TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing

Tweet

Back in January we heard that TechCrunch was going to run its first international Disrupt show in Beijing. Since then there has been no news, but after a few calls over the past couple of weeks I've learned that there are still plans to have TC Disrupt Beijing and I've been invited to help with the planning!

I'm told that the date will be set as soon as this week, so be on the lookout for the announcement. China friends, feel free to comment or tweet me here if you'd like to chat more once the date for the show is set. I'll be sending out emails soon to many of you to discuss how to make sure that the best startups from all over China and the region know about the timing and details for how to submit for the Hackathon and a chance to be in the Startup Battlefield.

This summer is proving to be big for tech startups in China. I'm sure that Innovation Works which has just announced its recruiting companies again and the new ChinaAccelerator will both be well represented at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing. Also, this Friday is the beginning of Geek Week in Shanghai. Let's see if that momentum builds as we get ready for TC Disrupt this Fall.

Even when we get the details about the show, many questions will remain unanswered for me, in particular:

• Who is planning to be in Beijing for TC Disrupt from the US and Europe?
• Will the winner be from Beijing?
• Will the new A Fund and its Android app launches crowd out iPhone and iPad?
• How many of the startups will *not* focus on the US/EU markets, social nets etc?

I'll be excited to see this show take shape in the next few months. See you there!

The 2011 SXSW guide to Interactive

Tweet

SXSW 2011 is upon us and in no particular order I have lumped together what I think are the apps that will fight for my thumbs from Thursday 3/10 to Tuesday 3/15.

I have left out the photosharing apps here like facebook, instagram, picplz, tumblr, and I have also left out the best reference, the Sched.org mobile website where I have picked out a panel and party agenda (official parties only) and plancast but these posterity pic-ers and schedule gatherers are not the focus of SXSWi for me. For me, the fun is in the hunt. The hunt that I'm talking about is the hunt for the best of everything in Austin, and these apps are most likely how I will find them. More accurately these apps will help me cheat off of those SXSW A-listers who have arrived before I have.

The 2011 SXSWi apps:

bump, hashable, yobongo, foodspotting, beluga, groupme, ditto!, LoKast, rdio, foursquare, twitter and HeyTell are going to be my signals. Will I be as excited about them on 3/15 as I am now? Definitely not, hence the precarious 'x's. Why have I chosen these above all others? If you are wondering why constrain myself at all, you're right Fred Wilson had a great post about mobile notifications on 3/1 which shows Android's superior notifications architecture for letting you have more and more engagement apps on without relying on them all to be on your home screen. But with 144 apps on my phone post cleanup this week (I had 6.6 gb of apps, was getting close to my limit on 16gb iPhone 4), I felt it was time to focus on what could fit in a folder (12), and since on top of that there's a tremendous amount of overlap in this group, here is my reasoning for why each of them gets a spot in the SXSWi folder. (for the record I hate iOS folders :) )

bump, intros, sharing contacts, sharing apps, sharing music, chat with contacts

hashable, intros

yobongo, meeting new people when chatting about panels / parties, deciding on things

foodspotting, figuring out the best bbq!

beluga, chatting with housemates, prepping with panel participants

groupme, finding friends, chatting, sharing links / photos to make people laugh

ditto!, deciding on things, crowdsourcing plans for the day / evening, pushing serrendipity

LoKast, sharing songs, photos with people nearby

rdio, searching for and downloading music, checking out what friends at SXSW are listening to

foursquare, finding out what's next, being findable, posting photos, finding addresses

twitter commenting on everything, seeing what's trending, sharing with people back home

HeyTell chatting with housemates like I'm on a Sprint Nextell / Boost phone or walkie talkie!

Those 12 Angry Apps are not the whole story. There are a class of apps that are invisible, they are API services that are plugging into one of those above apps, most likely Foursquare or Twitter.

