The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘president’

We are just starting to announce the first speakers at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City on May 24 – 26.

TechCrunch Disrupt is a three-day, single-track conference and startup competition to immerse you in the debate about what’s changing in media and technology right now, what’s causing it and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time. Join 2,000 or so of your closest friends to talk about what’s most important in the collision of technology and media.

Half of the event is a March Madness style startup competition. We’re sorting through hundreds of applications to find the most interesting startups launching this Spring. You’ll see live on stage demos, rapid fire Q&A sessions with expert judges from a variety of backgrounds (product, finance, team building, leadership and more) and highlights from behind the scenes mentoring sessions.

The other half of the event will put leading experts from around the world on stage to talk about the stuff that matters most in technology and media. A few of the speakers and experts are listed below. Keep an eye on the Disrupt Blog and Speaker list for more updates.

Get your ticket here.

Ron Conway
Angel Investor, SV Angel
Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ron was recently named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “deal-makers” in 2008 and is actively involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors. Ron is Vice Chairman of the UCSF Medical Foundation in SF, Board Member of The Tiger Woods Foundation, and SF Homeless Connect, and on the Benefit Committee of Ronald McDonald House, College Track, and the Blacked Eyed Peas-PeaPod Academy Foundation.

Jack Dorsey
Co-founder and CEO, Square
Software engineer Jack Dorsey is the Co-Founder of Twitter, and was the CEO until October 2008. Dorsey had the original idea for Twitter while still at Odeo, a podcasting startup which was a project of Obvious Corp. He is now the chairman of Twitter. In May 2009, Dorsey announced his latest startup, Square. Square, originally code-named Squirrel, is a mobile payment startup with both an app and a piece of hardware that allows the iPhone to accept credit card payments.

Brad Garlinghouse
President, Consumer Applications, AOL
Brad Garlinghouse is President, Consumer Applications at AOL since September 2009. Until 2008 Brad served as SVP of Communications & Communities at Yahoo, which includes the world’s most popular webmail product, Yahoo Mail, Messenger and Groups. During his tenure, Brad has also overseen the primary starting points to the Yahoo network, including Yahoo.com and My Yahoo. Prior to joining Yahoo, Brad served as CEO of Dialpad Communications. Earlier in his career, Brad led VC investments in communications and Internet businesses at @Ventures. He also spent time in leadership roles at @Home Network and SBC Communications.

Katie Geminder
User Experience and Design Expert
Katie started her career in Seattle, working to produce and publish print and web content for clients including Microsoft, Intel, and Expedia. She joined Amazon as the managing editor of the e-Cards business and led large cross-functional and customer experience initiatives including the Amazon.com Kitchen Store, re-launch of Tab Navigation, Target.com, and the Amazon Services e-Commerce platform. In 2005 Katie moved to work on the Apple Online Store team as a Sr. Manager focused on content and customer experience, collaborating with engineering, marketing, and design teams to improve online shopping for Macs and iPods. Katie joined Facebook in early 2006 and led the product management, design and user experience teams. She played an integral part in launching the News Feed and Mini Feed products, making Facebook available to all users (beyond college and high school), opening up the Facebook Platform to application developers, and the Facebook redesign. In August of 2008 she set out on building a design and consulting business with her co-founder, designer, and husband. She then rejoined Owen Van Natta at Myspace in July of 2009, a job she would leave in February 2010 after Van Natta’s departure.

Charlie Rose
Host, Charlie Rose Show
Charlie Rose is an American television interviewer and journalist. He entered television journalism full-time in 1974, when he became the managing editor of the PBS series Bill Moyers’ International Report. He currently hosts the Charlie Rose Show, where he has developed a reputation as a skilled interviewer.

Brian Sugar, CEO & Publisher, Sugar Inc.
Brian Sugar is the CEO and Publisher of Sugar Inc., the company behind PopSugar. As CEO & Publisher, Brian Sugar sets the overall direction for Sugar Inc. Prior to founding Sugar Inc., Brian served first as Vice President of Marketing then as Vice President & General Manager of 2Wire, Inc.’s media business unit. Before joining 2Wire, Brian was founder and CEO of Sugar Media, a digital media software company, which was acquired by 2Wire in October 2003. Brian was Chief Web Officer at Kmart’s BlueLight.com, Vice President of eCommerce at J.Crew, and a founder of Neptune Interactive, a Washington, DC-based ISP.

