience with Icons" at VanUE this Thursday. Check it out if you're in Vancouver and want to learn something from a kick ass designer :)

RICHARD MACMANUS ON THE NEW YAHOO!

Richard MacManus has the scoop on the new Yahoo! homepage. Take a look at his review, which is solid.

BATTELLE'S REVIEW OF SNAP AND HOW IT'S RETHINKING SEARCH

John Battelle's review of Snap:

As I've pointed out many times, Bill Gross, the man behind Snap (and Goto/Overture and about 25 other search related companies) is not one to take lightly. When Snap launched, I watched closely, and while many of its features were admirable (the transparency, for one, and later, the CPA model, for another), it never quite got enough lift under its wings, at least in its first year.

Today Snap is relaunching as a "broadband search engine." That means, it's heavy on Ajax features, clustering, and related results, among other things. It certainly is a new look. The results include large thumbnails of prospective pages, for example, and a suggested terms autocomplete feature (not unlike Google Suggest). In fact, there are tons of features that have been tried in various other places, but never have so many been implemented in one place at one time. It's an attempt to fight one's way out of the single search box interface, and whether it works or not, it's worth a look. The theory is sound - which is usually the case with Gross's companies - but often he's ahead of the market. (full post)

Monday, May 15, 2006

"WHY ISN'T SOCIALISM DEAD?"

Forbes' Rich Karlgaard has a good post and discussion string on his blog:

Old news, but worth repeating (since our MSM is in denial):

U.S. Q1 GDP growth clocked a whopping 4.8%. Also remember: This figure is typically is revised, upward, weeks later. Look for a 5.2% final tally. Gosh, what else is there to say about the roaring U.S. economy? Oh, yes. Unemployment is safely below 5%, and – wonder of wonders! – even the New York Times admits wages are rising faster than inflation.

And the bad news? The crunch in American manufacturing jobs, such as the auto industry … right?

Not a chance. About U.S. autos, my pal Jack Schultz writes: “In 1990 955,100 people were employed in the sector compared to 956,200 in 2005, not a huge increase but much less draconian than I would have guessed from listening to the media.” Good report, Jack.

The stock market agrees. The Dow closed at 11,577 on Friday … near its all-time high of 11,723, set in January 2000. From startups to job growth to share prices, the U.S. economy is awash in good news. Wouldn’t you agree?

Don't get your hopes up. This wonderful economic report has zero chance of of convincing the American Left that anything good has occurred. Or that the 2003 tax cuts caused it. Take this post from the leftist Daily Kos.

“The Bush tax cuts were designed to stimulate the economy by giving huge tax cuts to the wealthy. But Voodoo economics (trickle-down economics, or as we like to call it here, trickled-on economics) has been proven over and over again to NOT WORK…. Demand will dry up if there's nobody out there who can afford to pay for your goods and services…. This is a simple law of economics. I CLEP'ed 1 college econ class and made an A+ in the other, so I'm not a dummy when it comes to Econ.” (full post)

HARVARD LOVES KIM IL SUNG

HatTip to Mingi. Old op-ed I got a while back and forgot to post.

HARVARD University has a bizarre idea of how to advance the education of its grads: Instruct them to bow down to North Ko rea's paranoid dictators and show proper "respect" for the Axis of Evil.

It's the ultimate in radical Stalinist chic - the Harvard Alumni Association's $636-a-night totalitarian luxury tour of a rogue nation where thousands are deliberately starved to death.

"Demonstrations of respect for the country's late leader, Kim Il Sung, and for the current leader, Kim Jong Il, are important," instructs the Harvard Alumni Association's tour memo. (full op-ed)

SOCALTECH.COM INTERVIEWS PROTOMOBL CEO

Eduardo Sciammarella, founder and CEO of Protomobl, gets interviewed by socalTECH.com. Protomobl is a very cool mobile social networking interface startup I'm advising.

Friday, May 12, 2006

"WEB 2.0: THE FIRST 25,000 USERS ARE IRRELEVANT"

Great post by Brad Feld. Insightful as always. In GoingOn's case, it will probably be our first 100,000 that are irrelevant. 40,000+ are from Tony's media property, AlwaysOn, and many will be from his personal email collection and some initial news coverage when we launch our beta in a few weeks. Oh, the pressure :)

Anyway, here's Josh Kopelman's post that Brad referred to and another view by David Beisel.

REVIEW OF E3... AND CASUAL GAMING'S RISE IN THE U.S.

CNET has a good review of this week E3 conference in LA. Wish I was there :)

Another article from CNET on the casual gaming space's rise. My remember my friends at Korean gaming companies 4-5 years ago saying how U.S. companies, such as EA, Yahoo! and RealNetworks, just don't get how to monetize the casual gaming space in the U.S. or Korean market. I guess they are finally catching on.

