How to Change the World

Launch: Silicon Valley 2008

Launch: Silicon Valley 2008 is now accepting executive summaries. The deadline is May 9th. This conference is a very inexpensive way to get your startup in front of a highly-qualified audience of venture capitalists and journalists. It takes place on June 10th at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California. For more information, click here.

The Art of the Introduction

Just got back from Houston where I spoke for the Houston Technology Center. Houston has, by far, the funniest Web 2.0 babes in the world: Jenny Lawson of Good Mom/Bad Mom and The Bloggess; Laura Mayes of Digg for Chicks, aka Sk*rt; Erica O'Grady of Reinventing Erica; Tracey Lee Wallace of True Light Resources; and Carrie Pacini of OpMom. This is what Jenny was going to use to introduce me until she chickened out. (This is a picture of her getting ready for the event, by the way.)

My name is Jenny Lawson and I write for The Bloggess and Good Mom/Bad Mom on the Houston Chronicle. I was pretty shocked when they asked me to introduce Guy because most people know that I’m unable to talk for more than fifteen seconds without cursing inappropriately so it’ll be a pleasant surprise for all involved if I can manage not say the c word or start talking about "vaginas" up here.

Guy Kawasaki first came on my radar several months ago when our pseudo-editor, Dwight Silverman of the Chronicle, emailed to tell us that our parenting blog had been picked up by Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site and that this was “very significant.” And actually it was very significant, both because the recognition was nice and also because it marked one of the first emails I got from Dwight that didn’t tell me to stop using the F word or posting inappropriate dildo videos on the Chronicle. So, being a typical southern gentlewoman, I decided to email Guy and thank him, which I did. It was an email which may have included a few curse words and ended with me telling Guy I had no idea who he was and asking if he was the guy who invented the motorcycle.

Unsurprisingly, Dwight was not pleased. But surprisingly, Guy actually wrote me back and thus began months of email correspondence between us. Granted, it was somewhat one-sided, with me sending long, rambling emails about lap dances and my paraplegic cat and Guy sending back short one-liners such as his most recent email to me which stated simply “Very funny dick story. Your bizarre business proposal needs work.” Which? He’s right on one part.

So I decided I should find out who this guy actually is and why when I tell people that he’s emailing me half of them stare at me blankly and the other half totally freak out and pee themselves in excitement. I decided to look on Wikipedia because that shit is always accurate and here’s what I found out:

Guy Kawasaki did not invent the motorcycle. He did, however, invent the Internet. Or maybe something to help the internet. I’m really not sure because I got bored and stopped reading. Then when he was thirty he killed a drifter and totally got away with it. I’m not entirely certain that’s true but it makes for an interesting story. And really? (*long stare at Guy*) Prove you didn’t kill a drifter. You can’t. I rest my case.

But none of that really matters (except to the drifter’s parents who were probably pretty broken up about the whole affair). What does matter though is that Guy Kawasaki kicks ass. That Guy Kawasaki is totally famous. That Guy Kawasaki is a genius who looks a little like Jackie Chan and could probably take you out with a roundhouse kick if he wanted to. And, most importantly, that Guy Kawasaki is here with us tonight.

So without further ado, I give you…Guy Kawasaki.

Now that is an introduction. You can see a video of the event here.

Creating Infectious Engagement

Just found out about a great conference at Stanford called "Creating Infectious Engagment." It's on May 1st from 3:30 to 6:00 pm. Learn more by clicking here. It features speakers such as Diego Rodriguez, Perry Klebhan (CEO of Timbuk2), and Debra Dunn (former SVP at HP). The conference is free--it can't get much better than this!

Search and Save the Planet

In honor of Earth Day, Flock released the "Eco-Edition" browser. You can download it here. This version of Flock has two compelling benefits for people who want to save the planet:

1. Flock is donating 10% of the revenue generated by searches to a green organization. At the end of the year, users will vote for the organization that will receive the money.

2. The browser comes pre-configured with green sites, blogs, and media feeds. In fact, Green.alltop.com is the default home page, so that you can truly follow "all the top" green stories.

Switching browsers is a non-trivial issue, but I recently made Flock my default browser. It readily imported my existing bookmarks, and its integration with social-networking sites such as Twitter and FaceBook as well as photo sites such Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube is quite impressive. You can also blog directly from it as well as manage RSS feeds. And, if switching makes you feel disloyal to Firefox, Flock is based on Firefox, so you can relax.

