The Industry

Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup Report - July 1, 2008

It was standing room only again here at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup at C.U. There were announcements to start off the meeting, as usual, and, also as usual, we could only catch a few of them in toto.

First, this MeetUp, and the similar meetup in S.F. are organizing a meta-meetup of some unspecified configuration with the meetups from all over [the country? the world? presumably on the same ‘New Tech’ topic’] with the sum total of 60,000 people. There was also someone video-taping this MeetUp, so for those of us who get stage-fright in front of more than 3 people… but for the rest of you, the carrot seems to be the possibility of presenting your case to many, many people at one time.

They are also creating a Linked-In profile for this MeetUp… starting classes on How To Present At The MeetUp, and perhaps other things the details of which I am sure we will get email about.

Dan from PhotoBucket is hiring PHP, Linux, Perl etc. or rather people with these skill sets - senior and otherwise.
Peter from Me.dium is looking for a Win32 expert and senior Java person[s?].
It is about 30 days until the iphone developers conference
We were all invited to the Green Tech MeetUp
eswarm is looking for a lead developer / project lead
excellentcreations[?] is hiring Cocoa and Android developers
Kforce is hiring 200 developers…
richmarlena@gmail.com does marketing and is looking for work after her previous client was sold to Cisco

There were lots more, for example someone who can translate websites in Thai and Chinese, but… it would help if people could mention their website at the end of their announcement. And, as I know from personal experience, we all tend to say our personal names and website very, very quickly, and mumbley, because we are used to [and bored with] saying them all the time.

OK, on with the show…

Gnip

Presented by Peter Williams & Jud Valeski
Gnip will be demo’ing its first step in what will be a suite of pragmatic data portability solutions for today’s web services.
How the group can help: product feedback and utilization by relevant parties
http://gnipcentral.com

(Pronounced Guh-nip) Publicly launched today. Demoed the backend [by editing curl statements and viewed the resulting XML]

A few products this week were somewhat confusing and this was one of them. Using twitter as an example, they want people to access the twitter data API through them because:

1. This will reduce the loads on the network. This was their first point, and… well, I would love to be able to put the load on the network on my top 100 things to care about list. And, well, it seems like on the face of it, that Gnip will instead *increase* traffic: we poll them, and now they poll twitter. But it might reduce the load on the twitter servers if everybody goes through Gnip. But then so would Twitter adding a server to handle this very thing.
2. They can filter out data that you may not need to download. But hopefully Twitter has a decent API so I can specify just what information I need.
3. In the future they could normalize [generalize] the data so that, say, all profiles look the same from whatever server people are fetching them from… [sorry, my example sucks]
4. Future they could track user actions by looking at the data streams [uh… the privacy issues would be prohibitive, I would think .. and hope]

5. They mentioned their Gnip Notifications, kind of offhand, and yeah, it was compared to the idea of Push. Robert Reich, our host, mentioned PointCast hinting that there are other Push initiatives that failed.

The idea would seem to me to be that we could register to have Gnip notify our API when the information we want from Twitter has changed. To me, this seems different than the other Push technologies… it is opt-in, and it is an API.

If they are successful, one might imagine that they can poll Twitter (Twitter is just an example) just once for 1000s of people like us reducing the load on Twitter [but, in general, we all want different information, so, no this would still require 1000s of polls.]. So the whole, I just don’t see the ‘Gnip reduces the load on the Net and on Twitter et. al.’ thing.

But I think it would be GREAT for people with websites like us using the Gnip service.

As a different example, one of our feed-reader sites polls every 5 minutes to check on 1000s of RSS feeds. Many just return the entire feed, even when nothing has changed, which we then have to compare with a cache to see if anything is different. This would be a lot easier if we could just register to be notified when it changed.

The question is, then, why doesn’t Twitter, Feedburner , Goggle, Amazon etc support Push Notifications now? It would reduce the load on their servers quite a bit. [although Google already does this for their Checkout e-commerce API, and presumably so do others]. And if they do move to this, what will happen to Gnip?

