Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Conferences FYI: Graphing Social Patterns, the Business of APIs, Defrag and LeWeb3

I have explained and written many times over about conferences I attend, speak at or help organize. They represent a unique opportunity to catch up with a vast number of contacts or companies in our industry, and meet (and get pitched by) startups by the dozen. At the Getting Funded panel of TechCrunch40, I even mentioned that “getting mobbed at conferences was welcome” (as noted by John Paczkowski in his column :-)) and boy was I well served - it took me over an hour to leave the room after talking to about 20+ startup entrepreneurs). So I like attending conferences, and one of my favorite activity - besides being on stage - is “lobbyconing”.

The next couple of months are going to be very busy on the conference circuit. We'll obviously have the main event of the Web 2.0 industry, Web 2.0 Summit, in a couple of weeks - no need to talk about that one. I want to give a shout to 4 events that are put together by friends of mine, and look very interesting.

First, starting in a couple of days is Graphing Social Patterns : The Business & Technology of Facebook, organized by my good friend Dave Mc Clure. It is a conference for developers and marketers on how to build and distribute apps for the Facebook Platform, and how to reach online communities using social networking platforms and applications. The conference will be held in San Jose, CA from October 7th-9th. Main conference sessions are Monday 10/8 and Tuesday 10/9, with a bunch of cool workshops and a Hackathon on Sunday 10/7. Readers of Software Only can register with this 30% off discount code, but act quick - the conference is about to sell out.

Then is the Business of APIs conference, co-produced by my friends of DealMaker Media and Mashery's CEO Oren Michels (Disc. I was a founding investor of Mashery). As we know APIs are a key foundation of the Web 2.0 ecosystem, but too often (sigh) is the business implications of making APIs available overlooked. The objective of the event is to cover that very topic. It will take place in the afternoon of Monday 10/15, at the San Francisco City Club, and you can request an invitation here.

Early November I will head to Denver for Defrag, a very interesting event focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the “aha” moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, “social” networking, collaboration and business intelligence. You can enter the code defrag3 to get $300 off the registration price.

Finally, on December 11&12th, we'll have the fourth edition of LeWeb3, which I am really looking forward to. This year's program is in the good hands of Cathy Brooks, producer extraordinaire. I'll have a discount code for my readers sometime next week.

I really need to find an original way of talking about the conferences I attend

Howdy! First, to all of you really anxious to follow me around (but don't feel obliged, really) twitter (here) is where my “creativity” expresses itself these days. In short bursts of 140 characters max - which I found amazingly annoying but now really appreciate.

May has been crazy busy at work, lots of good developments in the portfolio, and lots of thoughts put in the scaling of my own business. And of course a bunch of conferences. And June is going to look pretty much the same.

First, I am writing this from SFO on my way to Amsterdam, where the Next Web conference is taking place this Friday. A great line-up of keynote speakers, and the super nice organizers, has led me to accept to fly to Europe for a couple of days (ouch). I'll write my preso in the plane on “Investing Around The Globe and the New Connectedness”.

Then, I will speak at SuperNova 2007, the conference put together by Kevin Werbach that takes place on June 20/22 in San Francisco. I will be on the investors panel and might disclose a new investment I have made there and then.

Finally, I will attend another DealMaker Media Under the Radar event, this one on Entertainment and Media (Disclosure: I suggested a few names of companies in the category and was asked to sit on the selection committee of the event). It will take place on June 28th at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View.

More when I get to Amsterdam, the plane has pulled back from the gate and the flight attendant is not happy that I tell her that I have to publish this. See you on the other side :-).

Another week, another bunch of conferences and events

You might think that I am spending all my time speaking at, or attending, conferences and there are some weeks where that feels very true. This week is one of those, with a few back to back events that are worth mentioning.

Monday 5/7 is the day of Startup Camp II, at the Westin San Francisco Market Street. I will hang out there for the day, and will probably lead/participate to a startup financing session, but there will be a lot of very interesting discussions.
Update: I just posted the slides that I used in the session this morning. Thanks to all involved for your participation and your many questions.
Update II: a few people complained that they could not really make sense of the slides (like the empty slides on Growth and Exit). This might indeed be the case since their sole purpose is to synthesize the points I covered in my talk.

Tuesday 5/8 sees the start of Software 2007 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara CA), a conference focused on the enterprise software market that will last for 2 days. As already mentioned, Ismael Ghalimi and I will lead the Enterprise 2.0 theme, made up of four panels.

