The Social

This is part one of a four-post series.

It was a sort of worlds-collide surprise when I heard recently from a few guys from my hometown whom I've known since college. They wanted to talk to me about this month's South by Southwest Interactive Festival, that annual everyone-goes-there digital culture bacchanalia in Austin, Texas, which runs from Friday through next Tuesday.

You see, these friends of mine had recently started working at a company called JagTag, which creates barcode-based marketing campaigns for clients like sports teams and apparel brands. They're hoping to spread the word about the start-up at SXSWi by strategically placing postcards around the festival: take a picture of this barcode with your camera phone, e-mail it to them, and they'll send you a digital list of all the SXSWi parties.

It's a cool idea. Everyone at SXSWi always seems confused about exactly where the parties are.

Basically, South by Southwest is the ultimate petri dish for testing out new apps and gimmicks since the entire city of Austin is more or less taken over by tech enthusiasts who are eager to try out innovative ways to meet up, socialize, and the ever-important "consume media." That's how Twitter broke out among the digerati in early 2007. It's also a hot spot for marketers, because SXSWi is the kind of conference where people don't just want to swap around business cards--they are eager to hear what digital mavens are talking about and get a glimpse at the next big thing.

That's why a lot of the high-profile efforts on behalf of big tech companies are focused on those companies' start-up outreach and small-scale innovation arms. You won't see a big marketing presence from the likes of Yahoo or Google, except for a party hosted by Google's Reader and Blogger products. But Microsoft is doing a bunch of stuff: Windows Mobile is sponsoring the TechSet Blogger Lounge at the convention center and holding a Rat Pack-themed party on Friday night, its BizSpark start-up resource division has joined up with music service Imeem to hold a barbecue "meatup" (ha! ha!) on Monday, and SXSW also marks the finals of its Phizzpop design challenge.

Given the dismal economy, there won't be a whole lot of new companies launching at SXSWi this year. There are a few: Social search company Aardvark and answer-outsourcing service Standard Answer are both making their official launches at SXSW (the latter with a party). So is mobile networking app FourSquare, created from the ashes of the blogger-beloved Dodgeball. Another location-based app, Whrrl, is releasing the second edition of its iPhone app in conjunction with SXSW; concert listing company BandLoop is debuting its first iPhone app, conveniently also tying into the SXSW Music Festival that immediately follows Interactive.

There will be loads of marketing campaigns bombarding Austin for those five days, even with budgets slashed this year. Expect to still obtain some unwanted swag and other bizarre free stuff. And never forget Red Bull, the energy drink company with a seemingly bottomless barrel of marketing dollars at its disposal. It's the big sponsor for Facebook's hotly anticipated party on Sunday night: and nerds love energy drinks, after all.

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.

Document-sharing service Scribd has pulled in $9 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Friday. The round was led by Charles River Ventures with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Kinsey Hills Group.

With the new cash, Scribd plans to speed up its product development and hire new employees.

And the first of those hires was announced in conjunction with the funding announcement: George Consagra, who most recently served as chief operating officer of AOL's Bebo, has been hired as president. (Co-founder Trip Adler has the CEO post.)

Scribd's monthly user count is now at around 50 million, the company said.

Productivity application start-up Zoho is in a tough position: it has to compete with Google Apps. That hasn't stopped the company from pushing forward and trying new stuff.

Case in point: Zoho's Marketplace, which launched Tuesday. Through the Marketplace, Zoho users can make a buck or two off of applications that they built with Zoho Creator, the company's drag-and-drop application development tool.

If you've made an application in Creator, you can list it for sale in the Marketplace and charge a fee, if you want. Zoho doesn't take a commission from the sale of applications, but if you use Creator (or any other Zoho app) more than its personal-use plan permits, you'll have to cough up a subscription fee. This goes for app creators as well--if a lot of people are using your applications, you'll have to pay too.

Zoho isn't trying to create a get-rich-quick scheme here. "There are many applications out there that are not available off the shelf but are needed in a particular use case or situation," an explanation from the company read, "but there is not enough (of a) market for vendors to offer such situated software, as the need could be specific to a use case or an individual/business."

In conjunction with the release of its Marketplace, Zoho also launched Version 3.0 of Creator.

Online-productivity suite Zoho announced on Wednesday that it now accepts Google and Yahoo logins. An executive from Zoho parent company AdventNet announced last month that Google login compatibility was on the way.

"For Google and Yahoo users who are curious about Zoho but don't want to set up another account, we've removed that hurdle," Zoho 'evangelist' Raju Vegsna said in a release Wednesday. "Users don't have to create a Zoho account to use Zoho applications. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to try our online apps."

In addition to accepting Google and Yahoo logins for new Zoho accounts, the site also allows existing members to synchronize with their Google or Yahoo accounts.

This required collaboration with both Google and Yahoo--interesting, because Google operates Google Docs, a bigger rival to Zoho. But it's just the latest data portability announcement to emerge in the past few months, what with Yahoo supporting the OpenID standard and teaming up with MySpace.com on its Data Availability project, as well as Google launching its Friend Connect initiative.

For Your Imagination, an online video production company based in New York, announced Friday that it has pulled in an additional $1 million in seed funding from existing investor ConsensusOne Ventures. ConsensusOne, which initially invested $1 million in January 2007, will then help the small company work on a Series A funding round.

For Your Imagination, or FYI as they like to be called, produces the Web shows DadLabs and Break a Leg as well as an interview series about Gotham start-ups called NextNYers and a live music series, Live at FYI.

But in the New York tech community, FYI is known just as much for its office, a spacious loft in Chelsea that hosts many a digital-media industry party.

Business social network LinkedIn has given itself a New Year's makeover a few weeks early: the site has announced a home page redesign and new features, and has simultaneously launched a developer program that it calls "InApps."