The quality of Flock as a browser plus the 10% donation and pre-loading of green topics means that the Flock Eco-Edition merits a try by people who are concerned about the environment. At least read more about it.

TicketLeap: The Democratization of Ticketing

If you ever have to sell tickets for an event, look into TicketLeap. This company provides a platform that democratizes the ticket selling process and makes it easy for event organizers to handle online ticketing and promote their event. Think of it as PayPal for tickets. The company handles ticketing for a wide variety of events from music festivals to small business events.

The website currently serves thousands of events and provides a strong assortment of tools to enable organizers to get started. For instance, you can use the Plaxo addressbook plugin to send out ticket invites to everyone you know via the TicketLeap interface.

The service is transaction-based which means it costs nothing to get started and organizers can pass the fees ($2/ticket + processing) on to the ticket buyer. TicketLeap was founded as a student project as part of the Wharton Venture Initiation Program.

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I am an advisor to TicketLeap.

See-Saw Power for Schools

I love ideas like this: Kids playing on a see-saw generate electrical power. Daniel Sheridan, a twenty-three year old student at Coventry University, created this design after working as a volunteer in Kenya. This fits right in with the PlayPump merry-go-round for pumping spring water and the Hippo Water Roller for delivering water. Dean Kamen's water distiller might also interest you. (Thanks to Thomas Kang for pointing these developments out.)

The Impact of Social Media on Sales, Support, Marketing, and Branding

Over at the Sun Microsystems small and medium business site, I published an interview with Josh Bernoff about his new book (co-authored with Charlene Li) called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. In this interview he discusses the impact of social media on sales, support, marketing, and branding. He and Charlene are big wheels at Forrester, so this is recommended reading people in any kind of web marketing role. Click here to read the interview to learn about topics such as why the CEO of a publicly-traded company probably can’t write an interesting blog.

Fixmyphotos Freebie

My buddies at Fixmyphotos recently updated their site with a new design and improved functionality such as four different ways to upload digital photos for retouching. This is the firm that brought you the before and after called Guy2.0.

In order to test the site, they will process orders for free until April 15th. Just make sure you use Internet Explorer and go through the whole ordering process, and your order will be back to you in forty-eight hours.

First, set up an account using your email address here.

Use the following credit card details to "pay" for your orders:

Credit Card Number: 370000000000002

Expiration date: 5/2008

Security Code: 123

All the other information can be anything at all but "required fields" must have something in them. While you are testing the site, the company would appreciate it if you:

• Use the "Contact Us" page to send us a note (any note)

• Send in images to be retouched using combinations of the services, not all the default choices.

• Deliberately leave out 'required' information sometimes to be sure the form detects it and prompts you correctly to fill in missing information

• Send in large and small image files.

• Send in more than one order.

• Follow emailed directions to retrieve your finished images.

• Send in positive and negative feedback.

• Try to use every link.

Please note that following is not available through this offer:

• Restoration of old photos.

• Upload back to SmugMug (not working yet).

• "Download All" button to download all the images from an order in one zip file (the file downloads correctly but the files within are seen as corrupt by some users).

Muchobene

Check out this new service by Muchobene. It enables website and blog owners to add real-time chat answers from a community of people. Think of it as instant messaging meets Yahoo! Answers.

The first implementation is at Ubergizmo. Here the use case is that people can ask questions about gadgets of people who know about gadgets. Users who only want to ask questions can just ask away in the dialog area--that is, no profile, no registration. If no one is currently available to answer your question, you will received a "deferred answer" later.

Users who want to answer questions install a plug-in. Then the Muchobene engine monitors your discussions to determine your area of expertise. As an answerer you can tweak your settings for the quantity of questions that you receive as well as your availability.

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I am an advisor to Muchobene.

Alltop Badges: Confirmation That You Kick Ass

For those of you who run sites and blogs that are listed in Alltop, we've created badges that you can use on your site. You can get them by clicking here.

Honestly, this isn't the real reason for this posting. One of the bloggers, Jenny the bloggess, didn't think our badges pushed the edge enough so she designed these for me. She is also the person who made "Kawasakied" an entry in the Urban Dictionary. She is the funniest person that I've met in years.

Jenny, like Laura "I'll make a statue to Guy" Mayes of Sk*rt (aka "Digg for chicks"), are both from Houston. There must be something in the water in Houston that make people so funny, so I'm going to check it out. Of course, to do that, I had to buy some cowboy boots.