Finally, I want to give a big shout to David Beach, the new co-chair of the SDForum Search SIG. He has put together a very interesting event for Tuesday Night over at Google on People Search. Very interesting topic that has seen a bunch of activity over the past couple of years, and it is just the beginning. Companies participating are Wink, ZoomInfo and Spock - Mike Arrington will be mc'ing. You can still attend that event by registering on site just before the session.

I will also swing by Stirr's Founder Mixer 2.5 on Wednesday. Another shout to Sanford Barr for starting this event that has become a must attend in the Bay Area for startup entrepreneurs, established companies and financiers.

Do come and chat if you are attending any of these events.

Tags: startupcamp2, searchsig, software2007

Interesting Web 2.0 conferences and events

The busy conference season is upon us again (just cleared TED 2007 which was an absolute blast), and I want to mention two events where I will be speaking in the coming month:

WEB 2.0 EXPO / APRIL 15–18 (Moscone Center, San Francisco CA)

The Web 2.0 Expo is a spin-off of the highly popular Web 2.0 conference (now called the Web 2.0 Summit), that will feature a large number of Web 2.0 companies exhibiting their products, as well as a multi-track conference that will be preceded by a number of workshops. A big shout to my co-chair of the Search SIG Dave McClure for co-organizing this event.

On the 15th, I will be running the workshop Starting Up 2.0: Strategies for Pitching, Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup with my good friend Rob Hayes from First Round Capital. If you have attended some of the Camps (BarCamp, TagCamp, MashupCamp,…) I have run a number of sessions about Angel/VC financing, trying to give participants insights on the funding cycle. We will have 3 hours to cover the startup process, and there will be a lot to talk about. We will keep the scripted part of  the session to 2 hours tops so that we can make sure that we address as many of questions of the audience as we can. Feel free to send me an email or leave comments on this post if you plan to attend the workshop, and have specific issues you would like to see addressed.

On the 15th, I will participate to a the Panel on Venture Capital 2.0: Bright Future or Broken Forever?. Since there will be six of us on stage, and we are all very opinionated, it promises a fun debate. I am really looking forward to the conversation with David Hornik, Chris Moore, Josh Kopelman, Michael Eisenberg (who we don’t get to see often enough out here). Mike Arrington will have the "interesting" task of keeping us on topic and/or schedule.

SOFTWARE 2007 / MAY 7–8 (Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara CA)

My friend MR Rangaswami has organized the Software conference for a number of years now. We met a long time ago when I was still an enterprise software investor, and have kept in touch to compare notes on the evolution of systems in the enterprise world. MR has asked Ismail Ghalimi – the CEO of Intalio, organizer of the Office 2.0 conference and talented IT Blogger – and yours truly to run an Enterprise 2.0 theme at Software 2007, which will span across 4 panels (titles listed below are work in progress):

• What does Web 2.0 mean to the enterprise beyond the technical alphabet soup
• Enterprise 2.0: Meet the companies
• Office 2.0: Meet the companies
• Enterprise/Office 2.0: the CIO point of view

Our goal is to set the scene in the first panel, establishing what 2.0 means in the enterprise context and where we have seen actual usage from corporate clients. “Meet the companies” will feature 4 startups building products in a particular segment in the Enterprise/Office space and will both their product vision and their market development strategy (against the incumbents). We will wrap up the discussion with a panel of three/four CIOs and get their views (“So what ? Who cares ?”) on this new generation of applications and services. I will post the formal program and names of participants in these sessions in due course.

Readers of Software Only can get a $300 discount off the regular price by clicking on this link.

UNDER THE RADAR: WHY OFFICE 2.0 MATTERS / MARCH 23 (Microsoft Campus, Mountain View CA)

I will also be attending (but not speaking at this time) the Under the Radar event on Office 2.0 put together by Debbie and Alison over at DealMaker Media. It will be interesting to listen and meet 32 company CEOs in the office 2.0 space. Readers of Software Only can actually get a discount by registering through this link.

Back from Le Web 3, and I am so glad I was there

Unless you have been away for a week in an Internet-deprived location, or don't bother reading blogs anymore, you are at least aware that a conference called Le Web3 took place in Paris (France) last week, and that a very profound and passionate controversy ensued - initially led by mostly negative feedback and subsequently by a wave of positive ones.

