The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘presentations’

We’ve been reporting a lot about Chrome OS the past few days. Possible features, screenshots, early builds — lots of good stuff. And tomorrow was promising to bring even more as yes, there’s an event partially dealing with Chrome OS scheduled to take place on Google’s Mountain View campus. But sadly, we’ve been banned from the event.

Truth be told, all press is now banned from the event, we were told this evening. And that sucks because just yesterday we were confirmed as attendees and had planned to report on what we saw and heard. But then PC World and The Next Web spilled the beans on the event, and Google decided to ban the press.

However, before they banned us and closed down registrations, we did manage to get the confirmation email about the event.

The event, dubbed Front End Engineering Open House will feature “presentations on Google Maps and Chrome OS, YouTube will be unveiling their new look and showcasing YouTube 3-D.”

While the presentation on Chrome OS is obviously the thing that first caught our eye, the “new look” for YouTube certainly sounds interesting. As does the showcase of YouTube 3D, something we covered a bit of this summer.

Here are the other key details:

When: Thursday, October 15th, 2009

6:00pm-9:00pm

Where: Google Headquarters

Program

6-7pm | Registration & Networking
7-8 pm | Presentations

Welcome by Adam Sah
Maps – Dan Barcay
Chrome OS – Ben Goodger
YouTube – Chris Zacharias & Igor Kofman
Panel Q&A

8:05-9pm | Networking & Demos

Should be interesting, too bad we can’t go. Anyone who does, feel free to film it and send us the video. tips [at] techcrunch.com.

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So imagine a service that downloads files from Rapidshare for you, then saves them on your 50GB account.

Or forget about Rapidshare, maybe it collects files from Bittorrent automatically.

Or lets you watch a DivX video online, without downloading it to your computer, in high quality, and listen to your music files inside your browser. Put.io will be launched as a paid service.

The service is in private beta right now, but they soon plan to accept beta users.

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Asus, Acer, HTC or BenQ: Taiwan is well-known as a significant player in the global electronics industry, but it’s safe to say the Taiwanese web landscape is still a black box for many of us. Taiwan ranks 10th in Asia in terms of Internet population, with around 15 million people currently online. Add to this an online ad market that grew by 14.9% to $208 million in 2009, and you have a fairly attractive Internet market overall.

As in many parts of Asia, the 800-pound gorilla in the web arena is Yahoo: The company established Yahoo Taiwan as early as 2000 after a buy-out and acquired Wretch, a wildly popular platform for blogging and sharing media, in 2007. Today, these two sites are the biggest in the country, with Facebook following as the No. 3 (Facebook now has 3.9 million users in Taiwan).

But the country does have promising tech start-ups with a global focus, too, some of which I talked with earlier this week during a (private) trip to Taipei. The TechCrunch/Crunchgear meetup on Monday, organized together with partner and co-organizer Chili Consulting (a local innovation strategy firm), was a blast. Over 120 people attended the meetup despite of a typhoon that traveled through Taiwan that day (we actually had to stop registration after a few hours due to space restrictions). Taipei- and San Jose-based hardware maker IPEVO sponsored the event.

A total of six Taiwan-based startups were given the chance to pitch their services (all are available in English) to the audience. Here’s a rundown on all of these companies.

Startup 1:
Swagly
Swagly, which calls itself a word-of-mouth affiliate network, is targeting a multi-billion dollar market: the monetization of social networks and video sharing platforms. The key idea is to let people buy what they see in pictures and videos via a product-tagging widget. This widget is placed right below the pictures or videos, with the social network users tagging products themselves (demo).

If a friend sees a user-tagged Gucci bag in an album photo, for example, the Swagly widget will show details of the bag and where the friend can buy it (Swagly works with a slew of American retailers by integrating with Commission Junction and LinkShare). In the case of a click or sell-through, Swagly shares the revenue with the publisher and the user who tagged the product.

Startup 2:
DragNTalk by Taroko Technology
DragNTalk is what appears to be a quite powerful application that makes it possible to project presentations (and other documents) onto nearby computers just by using drag and drop. The software automatically displays presentation materials as web pages in your browser. And all you need to do to share a presentation is to share a local web address with your listeners in a local network (details).

