The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them.
- Songbeat Gets A Second Life As Excellent Music App With Uncertain Future
- Google Voice Warms Up For iPhone, Cuts Off Calls After 15 Minutes
- The Lost Formula For Start-up Success. No, Really
- Br.st Throws Its Hat Into The URL Shortener Ring
- Rails Rumble 2009 - Vote For Your Favorite App
- AJAX Search: Is Google Sweating Bing Or Just Feeling The Need For Speed?
- WITN?: Exit ignorance, pursued by a bear. The truth behind Obama’s plan to take over the Internet
- Rising to the Top: 5 ways indie developers succeed on the App Store
- The Countdown to TechCrunch50 is on!
- What Cleantech Should Learn from Nanotech (Before It’s too Late)
- Twitter Conferences Continue To Grow
| Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them. Posted: 30 Aug 2009 07:12 AM PDT
Over the last few months everyone has weighed in on the question of “Why Don’t Teens Tweet” — except, it would appear, teens. We recently ran a survey of 10,000+ US teens aged 13 – 17 to see if we could add anything new to the question. As it turns out, the question itself is flawed. To date, reasons given for the alleged aversion of teens to Twitter have ranged from the condescending “Because they have nothing to say,” to the responsible “Because it doesn’t feel safe,” to the Letterman-like “Because they can’t afford it” — at least without a mobile data plan. Of course, all of these reasons are predicated on the widely accepted notion that “Teens Don’t Tweet” — that there is a phenomenon that needs to be explained. As recently as last week even, the New York Times cited the fact that only 11% of Twitter is teen as evidence of Twitter’s unpopularity to that group. The implication is that 11% is a small number, but if we look deeper, it turns out that Twitter has a higher concentration of teens than Facebook. You can see in the chart below that Facebook is only 9% teen, so Twitter is actually more teen than Facebook, which rightly has never been perceived as having a “teen problem.” Facebook has so many users that teens just can’t be that large a percentage of the service, by definition.
To be sure, the truthiness of the headline “Teens Don’t Tweet” is persuasive. It really does feel true, and on one level it is: the vast majority of teens don’t tweet. Of course, the vast majority of the adult population doesn’t tweet either. As it turns out, teens actually tweet more than the general population, prompting Silicon Valley Insider to say yesterday, “Kids Don’t Hate Twitter Anymore.” According to comScore, Twitter’s unique visitor composition index in the 12 – 17 age group is 118 (a value over 100 represents a higher concentration of unique visitors from that age group as compared to the age group’s concentration across the entire web). More interestingly, Twitter’s 12 – 17 composition index of 118 is higher than its composition index in the 25 – 34 and 35 – 44 age groups. The bottom line: Twitter actually skews more teen than the average site, and much more teen than Facebook. Similarly, the teens who visit Twitter do so 5.2 times per month, more often than users aged 25 – 44, who visit fewer than 5 times per month. But, there is a lot more to the story than widespread misinterpretation of data. After all, why don’t the majority of teens tweet? The issue of teens and Twitter first got legs when Morgan Stanley published an influential report written by Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old intern from the UK, which became an instant hit. Here is the reason the report suggested that teens don’t tweet:
To validate this explanation, we ran a survey asking thousands of US teens whether text messaging charges have anything to do with whether or not they use Twitter, and over 90% said: “No — I wouldn’t use Twitter anyway.” (Note: unlimited texting plans are common in the US, whereas the Morgan Stanley report was written from the perspective of a UK teen.)  Robson also observed his friends and classmates in the UK signing up for the service and then never using it again, a pattern that proves very similar in the US. In fact, in our survey, we found that 45% of teens aged 13 – 17 who have a Twitter account don’t tweet. Most send a few and stop altogether, and 17% never sent a single one.  Similarly, we looked into the idea that maybe teens are turned off by Twitter’s openness and consider it unsafe. We found no support for this hypothesis either, with almost no one citing “It’s too open” or “It’s not safe” as reasons they don’t use Twitter, as the chart below shows.  So why? Why doesn’t Twitter engender passion in even most of the teens who take the plunge and sign up for an account? The answer lies in the reasons teens do use Twitter. Of teens with a Twitter account, the top 4 reasons cited for using the service are, in order:
 If we break down those top reasons one by one, a clearer picture emerges of why Twitter is not more popular among teens.
