Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Social Innovation Conversations: Reinventing the world together - one conversation at a time

This tag line could very well be related to "An Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore’s thought provoking movie that I recommend everyone to go watch, and ponder upon. But it is actually the tag line of the podcasting channel that the Stanford Center for Social Innovation is launching tonight on Doug Kaye’s Conversations Network: Social Innovation Conversations.

The Center, which is part of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, seeks to build a community of people actively engaged in social innovation, and strengthen the capacity of individuals and organizations to develop innovative solutions to social problems for a more just, sustainable and healthy world. It is part of the curriculum of the Standford MBA program, and does research work on organizational aspects of non-profits.

The purpose of “Social Innovation Conversations” is to be a collaborative online platform for experts, community leaders, and scholars to share their knowledge across sectors for multi-disciplinary learning. The Center will offer conferences, faculty lectures, speaker events and expert interviews. In addition, leading professional and other academic institutions will be invited to contribute content to the channel to raise public awareness about the grand challenges of the world.

Topics covered by the channel include: Corporate Citizenship, Philanthropy, Responsible Investing, Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability, International Development and Disaster Relief.

Not only is it a very interesting program, it is also something close to my heart since the founding Producer for the channel, and Program and Marketing Manager of the Center, is none other than my beloved wife, Bernadette. So here goes for the family plug .

Tag: social+innovation+conversations

Timely podcast recording with Tom "Don't touch my Web 2.0 conference" Raftery

Tom Raftery has become a celebrity for his reporting of the IT@Cork Web 2.0 Incident that the blogosphere has been buzzing about since last Friday, and that got him interviewed by the New York Times: Squabble Over Name Ruffles a Web Utopia. He is also the producer of the podcast channel PodLeaders. I met Tom at Les Blogs 2.0 and most recently at the Web 2.0 Irish Conference.

We talked about recording a podcast on both occasions, and we are recording it this Tuesday. Given the context, not too sure who is going to interview whom… In any case, Tom has published a post where you can leave questions you would like us to address.

 

Podcasting news: PodTech.net's funding and TalkCrunch's first show

Busy evening on the podcasting front: first came the inaugural show of a new weekly podcast, TalkCrunch. Given the highly recognizable brand, you won't be surprised to listen to the audio extension of TechCrunch. The first show is about events and calendars, and you can subscribe to the feed here.

The second piece of news that I am delighted to relay is the Series A funding of PodTech.net, the podcast production company of John Furrier: the company just raised $5.5M (!!!) from US Venture Partners and Venrock Associates. Over the past year, John has tirelessly recorded and produced hundreds of shows with entrepreneurs, VCs, lawyers and senior executives - creating a market and a business model for himself and his growing team on both the consumer and the corporate side. It is not common for VC investments to get into content creation - traditionally a space where revenue multiples don't exceed 3 to 4.

Here a brief overview of PodTech.net's products:

PodTech is well known for its innovative InfoTalk™ podcast which has established itself as the leading Silicon Valley technology and business podcast. The Silicon Valley InfoTalk™ podcast has been host to some of the biggest names in technology and business. Notable personalities include Steve Forbes, Mark Cuban, and Sandy Berger, and hundreds of technology and media moguls. In addition PodTech has attracted leading corporations that include Yahoo, Intel, IBM, Juniper, among others.

In the past few months PodTech has innovated and expanded the InfoTalk model to include a new set of podcast media offerings. With this financing announcement, PodTech is launching the following media properties:

• PodTech News: Dedicated independent podcasting news team
• PodTech InfoTalk™ Network: Dedicated set of PodTech original and 3rd party podcasting content
• PodTech Sponsorship Network: Aggregated set of sponsors and paid content

Congrats John, it is fantastic news and I am really delighted for you, Linda and the team. You just have to add these Loomia recommendations we have been talking about.

More:

• Press release announcing the funding.
• Matt Marshall got the first analysis out (NPR is already heavily into podcasting by the way) .

A few data points about podcast advertising

MarketWatch’s Frank Barnako published a piece (free sub req'd) about podcast advertising, out of which a few nuggets of information are worth noting:

• Podshow claims to have reached in Q405 their 2006 revenue target of $300 to $400K, and predicts sales in the millions of dollars this year.
• There seems to be a consensus that there's money to be made by recycling established media in the podcast world, too. Michael Greeson, president of the Diffusion Group of Dallas, pointed out that NPR recorded 4 million downloads in the first two months it offered podcasts.
• Last summer, Greeson issued a research report projecting nearly 60 million people in the United States will be listening to podcasts by 2010. The report also estimated 15.5 million portable players would be sold last year; the tally was closer to 22 million.
• Cameron Reilly, the founder of the Podcast Network of Australia, is achieving between $40 and $100 cost-per-thousand on his podcasts, but this level of revenue will only be accessible to the most popular podcasts because of their traffic and/or demographics.
• At least half-dozen companies have announced plans to offer menus of podcasts to advertisers. Firms like Podtrac Inc. say that they will do the selling and help podcasters insert ads in shows, and take less than half of the revenue as commission.