You can then drag and drop any kind of file into the DragNTalk pane and go through your slides just like you do in Powerpoint, for example. The application lets you take snapshots of materials that are available in unsupported formats to be able to share these, too. Listeners can view the presentation you give in their browser windows.

DragNTalk is currently available as a trial edition, with a USB-powered wallet-size wireless router supporting the application in the works (people connecting through the Wi-Fi network spawned by the router will then be able to see the presentations automatically).

Startup 3:
Ragic
5-man startup Ragic wants to take on big enterprise solution companies like Salesforce with a dead simple database creation tool that’s based on a spreadsheet UI. Ragic claims their users can build a full-scale enterprise application like Salesforce’s account management system by themselves in about an hour – without any coding. Alternatively, users can customize and deploy applications offered by Ragic, i.e. their issue tracking or employee management solutions (Ragic’s own account management system is here).

The six applications Ragic currently offers are free to use for a limited time and are as easy to use as Excel. The company earns money by charging customers on a monthly basis (just like Salesforce in the form of a Platform as a Service model) and selling OEM licenses to web design companies.

Startup 4:
Starmugs
Starmugs was surely the most unusual of the demo companies presenting at the TechCrunch Taipei event. The site sees itself as the primary online destination for all lovers of Starbucks City Mugs, apparently quite popular collectible coffee mugs Starbucks started selling in 1994. If you’re one of these people, Starmugs lets you list up, display, trade and share stories about your mugs. The site even has its own virtual currency (Mug Cash).

Startup 5:
Citiport
Launched at DEMO last year, Citiport can roughly be described as a mix between Yelp and TripAdvisor. The site offers travelers “insider information” on the best places to visit in cities around the world. The idea is to collect recommendations on so-called “hotspots” (restaurants, bars, nightlife, shopping, sightseeing, hotels etc.) from people who live in these cities. These locals can be contacted directly on the site and may be ready to help travelers get around in real life as local tour guides.

Startup 6:
YusReader by Cloudonline Technology
YusReader is a nifty full-content RSS reader and sharing platform. The site encourages you to log in with your Facebook account, as YusReader makes it possible to find blogs read by your Facebook friends and share your own favorite blogs with them. The site is also pre-populated with blogs grouped in several categories (sports, lifestyle etc.), but allows you to add your own RSS feeds, too.

Each blog is displayed as an icon in a customizable grid-view. Click on the icon to view the blog in a full browser window where you’ll find a YusReader bar at the top. You can choose the blog you want to read via a drop-down menu and quickly browse through the articles from that blog by scrolling up and down with your mouse.

Event sponsor:
IPEVO
Founded in Taipei, Taiwan & San Jose, California in July 2007, IPEVO creates devices that expand and enhance the overall Experience over the Internet. Renowned for its iconic line of VoIP and Skype hardware, IPEVO has established a reputation for innovating award-winning designs and affordable products to help make the Internet a better place for what matters most–connecting, communicating, and sharing with the world around us.

IPEVO’s current product line includes the best-selling So20 Wifi phone for Skype and the Kaleido R7, a digital frame that features a unique pivoting display design and comes bundled with EyeStage software to wirelessly stream Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and other Internet contents from a PC or Mac to the frame. Available in late October, the Point 2 View USB Camera (pictured below) is a 2.0 Megapixel, PC & Mac compatible webcam that sits on a versatile swing-arm stand.

Many thanks to all attendees, demo companies, co-organizer Chili Consulting and sponsor IPEVO. xie xie! You can find many more pictures of the event here (courtesy of Chili Consulting).

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Editor’s note: Below is an open letter to our President from guest author Edo Segal, a concerned web geek who cares about the future of our democracy. It is followed by a proposal and a new website for anyone who thinks they know what #obamashould do (cynics please skip post).

Mr President,

On the night of your acceptance speech, just before you walked on stage, “you” sent out an email saying “i will be in touch soon”—but you disappeared and all we were left with was the strange feeling you get when your older brother ditches you for his cooler friends. Does it take you winning a Nobel prize to get another direct letter from you?