Given the above, it is no surprise that teen penetration is not higher. The value proposition of Twitter to the majority of teens is the issue. No doubt, this is why most teens describe Twitter as “not for me”, and also why most teens who are not on Twitter cite the generic reason why as “Because it’s lame.” Twitter doesn’t help most of them do anything new, so to them, it is lame. Of course, for those teens who are celebrity hounds or compulsive news followers, or those looking for an audience for their status updates, Twitter is invaluable. But now we have come full circle. Most teens don’t use Twitter because it doesn’t enable them to do anything they can’t already do elsewhere, which is the same reason most adults don’t use Twitter. It has nothing to do with any teen-specific concerns like texting plans or safety. It comes down to something more simple: delivering value beyond Facebook and MySpace — a competitive moat that Facebook is bridging one move at a time, from the Everyone button to the acquisition of FriendFeed to the centrality of the stream itself. The question of “Why Don’t Teens Use Twitter?” is the question of “Why Doesn’t Everyone Use Twitter?” The answer, it would seem, is both obvious and heretical … maybe Twitter isn’t for everyone. Additional Teens & Twitter Survey Results:      Disclaimer: Here is some more info on the panel of teens we surveyed. We don’t claim the 10,000+ survey results represent the definitive survey of teens in the US. We do, however, claim that our users look very much like the users of other social networks and that our audience overlaps significantly with MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and that the insights of myYearbook teens may be useful to this analysis. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco           |
| Songbeat Gets A Second Life As Excellent Music App With Uncertain Future Posted: 30 Aug 2009 04:41 AM PDT
And like Seeqpod, it was also an easy way to obtain copyrighted material from the many places on the Web where that kind of stuff can be found. Up, down, and up again Evidently, the music industry took notice and sought to shut the service down in court. Warner Music was the first to file a lawsuit against the startup behind Songbeat and ultimately forced the fledgling company to take the service offline, but not without them promising to return with something bigger and bolder in the future. Yesterday, the guys behind Songbeat came out with a revived version of the desktop client, which has been renamed Songbeat 360. Music lovers are going to love it. The music industry, however, is not. The app Songbeat 360 is an Adobe AIR powered desktop music player with a powerful music search engine - unambiguously baptized Songbeat Search - at its core. Search for artists or songs and the app returns a list of 50 search results, along with links to the originating source. Double-click tracks and you can instantly play them from the integrated player, or right-click to download tunes to your computer. Drag music tracks to the left-hand column and create custom playlists straight from the app. Slick, fast and easy. Wanna learn more about an artist? Simply hit the ‘Discover’ button and you’ll get all sorts of information from across the web delivered right to the desktop client interface, including similar artists so you can find more music you like by browsing their profiles and albums. Interested in knowing when the artist in question (or another) is playing at or nearby your location? Click the ‘Live’ button and you’ll get a list of gigs based on your location, which you can easily modify. Wanna let your friends know what you’re listening to? The integrated Twitter button will make that easy for you too. The cost Songbeat has set up an unusual way of monetizing the service. When you launch the application for the first time, you’ll see 50 credits at the right top of the client. Every time you do a search for an artist or song, a credit comes off your inventory. Scroll to the bottom of the list and you’ll get 50 more results, once again taking a credit off your account. If you run out of credits, which takes away the ability to search music using Songbeat Search, you can purchase additional credits at any time through Paypal, with a rate of €10 or roughly $15 for 1,000 credits. Here’s the funny thing: actually streaming music or downloading music doesn’t cost you any credits at all. Nothing. Zip. And that’s of course what will make users love it, and labels (and many music artists) hate it. The problem The announcement of the all new Songbeat starts like this:
Nothing short of provocative, and when I inquired about the specifics of deals that are in place with record labels or artists to make sure the latter get adequate compensation for their work, Fritz-Vietta made it clear that he is trying every trick in the book to prevent having to pay up for that. Which means that, unlike Spotify (which Songbeat loves to compare themselves with), there are zero arrangements with the music industry in place yet, and I doubt there ever will be. Like Seeqpod before them, Songbeat hides behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by stating they are only search providers offering users access to music that is already available on the Web, and that the company never actually hosts any digital files on its own servers. Seeqpod tried to play that game, got sued all over the place anyway, ultimately filed for bankruptcy only to be (presumably) picked up by Microsoft for its core technology and team some time after. Songbeat also says it actually wants to help artists and their labels market their music, concerts etc. better by - get this - offering them free ad space inside the client interface. The idea is that they’d advertise better quality tracks, concert tickets, etc. using ad units that are displayed whenever someone ends up on the artist’s profile. Somehow, I don’t think that’ll stick. This is part of their pitch:
In a perfect world, maybe. A serious shame we’re not living in one. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Google Voice Warms Up For iPhone, Cuts Off Calls After 15 Minutes Posted: 30 Aug 2009 02:07 AM PDT
From one user: “almost every call I make now dropping at 15 minutes and some seconds.” Other users complained of the same issue, and Google confirmed the problem, saying: “Thank you everyone for your reports. We identified the cause of the 15 minute dropped call problem and we expect the issue to be resolved now. If you continue to see this issue, we appreciate your feedback.” I’m using Google Voice for all of my mobile calls and haven’t noticed the issue, but my calls are rarely more than a few minutes. And as a recent iPhone user, I’ve learned to live with dropped calls, so I probably wouldn’t even notice. I’m not sure I ever managed to go fifteen minutes on the iPhone without the call dropping at least once. We continue to expect Apple to accept the Google Voice application for the iPhone sometime soon rather than deal with any further investigations that might uncover some…irregularities…with their recent communications with the FCC. Dropped calls after 15 minutes will hardly be an issue with those new iPhone users. Heck, they’ll just blame AT&T anyway. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| The Lost Formula For Start-up Success. No, Really Posted: 30 Aug 2009 12:28 AM PDT
You know the story. A group of friends come up with an amazing product idea, lock themselves away, code like demons, eat pizza, drink coffee and several months later come out with a prototype. The prototype is good enough to convince some investors, they raise money, build the full product, launch it, users love it, product gets traction, acquirers circle and then founders exit to a large pay-off. They then give media interviews which gets summarised into something that sounds like the above story. What is wrong with this picture? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Br.st Throws Its Hat Into The URL Shortener Ring Posted: 29 Aug 2009 08:25 PM PDT Big surprise. There’s another URL shortening service that wants to throw its hat in the ring and into a field that’s pretty much saturated. Do we really need another URL shortener? Brinkster, the web-hosting startup behind Br.st seems to think so. Similar to many of its competitors, Br.st offers statistics (in your own time zone) about your links, including number of clicks, referrers, and origin (by country or region) of all of the clicks. Bit.ly, which is one of the current leaders in the URL shortening space, offers all of these analytics as well. Additionally, Br.st filters submitted links through malware filters. Br.st’s service lets you post to over 10 social networks and sites including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Digg, and will soon offer Google analytics. The site also offers bookmarklets to add to your toolbar. And Br.st has opened up its API. Br.st says that it will also offer image and filer sharing (similar to yFrog or TwiPic) and will let you see detailed stats on these links. Though full of useful features, Br.st is entering a space that’s inundated competitors and it’s a dog eat dog world out there in the URL shortening field. It seems that every week, there’s a new URL shortener out on the market. TweetMeme just debuted its own URL shortening service, ReTwet.me. Of course, one URL shortener Tr.im, has dropped out of the race. And recently, Royal Pingdom conducted a study on which URL shortener was the fastest and Ow.ly and Bit.ly came out on top. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Rails Rumble 2009 - Vote For Your Favorite App Posted: 29 Aug 2009 08:22 PM PDT
The competition has ended and now that many of the contestants are awake again, it’s time for the public to kick the tires on these mini-applications and vote to decide who will take home the championship belt (and no, that’s not a figure of speech in this case. There really is a belt). The 22 finalists include something for everyone, whether you’re a developer working to nail down requirements, a boozehound trying to figure out what cocktails you can make with the leftovers from last night’s party, an old-school arcade nut looking to play multi-player Asteroid, or a hopeless romantic trying to employ Twitter to woo a crush. Even the teams that don’t come away with any material prizes will have gained some very valuable feedback on whether their idea might have any legs in the long run. Fifteen of the entries from the 2008 competition are still active and available to users, including all of the prize-winning applications. So head on over and check out the applications, leave some feedback, and vote for your favorite(s). Voting ends tomorrow, Sunday, at 5 pm PST. You’ll be deciding a grand prize that includes a netbook for each team member and a bottle of 12 year Pappy Van Winkle Whiskey (from GitHub - I knew those guys were classy), not to mention year-long bragging rights. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| AJAX Search: Is Google Sweating Bing Or Just Feeling The Need For Speed? Posted: 29 Aug 2009 05:14 PM PDT