I rarely take part of blogging “shitstorms” - unless one of my companies is right in the middle of it of course - since things related to angel investing happen largely behind closed doors. However this time, I ended up in the middle of it. First because my good friend Loic, the organizer of Le Web 3, was taking a beating which turned very nasty and personal - to the point of often drifting away from issues with the conference and focusing on personal anger against him. Second because I ended up driving a large part of the second day of the show as Loic was busy dealing with the “insertion” in the program of Shimon Peres, and French Presidential candidates Francois Bayrou and Nicolas Sarkozy. Since we added 90 minutes of content in the program, whilst trying to keep every speaker who made it to the show in said program, we had to plan (and re-plan) almost in realtime. So some of the complaints from speakers about the last minute changes, the recombination of panels, etc. should also come my way. I will only note that Bruno Bonnell, the CEO of Atari, flew from New-York especially for the conference, and only made a joke when pointing out that he could taken the next flight out had he known that his panel would be delayed by 3 hours (my doing, again). And this is a guy running a public company.

Loic has just posted a very detailed response to the criticism he has received, and so I won't cover the same topics. I would however like to share some reflections I have had at the conference and since then:

• As I said in my closing remarks at the conference, Le Web 3 might have had issues (and the magnitude of these issues really varied from one attendee to the next) but it was a very important event. It was the first time I saw the European ecosystem (like the one we have in Silicon Valley) come together in a palpable way. Young startup entrepreneurs hanging out with more experienced ones, potential partners from large Internet or telco companies, and - at last I should say - investors. I was pleased to see a large number of VCs from all over Europe chatting around with companies presenting at the startup corner or just attending the conference. Since I am not attending European conferences at the same rate as US ones (!!!), I would be happy to be proven wrong but I heard it many times from attendees (the happy ones).
• There was a disconnect between some of the audience and the intent of the conference, that we'll need to address in the future - provided that there is something beyond Le Web 3. This year's program was meant to be a departure from Les Blogs, with a much broader scope and ambition - the Web as a platform, for technology, business, media, etc. but also for culture, society and politics. This shift seemed clear to me, but there were people in the audience expecting a new iteration of Les Blogs - which is obviously not what they got.
• Like Ross, I think that as disrupting as it was, it was a good thing to add Peres, Bayrou and Sarkozy at the last minute despite the obvious risks involved in doing so. I was really disappointed, and embarassed, at the demonstration that many influential French politicians are or feel completely unable of entering into a conversation in English. Why can't they all be like Christine Lagarde, the Minister of Foreign Trade, who has a perfect command of Shakespeare's language and is super smart.
• Loic called for an end of blogger conferences. I am actually longing for conferences recognizing that the content part of the program is second to the networking opportunity. I paid almost $5,000 (if you count incidentals) to attend the Web 2.0 conference this year, and in 3 days I must have spent a maximum of 3 or 4 hours in the room. Why ? Because I was so busy meeting or networking with so a ton interesting executives in the audience. I had a very similar experience at Le Web 3 - until I took over from Loic and then almost ran away from people because the focus was on the program.

I think that Le Web 3 went way beyond the achievements of the first and second edition of Les Blogs, despite or maybe even thanks to the controversy. In any case, I want to congratulate Loic (again) for putting it together, and want to encourage him to push for the limits for next year's conference - or whatever ends up materializing.. in less than 6 weeks. And I hope that this time he will listen when I say that 30 mins is *way* too short for a panel - but that's another story.

PS: I was asked to list my favorite sessions/speakers. I thought that the two panels on gaming were really interesting (thanks to the panelists, not the moderator - me - who demonstrated that he was still very limited in his knowledge of the gaming market). And I really liked the talks from Danah Boyd and Hans Rosling.
PPS: I have to give a special shout to the Netvibes party. As many people mentioned, the music was a bit too loud to have networking conversations but man the dancing was good.
PPPS: I had to update this post with the amusing cartoon that the unique Hugh McLeod just posted. As usual, a pleasure to hang out with you in Paris Hugh.

Tags: lemeur, leweb3

SDForum Search SIG: The growing online video ecosystem - October 10th 6:30pm @ Microsoft - Featuring VideoEgg, Dabble, CastTV, POSTRoller

Update: we are trying for the first time to video stream the session at this address (QuickTime 7).

Close to 300 video hosting, sharing and editing sites have been counted to date, serving hundreds of millions, if not billions, of videos a day. Video creation is also growing exponentially, and the availability of decent video recording capabilities in cell phones will only accelerate it. It therefore made to us to organize a session on the developing online video ecosystem, ranging from editing, hosting, advertising to search and aggregation. And to make the picture complete, we have also invited the video content production side of things. We expect, and actually wanted, that we’ll discuss topics broader than search per se - but as we’ll establish it, search and discovery mechanisms are fundamental enablers in the world of videos.

To MC the event, we have also decided to innovate: we will have two moderators, who – amongst so many things – produce the “Om & Niall Podsessions” podcast. Om as in Om Malik and Niall as in Niall Kennedy, who are both actors and commentators of the evolving development of online media. Their recent podcast on the topic of video led to their leading this session.

