At the DLD conference I stepped away from “social media” for a moment to speak with Central Films film producer Fernando Sulichin, one of the judges of the competition that’s currently going on at theCrane.tv.  You may know him as the producer of great films like Malcolm X and Alexander.  I talked with Fernando about his films, his inspiration and his strong opinions about the direction modern day film is taking. When asked about how [...]

I met with Katie McMahon, VP Business Development at Shazam,  last month at the DLD Conference.  Shazam is a unique technology that launched in 2002 and enables music lovers to identify and capture songs from any location using just their mobile phone.  Shazam users can take a sound sample, using their mobile phone, and Shazam will return the song title and artist name.  Additionally, once a song has been captured by Shazam, users also have the option to [...]

My friend Yoav Leitersdorf is founder of YL Ventures, a VC fund that is also a Network Partner at Microsoft BizSpark.  BizSpark is an innovative new program that serves to support and accelerate the success of startups by uniting them with entrepreneurial and technology resources.  BizSpark is uniting a global community of entrepreneurs to help guide new startups through the ups and downs of creating a new business.  Their tag line, “Turning today’s most promising startups [...]

I attended an interesting panel discussion at LeWeb, moderated by Scott Rafer CEO of Lookery, about the trends in social advertising.  The discussion, which was called ”Social Advertising: Where’s the Love?,” focused on media proven revenue streams for social software and social networks in our current economic environment, primarily on the approaches of Brand Advertising vs. Performance Advertising.  Panelists included Philip J. Kaplan, Founder and Chairman of AdBrite; Travis Katz, International Managing Director for MySpace and Fox Interactive Media; Lorenz Bogaert, Co-Founder [...]

On March 9th and 10th I will be attending the Social Networking World Forum in London, a two day conference dedicated to social networking.  At the conference representatives from leading social networks will be talking about everything from their revenue models to the future of social networking, global brands and corporations will be presenting case studies about how social media can be used to build a brand, advertisers will discuss their means of using social [...]

At the DLD Conference last month, I had the privilege of meeting with Victor Cho, VP and General Manager of Internet and Software Services at Kodak.  We spoke about a few of the new and innovative things that Kodak is doing right now.  One of the company’s current focuses is on creating connected devices such as cameras and video recorders.  One of these devices, the Kodak Zi6 HD camera, was generously given to me and I love its simplicity and [...]

Last December at the LeWeb conference in Paris I sat in on an interesting panel discussion entitled Love in Motion: Why are Mobile Social Networks Booming?  The panelists, Antonio Vince Staybol of itsmy.com, Dr. KF Lai of BuzzCity and Ewan Spence of WuBud, talked about what mobile social networks are, who uses them and what they use them for, how mobile social networks are monetized as well as where they are going in the future.  Did [...]

At DLD I had the opportunity to speak with David Sifry about his new project, Offbeat Guides.  Offbeat Guides, which launched publicly in November, is the first company to create fully customizable travel guides.  Unlike many travel guides which were written over a year ago by a travel writer who quickly popped in and out of the city you will be visiting, Offbeat Guides are customized with the most up-to-date information written by locals and put together [...]

The Internet is rapidly growing– there are new sites and content being introduced constantly.  SimilarWeb is making it easy for users to discover new content without having to search around for it.  The SimilarWeb smart browser add-on shows you related content as you surf the Web so you can easily discover similar sites and content without needing to search for them, thereby enhancing your surfing experience.  The add-on is currently available for Firefox users and is set [...]

Last week at the DLD conference I had the opportunity to speak to Constantin Bjerke, founder of TheCrane.tv.  TheCrane.tv is a new online video magazine all about contemporary culture that is set to launch in March and plans to feature high caliber content on the topics of Culture, Art & Design, Fashion, Lifestyle, Travel, Ideas and “Green”/Ecology around the globe.  TheCrane.tv hopes to raise the bar for superior video content on the Web with what they [...]