These aftermarket, app-boosting services are going to be providing more than their share of the fun at SXSWi. These are clearly extra credit apps, but if you have time to set these up you might be surprised at how funny make your social experience:

Tweetgrabber, a friend, Matt Newberg who I met at SXSWi last year just launched this ingenious service which helps you follow specifically someone's Favorites on Twitter and lets you store them in your unread Instapaper. This is a wormhole into the psyche of those you'd like to follow on twitter, so much more revealing than reading what they choose to tell you on Twitter.

Assisted Serendipity, another brilliantly devised and simple service that hooks into Foursquare and emails you based on the 10 venues that you think will most likely have desirables of the opposite sex in attendance. The way to set up this service is you put the number of the Foursquare number (which comes after the 'venue/' in the 4sq URL) and set the female : male ratio (or vice versa) to your liking and wait for assisted serendity to send you an email with those profiles so you can decide whether or not to go.

Don't Eat.at This service as the picture shows can be hilarious if mixed with other food apps like foodspotting. Basically, if you are going to use this app, make sure that you check-in before you foodspot! However, I mentioned this only because it was funny, in truth, this is currently a NYC only app, so I guess donteat.at won't spoil your fun in Austin!

For those of you who have not been to SXSW interactive before, then here's my advice for gearing up.

This is a picture of my pre-SXSW stockup. I'm going to be staying up by UT Austin at a house that we've named HxSW II, casa chalupa, so I have rented a bike, and am bringing the New York Lock by Kryptonite with a deterrent that goes to '11'. I'm also bringing a Mophie Juice Pack: Boost which is the largest charger available that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone. It gives ~1 full charge but is still pretty discreet even when attached to the phone in your front pocket and has a carabiner for carrying on a belt loop / back pocket when you're not using it.

Also, on my trip to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress I bought a Monster Power Outlets to Go 3 with USB. For times when you have plugs near you (like near the stage at Stubbs!) this small outlet strip will come in handy to power up more than 1 device at a time. Actually, I had even grander power plans but waited too long to get one of these solar panels from Voltaic for my backpack.

I agree with Fashism's post that bringing regular running sneakers are not necessary at SXSW, but, I would disagree about bringing sneakers in general. There's a ton of walking going on at SXSWi and the daily fashion show that I've seen for the past 3 years has been about cool t-shirts and kicks, so remember to bring yours! Also, although it's pretty dry in Texas, many of the best events day or night have an outdoor component to them, like an outdoor courtyard (remember the rainy 4sq party last year?) or roofdeck so there's a very good chance you'll get caught in the rain at some point. Try to stash a rain jacket somewhere on you when rain threatens.

Remember to come and see Check-in 2 Check-out: Mobile Audience Engagement in 2011 on Tuesday 3/15 at 9:30 at the Hyatt! Let us... @jakemintz, @foolazy, @ladylexy, @BB_iojbegun and @tomlimongello ...know when you've checked in on Sitby.us

and now for the uberlink with all the links from this post and beyond that might be useful to you in Austin.

You know I'd love to, but I can't make...The Trip

Tweet

I want to watch a BBC 2 show called the Trip. These are the dark ages of internet broadcasting. As free as I am in the US to stream what I wish, I cannot legally watch the best shows and movies in the world. In these post-Chappelle times where great comedy is scarce, I like to look east to Europe. But the UK and many other mainland broadcasters and content aggregators block their content such that content or are forced to block because of rights issues that lag behind demand.

We are to blame too, I can't let my friends in Europe or Asia watch Saturday Night Live, and as a result they will likely go on not knowing what a 'dick in a box' is nor will they understand how easy it is to look like a millionaire if they'd just put a CHANDELIER in every room of their houses.

I've been thinking about this problem for a while. If you have a Sling Box and have a friend who can plant it in the country with best content you're set. Or maybe if you've got someone who'd like to watch a show with you in the country of origin you can ask them to share their screen over Skype then you've got it solved. Skype screen sharing is very romantic, and far slung Sling boxes are ideal, but not really for everyone and may even be considered to be stretching your rights. And it's not just streaming services like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon on Demand that are bound by broadcast rules to not share our most precious diplomatic assets of regionally generated comedy, but Apple's iTunes does not properly service the EU and Asia (or the rest of the world). And usually the sites that sell digital and physical formats like Holland's Bol.com don't take US credit cards or don't deliver to the US and the same is true in reverse of the US online stores.

