Local Bloggers and the Traditional Media

The other day at BlogPotomac, we were fortunate to hear a talk by Dan Beyers, the Local Business Editor of the Washington Post.  Dan spoke about the impact of social media on traditional media and what the post is doing to adjust and acclimate.  The video below is his actual talk.

After his talk, there was some audience questions that Dan fielded.  Being a local DC blogger I had one in mind that I wanted to ask, but the session ran out of time and I never go the chance to ask.  Part of Dan’s talk revolved around how the Post can continue to develop its coverage of the local DC tech scene, which is in need of some legitimacy that some Post covergae would provide.

Recently the post Technology section signed a deal with Techcrunch to syndicate Techcrunch posts in the online Technology section.  While this is  pretty cool acknowledgment for Techcrunch, I think this same model could be used for the post to reach out to local bloggers and get a better foothold into the local social media scene.  There are several of us that are trying to cover and evangelize some of the good things taking place here and I think the post could do well to maybe syndicate some of those works.  It seems to be a win-win for both sides.  The local bloggers can get some great exposure and the Post, the old school traditional media outlet, could get a little social media stree cred.

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• BlogPotomac: WaPo Dan Beyers talks about the future of the media [via Zemanta]

BlogPotomac in Pictures !

I wanted to also include all the media that I took and produced from BlogPotomac for your enjoyment.  This first part is a great video processing tool I have been using from Animoto.  You give it your pics and pic a song and it does the rest.

Here is the pictures from my Flickr stream

And here is the LINK to the group photoset.

BlogPotomac Recap

BlogPotomac was a rousing success.  I think we should all first take the opportunity to thank Geoff Livinsgton and his whole team for putting on such a great event for the local DC area.  This week was quite the conferences here, with Graphing Social Patterns held earlier in the week and then BlogPotomac wrapping it up on Friday.

I think one of the nice things that stood out to many of us, was the crowd of new faces in the audience.  It was really nice to get outside of our little echo chamber and meet other markeing and PR professionals in the area.  I think this was a great primer for many of them to understand the nuiances and needs to learn this social media phenomena.  The speakers list was increadible, creating a lot of audience participatin and communication around all of the topics.

The day started with a great talk from Lionel Menchaca, cheif blogger at Direct2Dell.  He chatted about Dell’s foray into this mediumsome years back and the benefits it has provided.  He told the audience that creating that engagement with the customers is so important these days and also for the company to try be be as transparent as possible with the consumer base.

Next up was a good talk by Dan Beyers, the Local Business Editor for the Washington Post.  he talk about the challenges traditional medai outlets are having in this shift in the ladnscape towards new media.  There was a lot of good questions from the audience as to how the Post can try to work better to cover the local tech scene a bit more and how there is some space for more collaboration.

Maggie Fox and Jeremy Pepper rounded out the morning talks with their expertise and advice on the PR challenges and necessities of using this new media forum.  The afternoon session started out with a great keynote by Frank Gruber explaining to the audience what he called, “bright shiny things”.  These are the tools he uses as aproduct development manager for the myAol.com product at AOL.  KD Paine gave a fascinating talk on metrics and measurement tools we can use to track engagement, et all.  And finally, one of the most active talks was given by  Kami Huyse on ethics.  Maybe it was active cuz the bar just opened … naaah, it was a great cap to a great day.  We look forward to BlogPotomac II next June !

UPDATE:  Nicholas Tolson had a great idea.  he has created a Google Spreadsheet everyone can go put in their info to stay in contact post BlogPotomac.  Here is the LINK

Local Startups Pitch Investors at Grubstake Breakfast

I was cruising around the interwebs this evening and came across an interesting article at Tech Journal South about the Grubstake Breakfast helpd in Vienna, VA this morning.

The Grubstake Breakfast, sponsored by the Business Alliance of George Mason University, is the longest-running networking and investors forum of its kind in the Mid-Atlantic region.

According to the article, the breakfast is an opportunity for local based startups to present their business models to a room full of these investors.  The companies are using early stage startups looking for an A series round of funding in the $250K to $2 million.  Here are the lcoa companies that presented today:

• Reston, Virginia-based Eye Q Development (www.eyedevelopment.com) utilizes an array of patent-pending techbnology and proprietary software platforms to inlay RFID into tickets, ID cards, and water-resistant wrist bands to allow tracking of assets and personnel for security and marketing data analysis.The company is seeking $2 million series “A” investment that will be used for sales/marketing, product completion of additional software, and beta and close of current pipeline.
• Herndon, Virginia-based IRFlex Corporation (www.irflex.com) develops and supplies mid-infrared fiber-optic devices for the military. The company’s products are key components in the new anti-missile systems for military and commerical aircraft. The company is seek private funding of approximately $1 million to acquire the fiber-optic equipment and produce commercial products.
• Vienna, Virginia-based Ordia Solutions, Inc. (www.ordiasolutions.com) has a Web-based sofware application that allows law enforcement officers and other first-responders to communicate and collaborate visually in real-time using tactical graphics, digital maps and shared workspaces to enable highly effective command & control without ever having to set up a physical command post.Ordia Solutions has already raised $630,000 and is currently seeking an additional $500,000 to continue operations and build customer support infrastructure while the early-adopter deals continue toward closing.
• Maryland-based Loladex (www.loladex.com) is a local search engine that allows users to find local businesses based on recommendations from people they know. By integrating with existing social networks Loladex emulates the word-of-mouth process that most people prefer for choosing local merchants. With $350,000 invested so far, Loladex is seeking an additional $750,000 in seed funding to support growth of its existing product and expansion into other Web, social and mobile platforms.