Has anyone done a review or comparison of podcast advertising tools/networks ?

Great podcast featuring Zazzle co-founders Jeff and Bobby Beaver

I already mentioned the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders program in the past, and how great a resource it is. I want to recommend the podcast of the most recent session, during which Jeff and Bobby Beaver - the two brothers who co-founded Zazzle with their father - explain in quite a bit of detail the different stages of creation of their company. Definitely a great listen, especially as Jeff and Bobby also talk about the more personal facets of being a startup entrepreneur: passion, vision and dedication. In case you have not heard of Zazzle, the company allows you to create customized t-shirts, posters and even stamps.

As we are in the midst of a discussion about re-inventing Venture Capital, and the removal of the “middle men” (the VCs), it is also interesting to hear from these two why they chose to raise money ($16M from Kleiner Perkins actually) even if their company was already profitable.

You can download the show here.

Tags: zazzle

Loic le Meur does it again - videoblogging with the French Interior Minister

My good friend Loic (GM Europe for Six Apart and MC of Les Blogs) has scored yet another coup: this time he has managed to chat for half an hour with Nicolas Sarkozy, France's Interior Minister (who oversees all Law Enforcement agencies) and reportedly a future presidential candidate. The interview is in French, but the gist of the talk can be found on Loic's english blog or in this BusinessWeek piece.

Loic has been a relentless advocate of blogging in France and in Europe over three years, and has since gone into podcasting and videoblogging. So, Jacques Chirac next :-) ? Joking aside, this might actually have start an alternate communication channel for the forthcoming French presidential campaign.

Chapeau en tout cas (“Hats off, indeed”).

Tags: france

Syndicate Conference: StructuredBlogging.org is officially launched

Marc Canter is on stage to announce the launch of StructuredBlogging.org, a non-profit initiative supporting the development and deployment of micro-formats in blog posts. The idea is pretty simple (but the implementation across all industry players is far from easy): as opposed to publishing a review of say, a movie, in a text format, a micro-format defines a number of fields that can be entered related to the movie: title, producer, director, actors, etc. Having information available in XML will make it much easier to intelligently extract elements of data to search, aggregate and syndicate. Specific plugins have been developed for WordPress and MovableType to make it easy to publish these formats through a blog. There are a couple of examples on the StructuredBlogging blog.

Salim Ismail from PubSub is now providing the list of formats currently supported: Reviews, Events, Lists, Media (audio, video, images), and People and Group showcases. The corresponding micro-formats will also be mapped to existing file formats like FOAF, vCard, iCal,... About 40 companies are supporting this initiatives at launch, and a much larger number is expected to jump on the bandwagon.

Mike Arrington from TechCrunch fame, and also Edgeio - the stealth project he and Keith Teare have been working on - briefly mentioned that supporting a forthcoming Classifieds micro-format will be part of the roadmap of the company. I should use this occasion to disclose that I am also involved in Edgeio - more on all this later.

This is a positive development for the industry, eventually pushing blogging into richer types of applications - and enabling new types of aggregation. I just wish that we won't see competing initiatives developing just for the sake of building something proprietary. This is an open source initiative, and everyone is welcome to participate.

Update: PubSub's Bob Wyman posts some thoughts about Structured Blogging, and mentions the existence of a discussion group.

Tags: structuredblogging, syndicate

PopTech podcasts are worth a listen

I have discovered the PopTech conference last year through its coverage on ITConversations. I was not able to attend the 2005 edition but I have been enjoying the sessions made available on ITC over the past few weeks. They are truly worth a listen, especially the two part program on the Future of Africa.

I hope that I'll find the time to attend the event in 2006 - I find PopTech to be one of the most inspiring conferences out there.

Sessions of the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Program are available as podcasts

One of the great things in living in the Bay Area is the incredible number of events, talks, presentations,... that are happening every day. Just take a look at WorkIt.com for an overview of a typical week. Stanford University hosts a number of these events, and one I particularly appreciate is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Program. Every week or so, a startup CEO, a VC or an industry luminary will come to the School of Engineering and address an amphitheater full of students, faculty and professionals. I blogged a couple of these sessions, most recently the one featuring Mark Zuckerberg from the Facebook and his board member and investor, Accel's Jim Breyer.

The good news is that ETL sessions are now available as podcasts (here on Loomia), in addition to videos which had been around for a while. The podcast of the Facebook session is here.

VentureWeek #2 on Search is up

Eric Olson has released the second edition of his show, focusing on the Search market. We recorded it a week ago, with my friends David Hornik, Brad Feld and Dave McClure.

We had great fun doing it, especially when we got into why Brad and David are the "Louis Vuitton" of Web 2.0 venture capital investing. Hope you enjoy the show as well, and give us some feedback.

And thanks to Eric for inviting me - I definitely look forward to listening, and participating, to future shows.