Since I don't know if broadcasters will ever fully open up internationally on a single release date I think there needs to be a different model for sharing. I think two potential options instead of free 'sharing' that might work could be:

1) Trading

2) Gifting

I would like to see a trading mechanism in place where I could 1-for-1 trade a SNL clip for a clip of the Trip. The same could work for episodes or full length films. However I think that there would need to be some form of royalties payment otherwise the broadcasters and studios would 'get very loud indeed' (see the clip from the Trip below for the reference).

How would it work? Would there need to be a fee charged to both parties using real or virtual currency (gifting)? Let me know if you'd like to figure out the details and potential legal roadblocks! I've put up a question on Quora if you have ideas that you'd like to share about this topic.

Question on Quora

Airplane Mode

Tweet

I've just returned from a trip to Croatia and after reading Albert Wenger's post '5 days and nights without my Blackberry' I thought I'd share my own thoughts on how I use my iPhone when I'm disconnected.

Unlike Albert's, my SIM card was fine, stuck in the middle of my iPhone 4 this time rather than on top where it was in previous iPhones. That meant I was less scientific in my experiment. Albert had no networking capabilities at all, not voice, SMS nor data, while I was just without data because outside of the US it's generally $19.97/MB, a price that invites only the direst need for data. As a result I think I was more annoyed about the lack of data because I was still using my phone for a bunch more things beyond using it as a watch. Here's my usage behavior in ascending order with respect to time.

~No Email: Albert said he would check for phantom emails, which keeps him in high correlation with BB user behavior. I did this as well on the iPhone, but with a twist. After a day at the apt I had unlearned the email checking habit, but if I was on the move the 'could not activate cellular data' notification that I received instigated a new habit. I would constantly turn the WiFi setting on and off as if to literally sniff for WiFi networks, even though my nose was several inches from the glass. Once in the port of Rovinj I actually found a free WiFi hotspot and I stood there long enough to pull down 3 days worth of emails, but no longer. Taking in those emails made me feel like the Escapist taking a breath of air after being tied in a sack, thrown into the river and having to undo chains and ropes and such.

Some Phone: I did use my phone as a phone...I had voice coverage in Hrvatska (Hrvatska means 'Croatia' in Croatian) on their HR VIP network and although price was a bit of a deterrent I had no dropped calls, even though I hadn't received my bumper yet, so I probably stayed on longer than I should have. I would take the calls from mom and the occasional one from work that I recognized as important, but for questions I tried to have family text me rather than leave voicemails. Calling voicemail from the iPhone seems wrong anyway, but especially so when there are international rates associated.

More SMS: Beyond that I also used it for both personal and social SMS: the SMS command line came in handy for telling mom and sis' I was ok, and for updating Foursquare by SMS so I could both tell friends and bookmark for myself what places and restaurants I had visited. I noticed that I had much less patience for entering in address details in a foreign country, moreover I was actually satisfied in some cases just to put in the name of the city. When I arrived '.@porec' I gladly peeked back at my phone seconds later to see the rather expensive text confirmation 'Ok we've got you at Porec!' from 50500.

Music: But the most important difference was that most of my apps were perfectly useless without a data connection. The only ones that were used a lot were the iPod and Rdio apps - Rdio works great offline if you spend the time to sync your music to mobile (look for the orange checkmarks).

Camera: I used the camera app more than the music apps, and here are some photos of what I saw each day that I thought were a bit out of the ordinary.

The biggest time-sink - Games: Throughout seasons 1-4 of the iPhone saga you would never have seen more than a few games on mine, and right now I only have one that I had just downloaded before leaving. The one I had was more than enough, Angry Birds which is #1 paid app in Croatia (and 59 other countries) is so for a reason.

