I am proud to announce the arrival of Tech Cocktail to Washington, D.C. I will be co-hosting the event with Frank Gruber, the co-founder of Tech Cocktail. What is Tech Cocktail? Tech Cocktail is a series of mixer events that are opened to bloggers, technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and other business professionals interested in the technology arena in undeserved technology communities. The mission of Tech Cocktail is to amplify the technology signal in under served markets and have fun doing it.

Tech Cocktail DC will be take place Thursday, May 17, 2007 from 6:30 to 9:00 PM. There will be a link for the RSVP list coming soon. Tech Cocktail is free for all attendees and is paid for by sponsors. If you are interested in sponsoring the event please contact Frank Gruber (frank at techcocktail dot com) or myself (nick [at] thewebpreneur dot com). Also we provide space for local startups to demo their products, so if your interested please feel free to contact either Frank or myself. Finally, if you want to receive updates about Tech Cocktail, then subscribe to the Tech Cocktail RSS feed. You may also subscribe to my feed as updates will be posted on here as well. We are hoping to have a successful launch to follow up on last weeks highly successful Tech Cocktail 4 in Chicago. If you are interested in viewing photos of the event, you can view photos from Tech Cocktail 4 on Flickr. Check them out!

Just yesterday, Mike Arrington announced the TechCrunch20 conference at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The event is going to feature 20 startups that get to demo their products for free to all the attendees. The price for the event? A whopping $1,995 through July 15, 2007 and $2,495 through September 10, 2007. A little to fat for my pockets for the time being. Two days ago I was informed of an alternative event for startups in New York City called “The Hatchery”. The cost for the event? Free! That is music to my ears.

According to their site:

The Hatchery’s Gauntlet affords entrepreneurs the opportunity to interact with objective and expert attorneys, financiers, accountants, Angels and other business professionals in a public forum. The monthly vetting event provides strategic critique, analysis and funding chances for those who are in the process of building their business and in need of publicity, consulting and networking exposure.

I spoke with the creator of the event, Yao-Hui Huang, and asked him if it is guaranteed that startups at the event will receive funding? His response?

To answer your question — yes.
The new rules will be that each presenter will have to get vouched by an industry expert from our panel pool. That panel member will be at the live event. The company then needs to pass the critique of the entire panel. Once through, they will get our management, business development, access to press, and most importantly our funding sources. We will take all that passes with no cap on quantity of companies. In exchange we will take a percentage of the raise and equity in the company. They can still opt to find other sources, but we do keep the equity. The goal is to use our team to drive them to success.

While there is no cap on the number of companies receiving funding as a result of this event, there is a cap on the number of startups that can attend the event. At the event on May 3, 2007 there will be a limit of 5 hand selected companies that will have the opportunity to present. If you are a New York based startup then I encourage you to submit your idea and try to take on “The Gauntlet” (the process of pitching and Q&A that you will go through at the event). To find out more about the event go check out their site. If your company is looking for venture capital, then this is a great opportunity to obtain it.

Yesterday, Duncan Watts posted an interesting article about the effect of cumulative advantage in the music and movie markets. Through an online study of more than 14,000 participants, Watts, along with Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds were able to draw a few important conclusions. The most important finding was that while quality had an impact on listener choices, social-influence had a much larger impact.

Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictably is inherent to the nature of the market.

The findings of the study support the strategy adopted by both the movie and music industries. Production companies diversify across a number of products since a small percentage are successful (somewhere around 1 in 10 succeed in the music industry). What are the implications of the study in regards to marketing?

I personally interpreted the findings to suggest that yet again, the most important marketing strategy is word of mouth marketing. I suggested this last week in my article “The End of Mainstream Marketing”. Conversely, mainstream marketing may still be effective as a way of communicating a certain product to key influential consumers. Ultimately, the results of the study further support the idea that luck is a major factor in a successful business. I am a believer of the idea that thought leaders can help to guide consumer decisions but in the end it is ultimately up to the consumer to decide. By diversifying your marketing strategies, you can help increase the odds that your product or service reaches the hands of influential consumers (the consumers that are discussed in Malcom Gladwell’s “Tipping Point”).

Recently I have been going to a lot of conferences. As I wrote two days ago, I will be attending the Future of Online Advertising in June. Also, I was at the Future of Web Apps in February and attended Podcamp NYC last weekend. Why on earth have I been attending so many damn conferences? One reason: to meet people. Keith Ferrazzi states it best in the book “Never Eat Alone”:

Those who use conferences properly have a huge leg up at your average industry gathering. While others quietly sit taking notes, content to sip their free bottled water, these men and women are setting up one-on-one meetings, organizing dinners, and, in general, making each conference an opportunity to meet people who could change their lives.