Michael Wolf, Board of Directors for Entercom Communications and iAmplify
Michael Wolf currently serves on the boards of Entercom Communications Corporation (NYSE: ETM), the fourth-largest broadcasting company in the United States, and iAmplify.com, a Web-based content publisher and syndication network and the world’s largest selection of expert video and audio downloads. He was formerly the president and former COO of MTV Networks. Michael was a Director of McKinsey & Company and head of its Global Media and Entertainment Practice. Before joining McKinsey in 2001, Wolf was a senior partner with Booz & Company, where he spearheaded its media and entertainment group. Wolf is the author of publications on the subjects of entertainment, economics, non-fiction, e-business strategies and the development of global media. His bestselling book on entertainment economics, The Entertainment Economy: How Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives was published in the U.S. in 1999 and then globally. He is frequent contributor and op-ed columnist for newspapers, journals and business publications.

In the second installment of a series of open interviews with government leaders, YouTube is going to field questions to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, following the launch of the National Broadband Plan next Tuesday (The FCC is the federal agency that oversees all elements of the U.S. communications sector). The plan aims to connect all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.

Similar to the question and answer session with President Obama following the State of The Union speech, users can submit video or text questions on CitizenTube via Google Moderator You can then vote on your favorite questions submitted by the community. YouTube will present the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in the interview next Tuesday. The deadline for submission is Sunday, March 14 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Google and the Obama administration have been working to incorporate the social video sharing site into government events. YouTube also aired the debate between President Obama and lawmakers over the President’s proposed healthcare reform at the Healthcare Summit in February. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid answered select questions submitted via Google Moderator at the end of the summit.

Business to business software can be a tough sell. Online B2B can be even a harder sell. While there is certainly money to be made, unless you’re one of the big players, the likelihood you’re going to succeed is pretty small. Starting today, Google is taking their roll as one of the big players and extending a platform to boost some smaller players.

Tonight, Google has unveiled their Google Apps Marketplace. This is an app store for enterprise apps in the cloud. Using a set of APIs, these third-party apps can deeply integrate their products within Google Apps, which already some 25 million people are using. And that also includes over 2 million businesses ranging from startups, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies.

For customers, this means a one-stop shop for a variety of applications that their business or organization can use. And it’s extremely simple to get started with apps in the marketplace — it just takes 4 clicks, Google says (though that initial click will have to come from your domain admin to approve the use of the app). For developers, particularly small startup developers, it means instant access to more users than they can likely imagine. It also potentially means something more important: money.

Like the popular mobile app stores (Apple’s App Store and Google’s own Android Market), Google is allowing developers to sell their apps through this Marketplace. And they’re actually offering a better deal: Google will keep just 20% of the revenue, while the developers keep the other 80% (compared to a 30/70 split with the Android Market). The reason for this better split is that Google believes the B2B market is a bit different, and they want to entice developers to join on board. And instead of Apple’s App Store, which charges a $100 yearly fee to developers, Google is charging a one-time fee of $100 to enroll in the program — and that’s for as many apps as you want to create.

As for what Google will do with their 20% share, they’re not entirely sure. “We don’t know what will happen with the revenue, but we think it’s a very fair rev share for the value we’re providing,” Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra says.

As you might expect, in the Marketplace, Google will feature certain apps on a rotating basis. And each will have a star rating system and reviews written by people who have used the app. Apps will be grouped into different categories to make it easier for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. Once they do, the four steps alluded to above are:

1. Click “Add it now”
2. Agree to the vendor’s Terms of Service
3. Grant access to the data that the app is requesting.  Some apps require data access, some don’t – only grant access to apps you trust.
4. Turn it on and start enjoying your increased productivity

So how does this all work? Google connection points for integration into Apps are actually done through open protocols such as OAuth. And while signing-in may seem like a pain across different apps, Google has streamlined that as well thanks to another open protocol: OpenID.

Once an app is hooked in to Google Apps, it will appear on your main Apps Dashboard alongside the other Google-made apps you use. It will even appear in the “more” drop down that Google uses in the toolbar across its properties. And because these apps are so tightly woven into Google Apps, they can take advantage of the built-in Google Apps such as Gmail and Gtalk to easily communicate within the third-party apps.

