A few weeks ago I attended a press event that the San Francisco Giants and Shoretel put on. The audio isn’t that great because we’re in the server room for the San Francisco Giants baseball team. Here SF Giants’ CIO, Bill Schlough, is showing off how the Giants saved a million bucks by upgrading its telecommunications equipment.

Remember that the ballpark that the Giants is in was originally named for PacBell, the local phone company. Interesting look at how phone systems have changed in just the past 10 years.

This is a nice win for Shoretel. How often do you get a customer to sing your praises like this? Especially one that so many people in the community like and appreciate?

The system will save the SF Giants about $1,000 a day. Not bad. Plus they got a ton of new features, which lets the Giants serve their customers better.

Excerpt from:
How the SF Giants saved a million bucks with telecommunications upgrades

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Gary Vaynerchuk’s dad came to the United States with nothing in his pocket. He worked for less than minimum wage and built up a business, Wine Library, that today sells $50 million a year in wine in a sizeable store in New Jersey.

Today Gary is building on top of his dad’s work and is taking the store global with a video show, Wine Library TV, that gets about 100,000 views a show. I remember when I first saw the impact he was having when I walked into a meeting at Revision 3 and the team was sitting around watching his show and drinking the wine he was talking about.

Here we visited Gary’s store and got more of how he’s using the 2010 web to bash in the skulls of his competitors. He calls it “bringing the thunder.” I call it the most innovative marketing I’ve seen on the web to date. We talked about a range of things from his dad to how he would compete with his show, if someone else had done Wine Library TV and he wanted in on the action.

This is part of our Building43 series of videos. Come over and join the community there, we’re looking for people who are fanatical about the 2010 web and who are looking to help other people and businesses get into this new world.

By the way, I’m a huge fan because Gary has never mislead me and he’s very willing to tell a CEO his/her wine is crap to his/her face (I’ve seen him do it, even after the CEO threw us a party).

Hope  you enjoy, tomorrow Rocky (behind the camera producer at Building43) and me are headed to London to find out what’s happening on the other side of the pond with regards to the 2010 web. Join us on Sunday night at a Tweetup in London.

Credit:
Behind the scenes with @garyvee at one of the best wine stores in the world

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After we had our Building43 launch party I wanted to explore more why small groups of people are so much better for actually learning something. By the way, Michael Sean Wright put together a neat little video of our launch party. He’s the one who produces Peter Himmelman’s awesome show on Tuesday nights.

Anyway, we’ve found that if you are throwing a party, somewhere around 200 people is the right number (or fewer). I’ve been to quite a few TechCrunch parties with 800 or so, and they just aren’t as satisfying. This holds true for weddings, too. I’ve been to weddings with 100 people and they are really fun. 300? Not so fun, they seem impersonal and more like a conference event.

Why are large numbers not conducive to learning and having a great experience? One reason is sheer noise. I remember meeting Del.icio.us’s founder, Joshua Schachter, at one of the large TechCrunch events with 700 or so and I was literally inches away from him and we both were yelling at each other but I still couldn’t hear him.

Another is distraction. In large groups you feel impelled to rotate through the crowd to meet as many people as you can, and grab their business cards. In smaller groups, like the one at the Building43 party, I didn’t feel that pressure and, if I did, I still could get around and meet most of the people and settle on a small group.

For the past year I’ve been playing with small groups over on FriendFeed. I setup a secret group there that I invited a few people into. Tonight I setup a new Twitter group that does the same thing. I’m studying what it’s like to have a small secret group of people inside a sea of a much much larger set of more public interactions.

Some things I’ve learned already. If you follow about 300 people, even industry luminaries, most of them don’t Tweet very often. So, the flow is very slow. There’s a lesson there. If you only want to Twitter a few minutes a day, keep the number of people you’re following to 300 or less. Once you get into the 1,000s your life is over. Heheh.

Another thing I’m learning? Because I hand picked all my friends in both of these secret groups and only included people I knew and cared about, my engagement level with them is higher than with groups that I don’t know as well (if at all). There’s a lesson in there for Twitter and is one huge reason why Facebook has more engagement than Twitter does. Do you really want to be engaged with Oprah? Not much, no. But your best friend? Or someone from work? Absolutely.

Some people have already started spreading around my “secret” Twitter address. Sorry, I won’t let anyone follow it. It’s a closed secret account and I want to keep interactions there very small and intimate.

I will let you know more about what I learn from these small secret groups, though, just like we shared what we learned at the Building43 launch party. Onward!