"HIJACKING MYSPACE FOR FAME AND FORTUNE"

Good article from CNET and validation for GoingOn's approach and business model:

Hoffman, who works for KEA Advertising in Valley Cottage, N.Y., has built MySpace profiles for several car dealers. He then contacts other members of the network asking them to be a "friend" to the business, using software tools to target those he thinks might be interested.

"You can become part of their network and develop a relationship. It is better than banner advertising, because you get to interact with the actual potential customer," he said. (full article)

"THE IM GENERATION IN CHARGE"

Tony Perkins has a good article from the AlwaysOn blogozine which he just put up on the AO site:

The IM Generation in Charge
Bye-bye standalone PC, hello social networking and mobile content. The real money is in making the 21-year-old set happy online.

While the "PC Generation"—led by guys like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell—drove the tech economy for the past 20 years, the "Instant Messaging Generation" is now in charge of innovation. Born between 1980 and 2000, this is the first generation for which the Internet and various digital communications technologies have been a persistent cultural presence.

While computer sales still represent a huge and growing part of the economy, today's under-twenty-five "IMers" are employing their PCs differently, and they're just as likely to use their mobile phones to post and share digital content or message their friends.

If you're either an aspiring entrepreneur or a venture capitalist, do take the advice Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker gave the students at Stanford Graduate School of Business last November: "Watch what the kids are doing—that is the future...."

Chairman of tech investment bank Jeffries Broadview Paul Deninger says, "You can sell your networking company for $250 million to Cisco, but you will have to pump $80 million into it to get there. So you've hit a double at best." He explained, "The big multiples are in the Internet space." To confirm Deninger's premise, you need only look at some of the Internet deals over the last year. (full article)

WEEKEND IN NYC... ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY

So Christine and I took a red-eye flight to NYC. We got in around 6am and headed to the St. Regis Hotel. It's our one-year anniversary weekend, so we're splurging a bit. It's also my younger brother's graduation from Columbia Business School and my father's birthday this weekend, so it's going to be a hectic.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

FIERCEWIRELESS'S 2006 FIERCE 15

Their annual list of emerging companies in wireless:

* Apertio
* Beceem
* ClairMail
* Digital Chocolate
* go2

* HELIO
* IPWireless
* mBlox
* MobiTV
* mPortal

* RedKnee
* Ruckus
* SkyPilot
* SlingMedia
* SurfKitchen

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

ARRINGTON ASKS, "IS SQUIDOO SETH GODIN'S PURPLE ALBATROSS?"

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has a good post analyzing Seth Godin's new thing, Squidoo. Check it out.

GOOGLE VIDEO TRUMPS YOUTUBE AND OTHERS... STEPHEN COLBERT VIDEO

Last week I got a few emails linking to the The Daily Show's Stephen Colbert speech at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner where he rips on President Bush. I waited a couple days and then I discovered YouTube had taken down the video, so I was bummed. Then I found out that Google swooped in and made a deal with C-SPAN, so it's back up. Here are the links to Colbert's speech and impersonator, Steve Bridges, who along with President Bush were hilarious.

Monday, May 08, 2006

RANDOM LINKS... CATCHING UP WITH OLD AND NEW

"Keeping tabs on citizens"
As the U.K. government looks to set up a national registry of adults, some in the U.S. are warning of the dangers of a national ID system.

"Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?"
*Danah Boyd's essay

"Spammers and ex-cons, not Tom, made MySpace, says journalism student"
*Yes, it's a link to ValleyWag :)

"Power Law of Participation"
*Good post from Ross Mayfield

"Blogs 'essential' to a good career"
*article from The Boston Globe

"Silencing a Hornet's Nest"
It seems like a lot of people are trying to shut up bloggers all of a sudden. It also doesn't seem to be working very well.

"Online spaces: The new frontier"
As users of Web 2.0 communications and game tools go, Joi Ito is the power user's power user.

"Former Apple exec joins Tellme board"
*former competitor from my HeyAnita days is still going strong

Sunday, May 07, 2006

ONHOLLYWOOD REVIEW & BUZZ

If you missed the live webcast of OnHollywood, you can visit the archives here. Here are two great clips of Peter Hirshberg's opening session and interviews he did, and Tom Green's presentation of his online channel, TomGreen.com.

Here are some of the newsclips and blog posts about OnHollywood:

Gotta put up Ashish's post first since him and his team at Tekriti were rockstars for us. You guys kickass as our development team and partners!

Adrian Chan, our social interaction designer, posts here.