The answer is… :-) Well, I do not know about our examples, but is a lot easier for me, as a website developer to add a Polling API to the server, and to poll a server as well [a website is just one big polling API anyway…], as opposed to implementing Push and its associated callback registration system . Obviously, the ease of adding Push could change if someone came out with a decent plug-in for this tomorrow [on Ruby on Rails]. So Gnip has a future handling this for small fry and people stuck with using J2EE and .NET, which will be slow to move to push.

Think of Gnip as a generic FeedBurner, a FeedBurner for things besides blogs. When I wrote my first blogging software, I was surprised to learn that when I post a blog entry, it didn’t push out the post to technorati or something. Maybe someday Blogging Tools will Push, but for the present, FeedBurner and other subscribers poll my blog over and over waiting for me to get off my ass and post something else. Further comparisions between these two tools is left to the reader…

mobileXware

Presented by Jason Ryer, Joel Lenorovitz
Demoing mobileXware’s flagship product, xFit, that helps people achieve their fitness goals by putting Fitness in the Palm of Your Hand
How the group can help: We are looking for general feedback on our product
http://www.mobileXware.com

This company sells a $25 product that shows you about 50 workout exercises on your mobile phone and/or device. They are looking for developers.

Truthfully, we go to the gym 3 to 5 times per week - and have about 100 books on various types of exercises, stretching, yoga, pilates, etc. So we are not the target audience and have a hard time relating to the target audience [hey, this is BOULDER,… we are just barely average here :-)].

My suggestion would be to talk up the weight-loss aspect of their exercises, which most Americans like to spend money on while they eat ever more junk food.

Also, they might want to team up with another, previous MeetUp presenter, Treatment Exchange, at http://www.txxchange.com who helps physical therapists deliver exercises to their patients.

Dizgo, Inc

Presented by Jeff Kohn
Dizgo’s web-based advertising platform (Advertising Management Portal) and show its mobile integration and SMS delivery of real-time, hyper local content.
How the group can help: looking for potential syndication partners, get feedback from potential users, encourage people to opt-in to receive great local (downtown Boulder) discounts-on-the-go!
http://www.dizgo.com

I have no idea what the competition is like, but this is a killer app.

A restaurant is having a slow night? The restaurateur signs in and creates a coupon for people to use that evening.

People are on the Pearl Street mall and can’t figure out which place of 600 in a 6 block radius to go to eat at? Use your Mobile to see what deals and specials are happening nearby.

The demonstration of the GUI for the restaurant owner to use to make electronic coupons looked straight forward and complete and includes information like a name, description [’happy hour with Radiohead in-person’], code [MeetUpsRule’], Length of time the coupon is good for [this evening], amount willing to spend [$400], tags [so people can find the coupon, like ‘Restarant’, ‘Indian food’]. etc.

The tags are bid on in a similar manner to Google AdWords. And they use a patented ontology to generalize user’s searches so that if they search for, I imagine, burgers, they will also be searching for ‘Restaurants’. [So people can patent ontologies now, huh? Or is that all searches that use an ontology? Ah, the mentally challenged and those that take advantage of them - how wonderful].

Real time analytics is also quite nice here - to see who is looking at your coupons and how many have used them. [How about, what coupons your competitors are offering next door? :-)]

There is also a part of the site dedicated to the consumer looking for coupons, called MyDizgo. You can subscribe to be ‘pushed’ information about when a restaurant, or whoever, has deals, perhaps just within certain time periods, etc.

They are actively signing up Pearl St. establishments here in Boulder, and soon LoDo and the Tech Center in Denver. They are also focusing on TradeShows and Grocery Shopping verticals. They are also seeking syndication partners, like mapping sites, who want to, say, display coupons on their maps.