Will be joining us on October 10th for that session:

• Video Editing and Hosting: VideoEgg – Matt Sanchez
• Video Search: CastTV – Alex Vikati
• Video Bookmarking: Dabble – Mary Hodder
• Video Advertising Network: POSTRoller – Tod Sacerdoti

The event will take place at the Conference Center of the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus (Building 1, 1065 La Avenida St., Mountain View) which has a capacity of 270 attendees. We suggest that you pre-register on this page of the SDForum web site. Note that we will only be able to accept sign-ups at the door based on the remaining capacity. This will also help us figuring out required food and beverages. To speed up the signing process, please print, fill in and bring this form if you are parking your car on the Microsoft campus

The now well established Search SIG Agenda format will be used:

6:30-7:00pm - Registration / Food & Drink
7:00–7:05pm - A few words about the Search SIG
7:05-8:15pm - Act I: The growing online video ecosystem
8:15-8:30pm - Intermission: Search Networking & Geeking Out
8:30-9:00pm - Act II: Product Demos from VideoEgg, CastTV, Dabble and POSTRoller– and Q&A with the audience
9:00-9:15pm - Open Mike Geek: Announcements (30 seconds of fame & fortune)
9:16pm - You Don’t Have To Go Home, But You Can’t Stay Here

Do get in touch with us (searchsig [at] gmail [dot] com) if you want to use a demo slot to launch a new search startup (one, and maybe two companies can take advantage of that).

And remember, there is a distribution list for Search SIG announcements – if you want to join, send an email to sdforum_searchsig-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Tags: searchsig

A few data points on Digg from Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps

Kevin Rose is presenting at Ryan Carson’s Future of Web Apps in San Francisco. He spent quite a bit of time covering the functionality of Digg, and briefly shared a few interesting data points:

• Starting in October 2004, Kevin funded the initial build of Digg by himself, paying co-founder Owen Byrne (who he found through eLance), $10/hour for his development work. Then, and still now, Kevin acted as the product architect of the service.
• After launching via Kevin’s blog, the growth of the service led to increased capital requirements to build a scalable back-end. One of Textamerica’s founders, and friend of Kevin, provided angel funding to the tune of $50K.
• The rapid growth continued and required some “serious” funding – matetializing as a $2.8M investment led by Greylock’s David Sze.
• Digg hit scalability issues upon the launch of version 2.0. Throwing in a bunch of servers did not have any effect, it was necessary to re-architecture Digg’s database layer to optimize it.
• Digg has 15 employees, of which 3 PHP developers and 4 guys in charge of operations and scalability. There is a cool picture of the whole crew on the Digg site.

More: As usual, Wikipedia has quite a complete coverage of Digg, and Richard McManus recently published an interesting interview of Kevin (part 1, part 2).

SDForum Search SIG: Search Analytics - September 12th 6:30pm @ AOL - Featuring FeedBurner, Google, Hitwise & MyBlogLog

After an extended summer break (as explained by my esteemed co-chair, Dave Mc Clure, we both have been quite busy), the Search SIG returns with a very interesting program on September 12th, focusing on Search Analytics. And since this is a wide subject that touches other types of metrics and usage, we have decided to broaden the scope quite a bit by inviting a set of companies that measure, track and analyse traffic and behavioral patterns of web sites, blogs and feeds.

Panelists:

Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics
LeaAnn Prescott, Hitwise
Don Loeb, FeedBurner
Scott Rafer, MyBlogLog

Agenda:

6:30-7:00pm - Registration / Food & Drinks
7:00-€“7:05pm - Intros & Announcements
7:05-8:15pm - Episode I: Search Analytics Panel
8:15-8:30pm - Intermission: Networking for Geeks (and non-Geeks)
8:30-9:00pm - Episode II: Live Demos
9:00-9:15pm - Open Mike for product launches or announcements (please email me at searchsig [at] gmail [dot] com)
9:16pm - End of the session

Location & Directions:

We are most grateful to AOL for hosting us on very short notice at the AOL Campus, Bldg #12, Shasta conf room. The address is 401 Ellis Street, Mountain View, CA 94043 (click for map)

Take the Ellis St exit from 101, and head west about 1/4 mile. The AOL building is a 3-story mirrored glass facility, about 3 blocks down on the left hand side. (note: if you get to the light at Middlefield you've gone too far; make a U-turn and come back 1 block)

PLEASE PRE-REGISTER on the SDForum website if you plan to attend (to help AOL plan for enough food & drink to go around)

Dave will emcee the session solo as yours truly will be in (hum) Vegas to attend the first day of TechEd - a long time commitment that unfortunately means that I won't be able to attend this very interesting session.