The best part of networking with people at conferences is that most of them are there to network as well. While I have met those that don’t see the value in conferences, there are plenty that realize this value and contribute to the cause. Also, networkers help other networkers because that is one of the most important aspects of networking (how many times will I say the word “network” or some derivative of it?) What I really mean is that networkers realize they are part of a community and being part of a community involves a little bit of give and take, but the number one component of being part of a community is participation. If you are there, then you are part of the community. In addition to Chris Brogan who has put forth a thorough list of networking tips, I thought I would put in my two cents and share with you what I think are the most important steps to effective networking at conferences.

1. Offer your assistance to the organizer - Putting on an event is a ridiculously challenging task. I’m currently trying to put together a simple networking event and even that is challenging. Imagine trying to prepare an event where thousands of people will be attending and need hotel, restaurant, transportation reservations, and more! Bottom line, the event staff is understaffed and over worked. Offer your assistance and they will truly appreciate the effort. Who knows, you may even get a free ticket to the conference.
2. Be a presenter - This is one of the most important attributes of a successful conference goer. All of the speakers are experts in their industry, and chances are that most of the attendees are as well but not all of them are speaking. To have been in the presenters shoes at some point helps you to sympathize with them and puts you on a better level to network with them. Although this is an important attribute do not go unprepared because it is worse to present an incomplete presentation than to not present at all. Work on creating the content for your presentation and then practice your presentation over and over again until you have perfected it. Once you have mastered the art of presenting, you are well on your way to success.
3. Dress Well - This one is a no-brainer (or at least you would think so). Dressing well is highly important. When you dress well, people take notice and suddenly you become an center of influence within their environment. Look nice for the people and don’t forget to smile!
4. Be personable - I don’t want to run through a laundry list of traits that make people personable but just to name a few: stand straight, be genuinely interested in what the other person has to say, be a good listener, remember the other person’s name, and more. I covered most of these in my list of “The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs”. Also, if you really want to learn more on this you can go buy a copy of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”.
5. Ask for business cards rather than dole them out - Chris Brogan covered this one in his post, and he states it well. “Only you can control contacting someone.” While this is true, I have been in the predicament of the person not having their business card. An aggressive networker would whip out a pen and write down their contact information. I chose to give them my card and luckily they contacted me. This is for you to decide how aggressive you want to be.
6. Write down notes about the person on their card - I am a constant offender of this one. You go to an event, get a ton of cards, get home, and don’t remember who the people are even though you have their cards. All you have is a little reference that hopefully can spark your memory. Most likely you aren’t going to remember. So if you want to be the ultimate networking pro, step aside for 30 seconds after you meet the person and write down a unique thing about the person you just met. If you don’t have anything to write down, then they probably don’t remember anything unique about you, and hence no connection was made.
7. Be brief - If you are at a large event, then spending large amounts of time on an individual is most likely not the best use of time. Occasionally you will have a strong connection with someone and it may be worth the extra time, but even still you can postpone part of the conversation to later (maybe over drinks perhaps?) Introduce yourself, learn a little about the person and what makes them unique, swap information, and move on. If you want to follow-up sooner, rather than later, that’s great, but don’t forget why you came to the conference in the first place.
8. Be a connector - Rather than just leaving and giving a person the cold shoulder, there is an alternative exit strategy. Prior to leaving, introduce the person to someone else that you met earlier that is in your vicinity. It makes it less awkward for the person you were just speaking with if you introduce them to someone new rather than if they had to introduce them self to the next person on their own.
9. Target the people you want to meet (networking with a purpose) - Prior to going to the event, list out a few of the people that you want to meet. You didn’t put in all the effort to come to the conference just to drink the coffee and listen to speakers lecturing you. You came here to meet people, and more than likely there is a certain type of person that you are looking to meet. So write down a few people that you want to meet and meet them. Once you’ve met the people, it is a small success and small successes add up to big ones.
10. Follow up after the conference (soon after) - This is the most important part of being a successful conference attendee. Once you put in the effort to meet new people and learn a little bit about each of them, you need to let them know that you appreciate their time. Additionally, perhaps you can help that person in the future. (Notice that I said help them, not them help you).

