Jefferson Memorial - Washington DCI got back today around 5 PM from Washington DC. There was a 3 mile backup on the turnpike because of an accident.
DC was very hot and humid. Back in New York, the weather wasn't much cooler either.
Now that I am back, I wanted to take a few moments to recap my experience and thank the incredible people whose hard work made this conference so much fun.
Graphing Social Patterns East was a lot of fun, definitely invaluable and one of the best ones in terms of networking opportunities and content if you are interested in penetrating or capitalizing social networks.
Dave McClure (the very awesome host), the speakers and the
O'reilly conference team did an outstanding job overall to make this conference an unforgettable one.
I have already blogged about few of the sessions. My intention was to take notes from every session but I failed to keep up. At times the conversation became so interesting especially during the panels that I wanted to listen in carefully than having to type everything. In my upcoming posts, I will try to find the slides and other blog posts for you. Here are quick links to my summaries:
The video clips Dave had painstakingly gathered fit right in with the presentations that followed them and were a lot of fun. Dave has posted the links to videos from both
day 1 and
day 2.
Sebastien de Halleux - COO of PlayFishOn Sunday night, as I was about to head to my room, I saw two gentlemen sitting at the bar. As I approached closer, I had to ask, "Are you Dave McClure? You look just like your photo on your blog." To which he made a very friendly reply, "Yes." I ended up sitting with Dave and
Sebastien de Halleux of
Playfish for a couple of drinks. Very quickly I was impressed by the insights Dave has regarding just about everything. Sebastien's company is growing very fast on Facebook and one of their games,
Bowling Buddies, is in fact addicting. I highly recommend checking it out.
Chris Bissell - Chief Software Architect of MySpaceFor the first time, I got to meet the
MySpace team. Dave introduced them the night before the conference. Really cool and original folks who are not only at the top of their game but also very helpful in lending advice. I had great chats with
Allen Hurff (SVP Engineering),
Chris Bissell (Chief Software Architect) and
Max Newbould (Platform Lead and Product Owner). I was pleasantly surprised by their personalities as I had wrongfully thought that being owned by
News Corp., MySpace team would be a lot corporate. But that wasn't the case. Quickly after meeting the team, I was having engaging conversations with them.
Max Newbould - Platform Lead and Product Owner for MySpaceAnother thing that pleasantly surprised me was that how much effort MySpace is putting in creating relationships with developers. They have created a dedicated channel on IRC just for developers and are hosting DevDemo days to interact on a more personal basis with developers. In addition, Allen put his friendfeed and twitter streams along with his MySpace and email addresses to give developers multiple ways to connect with him. Watch
OpenSocial MySpace Application Demo by Chris Bissell. Immediately after the conference, Max took off to give MySpace presentation in various countries.
Ro Choy of
RockYou presented an informative session on viral growth and how users use social networks. His presentation was full of examples on differentiating viral from anti-viral with countless tips on building viral engagement. For anyone wanting to explore marketing opportunities with social applications, this session alone was worth the price paid for conference ticket.
I also met
Sachin Rekhi of
imeem. Sachin had an incredible story about how he left his very promising job, formed a company, worked very hard to secure licensing contracts, got engaged and sold his company all within a year. A true entrepreneur at heart, Sachin was offering great advice to anyone interested in music startups. He warned about the complexities in negotiating music licensing deals. Sachin used to work at Microsoft creating Visual Studio. He had to go to great lengths to create an Open Social container at imeem since his team wasn't ready to use Shindig. Today, anyone can start creating their application utilizing imeem's Open Social container. Be warned that Sachin is more interested in quality than quantity when it comes to applications. As I learned more about imeem at the conference, I couldn't help but think that Sachin and his team have build an incredible product despite the licensing hurdles they had to face. Thanks, Sachin for great conversations and for building imeem.
Adam Ludwig of Give Real is an entrepreneur working on another disruptive idea. I have known Adam for sometime now and it was a great pleasure to catch up with him at the conference. Adam generously invited me and Michelle for a wonderful lunch at the roof top of Hyatt. Thanks Adam!
Adam Ludwig chatting with Benjamin JoffeAfter hearing the thoughts of Benjamin Joffe (
Plus Eight Star), I wanted to engage in discussion about mobile social networking and monetization with him. Benjamin had unmatched insight into how to monetize social networks and factors behind the success of mobile social networking in Asian markets. His presentation was one of my favorite ones.
At lunch one day, I sat on a table with Chris Sandoval (Director of New Business Initiatives, Enterprise Hosting at NTT). Chris had a great offer for startups to show how dedicated his company is to acquire business. IIRC, Chris' company hosts Twitter. He told us a joke that went something like: if you throw a stone in US, it would hit a lawyer. if you throw a stone in Japan, it would hit someone who works for NTT.
