Event Recap: DC Twin Tech

Well I can only say “Wow!”.  For all of those who were not in the know about this event, it was thought up and put on by Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs to bring together what some would label the “old school” and the “new media” communities of the DC area.

There was a lot of anticipation and it did not fail to deliver.  Peter did an amazing job of securing a great venue and gathering a lot of unique groups and people together.  I wish I could say I had video or pics to show you … I did take my Flip video to gather some interviews, but was having such a good time meeting and chatting with new folks an re connecing with old friends, I totally forgot about it.

There was such a wide variety of people, I was pretty amazed.  I saw everyone from Champ Mitchell, Chairman of Network Solutions to Sarah Lacy, author of “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good” to Craig Stoltz, author of a Time magazine Top 25 blog Web 2.Oh .. really? and everyone in between.

I was going through all the business cards I got and was amazed at the varied backgrounds of all the people.

There was some great coverage of the event by the local TechBisNow and also by Zack Goldfarb of the Washington Post.

This was the event of the summer so far and we hope it spawned great conversation and relationships that will carry over and produce some equally great working relationships between the two diverse ecosystems here in the area.

Watch out Satellite and Terrestrial Radio, Here comes the iPhone

I have not been fortunate enough to get myself a new 3G iPhone, but I did get to upgrade my first generation iPhone to the 2.0 firmware and have been completely impressed with the apps so far in the App Store.

The developers have done great work and I look forward to many more great titles to be released in the coming weeks.

I did have a thought today while at work about some of the apps, in particular AOL Radio and Pandora.  I totally love the regular Pandora site and when at my desk at work, this is the web site I always have up, playing a never ending stream of music I like.  Well with their great iPhone app, I now get that same experience on my iPhone.  I was hesitant at first, wondering how the music would stream over the “slow” Edge network, and was surprised by the quality.  It played without pause.

So as I sat at work, I wondered to my friends, “Do you think that the Pandora app will play through the fm transmitter in the car ??”  We thought about it for a moment and talked about how cool that would be.  So after work, I gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised that Iwas able to stream the AOL and Pandora apps right through my fm transmitter !  What a cool surprise.  I sat in my car and thought about this for a moment.  I have had Sirius radio for about that past two years and I love it.  I have not looked back to terrestrial radio in the least bit.  But now it occured to me that this may being another turning point.  Besides my Sirius I listen to my iPod/iPhone for mainly podcasts since I catch most of my music on Sirius.  But now what if my iPhone could go so far as eliminate the need for Sirius, music and talk.  With Sirius, I bounced between several stations for my music and would catch some talk shows no and then.  Well now with my iPhone, I not only get my fix of talk shows that I want to listen to through podcasts, I also get a music station that is totally personalized just for me, without a single commercial !  Pandora’s algorithm is such that is finds music you like and adds it to your station.  I have several personal stations set up, an Alt Indie, Jazz, and so on and the Pandora app lets me play any one of them.

This is an interesting time for both the satellite and terrestrial radio businesses.  Traditional radio has been looking in their rear view mirror as the new kids on the block, XM and then Sirius crept up to take a larger and larger share of the market.  And now those same satellite providers are trying to merge in order to not only stay alive, but also to continue to fight the traditional outlets for listenership.  Well now with the ability for a platform like the iPhone to stream content you want with no commercials for free, those new kids on the block better watch their mirrors as well.

The Age Old Question: East vs West

As many of you know, I am an east coast guy (although I would leave you all for a job in the bay area .. sorry) and I am always looking for other’s insights into the differences between the startup scene between the east and west coasts.  The other day, I came across another great piece written by Tim Marman, co-founder of Notches,  on CenterNetworks called “Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Start a Tech Company in Silicon Valley“. 

Tim brought up many great points to include:

Money

The more relevant piece is that there is more early stage capital available. The area is stock full of entrepreneurs with previous successes willing to pump that money into potentially new successes. But there’s also a dark side to this. First, Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive places around  - and if you factor in the need for a car (or two, if you’re a married couple and work in different place) and so on, it can even be more expensive than New York (which is usually one of the biggest knocks on our beloved city). Contrast this to raising a small friends and family round in Austin, Pittsburgh, or Colorado – you may have less available cash, but talent and office space (by far the two biggest drains) are a small fraction of what they are in NYC or Silicon Valley.

Talent

Again, though, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t great technical talent elsewhere. The cities I mentioned before - Pittsburgh, Austin, Boulder - all have great engineering programs producing local, young talent.

There has been a lot of talk about talent.  What I think is interesting as noted in another one of my posts is the fact that talent is really scarce in the valley.  Not only that, but the talent there is a little jaded as well.  Everyone is out for the quick hit, come on and get your options and hope they make it big.  Not that we all don’t want to make it big, sometimes you need talent to be with you for the long haul, and I think that you find that more outside the valley.

Tim makes some other great observations but the one I thought was most important was to “Avoid the Echo Chamber”

It’s really no secret that the tech community – and Silicon Valley especially, it seems – are huge echo chambers.

I think this is a really important point and a trap that many of us may fall into.  As we have seen in the local DC area, we have fallen into a dual ecosystem noted in a recent Washington Post article.  We tend to circulate inside our own ecosystem without venturing out to get a broader view of the scene as a whole.  Peter Corbett of iStragegyLabs is looking to help mitigate this with the Twin Tech event coming up this week in DC.  We need to remember that a better gauge of our ideas can be gotten outside the chamber we have created.

Event: Web Content Mavens

The Web Content Mavens consistently puts on great events with some really good thought provoking content, hence their name

In any case I wanted to pass along to all of you the details for their next meetup.  On July 23rd Kevin Novak, the Vice President for Integrated Web Strategy and Technology for the American Institute of Architects, will be presenting “Why Every Organization Should NOT Focus on Creating Communities”

In today’s world, people are more and more pressed for time. The explosion of the web and web services and sites creates opportunities and demands on an individual’s time. How much free time do they have? Can they carve out time to participate actively in new communities or should organizations adopt a distribution strategy where they are meeting users in the space and communities that they are already in?

Kevin Novak will provide background on several initiatives where users aren’t coming to communities despite large investments in infrastructure and marketing. He will also discuss and highlight several distribution strategies that can lead to success in expanding existing communities while serving and meeting an organization’s objectives.

Head over to the Meetup.com link to RSVP and get the location details.

PolicyMap, a Wealth of Data at Your Fingertips

At the recent SocialDevCamp, one of the great points by Dave Troy was that we must really start to think a littel more broad about the tech scene in our area.  He proposed a term “Amtrak Corridor” that basically represents the tech communities along the east coast to include Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC.

So while the stuff I cover here is really centered around the DC area, I took that to heart and was happy to see recently when a reader from the Philly area tipped me off to a new product released by TRF, The Reinvestment Fund, a leading non profit in revitalizing neighborhood revitalization.  The new product they released is called Policy Map, and their tag line:

All the Data You Need

All In One Place

All Online

is absolutely true.  I got in and registered and played around and was amazed a the data I was able to pull together in such a short amount of time. In a matter of seconds I was able to outline my local Congressional District and layer on the per capita income.

Many in our area are in the PR, Social Media relations, and other fields where having good demographic information at their fingertips would be awesome.  Well now they do.  It is hard to even describe all that you can do, but the good folks at Policy Map have put together a great video demo of the featureset.

Go HERE to check it out.

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