Remember, networking takes practice but can pay off big time. Being part of the community is critical to success (both in business networking and in blogging) so get out there and be a part of it. Also, remember when you are attending these events it’s about how you can help other people, not how they can help you.

With all the buzz surrounding social media and blogs, it is very easy to begin thinking that soon enough there will be nothing but media on the web. Soon enough there will be no more television or newspaper and everyone will spend their days consuming the web. Well, not exactly. As Victor Keegan writes, “to the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it”. While there is still growth in the blogosphere, it is limited primarily to those within a certain demographic (high education and higher income). Let’s face it, to the majority blogs are little more than a buzz word. I would be interested in seeing what percentage of consumers of blogs are also bloggers themselves. I would be willing to bet that the percentage is pretty high.

What inspires all of us that participate in social media, is it’s truly democratic nature. Your voice has practically the same weight as others. Post your thoughts on the web and someone will come read them. All of the intellectuals see this and realize that if they don’t participate then their voice isn’t being heard. If your voice isn’t being heard, then you don’t exist. So being that you are an intellectual (hey, you are reading this blog aren’t you?), get out there and start blogging. The people want to hear what you think, so give them what they’re asking for.

Yesterday I registered for the Future of Online Advertising Conference. The conference is taking place June 7-8 in New York City and has some really excellent speakers. Two of my favorite speakers at the conference are Darren Rowse of Problogger and Steve Rubel of Edelman. The conference is being put on by Carson Systems (Ryan Carson is the CEO) who also puts on a variety of other conferences including the Future of Web Apps that I attended in February and Future of Web Design. Topics of discussion include:

• How to guarantee the success of your online ads
• Tips for packaging your inventory and maximizing ad revenue
• Online Advertising Basics - Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask
• Advertising in RSS feeds – the next big thing?
• Marketing Beyond Google, Yahoo, AOL & MSN with Scale, Quality and Safety
• It’s all in the creative - how to create successful online ads
• Targeted Ad Networks - Cost Per Influence Vs. Cost Per Thousand
• Ads in Online Video – the future of interactive advertising?

This conference should be a great time if it is similar to past conferences hosted by Carson Systems. If you are interested in social media and advertising I highly recommend attending this conference. If you would like to receive a 10% discount on your tickets, you can use the following promo code: 10p3rc. Copy that code and go sign up here.

This past weekend at Podcamp NYC I attended a presentation by Drew Olanoff of Pluggd. Toward the end of the presentation Drew began accepting questions at which point I decided to ask “What is your current revenue model?” His response was ultimately that they don’t currently have a revenue model as investors are investing in the technology that they are developing called “HearHere”. According to their site:

Pluggd’s HearHere technology lets you jump to the exact position in audio or video where there is something you want to hear. Use HearHere to search the speeches and compare positions on current issues.

I gotta admit, that the heat map technology is pretty sweet, but it is more of a novelty than a robust solution. I’m guessing that their main goal is to ultimately have a podcast search engine. Additionally, I am confident that Google is already pursuing audio indexing technologies as it is their business to index the internet. Pluggd is up against some pretty stiff competition. Pluggd is also using a 3rd party voice recognition system rather than in house technology. I won’t elaborate on that since there is something else that I think is more important to this story.

While Drew claimed that they don’t have a revenue model, a quick browse around the site shows otherwise. You can see Google Ads that I’m sure provide a modest source of revenue. As we already know though, basing your startup on the ad supported revenue model is risky business on the internet nowadays. Do they really have investors that aren’t concerned with future revenue? I seriously doubt it. What this actually sounds like is one of two things: bubble talk or a conscious decision to hide their actual plans. I would like to believe the latter, but even an interview with Pluggd CEO Jonathan Thompson was absent of any discussion of their revenue model. Has asking about a company’s revenue model become something bloggers and journalists would prefer to avoid? Come to think of it, many of the companies featured on Techcrunch don’t have a stated revenue model. I guess we are to assume that they are following an ad supported revenue model. Granted, blogs like Techcrunch and Mashable are not in the business of analyzing companies, simply covering the basic story of a company. When did a company’s revenue model stop being part of the story?

My friend Orli Yakuel announced today (with co-creator Eyal Shahar) a new widget for her site Go2Web20.net. The sheer number of new web startups that are listed on her site is pretty impressive. You can use the following html to embed the widget on your site:

<embed src=”http://www.go2web20.net/widget.swf?maxItems=3&delay=5″ width=”200″ height=”200″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”></embed>

Simply change the number of items that you would like to display in the code and the delay in seconds. Once you’ve added the code, you will get a widget like the one below:

Head on over to Go2Web20.net or read more about the new widget on Orli’s blog.