The fact that I used a game more than any other feature on my iPhone really stuck with me. Maybe that's why in China and other countries where data is generally not an unlimited resource games are the biggest mobile pastime. Maybe that's also why even Apple is starting to drive patents for games

I'm a little embarrassed but I think I've played 150 levels now of Angry Birds, destroying increasingly organized and reinforced structures to get to the thieving pigs. I did this while I sitting idle on airplanes, on buses, on the beach, in bed and pretty much everywhere. Rovio, the game's creator does a very good job making it look like you have beaten the game a few times before it unlocks more levels and you realize that there's nearly no end to the little piggies. I'd suggest to try playing with that Beatles song on, I find it helps performance, as does anything by Biggie Smalls :)

Notorious B.I.G. via last.fm

"Doma, is an iPad ok?"

Tweet

The next iPad commercial should be set in a coffee shop like Doma.

I'm not one to fight with coffee shops on their policies. I understand when the owner is looking to manage the clientele from hogging seats and sipping one coffee over a long period while browsing the web. But my favorite coffee shop in the city is Doma and they have decided to ban computers past 6pm so that they can usher in more lounge-y people who are more likely to take advantage of their new simplified menu in the evenings.

The question I didn't think to ask the people who run Doma until showertime today was 'What if I only use an iPad?' To some substituting an iPad may seem like a sneaky way of just getting around the new Doma code of conduct, but others might think this is a legitimate excuse. After all, as a Doma customer you have a very good chance you have iPhone in your pocket, and an iPhone shares the same operating system as the iPad, and likely all the same content, just in a smaller form. Also, it would be quite weird if a place like Doma did anything but encourage you to bring a magazine or a book, and one way of bringing those reading materials is certainly to via iPad.

In fact while I was getting the PC boot from one of the owners I happened to be responding to an email from a family friend about whether he should ditch his laptop for an iPad. And although I told him to hold off because of the lack of file storing capabilities, it got me thinking that with the limitations of an iPad, it is easier to start to break out modes of behavior when interacting with the device. Some behavior, like sending email on an iPad, to me is just as good a behavior in a coffeeshop as staring at someone across the room. Then again, iPads can show movies, which could even make Starbucks think about imposing term limits on tables if there were no policy in place against media devices.

If everyone has a smartphone, then policies that ban any devices may be insufficient for helping Doma, or any business that looks to attract customers to seats for any period of time. They just can limit 'devices' because they want to curb free-rider behavior. Now that devices like the iPad exist, it seems we need to think of more clever ways to day-part customer profiles. And in fact, if planned correctly there could easily be 4 or more legitimate day-parts to any simple coffee shop.

An Apple commercial could show local businesses how a place like Doma can put up a category badge (physical or digital) every 4 hours as a sign to encourage different ambient behavior. Maybe coffee is only the main attraction early morning and coffee behavior like email and newspaper reading only occupies the first 4hrs of the day. Then by mid-day the fare has changed to tea and vitamin water and clients are encouraged to browse magazines and books. After 6 we switch to cocktails, IMDB and Scrabble and then late night it's time for beers, movies and TV.




If all of those customers are different people in a single day, then Doma achieves their goal of serving different customers different food and drink, and potentially different services (like WiFi for the watching the movie) at different parts of the day. Simply put, they are bringing in classes of uncorrelated asses and mitigating risk.

The SXSW Interactive Mobile Thriving Guide (iPhone)

Tweet

The snow today is making me really look forward to SXSW Interactive in Austin. 2010 will be my 3^rd time attending so I wanted to write up all of the mobile services that I will be leaning on to schedule, network and keep my battery going all week…and I do mean *all* week.

Rules

SXSW is a game. It’s about doing everything you want but not wasting your time planning and confirming, getting everything done, meeting up with everyone you wanted to see. Potentially you won’t remember any of it, but you’ll have lots of new connections and warm feelings for people who are showing up in your stream all year as a result.

Austin is your playground. It’s where all the new mobile services that help us accomplish our SXSW plans.

There are 3 areas which you must master if you are to fully free yourself of your laptop @ SXSWi:

Advance Scheduling: It is imperative to look at the schedules and try to comprehend everything that is going on so you don’t feel the dread of missing out on anything. This plan will fail miserably, but these tools will make the experience better for you and better for those who follow your example.