And there’s more. While it’s not quite ready to launch just yet, in the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch flexible billing options for third-parties using their services. Basically, this will allow companies to use Google Checkout to handle complicated billings, such as subscriptions. This could mean trouble for startups specifically in this space, such as Recurly. Also coming later will be detailed analytics for transactions, we’re told. For now, developers are free to hook up their data to their own analytic programs to run their numbers.

While Google’s options for this Marketplace sound nice and open, there’s actually something even better: you don’t have to build your apps on their platform. Whereas a big player like Salesforce wants to keep the apps it works with in the Force.com ecosystem, Google doesn’t care where you build it — it can be on App Engine, or on anything else. You simply hook your app up to the APIs and you’re ready to go. It’s a model so enticing that even a big Google competitor in this space, Zoho, is ready to work with them, and is launching as an initial partner. All told, there are more than 50 companies partnering up at launch, including a winner of the audience award at this year’s TechCrunch50, Socialwok.

As to whether Google could eventually roll this app store model out to the more consumer facing apps they offer, Gundotra gave me the old, “We have nothing to announce at this time.” That reads suspiciously to me like a “yes,” provided this is the hit it seems like it should be.

Tonight, Google is hosting one of their Campfire One events at their headquarters in Mountain View, CA. They’re using the event to launch their new Google Apps Marketplace. This is the app store that business applications can use to reach the more than 25 million people and 2 million business that use Google Apps for their domains.

Below, find our live notes.

Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering

• Two million businesses have “gone Google”
• 25 million users.
• Everything you need is now in the cloud for businesses
• Tonight we’re launching the new Google Apps Marketplace
• It’s great for developers – who get access to these 25 million users instantly
• It’s also great for users.
• It’s simple to integrate.
• Build your app. And you don’t have to use App Engine. You can use whatever you want.
• And you can sell your app in the Marketplace.
• What does Google ask in return? A one-time fee of $100. And a low 20% rev share.
• Over 50 launch partners.

David Glazer, Engineering Director

• I want to walk you through the “how” now – build, integrate, and sell.
• Google Apps now has a large and growing number of extension points (we’ll be adding more over time)
• there is a central management system
• Universal integration to Google Apps navigation system.
• We use OpenID to manage authentication. Single sign-on.
• And we use OAuth for secure access to data. The OAuth grant of trust is built into the Marketplace.

• We have a complete manifest.
• Time for a demo. Here’s a developer showing off a “hello world” application.
• Easy step-by-step process to get your application in the Marketplace.

• It might take a couple of days for the app to show up in the Marketplace when you submit it.
• A domain admin simply then clicks the “Add it now” button.
• Then just three clicks left – 1) agree to terms of service 2) grant data access (such as to your calendar) 3) enable the app
• You can even see it in the apps drop down if you’re in, say, Gmail.

• Here’s Intuit now showing how to take a real app – for payroll – to show how easy it is to itegrate.
• Intuit is the largest payroll provider in the nation.
• We usually serve small companies, many are less than 20 employees.
• Another demo, this time from Atlassian – a software development company
• You can easily embed your information inside of Gmail.

• The thing I’m most excited about is the studio activity bar.
• With this, Google Talk can be used for instant collaboration.
• All of this is available today. In fact it’s being used by 40 developers in a bus traveling from SF to SXSW in Austin, TX.

• Another demo, Manymoon – a social productivity app.
• We used open standards to convert free users to paid users.
• Everything you’ve seen so far will be live later tonight – for this next demo, it will be coming soon.
• Gmail contextual gadgets – like when a YouTube video is embedded in Gmails – soon third-parties will be able to use this.

• Here’s a demo from Appirio.

Flash games on the Web are getting to be so quick and responsive . . . that they can recreate 30-year-old arcade games no problem. And that’s just fine with me because those are about the only video games where I can hold my own. Online video arcade OMGPOP’s latest game is a remake of Atari’s Missile Command on its 30th anniversary.

The OMGPOP version is true to the original except it adds a multiplayer twist. It’s pretty addictive and the social aspect makes it more fun. Just like at the old coin arcades, it was always better when you went with a couple of friends.