Where’s the attention? The yes-we-can attitude, making us feel we can be good again? It seems that since you made it to the Oval Office you have been too busy at work, and our relationship has really suffered.

I recall that as the election results where announced, there was an epiphany that hit the pundits and us web folks at the same time. “He’s going to govern this way” we all thought. What we meant was that you will continue the evolution of direct democracy beyond using the Internet for fundraising, heralding a new age of direct access to the citizenry. A new age of democracy where the President has your email and can talk to you directly. An age without intermediaries and pollsters—just us and that cool guy who’s running the country.

Regardless of our political views, almost everyone in this country was in awe of how you came to be in office and changed how elections are won forever. But for the readers of Techcrunch, the people who grease the wheels of our progress online, it feels like after the hangovers were over and you moved on to set up your transitional government, from that day, what was a highly effective and motivating direct relationship with your supporters, an emotional relationship that was predicated on a real connection evaporated. And what we were left with was the most effective spam bot in the world (Gmail doesn’t block it) . This is wrong in so many ways, let me count just a few:

1. Stop asking me for money: Why are you still asking me for money? I think I am not alone in being confused with the notion that you are still asking me for money after you were elected President (I know why you need it intellectually but not emotionally). I mean at this point, I feel like you should be paying me back with change and not billing me every week. I pay a big bill every April that should just about cover it.

Using the “Network” purely as a means to raise money without the additional layers of engagement and relationship is offensive. We are the network. By just using email as a system to raise money you loose the soul of the connection you established with millions of people.




2. Your singular focus is distracting: While there has been much discussion about the administrations’ notion of taking on multiple fronts at the same time, the online channel recently has been fully saturated with a singular purpose of supporting the very important policy goal of universal healthcare. But in doing so, you have played into the hands of your opponents. The grind on Capital Hill and the levels of complexity that are involved in making this happen, and the time it takes are not a recipe for engagement—they are a recipe for disaster. You are losing your audience and failing us on a major promise of direct democracy. 



When I explained my support for you at the very early stages of your campaign to bewildered people who didn’t see how it could be possible for you to win the Presidency, I articulated that regardless of the specific nuance of your policies, the fact you have the power to motivate people in this way is priceless. You demonstrated that you can build on top of the best practices of prior online campaigns (Dean). Delegation to really smart people culminated in the most effective campaign financing system in the history of democracy. But if you don’t keep watering the soil from which your support stems, that direct relationship, you will not be able to make the historic policy changes you seek. Your base is eroding as you focus all of your communication channels on a VERY heavy piece of legislation. Don’t spam us, engage us.

3. The promise: From the perspective of the history of media, the level of engagement you can generate through the Internet has typically been reserved for occasions of war and violence, for times of strife and conflict. Like the days of WWII when people huddled around their radios to hear the comforting voice of their leaders. Imagine applying the same level of engagement that won’t just fuel death destruction and line the pockets of the military industrial complex, but rather will power true change, growth and improve the quality of life for all people. This is within your grasp if you follow through and use the medium appropriately.

Mr. President, beyond the content of your ideas, now is the time to extend the way you govern as we all heard you promise. Make us care again. Online engagement is the key to fostering the support you need to accomplish your policy goals. Engagement is the key to maintaining your base as you mount these vast campaigns. Getting the government to set up a network of Web 1.0 sites is a start, but we need much more. If you continue to spam us and recycle old speeches off a teleprompter into email (like you did with the Nobel eMail) you will lose your base, but if you step up to the challenge and continue to take risks and push the envelope in structural ways that only you can, your greatest legacy could be more than enacting historic legislation or winning a premature prize. It could be the very way our democratic process works and how we view government.