Tags: searchsig

Busy on the conference circuit - again

Courtesy of Upcoming.org, here is a quick subset of the events I am going to attend or speak at in the next 60 days. I will increasingly make bulk announcements regarding events (except for the Search SIG which is about to hold its first event in a while on Sept 12th), otherwise I would spend even more time blogging about these things than I already do (just check my tag cloud on the right hand-side of my blog, it is telling).

• I have been invited to participate to the Bloggers Corner of SAP TechEd, the SAP developers conference taking place in Las Vegas during the week of Sept 12th. That week is pretty crazy so I will unfortunately be spending just the first couple of days over there. I am however pretty excited to chat with SAP executives about Enterprise 2.0 and its implications on the SAP core business (and I don’t expect a “WTF would I care” ?). Thanks to Jeff Nolan for inviting me to join the Blogger Corps that covered Sapphire last May.
• Straight back from Las Vegas, I will hang out on the 13th and 14th at the Future of Web Apps Summit in San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts Theatre. Ryan Carson has been kind enough to reach out and invite me to attend this conference that I heard a lot of good things about. There is a great roster of speakers, and I look forward to the session and related lobbyconing – as usual. Oh, and it is amazingly good value ($295 for 2 days).
• It would be too simple not to overlay yet another event, so I will be moderating an HBS Tech panel on Blogs, Wikis & Social Media - Are 'Naked Conversations' a Business Communication Revolution? The event will take place on Sept 14th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, starting at 6pm. Speakers will be a few utterly unknown bloggers like SAP’s Jeff Nolan, Microsoft PodTech’s Robert Scoble, and a couple of others. As I am now used to, I plan to moderate this session un-panel style, so we’ll have a conversation “at large” with the audience. Thanks to Eric Moyer for inviting me.
• If you are interested in what happened to (2 year) old Web 2.0 companies once they have “graduated”, check out the Momemtum and Growth Conference that the IBD Network is putting together. The notion is to have CEOs from companies that have presented at an Under the Radar event in the past to come back and talk about growing, scaling, being successful or failing (?). That event is on Sept 27th and 28th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
• My friend Ismael Ghalimi is organizing the inaugural edition of the Office 2.0 Conference, which will take place on Oct 11th and 12th in San Francisco. Ismael is the CEO of Open Source BPMS company Intalio (Disclaimer: an 5–year old angel investment of mine) and the editor of the very popular IT Redux blog. The goal of the conference is to explore the landscape of the next generation of office applications that will reside somewhere in the cloud, all relying on your personal shelf space – which will also be in the cloud. A very interesting topic, especially after the annoucement of the forthcoming Google Office suite, and a great list of speakers. Note that you have two more days to get the earlybird price of $395. On Sept 1st, it goes up to $595.
• The Enterprise Software Investment Forum 2006 will take place on Oct 25 and 26th in San Jose, brings together Enterprise Software Investors, VCs, Strategists, and Entrepreneurs to discuss the evolution of the software market and its impact on venture capital and private equity investment strategies (and vice versa). It will be my first appearance at that conference that should also lead to interesting discussions.
• And there will be “the” Web 2.0 Conference – a registered service mark of O’Reilly, CMP Media and whoever alledgedly and reportedly claimed it . Update: Tim O'Reilly just blogged about the fact that CMP had agreed to restrain their attack dogs limit their enforcement efforts. Good thing when you recall the Web 2.0/IT@Cork brouhaha.
  That edition should be over the top, considering all that has happened over the past six to twelve months.

Phew. And I am sure I have forgotten a few. Feel free to point them to me (but he, not too many please) and as usual, happy to meet at any of these events - just email me at jeff [dot] clavier [at] gmail [dot] com.

AlwaysOn Summit, BlogHer & IBD Network's Strategy Series on Enterprise 2.0

Busy week on the conference circuit (again). I am attending the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford which kicked-off last night. I will be moderating and judging a couple of sessions of the CEO showcase. You can watch the conference through the live webcast.

I really enjoyed attending the first BlogHer conference last year. Unfortunately, I have a conflict that prevents me from attending the full conference but I will swing by the Welcome reception on Friday to say hi to my blogher friends.

On Monday Aug 1st, I will moderate the second installment of the Enterprise 2.0 discussion organized by the IBDNetwork: Web 2.0 & the Enterprise - REVISITED. The session, for which you can register here, is hosted by Fenwick & West in Mountain View from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

If you are attending any of these events, and want to meet, just come and say hi, or email me at jeff [dot] clavier [at] gmail [dot] com.

Tags: alwayson, blogher, ibdnetwork