DandyId

Presented by Sara Czyzewicz, Arron Kallenberg, and Anthony Dimitre
DandyId.org is a repository for users’ service identifiers and API for third-party sites.
How the group can help: a) signing up for a dandyid and adding their identifiers to our system, and b) use our widget or services API.
http://www.dandyid.org

DandyId [derived from dandelion] is another site that confused us.

They focused on ‘Share Your Id’. The idea seems to be that your friends, who are on MySpace and FaceBook, say, use this to find out what your id is: given that they know your id on one site already, they look it up on DandyId to find what your id is on the other. OK, I do not know about you folks out there, but I am too stupid and/or forgetful to use lots of different ids all over the place. I just use one. I guess if I had lots, then I would use DandyId not to find friend’s ids, but to find my own :-)

DandyId does not save passwords, just information publicly available from people’s profile. They mention something about being able to auto-populate a signup form when the place you are signing up to uses DandyId. Again, I do not sign up for places very often. If they ask me to sign-up, 95% of the time I am out-a-there, and if I do go for it, and they ask for more than my email, I am again most likely on my way somewhere else.

They have some good analytic tools, percent users on digg versus twitter, percent users on digg who are also on twitter, etc. Nice web 2.0 design, too.

They are looking for evangelists, product developers, and backend developers.

As we played with this website a little, trying to figure this out some by looking for people we thought might be on multiple social networks, we had a little argument about whether the Invite Someone field was associated with the People Search form or the form over on the right [BTW, I lost the argument] and found out that people have to register to get their profiles on to DandyId. I had just assumed that when I searched, they had either cached profiles, or did a poll on the major social networks, using Open Social, to find the person I was looking for.

One way this might work, for me, which is somewhat related to this, would be to have a site which only has profiles. No chats. No messages. No twits. It would be the master profile site for the net. IDinator.com or something [there are better names available July 17th]. And the profiles would have to be very cool looking to make people want to put their profiles there [using Open social and home page scrapers, it would be easy to initialize]. The temptation would, of course, be to work with Disqus or Intense Debate so people could see all their comments, and with Twitter to see what they are up to now, and flickr to see their photos… etc. But, focusing on just profiles, the idea would be to make profiles elsewhere seem to be, in comparison, behind a walled garden, inaccessible and unfindable to the world at large [i.e. appeal to both people’s vanity and their desire to advertise themselves].

mShopper

Presented by Jeff Kohn
We will demo an innovative, market-leading mobile commerce (shopping) application that runs on most web-enabled cell phones.
http://www.mshopper.com

Another ‘discounts on the go’, but with comparison shopping for consumer goods. The killer app would use Amazon, of course, to go into Circuit City and read both reviews and get a decent price. Amazon, however, terminates the accounts of their associates who try this [according to the Amazon Associates’ forum - when the iphone came out everybody was, yeah - this’ll be cool - let’s all port our Amazon apps to the iPhone. Presumably Amazon thought so too. I guess they will eventually write this themselves, and cut out the middlepeople.]

So, even though mshopper shows results from Amazon, they are not a partner with Amazon, and it is a good thing that they are partnering with others, like Apple.

The demo, also on their website, shows price shopping for a Sony TV [BTW, the XBR2 is old, old, old (about a year and a half to two years, I think :-)), we are up to XBR6 now for those most lust-worthy LCD TVs].

mShopper is, Angel funded, headquartered in Boulder and outsources development to New Delhi. They are looking for feedback from local focus groups on their Sprint-specific GUI [doesn’t New Delhi have people who will volunteer for focus groups? Come on, I can’t be the only person wondering …. ;-)].

Lijit

Presented by David Fero and Micah Baldwin
Lijit is launching a new ad platform for publishers.
How the group can help: General feedback around the efficacy of an advertising platform for publishers within their search results.
http://www.lijit.com

Lijit is another presentation that confused us. We thought that they were originally doing something else….but now they appear to be providing ‘in-situ’ search for blogs, along with widgets that bloggers can use on their blogs to show the most popular searches. They also provide analytic tools to show bloggers what people are searching for and not finding on their site [i.e. as a hint about what to write about next - something most bloggers would love help with]. Using these tools, they can quote statistics about how their widgets help keep people on their blog instead of hitting the back button [i.e. ‘bouncing’ - and they referred to the latest post on useit. What is it about a GUI design expert whose site looks ugly and who likes to post the obvious… *sigh*].