---

Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

That is my letter to Obama, but it is not enough. The notion that we will evolve the very essence of democracy beyond the already achieved goal of changing campaign financing and moving power away from private interests is profound. I truly believe it may end up being the greatest piece of innovation we are collectively offering the world in the coming decades. But to make additional progress, you and I need to step up. If each of us contribute a bit of creative energy we can accelerate this evolution by a generation

In the past, the main skills that effected political outcomes in the communications realm were polling, copy writing, speech writing, and directing and producing for radio and television. But today and in the future, the most potent creative skill-set is that of creating online connections. Yes, I’m talking about you. Our professional careers depend on our ability to create platforms that engage millions of people and constantly grow that level engagement. The readership of this blog constitutes the highest concentration of such competency on the planet. We spend our lives creating platforms that aim to engage millions of people.

We get it, it’s tough for government to take risks and thus political innovation moves at a glacial pace. Maybe we can give the pols a hand, help speed things up a bit.

Rather than just rely on comments and the ill will of the trolls, I took a little initiative and with the help of the good people at iGeneration who volunteered their time to build Obamashould.org, a site for the community to contribute ideas to the President. Please spend a few minutes there and voice your opinions in a constructive way. Or just tweet your ideas with the hashtag #obamashould. The site will track retweets, and the ideas gathering more support will float to the top automatically. Its like an http://www.ideastorm.com/ meets tweetmeme.com and uservoice for our President. BTW, Mr. President, if you want the source code, it’s yours. If you are a developer and want to contribute to the project please join us. We will take the best ideas that surface to the top from there and get them built by the community. We may even launch some of them here on Techcrunch in a few months.

Let me throw out some #obamashould’s to start the ball rolling. Click the YES re-tweet button if you support it!

Idea 1: What you did to get us, you need to do to keep us. Keep a weekly Youtube post that gets emailed to the base. It feels like you are becoming hostage to the status quo of what presidential. For both the Y Generation and many of us older folks, the notion of what constitutes presidential behavior is changing rapidly with your actions serving as the main catalyst. communications is when in fact you are the one that is supposed to re-invent it. It’s not a presidential address in the conventional sense of the word. Give us genuine direct talk over words tested with pollsters any day. A direct candid discussion about a given topic once a week that is not read off a teleprompter is priceless for the continual sense of a direct relationship. Just flick open your laptop in the oval office or in your study at night and talk to us. Have a small panel of trusted advisers review it, and if no serious red flags are raised post it and email it to us. The value of genuine conversation from a man with your insight will way overshadow the shortcomings offered in the prose. You will probably say things you will regret, but the damage done will be dwarfed by having a continued sense of renewed personal relationships with your citizens. If you do this, they will be there when you need them. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here


Idea 2: Engage the people via email and ask them for their opinions, not just their money. Have a weekly poll question that is linked to social media (twitter, facebook), creating a viral engagement engine. In addition to the immediate policy objectives, you need to understand that such engagement is not only a means to an end, but an end in itself. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here


Idea 3: Give $500 of your money to charitywater.com (Video) and send out an invite from their system to everyone on your mailing list to do the same. Tweet it, put it on facebook. Show people how they can use the web to effect positive change in the world and do good again. Why not? That single email will effect millions of lives around the globe. Giving changes people, help them give and start that chain reaction of good will. Use your power to promote things that have to do with generosity of spirit, not just hard core policy. This is a way to lead through example and not just talk in the abstract about the need for volunteerism. Your effect on the world cannot be reduced to a series of policy wins and losses. Different from prior Presidents making public their charity contributions, doing this via a digital medium is like clicking a button that activates a viral system and magnifies your contribution a million-fold over the web. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here

What do you think #obamashould do?

Go to www.obamashould.org and please contribute ideas now. If you want to join a vibrant open source community of people that are passionate about helping evolve democracy online, we need your help. Join us here.

Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, a search engine for the Real-time Internet in an age that predated RSS as a popular medium. As such he has had a decade to think about its implications. He ultimately sold the company (renamed Relegence) to AOL in 2006 and today runs an Incubator/Investment vehicle called Futurity Ventures. He recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.

Photo credit: Flickr/White House.

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The second day of the Geeks on a Plane geeky spree in Japan was completely filled with (mostly) insightful presentations, panels and pitches from newly launched Japanese start-ups (here is an overview of day one). The Startonomics Tokyo event was held Tuesday at the offices of KDDI Web Communications (one of Japan’s biggest hosting providers) in downtown Tokyo.