I was really happy to see Loladex on the list.  I have an email in to Dan Goodman, one of the founders, to get some more insight and news as to how things went for them.  We featured loladex here when they launched and have come to know them well and look forward to their success.

SocialCash, Monetize Those Social Apps

After the first day of the Graphing Social Patterns, I was lucky enough to score an invite to a launch party for a new product by Gratis Internet called SocialCash.

Gratis Internet is a local internet company based in the Washington, DC are, so I was happy and excited to see and hear about their new product.

Gratis Internet connects advertisers and consumers worldwide with innovative online marketing techniques. Since its founding in 2000, Gratis Internet has pioneered the incentive marketing industry.

When I arrived I was fortunate to get some time to chat with Gordon Peters, Vice President of SocialCash, for him to give me a little insight into their newest offering.  Gordon told me that SocialCash is a way for social application developers to monetize their applications.  One of the themes throughout the conference the last couple of days was social applications and monetization strategies.  The great thing about SocialCash is the ability to take that burden off the shoulders of the developers and let SocialCash take care of that.

SocialCash, which is Web-based and self-service, simplifies advertising and allows application developers to focus on what they do best, developing viral and engaging applications. With more than 70 percent of social network users residing outside of the U.S., SocialCash customers also benefit from Gratis Internet’s eight years of experience working with high-quality advertisers worldwide through its network.

Initially SocialCash will have two ad products, BannerCash and PointCash.  BannerCash is an ad network that delivers banner ads into social network apps and PointCash is a virtual currency engine allowing users to complete ad offers for points or coins.  A third product to round out the service will be added soon.

Gordon told me that SocialCash has been running in a private beta period with 15 partners and over 200 Facebook applications with very positive results.

We look forward to keeping an eye on this new venture and its impact on the social application advertising space as we move forward.

Recap: Day 2 Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

Well we have wrapped up day 2 of Graphing Social Patterns East 2008 and it was a huge success.  Dave McClure and the rest of the O’Reilly team should really be congratulated.  Thanks to all of them for putting on such a great conference, especially in our backyard here, DC.

HERE are my live notes from the day.

In any case, day 2 here was a great follow up with some more great content for us all, and the popcorn and snacks at the break were not so bad either The day started off with a couple of geat talks by Google and MySpace.

Patrick Chanezon and Paul McDonald gave a great talk about Google’s newest product, the Google App Engine.  It is their foray into the cloud computing space aiming at making the barriers for entry to developers very very low.  I have beena huge Amazon EC2 fan and am happy to see Google get into the mix.  Then Allen Hurff of MySpace followed up with a really good presentation of MySpace’s foray into building out their developer platform.  They have done a lot of work in a very short amount of time and really opened up to the community.

The next session was a panel from Facebook with Dave McClure at the moderator helm, and it was a great time.  He gave no slack and asked the tough questions to the panel.  Unfortunately there was not too much info spilled by the Facebook team.  They must be some sort of politicians or something.  When Dave asked how many companies Facebook has invested in from the Facebook Fund, Ben Ling answered, “somewhere between 2 and 10″ …..  ahh very specific, thanks for the details

Patrick from Google came back on with a small panel to chat about OpenSocial, Google, platform it teamed with Yahoo and MySpace to open up, consisting of RESTFul API calls and some javascript to give users across many platforms a better experience.

After lucnh we heard from a great panel on platforms, building it or buy it.  There was representatives from Mashery, Bebo, Friendster, and Salesforce.  Again the talk was about applications and platforms along with the security implementation.  I found Salesfroce.com’s approach interesting.  Since all of their app’s are installed by users on a pay per app basis, they only workd on creating their platform as a server (paas).

We then had an interesting panel on metrics and a number of companies who have cropped up in this area to help users and developers of these social applications good data.  According to the panel, Google Analytics are not built ot gather this type of data, wherewas their apps are from the API on up.

Nick O’Neill, local DC blogger and founder of Social Times, moderated a panel on the virality and “stickiness” of social apps.  The consensu was that due to some policies put in place on platforms like Facebook, virality seemed to have diminished somewhat.

The conference wrapped up with a couple of talks on monetizing those social apps and also a very important topic of data portability.  Head over to Inside Facebook for a great detailed wrap of each session.

Again, it was a great time.  I met some great people and saw some old friends.  We can only hope we are lucky enough to host this event next year.

Photos above courtesy of:

Shashi Bellamkonda www.shashi.name and www.solutionsarepower.com.