Like most OMGPOP games you can enter a live match with other players or invite your friends to meet you in a game room. You can sign in with Facebook Connect or AIM. OMGPOP matches you with players at about the same level as you. You can get more missiles, enlarge their impact radius, or increase your reload rate buy using your health points to buy better capabilities. If things are going really badly you can buy a nuke for 500 “coins.” You earn coins the more you play, but you can also pay for them straight out through PayPal or a credit card.

Selling virtual goods is OMGPOP’s main source of revenues. The site has about a dozen games. CEO Dan Porter (who used to be the president of Teach For America, TicketWeb before it sold to TicketMaster, and worked as a corporate VC for Virgin) says that about 2 to 5 percent of players end up actually paying for something. About 30 percent of its virtual goods revenues come from third-party offers from TrialPay, but they try to keep the scammier offers out. Porter says the site has 2.5 million members, and about 1 million monthly unique visitors. Most of those are high school and college students. The site is still small but has a loyal following. About 40 pecent of users visit the site more than 50 times a month.

I recently visited OMGPOP’s New York City offices, where Porter, founder Charles Forman, and game developer Will Chen gave me a preview of Missile Command in the video below. I also get Forman to weigh in on the HTML5 Vs. Flash debate. He says there is no way he could create the games on OMGPOP without Flash.

Last week, Yammer, the business-oriented microblogging platform that won TechCrunch50 2008, sent out invites to press inviting them to virtually attend a “major launch event” that will be broadcast through a WebEx meeting tomorrow morning. The company has also posted an invite to its blog, along with a not-so-subtle jab at its competitors: “Forget all that over-hyped chatter and annoying buzz, Yammer is releasing the next wave in Enterprise Microblogging“.

So what exactly is Yammer about to introduce? We’re hearing from one source that the company is planning to start allowing people to create networks that aren’t built around web domains. That may not sound like a big deal, but it would be a major change for Yammer, and one that could open it up to a huge number of new users.

Until now, in order to create a Yammer network you’ve needed to have email addresses associated with your own business domain name (say, jason@company.com) . This works great for sizable companies (everyone who has an email account on that domain is automatically placed into the correct network), but it’s a big limitation on who can actually use the service — plenty of businesses and organizations don’t have their own domain names.

Depending on how Yammer rolls this out, there could be countless uses for this.  Last summer, I wrote about how useful it would be to have a Yammer for families that would allow family members to easily share information in a centralized place (and get SMS alerts if something important came up).  Local groups could set up Yammer accounts to share information instead of relying on long Email chains, and so on. But Yammer wouldn’t be alone here — a recently launched startup called HipChat is already going after this broad market.

We’ll have more details tomorrow at 11 AM. And if you’re interested, the WebEx meeting is apparently open to the public.

This is has not been confirmed by either party, but we’ve heard from multiple sources that European music startup Spotify has closed a venture investment from Founders Fund. Managing Partner Sean Parker, who was a cofounder of Napster and President of Facebook, led the round for Founders Fund, and we believe he may have take a board of directors seat.

We do not know the size of the investement; however, we believe it may have been a token amount to get Parker’s involvement in the company. The investment was likely done at the same €200 million valuation as the round Spotify raised in late 2009.

This is the first U.S. investor in Spotify, and the service is only available in some European countries. A U.S. launch has been broadly anticipated for months.

We’ve also heard this was a competitive round and a number of U.S. venture funds were interested. Parker, with his ties to Facebook and his experience in early P2P music sharing via Napster, is likely the winner for his strong strategic potential.

In January we reported that Spotify had been in talks with Google over integration with Android for their U.S. launch. When Spotify does launch in the U.S. (assuming it does), we expect them to have a large U.S. partner alongside them. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are all likely to be talking to them, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of them sign a partnership.

There’s a changing of the guard taking place at social software company Jive. Co-founder and CEO Dave Hersh will be stepping down from the role to allow board member Tony Zingale to take over as interim CEO. Hersh will continue at Jive as chairman of the company’s board of directors.

Zingale was most recently the president and CEO of enterprise company Mercury Interactive, which was acquired by HP. Prior to Mercury, he was President and CEO of CRM provider Clarify. Jive’s board of directors has begun a search for a permanent CEO, and is currently evaluating candidates for the position.