What follows is a brief overview of what you missed during that day, followed by a quick summary (and full video) of an on-stage interview with Kenji Kasahara. Kasahara is CEO of Mixi, Japan’s biggest social network, and openly spoke about his success story (the interview was done on the third and final day of GoaP’s Tokyo leg).

But first, here is a summary of all the presentations and panels that the GeeksOnAPlane witnessed during Startonomics Tokyo. (Note: The following summaries are edited. In addition, the statements listed in the panel summaries don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of all the panelists involved.)

Presentation: Overview of the Japanese online Market: Web, by Tsuruaki Yukawa from Jiji Press

Background and key points:

• Generally speaking, Japan is a huge online market, even by global standards.
• With 94 million users, the country’s web population is the third largest in the world (just trailing China and the US).
• Japanese broadband is about 50% fiber (making it the world’s No. 1 nation in that area according to the OECD).

Slides of the presentation (partly Japanese):

Presentation: Overview of the Japanese online Market: Mobile, by Gen Miyazawa from Cirius Technologies

Background and key points:

• Japan boasts 100 million 3G users (size of the population: 127 million).
• 3G penetration rate: 96% (3.5G penetration rate: 35%).
• iPhone is doing relatively well in Japan, but it’s not killing.
• Japan’s mobile web traffic still grows faster than the PC traffic.
• Size of the mobile e-commerce market: around $1.2 billion (data from July 2008).
• Biggest players in the mobile web only-field: Mobagetown (13 million members) and GREE (10 million members).

Slides of the presentation:

Presentation: Overview of the Japanese online Market: Gaming, by Shuji Utsumi from Q Entertainment

Background and key points:

• Japan’s game industry was born in the 1970s.
• The sector grew quickly and internationalized heavily, starting in the 1980s.
• Japan used to be the world’s leading gaming nation but loses influence rapidly.
• Microsoft’s XBOX360, for example, is managing to beat Sony’s PS3.
• Japan loves RPGs and family games, while Americans rather play FPS and music games.
• The gaming industry is now bigger than ever as non-geeks nowadays play, too.
• Developers from China, Korea and Eastern Europe start entering the gaming market.

Slides of the presentation:

Presentation: Success Story - DeNA, by Shin Ikeji

Background and key points:

• DeNA is listed at the Tokyo stock exchange (current market cap: $1.5 billion).
• Mobage-town, Japan’s biggest mobile game community, was launched in February 2006 and now boasts 13 million members and 15 billion page views monthly.
• Revenue in 2008: $200 million, 70% profit margin.
• Mobage-town’s overseas version, MobaMingle, now has about 150,000 members.

Presentation: Kris Tate - American entrepreneur living in Tokyo

Key points:

• Tate started photo sharing site Zooomr as a teenager four years ago (in Silicon Valley).
• Tate’s new company is called BlueBridge (in Tokyo).
• BlueBridge successfully launched AM6 (a Japanese email news delivery service) and just started Keireki (a Japanese-only community “for grown-ups”).
• Foreign entrepreneurs have better chances regarding PR in Japan because they stand out.

Presentation: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Key points:

• The majority of start-ups fails miserably.
• Those that survive are often completely different in nature when compared to the initial vision of the entrepreneur.
• The key difference between success and failure is the number of iterations (agile (lean) product development).
• Ries’ former company IMVU pushed to production up to 50 times daily.
• Instead of doing PR work, companies should focus on customer feedback before they launch services (customer development).
• Start-ups building something no one wants will fail.
• Instead of multiple departments, start-ups should have a problem and a solution team.

Slides (highly recommended to get the whole picture of Ries’ approach):

Panel: Japan investment overview

Panelists: Shinichiro Fukushige from Mitsubishi UFJ Capital (moderator), Masashi Kobayashi from Infinity Ventures, Brian Nelson from Value Commerce and Yozo Kaneko from ngi group

Background and key points:

• Similar to the US, the investment climate in Japan is currently “difficult”, with valuations dropping drastically.
• 49 IPOs in Japan last year, after about 100 in 2007.
• Majority of Japanese VCs are structured like corporations/banks.
• Compared to the US, competition among Japanese VCs is weaker, leading to lower valuations.
• Before going public in Japan, the PE ratio should be higher than 60.
• Japanese VCs end up owning about 10% of their portfolio companies (US: 20-40%).
• Two attractive business fields in the future: mobile gaming and “graphical content”.