I wonder how many other people have secret groups or multiple Twitter accounts?

UPDATE: along these lines, the New York Times has a bunch of good advice for keeping your Twitter work sane. I found this on @steverubel’s Twitter account because he’s one of the secret people I subscribe to.

UPDATE 2: Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote about just this topic yesterday, as it pertains to security. I forgot to mention that my observations match Dunbar’s number and that Schneier’s article explains what that is and how it applies.

Original post:
Really Secret Scoble

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I love hearing stories about how people turned their passions into a career. Lou Mongello used to be a lawyer, but he kept going back to a childhood memory: his family kept taking the family to Walt Disney World in Orlando. He turned taking his own family there into a hobby and later quit his job as a lawyer and now has a media company that publishes books, CDs, magazines, and does a weekly radio show, er, podcast, about Walt Disney World. Very popular stuff and he is hitting a monetizable audience: traveling families who will spend lots of money.

Some things I learned in my interview with him: social networks are changing how he’s marketing and interacting with his customers. He uses real time services like Ustream to keep in touch and, of course, he has a Twitter account, where he publicizes meetups at the park.

You can find him at WDW Radio.

Oh, by the way, in the video, we talk about trademark concerns. He says that he worked to find a way to tie his brand to Walt Disney World’s brand without infringing on Walt Disney’s trademarks. That’s very smart and something that a lot of the folks who are using Twitter and Leo Laporte’s trademarks should consider because they are putting their business at significant risk of a trademark lawsuit if they don’t stay clear. Over on Facebook Jesse Stay reports that anyone who uses the word “face” in their Facebook applications will be banned outright. So, choosing a name that stays on the right side of the trademark battle is the best way to go.

In the interview we learn just a bit about Walt Disney World (he has hundreds of his own podcasts if you want to know more) and we cover how he’s using social networking to interact with his customers. You can find all of his Walt Disney World stuff at WDW Radio.

Original post:
How @loumongello turned vacation at Disney World into riches

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Steve Gillmor has been hard at work putting together an interesting day for those of us who are interested in the real time web.

The speakers lineup includes founders and executives from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, Meebo, WordPress, Seesmic, Virgin America, Tweetmeme, Qik, and more.

But that’s not what will make this interesting. In between all the interesting panels about APIs and search and Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Mike Arrington and I will pit our mobs against each other.

Or, more realistically, have a discussion about what he sees as a frightening trend: that mobs are being formed faster and with more “real” participants now thanks to real time technologies, in particular FriendFeed.

Me? I see that there’s a good part in crowd behavior. I’ve seen charities raise tons of money because of crowds very quickly. News distribution is changing pretty radically thanks to crowd behavior. I noticed that I started watching more TV because the crowd would talk about interesting shows (this weekend, for instance, I saw tons of people talking about the BET Awards).

But there is a downside to mobs. People do get hurt and lives are getting threatened. So, we’ll try to come up with some suggestions for FriendFeed to see if we can find some way to help curtail mobs.

+++++++++++++

To get personal for a moment. This is a problem that’s existed for a long time. Kathy Sierra left her blog (and she’s far from the only one) because discourse about her went way over the line. Even before blogs we have seen trolling behavior online.

But now it’s sped up and I agree that the language is getting worse and the crowds are bigger so the chances that someone will follow through in real life are getting more and more real. Mike’s life has been threatened by someone credible enough to really disrupt his life for a while and he was spit on at a conference earlier this year. While most of us can cheer sports jeers without going over the line there are those among us who are a bit more unbalanced.

It’s also interesting that many many more of us are being seen as “micro celebrities.” I remember being called “weird” and an “outlier” because I had a couple of thousand followers on Twitter. Now that’s a very commonplace thing. So, more of us are going to have to face both legitimate criticism for what we say online as well as trolling behavior, or worse.

Anyway, it should be an interesting discussion.

Just in case we get out of control, though, I’m going to be over in London and will participate via Skype. It’ll be interesting to see how that, too, both helps and hinders the conversation.

Hope to see you there!

Originally posted here:
Calling my mob: #realtimecrunchup is next week @techcrunch

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TechCrunch and others are saying that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is adding Tweets soon.

Microsoft has finally figured out the strategy to compete with Google. Cut Google where they are weak. Keep cutting. Bing!

This strategy is winning. Google is losing market share and hasn’t yet figured out how to respond.

Hint to Google: your UI is stale. Your search results are, while getting faster (FriendFeed and Twitter posts are now getting into Google within a few minutes) still not real time and you haven’t shown any real time leadership.