Jive, which recently acquired social media monitoring startup Filtrbox, has been steadily growing. The startup just raised $12 million from Sequoia Capital and also expanded its operations to Silicon Valley with a new Palo Alto office. The company said in a statement that the new CEO will be helping Jive continue on its growth trajectory.

But Jive may be also facing the heat from Saleforce’s venture into the social enterprise space with Chatter. While Chatter is still in private beta, Salesforce’s application is eliciting a lot of buzz in the enterprise world. Unfortunately, Salesforce is limiting its beta users so its unclear how much of a threat it will be to the existing social offerings in the marketplace, but its potential threat to Jive’s marketshare is sure to be on the company’s mind at the moment.

Women, Hispanics and blacks have always been underrepresented in the ranks of the Valley’s tech companies.  A new analysis by the Mercury News shows that from 2000 to 2008, the proportion of women tech workers in Silicon Valley dropped from 25.3% to 23.8%, and that the national numbers dropped from 30% to 27.4%.  In 2008, blacks and Hispanics constituted only 1.5% and 4.7% respectively of the Valley’s tech population — well below national tech-population averages of 7.1% and 5.3%. It seems that the problem I highlighted in my last post on the dearth of tech women is actually getting worse, particularly in Silicon Valley.  And it’s not just the women who are being left out, but also important minority groups.

Is the Valley deliberately keeping these groups out?  I don’t think so.  Silicon Valley is, without doubt, a meritocracy.  In this land, only the fittest survive.  That is exactly the way it should be.  For the Valley’s innovation system to achieve peak performance, new technologies need to constantly obsolete the old, and the world’s best techies need to keep making the Valley’s top guns compete for their jobs.  There is no room for government mandated affirmative action, and our tech companies shouldn’t have to apologize for hiring the people they need.  But at the same time, without realizing it, the Valley may be excluding a significant part of the American population that could be making it even more competitive.  False stereotypes may be getting in the way of greater innovation and prosperity.

Consider the data that I highlighted in my earlier post.  It wasn’t always like this, but girls are now matching boys in mathematical achievement.  In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men.  Women earn more than 50% of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and nearly 50% of all doctorates.  The companies they start are more capital-efficient, produce higher revenue, and have lower failure rates than those led by men.  Yet women are still a rare commodity in the ranks of tech CEOs and CTOs.

How do we fix the “hidden biases” and discrimination?  The experts I’ve spoken to have many great ideas.  They suggest we create role models, provide mentorship and financing, and teach entrepreneurship. Foundry group’s Brad Feld says that simple acts of encouragement from parents, teachers, and peers would make a big difference.  Cindy Padnos, of Illuminate Ventures suggested a solution that particularly resonated with me.  She says that women should follow the trail mapped by Indian entrepreneurs (no, not the American natives, but my kind: the immigrants).

Thirty years ago, there were hardly any Silicon Valley firms with Indian-born founders.  UC-Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian documented that 7% of tech companies started in 1980–1998 had an Indian founder.  A survey conducted by my research team at Duke University found that this proportion had increased to 15.5% from 1995 to 2005. My team also determined that in this period, Indians started 6.7% of the nation’s tech and engineering firms.  These are pretty astonishing numbers considering that according to the U.S. census, in 2000 less than 0.7% of the U.S. population and only 6% of the Silicon Valley high-tech workforce was born in India.

I know from personal experience that Indian immigrants didn’t have it easy.  They suffered from the same types of stereotypes as women, blacks, and Hispanics.  Despite having co-founded a software company that we took from startup to $120m in revenue; profitability; and IPO in a record five years, I couldn’t get Research Triangle Park (RTP) VCs to even return my phone calls when I was ready to start my second venture.  I later found out why: “my people” were great at mathematics and made great engineers, but didn’t make great CEOs — “we” didn’t have the necessary management skills, didn’t like diluting our equity ownership by raising venture capital, and couldn’t “fit” into the rough-and-tough American business-management culture.  That’s what one RTP VC told me over lunch, to explain why his firm wasn’t inviting me to pitch my business plan.  They were very busy and had to be selective in who they met.