1) Tungle Tungle lets you schedule with people without a lot of back and forth. It looks at your outlook or ical powered calendar and lets you paint your availability, or even shake to schedule from it’s iPhone app. This is for real meetings with people that you cannot miss.

Here is the tungle demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQ9O4Rycc

SXSW calendar [No], Social Features [Some], Requires Download [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Fast]

2) Plancast http://plancast.com/toms I’ve been told I use this too much already, but I’ve been very excited about it’s potential for spreading the word about your particular panel or workshop at SXSW. They've created a SXSW splash page with a suggested follower list and useful SXSW channel profiles to follow like "Badgeless SXSW" which tells you all the events you can attend without a SXSW Badge. BTW @Leahculver please skip the Owen Van Natta party and finish up the iPhone app b4 SXSWi, drinks on me, kthxbai.

SXSW calendar [Yes, via profiles], Social Features [Yes], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Slow]

3) My.SXSW iPhone Application This official app loads all of the event schedules at once (which takes a good amt of time the 1^st time) and is integrated with the my.sxsw.com schedules and your official SXSW profile, which on the iPhone app is easier to set up than on the desktop. You can upload your photo and add social networks. However, this app is not connected for sharing panel links on social networks or even via email.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Fast]

4) Sched.org http://sxsw2010.sched.org This was the best mobile web calendar last year with full description of panels and great use of JavaScript overlays to minimize page loads, still a bit heavy for AT&T

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Medium]

5) Sitby.us http://sitby.us This may replace Sched.org for me this year. A quick loading mobile website with really easy navigation for the full SXSWi calendar and ability to check-in and share on twitter WHERE YOU ARE SITTING in a particular panel! How’s that for real-time? Really well done.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes], Requires Download [No]

Contingency Planning: Planning The panels, movies, drinkups and music in Austin start out like spores and grow based on community distribution of event details and checkins from attendees. The battlefield of SXSW will look nothing like your pretty calendar. So SXSW has already tested Twitter and Foursquare in this capacity, but there is a new entrant to the fray and it is specifically designed to facilitate conversation at an event without junking up the feeds of people who are not attending, and it’s called HotPotato. All panels at SXSWi 2010 should start by pointing their audiences to the associated HotPotato event.

1) Twitter and Twitter Connect Sites/Apps Status updates and hashtags still rule the day, it will be interesting to see if that changes in 2010. Tweetie 2 is my choice of app, and its seamless ability to manage more than one account is quite helpful when on the go. Sitby.us like many other apps lets you Tweet

Reach [High], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Hashtags], Noise [High]

2) Facebook and Facebook Connect Sites/Apps Facebook events are underlying a lot of the Plancast links and is currently the glue behind HotPotato

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [Low], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Full Service], Noise [High]

3) Foursquare Foursquare has picked up where Twitter left off, as now people find out which party to go to based on the stream of Foursquare check-ins. Badges specifically designed for SXSW were a hit last year, e.g. the Porky badge for checking in at Stubbs. Too crazy for you?... Check-in off the grid like tiger w. be

Reach [Low], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [People Tab], Noise [Medium]

4) HotPotato HotPotato lets you attend, watch or follow events based on your proximity and makes the chatter in each event relevant by 1) defining the event 2) offering more than just commenting e.g. posting photos and links for making references and analogies to the event 3) giving you a view to whom within your network (currently powered by Facebook Connect) is commenting on what events 4) tuning your feed based on location

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [Full Service], Noise [Low]

Battery Life!

What I will bring to stay connected 24/7 from Thurs-Wed.

1) Just Mobile | Gum Pro: this little power grenade from Just Mobile is supposed to carry 2-5x iPhone charges and power up fast, 90% in an hour, and it uses both a 5-pin camera cord power up and and the iPhone cord to charge the iPhone, with a switch to turn off the juice if it is not being used.

How people will make fun of you: “Why do you have an iPhone cord coming out of your pocket? Are you plugged in right now?”