But where’s Yahoo? Carol? Hello? Twitter is happening now and you need to get involved in this before Bing Tweets and gives you a headache.

Oh, it’s not on yet. I hate it when news leaks before the feature is ready to test.

UPDATE: My asterisk * is because it turns out that only popular Twitterers will get this feature turned on. That is totally lame and leaves a huge hole for Yahoo and Google to crawl through.

Excerpt from:
Bing Tweets! *

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It’s been just about a month now since I stepped off of the USS Nimitz. Well, was flown off, more accurately.

I took a month off to let is sink in just what I was there for. It is SO easy to hype up such a trip right after you get back. And I did over on Twitter and FriendFeed.

But I wanted to do a blog post about what I remember of the trip. Not a long one. Enough words have been written by others to occupy your reading time for hours. More on that later.

But just a short one.

Here it is: young people rock.

I remember standing by myself watching pilot after pilot flying aircraft onto a moving deck at night just by watching a small few rows of lights. It is a task that nothing I do in my life will ever come close to in difficulty.

But I watched as 19-year-olds guided the planes to their spaces a foot or two from the water’s edge. I watched as other young people piloted one of the most expensive pieces of machinery around. These were people half my age and I can barely drive my car around, much less do what these young people are doing every day. Yeah, there were a few adults around who had a few scars on their backs, I’m sure, and they were guiding the younger ones and making sure they had the training to get the job done, but the young faces I saw doing the dangerous work of keeping one of the most expensive weapons platforms the world has ever seen working and working flawlessly just takes away any doubt that our next generations will be just fine, thank you very much.

We were there just a few days after five of their crew members were laid to rest thanks to a helicopter mission that had gone horribly bad. That was a reminder that these kids are putting their lives at risk every day to keep me safe.

So, what was I there for? My mission was to study how the social media team on board the Nimitz uses Twitter and other methods to get the word out about what 5,500 people are doing out at sea. I also met the Twitterer who keeps the “FlyNavy” account bubbling along. Families, I’m told by some of the sailors I met on board, watch every word.

I also saw myself as the photographer for the group and rented a huge 600mmF2.8 lens that let me get some of the closer photos of pilots landing.

The Navy, we were told, invites VIPs and others on board every day to be a proxy for all of us who can’t get a tour of a ship that’s spending our tax dollars in a very large way. This was the first such trip of bloggers, so they were watching to see if we’ll do anything different from all the other journalists, movie crews, TV crews, and other VIPs who visit.

Some other things I remember:

1. You gotta be in good shape. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. No elevators here.
2. I remember that the pilots said they get afraid EVERY TIME they come in for a landing. Jennifer Jones got a podcast with one of the pilots we met. It’s interesting that you can’t train the human brain to get rid of fear. But you can train it to work around it.
3. The captain — right in the middle of telling me something that I’ve now forgotten — turned around in mid speech and picked up his phone, called someone down on the deck, told someone to get his act together, then turned around and continued his conversation with me without missing a beat.
4. I watched TopGun hundreds of times (we used to play it over and over on the TVs in the store I worked at in Silicon Valley) but take that feeling and ramp it up 1000x when you are 20 feet from an F-18 taking off. There is no HD camera that can capture the sensory overload you experience when on the deck of an active aircraft carrier. I can’t imagine I’ll have another experience quite like that.
5. The Navy is much more open than I expected it to be. At times I couldn’t tell that I wasn’t walking around some high tech company. When we visited the war room they asked that we not take video or photos of the screens (a request I get quite often when hanging out at companies in Silicon Valley) but they let us watch all we wanted. We visited with tons of sailors all over the ship and they never refused to answer our questions.
6. It’s going to be tough for everyone in the Navy to get into social networking. Why? Bandwidth. There are no cell phones out at sea and the bandwidth to satellites is a precious resource that is metered out to those who need it. Much like water in a drought. Sailors can use Twitter and Facebook in the computer room, but getting time on a computer is tough and the bandwidth isn’t fun.
7. I came away with a new respect of the word sacrifice. The sailors are away from their families months at a time and they aren’t able to just turn on their iPhones and call home or do Skype calls due to the limitations in bandwidth.
8. They look for the simplest solution, not the “coolest” or “geekiest.” Especially true of when we visited the guys who keep the database of every plane on board. Hint: it’s not on a computer.

Anyway, Andy Sernovitz wrapped up the trip best. “They are doing it for us.” Andy also linked to all the bloggers and their reports.