So how did “my people” rise above ignorance and bigotry?  When the first generation of Indians in Silicon Valley succeeded in shattering the glass ceiling, they decided to help others follow their path.  They realized that they had all surmounted the same obstacles.  And they could reduce the barriers to entry for others behind them by sharing their experiences and opening some doors.

In 1992, a number of highly successful Indian business executives formed a group called The Indus Entrepreneurs (which is now called TiE). Their mission was to give back to the community by fostering entrepreneurship.  They would hold monthly events, teach entrepreneurship, and provide mentoring and support.  And they would facilitate Indian-style matchmaking between entrepreneurs themselves and with investors and corporate partners.  They created two categories of members: a charter member, who took the role of guru, and a regular member, who would be a disciple.  The Guru had to donate time and money (minimum $1500/year) and was not allowed to gain any personal financial benefit.  When disciples achieved success, they would be expected to pass it forward by becoming charter members and helping others behind them.

One of my current research projects is to document and quantify the accomplishments of TiE. But I already know the impact TiE has made. After my lunch with the RTP VC, I cold-called TiE co-founder, Kanwal Rekhi. He told me that my experience was no different from what he and others in Silicon Valley had endured.  Rekhi advised me to look outside the region and to recruit a white male as president of my company.  TiE Charter Member Vinod Khosla advised me to contact VCs in Boston and gave me several introductions. After I followed Rehki’s and Khosla’s advice, it didn’t take long for me to get a term sheet from Greylock Partners (of Boston).  When the word of this got out, the RTP VCs came begging that I take their money.  (I didn’t take their money and after I achieved success, I became founding President of TiE-Carolinas and would usually spend five to seven hours weekly — even when I was really busy — mentoring fledgling entrepreneurs.)

Telle Whitney, President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, says that TiE has done an amazing job and that its work is a great example of a mobilizing, formidable force in making change through networks.  But all networks are not created equal.  To achieve systemic change and have more women and minority-group members as entrepreneurs, we need to involve corporate leaders.  They need to personally be mentoring, proselytizing, and demonstrating by example a different model of investing in women and minority-group entrepreneurs.  There is nothing more powerful within an organization than having its own CTO talk about the importance of, for example, promoting women.

I agree with Telle. Neither Rekhi nor Khosla knew me from Adam, but both readily gave me invaluable advice.  That is the type of mentoring that women, blacks and Hispanics need. In addition to establishing stronger networks for these groups, we need to have the CEOs and CTOs of all of our top companies volunteer their own time to help others follow in their footsteps. They need to do this because this is the best path to diversity and this diversity will enrich their organizations. And we need to have VCs mentor the women and minorities they typically ignore. They need to do this not only for social good, but also for their own survival.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here are some links to women and minority networking groups which readers may find useful (If you know of others, please detail these in your comments).

Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

Astia

Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives

National Center for Women & Information Technology

Silicon Valley Black Professionals

Silicon Valley Hispanic Professionals

Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers

Springboard Enterprises

The African Network

Women 2.0

Young Women Social Entrepreneurs

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Gossip mongers and sports fans alike are eagerly awaiting Tiger Woods’ press conference tomorrow morning, when he’ll confront the public and apologize for his string of affairs that tarnished both his image as a role model and his endorsement earnings. And, according to one source, you’ll be able to live stream it from the world’s most popular video portal: YouTube.

This is interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s going to get a lot of traffic, as many people will be at work and won’t be able to watch the conference from their TV sets. But it’s also another live video feed on YouTube, which historically has almost exclusively featured recorded content. Over the last year or so, YouTube has been experimenting more often with live feeds, with broadcasts including YouTube Live, numerous political debates and events including President Obama’s record-breaking inauguration, and more recently, earnings webcasts. But the Tiger Woods event, while certainly newsworthy, is a different beast. It’s related more to gossip and sports than it is to our nation’s future or Google news.

It could also be a sign of things to come.  YouTube doesn’t stream these events themselves (they’ve often relied on Akamai), but it’s apparent that they’re becoming more open to featuring live streams on the home page. And even though YouTube’s roots may lie in user-submitted videos, it seems foolish to push users to other video sites whenever they want to see a major event live.

The event starts at 8 AM PST. Other sites that will be streaming the event include Ustream and major news networks.

Update: It’s official, YouTube just announced it here.