Local Startup: IntroIn Connects You To Apartments

Recently while attending the SocialDevCamp I ran into a local company from Vienna, VA that had a new concept they were about to launch into private beta.  I took a few minutes and spoke to Premraj Jeyaprakash, founder and chief executive officer of Introin.com.

Introin is a pretty innovative new service that aims to

to connect renters and people who have inside knowledge about rentals. After all, who knows more about any particular community than those who live there now?

A comprehensive, nationwide listing of apartments allows remote searching. Our secure message service puts new and existing renters in contact. And because management companies offer bonuses for referrals, existing renters can earn money by referring new renters. Money they can share as an incentive. Introin handles both new rentals and sublets, connecting those in the know to those who need on-site information.

I was pretty impressed with the concept, to connect those who have info on apartments to those who need that information.  With Referrals, they also have allowed those who get a referral bonus form the apartment management service, as well as list any sub leases.

As a prospective renter, this service allows me the ability to connect with people that currently live in that development to find any info on it.  Also it allows the current resident to refer those who connect with them and earn a little extra cash for the referral, maybe even split a bit with the new renter !

Even though they are just now in private beta, they have a very extensive listing of communities around the country that prospective renters can search on to find the right place to live.  Users can search by State, City, and Community, or just by the zip code.

Check out the video here for a browse at the interface, and let us know what you think about this new service.

And finally, a few questions answered

In a paragraph or less, tell us the concept?

Introin is a platform between a renter (prospective resident) and a referral (current resident) where they can communicate and share benefit from the reference program of the apartment community.

What is your target market?

Current and prospective residents of any apartment community.

What niche are you filling and how do you stand out .

Existing websites only list the apartment communities. These sites do not provide features for users to connect and communicate. IntroIn.com helps existing renter to offer information and opportunities to those seeking housing.

Who are your competitors in this space?

Rent.com, Apartmentreviews.com

Mr. Premraj Jeyaprakash is the founder and chief executive officer of Introin.com. Prior to founding Introin Mr.Jeyaprakash held significant executive positions in operations, information systems, and finance with Technowave Inc(CEO), Trinity Technologies Inc (CTO). In addition, he held various senior technology management roles at Intel, Chrome Systems Corporation and Epicor. Mr.Jeyaprakash holds a Masters in Computer Information Systems from University of Phoenix.

Mr. Nitin Pereira is the chief technology officer of Introin.com. He has extensive experience providing end-to-end web solutions for clients and has developed Content Management Systems while managing the entire software development life cycle. At Michigan State University he was the Director of Web and Graphic Marketing. He also managed the National Association of College and University Food Safety’s website that received over 400,000 hits per month. Mr. Pereira holds a degree in Information Technology Management and minored in Business from Michigan State University.

What was the “spark”, the inspirations for your startup .

Before we buy any product, we always seek feedback of others who are using it. But, as a renter, I never had a chance to get an insight from the current residents while searching an apartment. So we built this application where prospective resident and current resident can communicate and share benefit from the reference program of the apartment community.

Recap: Day 1 Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

Day 1 of O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns is in the books and it was a great day with a lot of great content.

I live blogged the event HERE, so check it out.

A lot of the talk today revolved around widgets, it seems to be thehot topic of the day as we have seen a couple of funding rounds recently for the local Clearspring and also RockYou from out west.

Hooman Rafdar, CEO of Clearspring, gave a great talk on widgets.  He had a couple of interesting points but the one I took away most form it was

the only constant in all of this is change …

try new things FAST and use data.

Between his talk and another panel on widgets moderated by Allen Stern of CenterNetworks a key concept was to make sure that you take the time to develop a good widget strategy before diving into the deep end.

Another one of tha talks was by Adam Nash of LinkedIn.  He talked about LinkedIn’s stratey in buidling a business social network and their tring to make it all very relevant to the professional.

There was a lot of talk about the differences between Advertising and App-vertising, and how social applications have become a new way to advertise by combining content and the ad into one unit.

Frank Gruber moderated a panel on White Label Social Networks.  There was a good discussion on building out of these kind of instant on social networks and the tools that are the best to use.  There is a video of this talk HERE, so check it out.

We had a great look into the class taught by Dave McClure at Stanford on building Facebook apps and how succesful it was,  They have had over 20 million installs of some of the apps that were built out of the class.  Several companies have been formed and many of those students have no shortage of job offers.

And finally there was a great panel on “Need for Feeds” and how networks and users are using their news feeds.  I found the talk of making those feeds even more tailored to the user and how this will play out in the future extremely interesting and engaging.  It seems this is the next direction for many.

Off to Day 2 !

Note:

Photos above courtesy of:

Shashi Bellamkonda www.shashi.name and www.solutionsarepower.com.

Frank Gruber of www.somewhatfrank.com

Day2 Live Blogging: Graphing Social Patterns East 2008

GSP: White-Label Social Networks

Got a good video of the panel moderated by Frank Gruber of SomeWhatFrank.

It was a good look at the tools and building out of “white label” social networks

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