I especially liked these reports, but they were all good:

Carroll “Lex” LeFon, former F-18 pilot who hung out with us during the tour (he is retired and got a flight back to see his old buddies). He’s a great writer and gave his impressions of hanging out with a bunch of clueless bloggers.

Guy Kawasaki who noted how close I was to death, in a funny way.

Jennifer Van Grove looks mighty mean holding a gun.

Chris Pirillo said it gave him a whole new respect. So did TechMama Beth Blecherman. That was the overwhelming reaction after we got back to our cars.

Bill Reichert, Silicon Valley VC, pulled out 10 management lessons he gained.

Anyway, thanks to Guy Kawasaki (who is the one who got me onto the list) and Dennis Hall (who puts together these embarks for the Navy) for inviting me.

Check out my complete set of hundreds of photos (they are all in the public domain so you can use them for whatever purpose you want — they are high enough resolution so you can print posters out, for example). I shot a few HD videos, like this one, too (make sure you visit those and watch them in HD, I shot those on my Canon 5D MK II and they are the sharpest videos of anyone in the group):

Original post:
What was Scoble doing on an aircraft carrier? @flynavy knows

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How do you improve the world if you worked at a charity? Well, in the old days you would do a lot of work just to meet people. You’d use direct mail. You’d hire phone banks of people to call and bug other people during dinner (we get those calls all the time). You’d go to conferences where rich people hang out (I meet charities all the time at Davos and other conferences). You’d work with HR directors at companies to build projects (the United Way did that with Microsoft, for instance).

But there has got to be a better way to raise attention on issues and get people to donate, isn’t there?

Yes, and we’ve seen this new way used quite a few times on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook.

Now there’s a web site, Socialbrite, that covers how you can improve the world with social media. Started by JD Lasica, it’s an attractive site that tracks, and helps, people and causes who are using social networks to change the world. It’s worth spending some of your attention on.

Continued here:
Improving the world, social media style, on socialbrite

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We all remember TwitPic, right? It was used to snap a picture of the airplane that crashed into the Hudson.

But there are a raft of others that are trying to get Twitterer’s to use them. These are in no particular order.

Radar.net.
Twitgoo.
Img.ly.
2tweet.
Yfrog.
Twicsy.
TweetPhoto.
Picktor.
Pikchur.
Pixim.
TwitnGo.
TwitrPix.
Brightkite.
Ourdoings. (I use this because of its strong real-time integration into FriendFeed and inclusion of location data, which I think is important when I’m using my iPhone to take pictures).
FriendFeed. (you send your photos via email to share@friendfeed.com and it uploads them to FriendFeed, which can then push them to Twitter).
Flickr, now that you can Tweet photos on its service.

Obviously there are WAY TOO MANY photo sharing services out there. I bet only three of these survive and even Flickr, after millions of photos, isn’t making huge money for its owner, Yahoo. So, the key is to be differentiated so that these services can attract an audience.

So, how is TwitSnaps trying to differentiate itself? By offering higher resolution so you can use both DSLRs as well as high resolution cell phone cameras like the new Nokia N97 that’s just coming on the market. They also, this week, are adding video which is something I’ve seen Twitvid.io do so far. In the video I shot yesterday TwitSnaps founder, Simar Sing.

Rev2.org has a good review of many of the Twitter photo sharing services. So does Mashable.

Even those professional reviews aren’t comprehensive, though. They can’t hit everyone. So, which one do you use and why? Are there any others we should check out?

UPDATE: it seems that some of these could run into Trademark issues, so expect names to change. I’ll have more to say on that later. In fact, Leo Laporte owns the trademark to the word “twit” and he’s not happy that people are using that term.

Read the original post:
TwitSnaps jumps into competitive Twitter photo sharing space

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Don’t know what StockTwits is? It’s a way to talk about stocks on Twitter. Is it popular? Yes! Is it popular? Yes! Will it be profitable? I believe so. (Advertisers love an audience of people who are trading stocks). Is it using Twitter in a unique way? Yes!

So, how is StockTwits doing it? Well, Rocky and I traveled to New York to find out and we met up with Howard Lindzon, founder of StockTwits, to find out the inside scoop.

Lindzon is also an investor in other businesses and now owns a stake in Twitter itself.

This video is part of the Building43 community which is for people who are fanatical about the Internet.

Original post:
Retweet this: how StockTwits became my favorite Twitter business (thanks to @howardlindzon )

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