Scott Slack (founder of a100voices) was also at the lunch table. He is working on a very interesting project as well that focuses on social networking and locality to create content. Check out a100voices.org for more details.
Also sitting with me on the table was Durjoy (Ace) Bhattacharjya (VP, Interactive Marketing, Digital Media of
Core Performance). Ace's company trains top athletes and they recently signed a deal with Sheraton to provide a custom program to integrate their services with health clubs at Sheraton.
As I stepped out to smoke a cig. (bad me!), I met Sonu Kansal (CTO of
Associated Content). Sonu runs a large infrastructure to support the operations of Associated Content which now has an incredible amount of content. We talked about various scalability and high availability challenges among other things.
On another smoke break, I ran into Peter Foley (CTO of
Artez Interactive). Peter's company offers online fund raising solutions to non profit organizations including Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, Children's Miracle Network and National Ovarian Cancer Foundation. We talked on a variety of things ranging from utilizing social networks to technical challenges. Thanks Peter for a great conversation!
Adam Nash - Senior Director of Products, LinkedIn(Senior Director of
LinkedIn) gave a high level overview of his company that was very interesting. Of all the social networks LinkedIn is the one I use the most. LinkedIn is working on opening their platform to developers so we can expect to see some great applications. Adam, did you get my LinkedIn invitation? :)
Michael Lazerow - Buddy Media of
Buddy Media is really good at his job too. His presentations and insights were eye opening. His company has been working on disruptive applications. Unfortunately, although I wanted to, I didn't get to chat with him one on one. I can't wait to run into him next time.
I really enjoyed meeting, probably the funniest guy at the conference,
Mo Kakwan (of
MoBouy) as well. His sense of humor was incredible making everyone laugh and smile. I could see that everyone enjoyed Mo's company very much.
As the presentations ended on the last day, I sat in the lobby with a few friends including Mo. There I had some great conversations with Siqi Chen (CEO of
Serious Business). Siqi had to catch a flight so we cut our conversation short. He is a very smart entrepreneur with a great personality who created the
Friends for Sale application that is getting rave reviews and has a very impressive number of daily active users (IIRC a million plus). Siqi understands social graphs and social interactions on social networking sites and plans to create more engaging games that are built around these interactions. Read Siqi's blog post on Startupism.com, "
How to Not Suck at Facebook Apps."
Also sitting with us in the lobby was
Brendan King (CEO of
MyFrontSteps). Brendan is a real estate veteran and an entrepreneur working on creating exciting solutions for the real estate market.
While we were sitting,
Marc Porcelli (Chief Marketing Officer of
SinglesNet) joined us. Marc's company is a leading provider of online dating services and he was interested in buying more impressions for his site. It's impressive how much Marc's company is dominating the online dating market. He provided many usability gems as to why his company is perceived better by online daters than eHarmony or Match.com.
In the session,
Geek Metrics,
Hiten Shah (CEO of
KissMetrics),
Albert Lai (Kontangent), Ian Swanson (
Sometrics, Inc.) and
Roy Pereira (
Refresh Analytics) provided intuition on the metrics for applications and widgets. Dave moderated the session and herded the panel to highly unique selling proposition of each of the analytics provider. Later, I had interesting conversations with Albert Lai who is an established serial entrepreneur having sold several companies.
Oh, I almost forgot about Mark Sendo (CEO of
Urturn). A very approachable, friendly and smart guy, Mark has a background in Macroeconomics and his new company is creating a promising virtual currency for social networks. Urturn has been covered by TechCrunch and several respected sites.
At the dinner on the last day of conference, Dave introduced me to his long time friend Justin Won (President of JayDub Enterprises, LLC). As I conversed with Justin, who used to be involved with databases years ago, I couldn't help but be impressed by his understanding of what a proper scalable solution would comprise of. Very quickly we covered bottlenecks of most infrastructure related issues. I really loved Justin's quote that "DBAs are a different breed than programmers."
David Recordon (Open Platforms Technical Lead for
Six Apart) was also present at the dinner. He had quite a bit of industry knowledge including the challenges that some of the popular websites are facing (no, I won't name the sites). Thanks for your insights David.
I am also thankful to Ahson Wardak (founder & CEO of ShareMeme), John Maver (founder of Thought Labs), Chris Saad (Founder and Chairperson of
Data Portability Project), Jared Goralnick (Productivity Evangelist at
AwayFind), Keith Schacht (Founder & CEO of
42 Friends) and Erik Giberti (AF-Design) for great conversations and insights that they all generously shared with me.
I am sure I missed out some of the names (sorry for my bad memory!). My apologies and a big thanks to everyone with whom I conversed but didn't list here.
Now, I am definitely looking to the next conference.
Labels: graphing social patterns, gspeast, GSPEast08, imeem, linkedin, rock you
