Marketing Nirvana

Summary: Hundreds of (900 to be precise) valley bloggers, entrepreneurs, VCs and “anybody who’s a somebody or a wannabe” gather at annual gala — TechCrunch “9 conversations”

Over 800 packed in the August Capital HQs yesterday

Welcome to the year-after-the-hype. Last year, upon my return from TechCrunch 8, I asked the question “Is this Bubble 2.0?” because obviously all the excitement and enthusiasm of the preceding day’s TechCrunch 8 party hadn’t worn off of me and I felt jubilant. Today, I have to say the excitement has sobered but it seems to be a more mature feeling rather than a youthful exuberance. For me, each year the TechCrunch party is about people and besides my good friends whom I meet party after party (think Jeremiah, Gabe, Brian, Dave, Ben, etc… ), it was also about meeting others.

Here’s a rundown of people I met and stuff we talked about, in a section we’ll call TechCrunch “9 Conversations”:

1. Om Malik | Michael Arrington

There’s Arrington and Om comparing their iPhones. (Yes, the place was swarming with iPhone users. Not a good day to turn on your Blackberries… whatever!) Om was fresh off of his starring new role as host of his own show on Revision 3, which you can check out here.

2. Brian Oberkirch | Jeremiah Owyang

Moi, with two very cool bloggers & friends - Jeremiah and Brian

Yes, I’ve heard a lot about Brian. He’s a good friend of two of my good friends Jeremiah and Steve Ganz (from LinkedIn), but it was great chatting with Brian, who has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to all things social media and product development. Chatted about the future of social networking. Brian has some interesting stuff on portable social networks that I’m currently reading up on. By the way, I was surprised to learn that he’s from New Orleans. Given all his blogging, I’d pretty much assumed he was from the Bay Area as well. I look forward to an opportunity to hang out with him in the future.

3. Kay Luo, LinkedIn | Matt Marshall, Venture Beat

There’s Kay from LinkedIn with Matt Marshall who runs Venture Beat.

VentureBeat’s mission is to provide news and information about private companies and the venture capital that fuels them. It is the successor to SiliconBeat, co-founded and written by Matt Marshall.

Interestingly, we ended up chatting about corporate blogs, which in the future could be the repository of breaking news from companies. One of the things, I’ve always thought about is how company sites have to speed up their information dissemination owing to the transformation that the blogosphere has brought about. In the past, it was day by day, and nowadays, the minute a blog post breaks in the blogosphere, I’m out there on TechMeme searching for the most recent conversations. And, while we were chatting about blogs, he introduced me to the CEO of Automattic (WordPress), Toni.

4. Toni Schneider, AutomaTTic (WordPress)

(Photo source: Dave McClure, from another event)

First off, had to let Toni know what a big fan of WordPress I am. I’ve been running my personal blog - Marketing Nirvana, on WordPress for the past year and boy, have they made blogging easier. It’s usefulness is all the more in focus when contrasted with a couple of other blogging platforms that I’ve tried in the recent past. Toni mentioned a couple of new feature upgrades that are coming out, their recent addition of more high-profile bloggers/sites to their roster (think CNN) and their focus on improving the user experience.

5. Gaurav Dhillon, Jaman

Gaurav and team (Photo: Kathy Johnson)

Gaurav who runs the new indie/international movie site Jaman, was hosting a movie place at TechCrunch9 with popcorn et al. to showcase some of Jaman’s capabilities on a screen, hooked up to AppleTV! It’s been a while since I met with Gaurav and his team. So, what’s Jaman?

• Watch high-def films from around the world
• Connect with other fans
• Start with 3 free movies, any three, on us

Wonder what Michael Rubin thinks of this new service? Good luck to Gaurav and team. Given, what he accomplished with Informatica, I look forward to seeing their progress in this entirely new (and may I add, competitive) social media space.

6. Rob Hof, Business Week | John Furrier, Podtech

Have seen Rob at similar events; finally got a chance to chat with him. Also, briefly spoke to John Furrier who runs Podtech and whose team Scoble and Jeremiah are a part of. Some of you may be aware of the last minute online back-and-forth between Podtech and TechCrunch.

7. Megan McCarthy | Lane Hartwell


Source: Scott Beale (Laughing Squid)

I like reading Valleywag. There, I said it - Valleywag, along with FSJ is my favorite silicon valley guilty reading pleasure. Got a chance to meet Megan who started at Valleywag recently (methinks) along the same time Owen Thomas started as editor. As much as Owen (formerly at Business 2.0) is trying, I still feel he’s got a rather formal edge to his writing and I’m waiting for his definitive entry into Valleywag territory (meaning, really edgy & sarcastic posts). I’m sure it’ll happen soon. Oh! and Megan is one of my three favorite Valleywag bloggers, guess the other two?

8. Ian Kennedy | Chris Heuer

Relationships Matter (OK, I borrowed our LinkedIn tagline), because the more you network, the more you realize how interconnected we all are professionally. So, I meet Ian Kennedy from Yahoo!/MyBlogLog and I realize he’s now working with Robyn Tippins (Community Manager at MyBlogLog) who was or is the moderator of a Yahoo! Group of LinkedIn Bloggers, which was a group I was introduced to by Jeremiah who is right now at Podtech, whose CEO is John Furrier whom I also met today, and I could go on, but my head is spinning and I digress. So where was I? Forget about it. I met Ian who posed for a photo with Chris whom I met for the first time after his recent marriage. Congrats to Chris and Kristie!

9. Dave Sanford | Box.Net guys

I’ve had a chance to work with Dave when he was at LinkedIn. He was instrumental in the “LinkedIn for Good” initiative and since then he’s moved onto Yapta. What’s Yapta?

I saw a pre-launch demo of the company yesterday from co-founder and CEO Tom Romary. The site, which should launch around May 15, helps users find deals on flights and (later this year) hotels.

Yapta is very different from other travel sites. It is not hooked up directly to airlines’ systems (as Expedia and Oribitz are), nor is it essentially a search engine for low fares like Farecast. Instead, they’re using some of the ideas behind del.icio.us and bookmarking to create a potentially compelling new way for people to search for cheap flights. (Arrington on Yapta)

I also had a chance to meet Aaron Levie and Sam Ghodes from Box.net who are in the same space of online data storage vendors that Jeremiah is tracking over at his blog. Now, here I go again with the “It’s a small world and we’re all connected” theme…

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Speaking of former LinkedIn’ers (for lack of a better term) I also briefly met Josh Elman (formerly at LinkedIn) who currently runs product at Zazzle. Others citings included Peter Pham (Photobucket), Randi Zuckerberg (Facebook), Guy Kawasaki (y’know - from Apple - Jackie Chan lookalike) and approximately 888 others schmoozers, whom I didn’t meet personally. But it was a fun evening and I’m sure next year being the 10th will be a success party celebrating the rapid’er success of TechCrunch. They’ve already surpassed half a million subscribers, and just think of how just a year ago, Josh Koppelman called TechCrunch a narrow audience.

Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

Since then, TechCrunch has grown 10 times in the past 12 months (they’re at ~ 530K readers) and I wonder where Heather and team are taking the site. Kudos!

Quick Update: Michael Arrington just posted his overview of the event with a link to related posts. Check it out here. And, don’t miss Megan’s yet-again accurate assessment of the TechCrunch party scene and a scoop on a surprise party guest, here.