The hottest hotspots in New York...for nerds.
(Credit: Sam Lessin)Just how powerful can the data behind a location-based application be? Extremely.
Earlier this month, the second annual Internet Week New York took place, and Dropio founder and certifiable data nerd Sam Lessin crunched a bunch of numbers based on what his contacts on urban navigation and friend-finding service Foursquare were doing. Lessin was working with a group of fewer than 100 contacts, almost all of whom are involved in the tech and new-media industries (this is the scene that birthed Foursquare and its predecessor Dodgeball, after all), and yet it's a fascinating peek at just how much this kind of data can reveal. He's posted it on his personal file "drop" on Dropio.
Lessin trawled through the data to find what time people checked into coffee shops in the morning (and whether they were doing this earlier or later on a given day), how much people "lost steam" over the course of a party- and conference-filled week, and how much the most popular gatherings actually matched up to the Internet Week New York official schedule. As it turns out, the hottest parties were impromptu, unofficial gatherings at the Standard Hotel and, um, Sing Sing Karaoke.
Obviously, this isn't perfect. Foursquare updates are voluntary, which means that data can't say a thing about what people are doing when they aren't telling the app about it. The presence of an app like Foursquare, too, can also skew social activity: word about the massive impromptu party at the Standard Hotel bar, for example, spread when the Foursquare check-ins started snowballing.
But when you have enough people participating--which, as of yet, Foursquare does not--the critical mass starts to correct some of those issues. It's a fascinating sneak peek at what sort of value this data could have down the road.
What we can also look forward to: pretty infographics, Orwellian privacy concerns. Eek.
This is the new Dropio interface with a chat pop-up at the bottom.
(Credit: Dropio)When Facebook announced that its news feed would turn into a real-time "stream" of updates and media, it became clear that the Twitter-like model of fast-moving information flow was gaining a real foothold in the dot-com world.
Now, file-sharing service Dropio has opted to turn its "drops"--the pages where people can drag and drop any number of multimedia files and then password-protect them--into streams optimized for collaborative work. If you're working in one of them, it updates instantly for all users.
There's also a new feature, much like in Google Docs, Zoho, and other collaboration tools, which lets all members looking at a given "drop" chat with one another. Dropio has also turned on access to drops from third-party chat clients with Jabber support, like Adium and Pidgin.
But founder and CEO Sam Lessin said that he doesn't see the collaboration-focused new development as bringing Dropio, which turned on Twitter support last summer, in competition with the Web's numerous productivity-suite applications.
"We're still not interested in, and we're not competing in the 'let's open up a document and edit it together in real time' space," Lessin said to CNET News. "I've yet to see...a normal workflow where you want to do that. The workflow for us is much more along the lines of opening up a pipe between 15 people who are collaborating or 100 people who are in a conference audience and let them collaborate around the event."
A more direct competitor, he said, would be the 37Signals product Campfire.
A look at the new Dropio home page.
(Credit: Dropio)Dropio, a file-sharing start-up that lets you easily toss anything from photos to phone calls in a "drop" (kind of like a virtual storage cabinet), has launched a new look.
The redesign makes the site look a little slicker, and certainly accentuates Dropio's "easy to use" mantra. It's also clearly a consumer-oriented product now--in comparison, the old design looks like a back-end content management system. That's good, because the company hopes to appeal to Luddites as well as techies. (For a business model, Dropio offers premium accounts that get rid of the 100MB free account storage limit.)
Feature-wise, it's pretty much the same, but Dropio's team has said that it's "about a thousand times more customizable and useful" thanks to a newly reorganized dashboard. They also say that the speed of the site should also be a notch higher.
One part college reunion, one part cultural showcase, and one part weeklong think tank, some classify the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) as "spring break for geeks."
But this year more than ever, many eager young entrepreneurs consider the festival, which takes place Friday through Tuesday, to be more than just a nerd haven where the margaritas are flowing, the barbecue is sizzling, and (almost) everyone knows that Ruby on Rails is not the name of an indie-rock band. Going to SXSWi is considered a crucial business move, particularly after the meteoric rise that the then-unknown Twitter enjoyed at last year's festival. The microblogging start-up not only gained buzz from winning a SXSWi Web Award, but also earned a loyal following of tech-friendly addicts who used it as their communication tool of choice at the chaotic confab.