Panel: US Platforms & Social Networking

Panelists: Dave McClure from Founders Fund, Bradley Horowitz from Google and Dan Gould from Fox Interactive

Key points:

• Monetization and distribution are more important than features.
• Facebook is making a mistake in its attempt to copy Twitter, which is a less “personal” service.
• The US must try and take over Japan’s social payment infrastructure.
• America’s leading payment gateways are e-commerce sites like Ebay or Amazon (not social networks) because they offer “shit people want to buy”, meaning they don’t need social networking functionalities.
• Japan’s stored-value cards are very effective in linking the offline and online worlds.
• McClure sees huge opportunities in building a social network focused on families/moms/children in the US.
• Mobile: Horowitz views Android as work in progress and in an early stage in the product life cycle, that’s one of the reasons it currently has trouble following the success the iPhone currently sees.

Panel slides:

Panel: US investment overview

Panelists: Dave McClure from Founders Fund, Joyce Kim from Soompi, Ryan Pipkin from Angelsoft and David Troy from Popvox

Key points:

• The recession has hit the American VC scene harder than the start-ups, meaning VCs have a tougher time raising money now relative to the start-ups that have to live with lower valuations (minus 33-50%).
• It takes VCs 50% more time currently to close deals.
• Main focus is now on revenue and getting to break even, less on user acquisition.
• From an ROI point of view, the downturn means better news for seed funds, incubators and angels than for VCs.
• Start-ups can now get to proof of concept stage with less than $50,000.
• Micro-seeds ($100,000 max.) will gain ground in the near future.
• Only the good VC companies will survive over the next years.

Panel slides:

Lightning talks:
Lightning talks were held by a total of five Japanese start-ups. These were J-Magic (a mobile service provider image focusing on image recognition technology/more info here), AdLocal (a mobile advertising platform whose heat map geographically shows advertisers where they get impressions), Scigineer (recommendation engine provider/more info here) and Cerevo (an innovative photo sharing system/more info here). Jon “Yongfook” Cockle resisted the urge to pitch his social media ROI tracker Peashoot but delivered a presentation of the usage of mascots in Japanese web services instead.

On-stage interview with the CEO of Mixi (on Wednesday):
On their last day in Tokyo, the GeeksOnAPlane were given the chance to meet someone who can perhaps be described as Japan’s answer to Mark Zuckerberg, Kenji Kasahara. Kasahara became an instant billionaire at 30 when his company, Mixi (Japan’s No. 1 social network), went IPO in 2006.

Kasahara revealed what inspired him to launch Mixi (Friendster’s success), how he got the first users to join his site (Amazon gift certificates), how Mixi grew from 0 to 17 million members in a few years (hardly any ads) and how he values his personal wealth (it’s stocks, not real cash).

I myself wanted to know from him if the severe competition Mixi faces (particularly from domestic players) lets him sleep at night (listen to what he responds at 35:05 min.). This insolent question I put to Kasahara was easily topped by visiting geek Larry Chiang (at 42:15 min.) who asked how a billionaire like him usually scores chicks (”Do girls want to meet your money or you? Do people pretend they are you to get chicks?”).

View the complete on-stage interview with Kasahara in the video below (in English and Japanese, 51:37 min). He was interviewed by Ejovi Nuwere, CEO of Tokyo-based digital media company Land Rush Group.

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Quick, draw the icon for Google’s Chrome browser. It’s got a bunch of primary colors, but that’s all I can remember about it without looking at it. Most people have never seen it, or even know what Chrome is. (It is Google’s browser). Google wants to change all that with a viral marketing campaign.

It is asking people to submit videos showing creative ways to build the Chrome icon. It will pull the best one together into a final reel presumably. Here is where you can submit your videos until July 22 and see what else has been submitted.