Bunch of ZDNet posts...

Steve Gillmor's "Hollywood High" post states:

But Tony has a odd sense of timing that seems to presage important shifts in the tech ecosystem. As an example, Tony is showing a slide that shows an upward curve (A great time to be an Entrepreneur) that he cheerfully admits has absolutely no data to back it up.

Along with some biting commentary on Peter Hirschberg's opening session.

"The Glass Onion"

"True or False"

"The Emperor's New Clothes"

"Letting 'them' eat cake"

ZDNet's Dan Farber has a few (crap. forgot to put his blog in the OnHollywood blogroll. sorry!):

"OnHollywood kick off keynote"

"Hollywood trying to play by new rules"

"Net neutrality about the future of TV?"

"VC Tim Draper: SOX ruined our business"

"OnHollywood: Consumer generated media"

Jeff Clavier's post on the "Exit Strategies for early stage companies - Buy, Hold, Sell" panel is here.

VC Ratings, which is TheDeal.com's cool new blog in the TechCrunch, alarm:clock, and VentureWire space, has this post, "Draper and Calacanis clash in Hollywood."

CNET has a couple posts...

"No more bargains lost in the laundry"

"Hollywood may get it, but will they kill it?"

Stowe Boyd writes, "The Suits Are Clueful"

David Parmet has his "Best lines of the show"

Traditional Media:

"Is the Web the new Hollywood?" (CNET)

"CBS launches Web-based `channel'" (The Mercury News)

"Show Asks: Is Web The New Hollywood?" (Investor's Business Daily)

[tags: onhollywood, alwayson, goingon, media, hollywood, technology, tech, new media]

ONHOLLYWOOD AND WORLD AFFAIRS COUNCIL CONFERENCE HOPPING

This past week was awesome. Professionally satisfying, personally rewarding, thought-provoking, hilarious, entertaining,...

Tuesday through Thursday I was down in LA for Tony's OnHollywood conference. GoingOn was providing a sneak preview to our new platform by having the conference's live webcasts, blog and links on a GoingOn network. All went well besides a bug on one blog post during the first few hours of the conference where users couldn't see the webcast hyperlink unless they clicked to the second page and the Wi-Fi connection at the Roosevelt Hotel was very slow or erratic for more than half of the conference. Anyway, even though I posted it below already, you can check out the OnHollywood conference network here.

Valerie did a kickass job on pulling together the program and most of the speakers, Allison and Debbie's Cerulean Media Group did the logistics well again, and Big Picture did the video and audio well again too. Valerie is on "loan" to AlwaysOn and now will be transitioning full-time to GoingOn to clarify for some of you that asked. Also there was a fair amount of confusion on the relationship between AlwaysOn and GoingOn, so I might as well write about it here.

AlwaysOn is Tony's media brand that he built up after Red Herring where he had to foresight to see how media, user-generated content, and social networking was developing online. GoingOn is a separate legal entity and operations that is providing a new blogging and community building platform for companies and organizations, and AlwaysOn is one of its first customers. Of course the common element is that Tony is the CEO and a shareholder in both companies. My only connection to AlwaysOn is that I try to be a part-time columnist covering the blogging and social software space, but fail miserably since I write an article every few months instead of weeks :)

After OnHollywood, I suffered through a two-hour delay to San Francisco on Friday(lame United), then rushed to pick up Christine. I finally arrived at her office around 6pm and we drove down to the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, CA. The World Affairs Council of Northern California was holding its 60th Annual Conference where it has been at Asilomar every year since its beginning. The conference's theme was "Global Change: The Balance of Power in 2020" where it focused on the emerging roles of China, India, and Brazil in the world order. A solid lineup of speakers where a handful were truly thought-provoking and have pushed me towards possibly becoming a voice for some of these causes. I'll post more on this later.

[tags: onhollywood, alwayson, goingon, media, hollywood, technology, tech, foreign affairs]

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

AT ONHOLLYWOOD... CHECK OUT THE NETWORK AND THE WEBCAST!

Just busy at the OnHollywood conference. Check out the conference network on our platform here and the live webcast!

Monday, May 01, 2006

PREPARING FOR OUR SNEAK PREVIEW... AT ONHOLLYWOOD!

The past few days have been hectic and the final stretch before our sneak preview at Tony's OnHollywood conference. The conference is turning out well and looking good in terms of speakers and quality of attendees.

GoingOn will be providing OnHollywood attendees a place to coverge online to access conference information, view live webcasts, and read daily updates. So I'll post the URL later for you to check out and visit!

Today I also dropped by the Internet Identity Workshop 2006 to learn more about this space before I take off for LA tomorrow morning. Very relevant to our business :)