For bootstrapping entrepreneurs, SXSWi is like a cross between a debutante ball and a petri dish: spread the word about your new social-media brand among likeminded people (particularly over an open bar), and ideally get them to start using it on the spot. This time around, plenty of new companies are vying for the status that Twitter enjoyed last year--but caution is key. Not only will it be extremely difficult for any start-up to pull off a "Twitter coup" at the festival, but it'll be even more difficult for it to do what Twitter has not yet achieved, and that's the feat of translating SXSWi trendiness into real-world success.
"It looks like everybody's fighting for it," said David Karp, founder of blogging platform Tumblr, which launched last year and will be making an appearance at SXSWi for the first time. "I think the whole thing is kind of funny, the way people look at this industry and the way they're super competitive about it."
It's true. While few actual product launches take place at the nearly press-conference-free SXSWi, many small companies have amped up their product offerings in the weeks before the festival or have created SXSWi-specific promotions to get the word out. Pownce, a microblogging start-up that launched last year, just opened an application programming interface (API) for developers. Publishing platform BricaBox formally launched in late February and has debuted SXSWi party guide SXSWhere.com as one of its inaugural product demonstrations.
Unofficial debut for many
Other companies consider this year's SXSWi to be their unofficial debut in the tech enthusiast community--much like Twitter, which was already five months past its formal launch at last year's SXSWi. "We really want to make a big splash," said Matt Galligan, founder and CEO of the Colorado-based Socialthing, a new company that aims to help users organize their online social-networking profiles in one place. Socialthing, currently in private beta, is hosting a party on Sunday night, has set up a booth at the festival, and has beefed up its server power to accommodate new users.
"South by Southwest is just one more step out for us," said Sam Lessin, founder of file-sharing start-up Dropio, who says that he's "really amped" that his company was nominated in the "Technical Achievement" category of this year's Web Awards. "We want to push the name out, get the concept of what we're doing out a little bit wider, and get feedback and reactions and engagement from those people."
A few bloggers have suggested that Dropio, which lets users toss all kinds of media into group "drops," could be "this year's Twitter," as SXSWi attendees could potentially use it to communicate and share information with one another. Lessin has mixed feelings about the characterization. "There are aspects of Twitter which are awesome, and which we would love to be associated with," he said. "We'd certainly love the kind of growth that they saw coming out of SXSWi (2007). There are other aspects that we'd rather not emulate."
Lessin confirmed that Dropio's servers will be getting extra juice for the festival to prevent high-profile meltdowns like the ones that still occasionally plague Twitter a year after its SXSW 2007 debut.
Plus, there's the disappointment factor. Despite the fact that it remains very popular among social-media geeks, Twitter really isn't a household name, and the tech industry's perpetual hype-backlash cycle has led some up-and-coming entrepreneurs to tone down their enthusiasm when it comes to SXSWi buzz. "This is not an important event for us," said Karp, who added that he doesn't think elevated chatter at SXSWi indicates future success for a start-up, given the festival's insidery crowd. "Conferences aren't necessarily a great case for a mainstream activity. This is going to be like a big tech slumber party."
Nevertheless, Tumblr will be co-hosting a party with video start-up Next New Networks, and is encouraging people to contribute to a group blog. "During the party we're going to just hand out an e-mail address that people can put into their phones, so that during the event they can send in video and text updates and photos," Karp explained, still insisting that it wasn't a big deal. "We kind of fell into this party that we're now co-hosting. That was mostly an accident."
Is another Twitter needed?
Twitter broke out last year, he theorized, because it was just the perfect fit for the conference in a way that we won't likely see again. "Twitter was especially magical in that such a thing didn't really exist (before) and it blended in perfectly with the conference," Karp said. He added that because of that, there's a chance that this year's SXSWi masses will just use Twitter again as their communication tool of choice; many of them still use it avidly, after all. There might be nothing that emerges as the "next Twitter" because nothing is needed.
Then there is the fact that the new-media industry may be looking less for a hot new start-up and more for sweeping ideas to help mature the industry. If the recent Future of Web Apps conference in Miami was any indicator, the hot topics in social networking and Web development are community-driven standards like OpenSocial and DataPortability that aim to infuse a jumbled landscape with a bit of order.
And let's face it: at its core, SXSWi is one big party, and plenty of those present will be there to have a good time with fellow geeks, not philosophize about the next big thing. At least one entrepreneur I talked to has indicated that the most important preparation he's done pre-SXSWi has been brushing up on his Guitar Hero skills.
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