But just getting the early Chrome to lend a hand with marketing by spreading videos around the Web is indicative of Google’s marketing philosophy overall. This is not a Bing-style marketing blitz on TV and everywhere else. Although, Google is not above running ads on TV anymore. Browsers are a new market for Google where it still has practically zero mindshare. And it will try to get that mindshare any way it can, both on TV and on the Web.

I wonder which set of ads will be more effective.

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After attending a great Tokyo 2.0 event last night (more to come about that later), the GeeksOnAPlane group is now at Startonomics Tokyo, where we’ll be hearing about a broad range of topics pertaining to Japanese tech throughout the day.

Join us below as we watch the presentations.

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We’re here at Google I/O, the search giant’s annual developer event in San Francisco. The first day’s keynote address is happening right now, and we’ll be covering it live. Find my notes below.

Live notes:

• They’re showing off some Chrome JavaScript goodness set to some odd tribal music.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt up first

• We have spent 20 years trying to build a programming model that is the right one. Then the Internet arrived. “It’s time.”
• Going to talk about App Engine. Now works with Java.
• Android looks like it’s going to have a strong year.
• “Where’s the ‘it works’ option?”
• We’re just the beginning of getting this right.
• This is the beginning of the real win of cloud computing, of applications (on the web).

Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering for Google

• “Never underestimate the web.” At Microsoft (where he used to work) we thought web apps could never rival desktop apps.
• “The web has won.” A more powerful web made easier.
• New HTML5 standards. A chance to do things differently.
• Almost half billion people now using modern open source browsers.
• 5 things that excite Google:
• 1) Canvas - intrinsic to the web, works with JavaScript, CSS and the DOM. Pixel-level control drawing on the web.
• Canvas is on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera — Let’s talk about IE (laughs). Microsoft has made public statements to the HTML5 standard, we eagerly await seeing evidence of that.

Matthew Papakipos, Engineering director (Chrome) at Google

• 3D in the web browser. Game-like graphics, but this is in the web browser.
• Big on textures, all coded in the source code.
• Doing all the graphics on the GPU, CPU load in demo is less than 10%.
• All JavaScript code. Looks great.
• We want to get to where you can type a URL and immediately play a rich app. So we need common APIs that are in your browser of choice. Standards are the key. Working with Apple, Mozilla and “others” — no mention of Microsoft, chuckles.

Back to Vic Gundotra

• 2) Video - Video in the browser is tough today because it’s about plug-ins. Now a new video tag.
• YouTube running entirely using the video tag — just a demo today, but it’s possible. No Flash required. Applause
• 3) Geolocation - All apps could be better with geolocation.
• Cell ID and WiFi solve the problem of getting the data. They’ve mapped really the entire world.
• Again all the browsers but IE support this now.
• Gundotra is thanking Mozilla for their hard work in making new standards possible. Another jab at IE.

Jay Sullivan VP Mozilla

• The browsing competition is heating up again. We all have different missions, but we share things in common. We believe the web is the developing platform for our time.
• Firefox 3.5, what’s coming. We have about 300 million users worldwide of Firefox 3, but we think Firefox 3.5 is much better. JavaScript performance is 3 times faster in Firefox 3.5 versus 3.0. And it’s 10 times faster than it was in Firefox 2.0.
• Canvas, video, geolocation, app cache and database, web workers. All coming in 3.5
• Demo of Google Maps using Geolocation — a new button to user interface called “My Location”
• Click one button on Google Maps and it will find you (right above Street View area)
• But it’s user opt-in.

Back to Vic again

• Demo of Latitude using geolocation — on the iPhone.
• And this is all in the browser — not a separate app.
• Will be out shortly after iPhone OS 3.0. New iPhone Safari will support HTML5
• 4) Database and App Cache - Store what you need locally to make applications faster.
• Showing off Gmail on an Android phone — running offline.

