from Andrew Sullivan.
As my friend Justin said: I do hope the next generation will end the dangerous war games of our fathers. That is something to hope for.
Yes, this is the siphon pot coffee from blue bottle. Todd Sampson first introduced me to this place and it’s now a must-visit on every trip to San Fran.
Decidedly not Peet’s. Blue Bottle Cafe, San Francisco.
I recently discovered The Autumn Film and have been blown away the more and more I listen. This video (filmed by my friend Andrew Hyde) is one of the most chilling and honest performances i’ve seen in a long time.
They’re currently giving away 3 songs and this video on their site and I highly encourage you to go check it out.
before wade beat me (and won the tournament), i did win one round with a decent slam :)
mid-slam.
On Friday I spent the day in Boulder, Colorado on my first day as a TechStars Mentor. I had the chance to meet with some great Boulder-based startups to talk shop, brainstorm product strategy, and help them think big about their businesses.
In the evening, we hosted a Facebook Developer Garage Boulder, and had a chance to hear about some great Facebook Platform and Connect applications being built in and around the Boulder/Denver community.
The most interesting thing I took from this first session in Boulder is that the startup energy there is electric. The entreprenuers are passionate, and the community is overwhelmingly collaborative and supportive of each other.
Here’s a look at a few of the startups I had a chance to meet with on Friday. For the most part, when mentoring startups, you talk about the future. Here you will find a quick overview of the present. I’ll leave the future to be seen in each of their products.
Suffice to say, there are some really cool things going on in Boulder:
Lussumo is a free, open source, platform for doing cool things. Right now, they’re shipping an awesome discussion forum application called Vanilla, which over a million users love. Expect big things in the forum space from Lussumo in the future.
The Next Big Sound is pushing the music envelope on the internet. Today they’re a platform for discovery of unsigned bands. Tomorrow they’re looking to change the way music business is done. With all of the innovation needed in how artists and management interact with the internet, these guys are thinking about things in exactly the right ways.
Everlater seeks to make telling travel stories fun and easy. In traveling around the world, and looking around the web, they realized that putting together a simple travel story is actually quite hard. If you are a traveler who also loves to share and create, keep an eye on Everlater.
Mailana is frustrated with how hard it is to make meaning out of the increasingly massive amount of user generated content inside the email stream. They’ve been expermimenting with new ways to visualize email inside the firewall, and have released some of these tools for consumers on top of Twitter. With all of us fighting our inboxes every day, lets hope Pete and the team at Mailana bring some innovation to the craziness of email.
EventVue seeks to connect you to the people who matter most every time you attend your favorite conferences. With recent Facebook Connect integration and a slew of upcoming features, attending conferences will never be the same. If you run a conference series, or are looking to get one off the ground, I highly recommend you take a look at the work this team is doing. They’re making connecting, in person, easier for all of us.
TimZon makes communicating concepts and ideas to remote teams easy with video, white boarding, and a slough of asynchronous private video communications tools. What they are doing is really cool, and has a shot at helping people communicate an be productive with video in a way that no one else has tried.
Lijit gives blog publishers powerful tools for search by extending the idea of search to include the social network surrounding the publisher. The social graph is a powerful thing, when combined with search and put into the hands of publishers.
Ignighter takes a more social approach to dating. Rather than signing up for the site by yourself, you invite your friends to become a “dating group.” Then, you can find other dating groups to go out with on a group date, increasing your odds for finding a compatible mate in the social graph. These guys are adding more features soon which will help get more people involved and hope to create a movement around group dating. I think they’ve got a shot. If you’re single, stay tuned, this could be really cool.
meeting with dave was awesome.
I’m spending a large number of my brain cycles recently thinking about “social distribution networks”. Each day that I spend in startup world I feel more and more that we’re at a major inflection point in the history of media. When hundreds of 140 character thoughts from my friends get more of my attention than all the news giants of the past combined, something is changing.
If you sense the same thing, you should read John Borthwick’s essay (and the comments) on Social Distribution Networks. We’ve been using the same term for the past month or so in the EventVue office a bit differently, but John really uncovers a lot of the power in this new distribution model. One favorite quote:
Today there seems to be a new distribution model that is emerging. One that is based on people’s ability to publically syndicate and distribute messages — aka content — in an open manner. This has been a part of the internet since day one — yet now its emerging in a different form — its not pages, its streams, its social and so its syndication. The tools serve to produce, consume, amplify and filter the stream.
Go read the whole essay.