For LinkedIn, which says that it recently passed 17 million user accounts, this move comes at a time when some observers are saying that business social networks are about to take off in a big way. The redesigned home page has not gone fully live, but is now accessible to logged-in LinkedIn members on a beta page. Included among the improvements are modules to show what questions people in your network are asking through the LinkedIn Answers feature; a selection of "connections of your connections"; and a smattering of jobs and opportunities that your network might offer.

Along with the redesign comes LinkedIn News, a set of headlines aggregated from about 10,000 sites and blogs that are tailored to be directly relevant to a user's company, industry, and competitors. This feature is being rolled out to a limited number of LinkedIn users and will be more widely available in early 2008.

But of more interest to the geek crowd may be "InApps" (short for Intelligent Applications), LinkedIn's answer to the myriad developer platforms that have emerged in the wake of the Facebook Platform. But InApps won't bring food fights and zombies to LinkedIn, something that became clear early on when executives started hinting that the company would unveil a developer initiative. Rather, this will be a select group of productivity applications including internal widgets (a calendar of conferences, for example) and code for porting LinkedIn functions to external Web sites.

LinkedIn is also a partner in Google's somewhat stalled OpenSocial initiative, and the company has said that InApps' structure "(includes) the ability to develop applications that will run within LinkedIn using the OpenSocial development model."

"The goal of the Intelligent Applications Platform is to help make our users more effective by providing them with access to the intelligence of their professional network both on LinkedIn and on other sites they visit to get work done," LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye said in a statement. "Our focus is 100 percent professional, so we will be working with select business partners to build high value, high productivity applications."

One of LinkedIn's inaugural partners, BusinessWeek, has used InApps to create links on its Web site that lead to LinkedIn profiles and company information.

Here, kitty kitty kitty! Rain-soaked Apple nerds wait for Leopard.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

NEW YORK--On Friday afternoon at the hour that Apple launched its latest operating system, Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, it was pouring rain in Manhattan. It was also windy and chilly. That didn't stop several hundred people from lining up outside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue to get their hands on the new software, huddled underneath Gore-Tex jackets and umbrellas.

"It's the cult," commented another reporter who had also been covering the water-saturated event.

The line for Leopard appeared to be divided fairly evenly between rabid Apple fans and shoppers who'd figured they could stop by and pick it up quickly--and indeed, come launch time, the line moved fast as customers were ushered into a gauntlet of Apple Store employees (much like the iPhone launch in June) and directed straight to the cash registers when the doors opened at 6 p.m.

"It's a happening," said first-in-liner Bob Greenlees, a twenty-something student at the nearby Cardozo School of Law, when I asked him why he'd bothered to wait amidst inclement weather for an operating system that could easily have been pre-ordered online and delivered to his front door. "It's one of those things. It's Apple, it's Fifth Avenue, it's a flagship store. And it's an opportunity to be in line for something without waiting for three days."

Greenlees, after posing for a photo with his new purchase, said that he was going to go straight home and install it. He'd been in line since about 2:30 p.m.

The line went to the corner and around the block to the intersection of 58th Street and Madison Avenue.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

"I came for the free t-shirt," said Steven Miranda, a Manhattan College student who was ninth in line. The Apple Store was offering t-shirts to the first 500 people who showed up, and for hardcore Apple fans, those shirts were a coveted prize. I asked Miranda and his friends whether they agreed with Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg's assertion that Leopard was "evolutionary, not revolutionary."

"Compared to Vista, it's revolutionary!" chimed in one Apple fan who was just ahead of Miranda in line. Indeed, the Microsoft-taunting was hardly under the radar. One person in line was wearing a t-shirt that bore the Windows logo along with the caption "Hasta la Vista."

For the two hours prior to the Leopard launch, the normally 24/7 Fifth Avenue store had been closed in preparation--my personal theory is Apple closed the store for a longer span of time than it needed to, to assure that an adequate queue would form in anticipation, but I'm sure Apple's not about to confirm that to me.

In addition to Leopard t-shirts, buyers were also treated to free umbrellas as they were ushered into the store. Nice move, Apple. "Keep the Leopard dry!" an Apple Store employee shouted. "Cats don't like water!"

But that raises a very serious question. Now that Apple has let Leopard out of its cage, following in the tracks of Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger, the big question is--which cat's next?

My money's on Ocelot.

NEW YORK--At about 1 p.m. EDT in midtown Manhattan, I overheard a group of suit-clad thirtysomething men talking as they waited to cross Madison Avenue.

"You know, leopards are solitary animals," one of them said. The other three or four continued musing on the characteristics of the large exotic felines, and I figured that it was actually part of a conversation about Apple's latest operating system, which launches Friday at 6 p.m. I thought, wow, if fratty midtown office types are talking about Mac OS X 10.5, there must be a huge line of fanboys at the Apple store!

Wrong. There was almost no sign of a major product launch at the 24-hour Apple store on Fifth Avenue, besides a few signs and posters announcing Leopard's advent. The store was still a mob scene, of course--in that touristy shopping district just south of Central Park, it always is. But there was no buzz factor like there had been with the crazy iPhone launch in June.

Apple Store customers try out Leopard at the Fifth Avenue store in NYC.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

Apple retail employees told reporters that the store would be closed from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for preparations, and that when the doors finally opened, there would be "demos all night long."

For an idea of what the scene might be like, they told the press to look up the Japanese launch of Leopard the previous night, which apparently had eager buyers lined up around the block. Then, clearly uncomfortable about saying too much, they said to contact company public-relations representatives instead and encouraged the press to test out the new operating system--it was already installed on all the demo computers at the store.

A few minutes later, reporters were informed that Apple retail employees had just been told not to speak to the press any more, until Leopard's launch at 6 p.m.

Meow.