Michael Abbott, Senior VP of Palm

• A year ago no one would have predicted Palm would be onstage at Google I/O. But we agree the web is the platform — that’s why we made webOS.
• webOS is built around the JavaScript

Back to Vic

• 5) Web Workers
• The past problems of having the browser freeze. Background processing now possible with these new standards.
• JavaScript to do motion detection. It can sense when there is motion and only run when needed.

Kevin Gibbs and Andrew Bowers, Tech Lead and Product Manager, Google

• 80,000 applications deployed since we launched last year
• 700 requests per second when the white house used moderator
• Background processing coming soon.
• Now we have Java support — interest has been remarkable.
• Opening sign-ups for Java on app engine right now
• Showing off App Engine demo. Making an app right now.
• Hey, it works! Applause.
• Next version of Google Web Toolkit — manual code splitting JavaScript is hard, but now we’ll do it for you with runAsync. Download code after the initial download. Code downloads in background after user up and running.

Back to Vic again

• Over 60 APIs available for our Google products. Over 4 billion API calls everyday coming into Google. Huge.
• Today something new — You know AdSense and YouTube Embeds so easy to embed. Imagine it for everything else.

DeWitt Clinton, Tech Lead

• Brand new developer product: Google Web Elements
• Example: Pull in Google News box — embedded in your page.
• Maps, Presentations, available for a lot of Google products.
• Google Conversation element, allows visitors to post comments and videos — kind of like FriendFeed embed.
• Google.com/webelements

Vic again

• Next up, Android.
• 7 months, 10 carriers in 12 counties
• 4,900 apps now available
• 40+ App downloads per user
• #2 in Mobile web U.S. web browsing (behind iPhone of course)
• What’s up next:

Romain Guy, Software Engineer, Google (Android)

• Next version: code-name Donut.
• Search should be more powerful. Kind of looks like the new search in the iPhone 3.0.
• Add a new API — Text-to-speech API.
• Lots of different voices, and different languages/accents. Applause. And this engine is open source.
• And there will be more APIs (not ready to announce today).

Back to Vic

• Recap: HTML 5, App Engine, Google Web Elements, Android
• Now 3 More things:
• Part 2 of the Android Developer Challenge. Submissions through August, winners at the end of the fall. User votes now as part of judging.
• Give away a box a new Android phone. For everyone here. Huge applause. Vic’s Oprah moment. Included with a SIM with unlimited 3G data. Daaaaammmnnn. And call time.
• “Don’t miss tomorrow’s keynote”

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

At last week’s The Next Web Conference, I was part of the 4-headed jury that evaluated all presenting startups and ultimately decided My Name Is E should be awarded the top prize. It was an extremely close call, since we ended up having to decide between the young Dutch company and a startup that built a simply amazing web application you’re really going to want to check out. The tool I’m referring to is called Prezi, and it allows you to create amazing presentations on the web.

If you think you’ve heard that too many times, don’t stop reading just yet, because this one is just plain awesome. It’s an entirely Flash-based app that lets you break away from the slide-by-slide approach of most presentations. Instead, it allows you to create non-linear presentations where you can zoom in and out of a visual map containing words, links, images, videos, etc. This is similar to pptPlex, a Microsoft Office Labs project that aims to bring that type of functionality to PowerPoint.

It’s really no use explaining how presentations come out without seeing it for yourself, so it pains me that there’s currently no way to embed the examples that are showcased on the Prezi website. Instead, you will need to jump to examples in another tab or window, but please do it: good examples are ‘AIESEC’ and ‘Technical Investigation ICYA’.

It takes a while to get used to the way Prezi lets you create presentations, although the interface is fairly intuitive once you’ve grown accustomed to using the ‘Zebra’. There are a number of tutorial videos to assist you in creating your first Prezi presentations.

To get started, you can use the free version which brands every presentation with a Prezi logo, offers 100 MB of file storage, comes with an offline player but without the ability to make presentations private. For €39 a year, you get all that but 5x the amount of storage space and the option not to have your presentations made public. A third ‘Pro’ version costs you €119 per year but features a cool desktop application you can use to create and edit Prezi presentations offline. Besides offering paid versions of the software, Prezi also has other revenue streams, like selling DVDs and offering branding services.

Try it out and let us know how your presentations come out!

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