One such user is Mike Stoppelman, a software engineer at Yelp. But Stoppelman’s take on it is interesting, and worth noting because before he worked at Yelp, he was an engineer at Google for four years. As Stoppelman sees it, Google is bringing out AJAX Search to combat Microsoft’s Bing search product, which has garnered quite a bit of attention since its launch a few months ago. Some claim that Bing is faster than Google, but an AJAX Google would undoubtedly be faster than Bing. Of course, as I mentioned, Google has been testing this since well before Bing was born, but the timing of a wider roll-out could well be a result of Bing. Google has denied making changes as a result of competitors in the past, most recently for its new “Caffeine” test, but at some point they have to concede that they do watch what rivals are doing and change plans accordingly — it would be foolish not to. It’s worth noting that Caffeine appears to use AJAX search results as well. There’s also the issue of whether or not this speed increase really matters all that much? After all, both Google and Bing are now serving up results in fractions of a second, and any increase probably isn’t going to be perceived in a meaningful way by end users. But remember, this is Google. A move to shave off fractions of a second definitely seems like something they would focus on, knowing that those fractions add up. Shave enough fractions of a second off of everyone’s searches and you’ll be supplying people with more time to do more searches — which of course means more ads served, and most importantly, more money. So how will you know if you’re getting the AJAX results? Look at the URL. A normal Google Search has something like the following at its end:
An AJAX search result replaces that with something that looks like:
As I mentioned, if you don’t see the AJAX results in your regular Google results, you can see it on the Caffeine test page here. [photo: Paramount Pictures] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| WITN?: Exit ignorance, pursued by a bear. The truth behind Obama’s plan to take over the Internet Posted: 29 Aug 2009 03:14 PM PDT
My first find was this story about a bear who had got trapped in a Colorado skate park, presumably after breaking in to practice his Ollies, or whatever it is bears do on skateboards. The bear was finally rescued when townsfolk dropped a ladder into the park, allowing him to climb to freedom. To any normal person, a bear trapped in a skate park would be little more than a heartwarming newsbite; a quirky story to distract from another week of war and terrorism and kidnapped children living in back yards in Antioch. But not for the lazy tech columnist looking for inspiration. For the lazy tech columnist looking for inspiration, a bear trapped in a skate park easily becomes a metaphor for the attitudes of certain Silicon Valley types who are trapped in their little Northern California bubble and don’t realise - or care - that there’s a world outside. And the ladder, I suppose, represents the columnist whose job it is to provide escape from the ignorance. Perfect. Another Saturday box ticked. Move on, nothing to see here. But just as I was about to shut down Firefox and start scribbling skateboard jokes in my special columnist’s notepad, another headline caught my eye, this time from CNET. It read: ‘Bill would give president emergency control of Internet‘. Wow, I thought, this Bill guy sounds like a dick. But no, as it turned out, the Bill in question is the Rockefeller-Snowe bill (S.773), notable both for being the first piece of US legislation to be named after a Fatboy Slim track and for the fact that it gives the President the power to shut down the Internet whenever he feels like it. Unsurprisingly, the 1000+ comments on the article are somewhat hostile, helped by a link from Matt Drudge who thoughtfully added his own scare quotes around the word ‘emergency’. ‘This has nothing to do with “prorecting” [sic] the internet,’ wrote one commenter, ‘and everything to do with the power drunk, dicatorial [sic] Obama engaging in an unprecedendted [sic], unconstitutional power grab, orchestrated by his psychotic lunatic fringe “czars”.’ A bold statement, from that rare person who can spell ‘psychotic’ and ‘czars’ only to stumble over ‘protecting’. ‘Can you say, “Caesar Chavez?”‘, asked another, presumably rhetorically - while a third managed to wrangle two talking points into one meaningless one with: ‘Of course this goes along with the Obamacare nonsense that the government will have direct access to your bank accounts if this Obamacare BS becomes law. Hitler all over again’. Well said, Sir. It’s a scandal that Adolf Hitler’s cybersecurity bill and healthcare proposals don’t get the criticism they deserve. But behind the megaditto rhetoric, some of the commenters do actually have a point. Unlike the previous administration’s PATRIOT act, which promoted freedom of information by wiretapping every man, woman and child in America, the Democrats’ Rockefeller-Snowe bill does sound pretty creepy and invasive. All the President needs to do is declare a state of emergency and he’ll have the right to disconnect US citizens from the web, access their computers and even hack into the servers of private companies. That’s a horrendous power-grab for use in an unspecified emergency. Or at least it would be. If that’s what the bill actually proposed. In fact, in its current form, the worst the bill does is to clarify the President’s existing power to take limited control of communications