2) Griffin Tune Juice: the un-green little AAA battery pack that takes 4 batteries and charges without requiring a wall socket. Which means you don’t have to stand under the stage at Stubbs or hit on hostesses to have them charge your phone if you forgot to charge your extra battery pack.

How people will make fun of you: “batteries? srsly?”

3) Kensington Mini: This bottom feeder is good for a small charge at the end of the day, light, small, no extra cords while carrying. Charges with a 5-pin camera cord into USB. The fact that it plugs into the bottom could be a problem if you put it in your front pocket and sit down. L

How people will make fun of you: “gee you have a really long phone.”

4) The Mophie Pack: Mophie gets a colbertian wag of the finger. Once my battery pack of choice, until the weird jack that plugs in a weird non 5-pin cord broken into the device and has rendered the Mophie pack useless.

How people will make fun of you: “is that really an iPhone, it looks so big and bulky.”

It will be a showdown for sure, but at least I’ll be prepared.

What I’ll be doing:

http://plancast.com/a/if1 Moderating UX of Mobile Panel, Friday March 12^th @ 11am with Kyle Outlaw (Razorfish), Scott Jenson (Google) and Barbara Ballard (Little Springs Design)

http://plancast.com/a/11r0 Organizing HTML5 vs. Flash Discussion, Monday March 15^th @ 11:00am with Richard Ting (R/GA)

http://plancast.com/a/if3 Organizing the Mobile Advertising Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 3:30pm with Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) and Justin Siegel (MocoSpace)

http://plancast.com/a/if4 Organizing the Mobile Social Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 2:00pm with Michael Sharon (Facebook) and Justin Shaffer (HotPotato)

http://plancast.com/a/if5 Organizing the Mobile Commerce Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 5:00pm with Francesco Rovetta (PayPal)

Is anyone writing up a guide for Android?

Ping me @ SXSWi on your service of choice.

foursquare

tungle

plancast

twitter

The iPad and the Blue Lego

Tweet

You've read a lot this week about the iPad, but I wanted to share what I've seen on twitter as a mounting protest in the past couple of hours.

It begins with the Blue Lego. For anyone that has used an iPhone to surf the web in mobile safari, it is likely that they've come across the Blue Lego of Flash-less-ness. When you go to the NyTimes' regular website on an iPhone you will see a webkit standard 32x32 pixel blue lego in the middle of the Video section.

John Biggs says that the iPad might run flash because the Apple iPad demo video had a NYT restaurant section show up instead of the Blue Lego, but demos can be deceiving. Update: Wired says the screenshots were fake.

Joe Hewitt pointed out that Adobe looked pretty defensive with this recent blog post, because they predicted that the Blue Lego will be everywhere when the iPad launches. Lee Brimelow photoshopped the Blue Lego (aka the NullPlugin...thanks Chris Messina) onto many of the sites and web games that we hold dear, assuming that the Blue Lego will be used to comfort iPad users in the same way it has served iPhone users. What will be the response? Will Steve Jobs lobby the webkit standards bureau to make the icon a 64x64 pixel square?

Already, Keith Peters has started joking around and has replaced his Twitter avatar with the Blue Lego, and flash developers are starting to rally. And, update: Kendall Helmstetter posted a response on Flickr, and Ryan Cooley posted to Twitpic to fan the blue flame war with 15,700+ views.

So, for me this started last night just before I left the office. I asked my Twitter following if they knew how to find a high resolution version of the ubiquitous, yet tiny 32x32 pixel Blue Lego Icon. I have to send a big thanks to Yiying Lu who I worked with to make the Failwhale big back in 2008. She sent me her enlarged Blue Lego design before I could even ask her!

And here it is, your SXSW 2010 t-shirt, the Blue Lego!

Banned by Lego on Zazzle :(

http://thebluelego.spreadshirt.com/


Also, a big thanks to Lee Brimelow the platform evangelist and blogger from Adobe whom I metioned earlier - he has already retweeted the zazzle link!

Update: There's now a Chrome extension that shows you the web on the flashless iPad! https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ilejdkfldemlafkeebadjppfhdiimbfd?hl=en-US