You could say that Thorsten Claus, Director of Playout Intelligence at Detecon, Inc., acts as one of the more innovative spearheads of Deutsche Telekom. Focusing on content capitalization Thorsten uses his San Francisco base to know the Bay Area’s start-up scene, meet the founders of the hottest start-ups in Silicon Valley and thus staying up-to-date with all developments in the digital entertainment industry. Being an angel investor himself, he not only knows the distant corporate approach to shirtsleeved founders but he’s fully equipped with what it needs to start, run and grow a company. Thorsten is a very open and helpful guy – so if you are in need for some valuable advice – don’t hesitate to contact him.
Alone in San Francisco? Never! Just visit the Organic Cafe and check in via Foursquare, et voilà! That’s the way we met Wendy right before the start of the Web 2.0 Expo’s second day – trying to awake herself as we did ourselves. Based in Utrecht, Netherlands, Wendy works as an online campaigner at the non-profit organization Oxfam and as a freelancer in web editing and text translation (Dutch to English and English to Dutch). Besides she is a blogger at Dutch Cowgirls. We had a very nice chat about making Foursquare still more social – although it definitely is very social to have an appinion like this as result of a mere check-in!
When Italy-born Carolina Milanesi publishes some figures on the Mobile Industry the crowd is listening: The London-based VP of Research at Gartner’s Mobile Devices team is the the second-most quoted mobile analyst. Responsible for the forecasting and market share efforts of the mobile players she also is Apple’s vendor lead. The launch of the iPhone 4.0 “will keep Apple ahead of the game, although Android has made huge process” – is Carolina’s statement on the latest smartphone from Cupertino. We met her at WWDC10 where we had the opportunity to chat about the App Economy – and to ask her about her usage of apps!
The Parrot AR.Drone is a four-propellered flying machine. It features two cameras, which enable the Drone to “see” via a Wifi connection. They also are able to help control the gadget’s speed and altitude. All of this is powered by the AR.Drone’s on-board computer, based on the Linux OS. More details on the Parrot’s Facebook page.
The Drone will be controllable via an iPhone app – and read this carefully: c o n t r o l l a b l e – not controlled – as you will see in this demo! Imagine you buy two of them – the retail price is rumored to be less than $400 – and you start air-attacking your son! That’s the perfect Father-and- Son game! Can’t wait to see it flying…..
8 employees, $2 million revenues, a low cost basis and high quality content broadcasted continuously – this is TWiT: a tech show on the Internet. Former radio anchor Leo Laporte serves tech pundits with audio and video content, as podcast or live. 6 cameras in the TWiT cottage are filming anything what Leo does: a chat channel with several hundred participants is showing him what people think of his show. Read on…
Berlin born Marcus Greinke, who has been living between Palo Alto and San Francisco for the last 20 years, started in the advertising industry. In 2005 he founded charlesandmarie.com, together with his business partner Claus Krogmann, who’s overseeing the European operations. Sourcing and producing the latest design products – mostly in Asia – is the business model of this ecommerce platform.
The latest project of Marcus and Claus is XXL Commerce, Inc – a Flash Shopping App which still is in Closed Beta. Marcus, who is an iPhone addict, sorts his apps by colours – a unique approach for appinion participants so far!
Gabe Rivera’s Techmeme is the news reader of choice for people interested in tech. He has five editors curating what has been aggregated on Techmeme and its sister site for the media industry, MediaGazer. So the question of what is relevant news in either the tech or the media industry will be answered by a clever combination of algorithms and human curators. Feeling “continuously frustrated”, Gabe describes the ongoing effort to optimize the results for his readers. Being in the aggregation business for many years now he must admit that every additional gain in search results demands more and more effort to invest. Not to mention that there is no Techmeme iPhone app, yet…
We met Andrew when waiting in line at the Apple Store in Stockton St, San Francisco. He is an app developer from Vancouver and on a business trip with his colleagues. They took the chance to stock up on iPads while in SF.
Journalist and netcaster Leo Laporte seems to be the first person having founded a profitable podcasting business. Based in Petaluma, 60 miles north of San Francisco, Leo is operating a tech focused audio and video broadcasting network from his three-storey TWiT cottage. Mainly being his own host, Leo has created a viable business model with revenues of more than $2 million – after commissions. Read on…
Ok – printing is very Eighties – but in some situations it does make some sense to print something. Being on the road you can cut out your computer as the middleman: you can print your emails, contacts, fotos and other files as well as whole web pages – and you only need 3G and Wifi. Read on…
appinion - Atul Arora, Product Management Director @ Vimo
Low Cost Broadcasting – Leo Laporte leads a new breed of broadcasters
appinion – Felix Huber, Graduate Student at Stanford University
appinion – Frederik Hermann, Talenthouse
appinion – Gabe Rivera, Techmeme and Mediagazer