Mass marketing has become so prevalent that it has rapidly lost its effectiveness. Gone are the days where a national marketing campaign provides sufficient influence on your consumers to convince them to purchase your product. As the web expands personal communication has become more important. The web has empowered individuals by increasing their reach. Your customers can read through the material nonsense that large marketers force down their throats via tv ads and newspaper ads in which the consumer has a huge smile on their face. The most influential marketing strategy has become guerrilla marketing. But still, guerrilla marketing has even garnered negative rapport as marketers have begun to invade individual’s personal relationships. So how do you connect to your customers?

You need to build genuine personal relationships with your customers. While this may not be the case for commodities, this is the primary case for the vast majority of services being offered. As you build these relationships with individuals they will in turn tell their friends and suddenly your marketing efforts will have paid off. You can reach out to more individuals via blogs and alternative forms of social media.

It’s nothing new, in one sense. The only advertising that was ever truly effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation. Now word of mouth has gone global. The one-to-many scope that technology brought to mass production and then mass marketing, which producers have enjoyed for two hundred years, is now available to customers. And they’re eager to make up for lost time. -Cluetrain Manifesto

You may even be able to generate some traffic to your blog and various web sites via mass marketing, but the impact from these large marketing campaigns will be nowhere near the response you receive from developing geuine relationships. Trust me, I have seen a number of national television advertising campaigns by Fortune 500 companies only generate 50 leads to a site. Some will say that it’s because their ads were bad. This may be true, but I’ve witnessed the result of successful word of mouth campaigns that would dwarf any national mainstream media campaign. The new marketplace is primarily responsive to relationship marketing. So get out there and start building new relationships!

I just got back from Podcamp NYC and it was a blast. I met a lot of really great people there. There were both podcasters and other web industry people at the event. I learned a lot more about podcasting and the podcast community. One thing that was interesting was that it seems like a lot of podcasters do podcasting as a hobby and not for a living. Many of the people that I spoke with weren’t monetizing their podcasts except for a few people. I likened it to ham radio hobbyists. Many of the people are passionate about podcasting but haven’t found a way to make money from it.

One pretty cool company that was at the event was StopMeIfYouHeardThis.com. They take videos of people telling their jokes. Check it out!

Today I am off to Podcamp NYC. I am really excited to go to the event. There are a bunch of great speakers/participants lined up. It is slightly overwhelming given that there are almost 96 presentations in all. Unfortunately, if you want to sit through entire presentations you can only see 8 of them, so there better be some good coverage by bloggers. I am going to try recording some of the presentations and putting them up on my blog. So check in over the course of the weekend or on Monday and hopefully I’ll have some good stuff for you to read and watch. While I’m not really a podcaster, I hope to learn a lot more about podcasting and potentially provide you with alternative media content in the future. Enjoy your weekend!

Over 4 months ago I started on a journey. Well actually, 25 years ago I started the journey but only 4 months ago did I begin to write about it. 4 months ago I was introduced to the power of blogs through my boss at the time. Quickly, I began reading every blog out there related to the web that had any sort of influence. Blogs like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, etc.

Inspired by the large scale success of these blogs, I embarked on a path toward duplicating a similar success. I wanted tons of readers who were all waiting on my next post. I chose to adopt many of the writing strategies used by my “virtual mentors”. Since then I have realized that providing value to the readers is not done through simply mimicking someone else’s strategy, but rather success comes from within.

The best part of this blog is that you will read about the manifestation of success rather than listening to me speak down at my listeners. I want to thank a personal friend of mine, Nicola, who helped me find part of the value in my blog. Thanks to myself and my other friend Leslie, she has also become a future successful blogger. You can read her blog, “Standing FIRM”.

Rather than providing a digest of today’s popular tech news items I am going to follow a new path. I will continue to cover tech items that I find of interest, but the new focus will be personal exploration and how it relates to the web, entrepreneurship, and blogging. A major focus will be on blogging, and I will begin setting measurable goals that I can read for this blog. The first goal is to grow this blog up to 30,000 visitors per month. If I occasionally go off topic, I apologize, but you are being granted unfiltered access to my thoughts and that’s just how I think. So take it or leave it. I hope you enjoy as I share my personal journey with you.