networks in the case of national emergency or war. Like President Bush was able to order all planes to be grounded on September 11th, the bill would allow President Obama to ground parts of the Internet in similar circumstances. But at this stage even those powers aren’t set in stone - the bill is still in draft form, having already been redrafted after early objections that the wording was too vague. And it’s still too vague, to the point where Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, says: “we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.” Indeed. What we really have here is a classic situation of an ambiguously-drafted bill, not even close to passing but which has the capacity to generate some pretty scary headlines. Last week it was death panels, this week it’s Obama stealing our Internets. Like a bear trapped in a skate park, critics - mainly of the President rather than the bill - are running round and round, without any kind of information ladder to help them out of their pit of paranoia. And so, as ever, it falls to me to provide that missing ladder. Don’t ask me how (*cough* French hacker *cough*), but I’ve managed to get hold of a copy of a secret memo sent to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe by the Whitehouse, outlining exactly what powers Obama wants over the Internet, and why. I think you’ll agree, it makes pretty interesting reading…
So there you have it. The bear of ignorance, rescued by the ladder of facts. My work here is done: let the mature, informed debate begin. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Rising to the Top: 5 ways indie developers succeed on the App Store Posted: 29 Aug 2009 12:30 PM PDT  It's no secret: there's some Benjamins to be made on the App Store. In fact, the App Store is now a $2.4 billion dollar per year business, according to AdMob's monthly mobile metrics report. Here's another fun fact you probably already know: most app developers fade into the App Store abyss long before they ever find fame and fortune. Even if you ignore the junk apps and the million e-books each published as a separate app, you've still got a solid 5-10,000 apps clamoring to grab a piece of the App Store pie. Many developers feel like the App Store is akin to high school: an anarchic and ruthless popularity contest to see who's got the biggest, well, um, you know what I mean. That brings us to the $2.4 billion question: how do you succeed on the App Store? We've spent the last few weeks trying to answer that question and have come up with a list of tips and tricks that'll help you edge your way into App Store glory. Now, none of these will replace making a good product or compensate for a million-dollar advertising and PR budget, but they'll likely help you get noticed or keep your current momentum. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| The Countdown to TechCrunch50 is on! Posted: 29 Aug 2009 11:24 AM PDT
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Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| What Cleantech Should Learn from Nanotech (Before It’s too Late) Posted: 29 Aug 2009 11:15 AM PDT
It seemed like a great investment thesis for a few reasons: There was actually real patentable science there and because the possibilities seemed so limitless, it was a huge market. A February 2005 BusinessWeek cover pegged it at nearly $300 billion by the end of the decade. (You know, now.) There were some VCs who shied away, some—like Steve Jurvetson—who went whole hog, but most were somewhere in the middle. In other words, they didn’t really know if this tiny thing could be huge, but wanted some horses in the race just in case. In all more than $1 billion was invested in the space, according to that same BusinessWeek cover, and some 1,200 startups created. (The typical venture research firms don’t break out nanotech investments so better numbers are hard to find. I think BusinessWeek’s figures are actually pretty conservative considering fundings of $20 million-$40 million a pop weren’t unheard of.) By some measures, the movement succeeded. According to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Project on Emerging Technologies more than 1,000 nanotech products are available to consumers now, up from only 212 products in 2006. The director of the study David Rejeski told PEHub he expects the number of products to reach 1,600 within the next two years. Awesome. Oh, wait. Not awesome—What about the exits? Where's all that nano-cash the Valley was supposed to be awash in by now? Pending IPOs of companies like Nanosys, Nanofilm and Konarka never happened. (All three companies are still in business and have raised hundreds of millions in venture capital and private equity between them.) What exits nanotech had were, well, tiny. There was never a huge, iconic nanotech IPO to justify all that hope and keep the believers believing and investing. Looking at the Pew study, the product potential was clearly there. So what happened? One of three things: The markets for those products were too small and the companies couldn’t scale as hoped, the products and science was just too incremental to turn into a big hit, or some huge IPOs are still around the corner. In some ways, that's not too different than complaints lodged at the Web 2.0 generation. Skeptics say that most of the startups are less companies and merely Y Combinator-style features and apps that at best will get acquired for $20 million or so. The difference with Web 2.0 is these sites and apps are incredibly cheap and quick to build and