This presentation announced their plans to show ads on the top and side of the search results. Yep, just like Google. They will be aggregating 4 different advertising steams, and more later, so, unlike Google, they will have other ads [Rubicon, etc. from the 20% that Google does not currently control]. The blogger themselves are to get a portion of the proceeds from the ads.

It seems to me…. that competing with Google on their core-competency is a little difficult - and hoping that MSFT will get interested, as they try to buy everything search-related under the sun, well, that might work. But I think Lijit would have to be pretty well entrenched in a lot of blogs first. However, MSFT *is* in panic mode. :-)

But as a blogger, I would use Goggle for our blog - they do a good job, they got lots of ads, and it solidifies our relationship [such as it is] and helps expand our Googleworthy knowledge base and comfort level.

The reason we do not use Google search [yet] on our blogs? Because the search results look like poop. They look like Google, and not like our blog[s]. This is to say, a widget like Lijit that produced search results that looked like my blog, using the same theme, perhaps including a header and a few words of content from each post in the results, maybe a thumbnail from the post too - something that smoothly integrates with Wordpress blogs et. al. Well, maybe that is something that a lot of bloggers would be more comfortable with. [thinking about it, this is a lot like search on forums - which is boring but better than the Googlish approach. Combining with ‘most popular searches today’ kind of widgets, a tag cloud widget, heat maps, etc. would be nice].

blitzlocal

Presented by Dennis Yu
High level overview of social advertising using Facebook
http://www.blitzlocal.com

A presentation of how to advertise on FaceBook. OK. A short high-altitude introduction to the fact that there is indeed advertising on FaceBook [hey, I did not know. But then again, we do not sell anything kids can afford], and how it might be a good idea give it a look see.

Blitzlocal spends $10K a day on FaceBook ads. They were one of the first to bat when FaceBook opened their API with 100s of applications. From what I understand they had about 1/3 of all FaceBook traffic for awhile there. OK, so we are not going to see these guys at the MeetUp looking for work anytime soon.

He was also able to explain in an exceptionally clear manner about how advertising on FaceBook is different than, say, Google. People on FaceBook are there to hang out with friends, not searching for a color laser printer to buy. Instead of keyword focused, ads are user-profile focused.

Ads are targeted by group, age, location, etc. which is much more specific than Google [who, on the other hand, has people who are frequently actually looking to buy something].

The idea is that [kids] like to tell everyone about what they buy, so if you can engage just one, they will have an average of 64 friends who will know they just bought the latest cool ringtone or whatever.

Currently, the Ad Manager on FaceBook is primitive compared to the Google manager: no ad groups, inferior [my word :-)] analytic reporting.

There then followed some ROI talk, which to me is like much of the information on this topic… which can be summarized as lots of ways to say ‘keep your head down’, ‘your mileage may vary’, ‘good money after bad’.

For a message therapist. 5 clicks per day, resulting in a cost of $20 - $30 per new client, is a good ROI. OK…. make sense.

Click rates vary from 0.01%, to 2-3% if your ad copy is good, to 10-20% if you have great ad copy. OK. Now about that ad copy - in my [albeit limited] experience great ad copy is not even ‘know it when you see it’, it is just some mysterious relativistic windfall that strikes your ad [or doesn’t! :-)] and makes it magic [or money forever gone and a complete waste of time spent. Yes, I looooove running ads.].

There is more … the main idea being that now is a good time to advertise on FaceBook - the prices can be about 30% of what you pay on Google - but you will have to shift your thinking some about how you target your ads.

OK, see ya all next Month!

© 2008 GUI.NET.