host. Designing sub-atomic particles that will be manufactured into pants are not. You know what else isn't? Most of the big opportunities in cleantech. Cleantech investments are down 30% this year in terms of deals and 60% in terms of dollars—with a big shift going away from energy generation towards energy savings. It's in danger of looking a lot like nanotech several years from now. For the billions that have poured into cleantech—what do we have so far? There've been a few public exits. We've had a smaller number of jaw-droppingly killer products, mostly in the car space with companies like Tesla, Fisker and Better Place. And….what else exactly? As oil prices have spent much of the last year in more reasonable territory and the whole Inconvenient-Truth-fad has faded, cleantech needs a huge Netscape-like IPO to get everyone excited and ignite real investment in needle-moving science and development, not play-it-safe software programs to manage smart grids more effectively. VC Paul Holland of Foundation Capital says in the Press:Here clip below that there are a few contenders on the horizon right now. [Discussion near the 4 minute mark.] Others have speculated that several cleantech companies were readying themselves to go public before the crash, signaling a potentially active 2010. But most of these are well under the $1 billion market cap level. For an industry that billions have been invested in—that's like kissing your sister. No doubt the opportunity is huge for cleantech to remake nearly every old-line industry in the world. And I don't doubt that it will. The question is whether it succeeds where nanotech failed and remakes the golden era of VC returns. [BTW: Steve Jurvetson, if you're reading this and that big IPO is just around the corner, we'd love a guest post rebuttal on why nanotech is still alive.] Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Twitter Conferences Continue To Grow Posted: 29 Aug 2009 11:00 AM PDT A few months ago we wrote about the growing number of Twitter-focused conferences that are taking place around the world. Many were informative, with thought-provoking and compelling insights made by VCs, pundits and entrepreneurs. At Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference in New York in June, Twitter investor and VC Fred Wilson expounded on Twitter as a power-distributor of passed links. Of course, this particular conference was not without glitches, as noted eloquently by TechCrunch’s Paul Carr. It looks like the trend of Twitter conferences is growing, with more events popping up around the country. As we’ve said in the past and will continue to say, there are tremendous opportunities for businesses, brands, non-profits and individuals to use Twitter as a tool for customer support, fund raising, brand management, advertising, job search and much more. Twitter continues to grow at a steady rate and is mulling over different ways to monetize. There was some light shed on possible revenue streams during the whole Twitter document leak fiasco. And Twitter recently made a move to engage businesses by launching “Twitter 101,” a how-to guide for how businesses can best use Twitter. Whether Twitter will successfully monetize its platform is yet to be decided but one thing is for sure: conference coordinators around the country are banking on the buzz. Here are the ones we found taking place over the next few months: TWTRCON DC 09: Taking place in Washington D.C. on Oct. 22, TWTRCON focuses on discussing how to use Twitter as a business platform, paying particular attention to use by non-profits and government agencies. Speakers include Craig Newmark and Scott Harrison, from Charity:Water, which wrote about here.
140 Characters Conference: Organized by Jeff Pulver, this conference had its first stop in New York City in June. 140 Characters will be taking place in Los Angeles on Oct. 27 and like its sister conference, will address Twitter’s disruption of social media and look at microblogging’s effect on businesses, brands and advertising. Panelists include Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer, and Billy Bush. Cool Twitter Conferences: This is a roving conference that makes stops accross the country, aimed at advertising and marketing professionals and entrepreneurs who want to leverage Twitter’s real-time and viral platform. It seems to targeted towards those who are newbies to Twitter and want to learn some of the basics. Future stops include San Francisco and Boston. If there are other Twitter conferences taking place in the near future, let us know in the comments. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
This guest post is written by 
Nielsen also suggested that “
I liked 
This is a guest post by 
Since February, Google has been 
Feeling a bit under the weather yesterday - presumably my body’s reaction to the fact that San Francisco has suddenly become sunny - I decided to take a jaunt around the Internet for column ideas. My deadline was a whole 24 hours away, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared, right?
Back before we had Web 2.0 and cleantech to obsess about the Valley was abuzz about nanotech—the idea that sub-atomic particles would suddenly be the building blocks of, well, everything. It would make the paint on our houses last longer, the non-stick on our pans stick less, and our pants impervious to wrinkles. Somewhere, someone was probably promising their board they could use nanotechnology to make Harry Potter's invisibility cloak a reality.
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