Free Access To ‘Streams In Business Report’ This Week Only

To celebrate the launch of Podio tonight (at the Podio Store, 224 6th in San Francisco) I am going to provide free access to my report, Streams In Business, this week only. The report provides in-depth scenario-based evaluations of the following products: Podio, Bantam Live, Cohuman, Flowr, IBM Connections, Mangoapps, Socialcast, and Yammer.

Here’s one comment about Podio, from the report:

The combination of rich user-defined or user-customizable applications and Podio’s mechanisms for easily filtering the datasets being managed by their apps seems to be to be an amazingly powerful environment for managing everyday workflows, and sharing the stream of activities that form the basis of today’s work.

If you’d like to read just the Podio chapter, it is accessible here. It may be helpful to read the scenarios description that I use to evaluate the products in the report, here.

The full report is managed in a Box.net folder, located at http://www.box.net/shared/ko7v7z6gvr and the password to open it is ‘antimony’. Box.net supports download an entire folder, or you can download the files independently.

Please leave comment or questions on this blog post, if you’d like.

Adapting To A New Tempo: ‘Streams In Business’ Research Report Versioning

I have been deep in the investigation of streaming applications designed to be used in business for several months. Think of it as Twitter or Facebook for the enterprise (a list of the companies involved follows), also know as microblogging for the enterprise.

For months I’ve been heads down, evaluating products, getting demos, writing my observations, and basically heading toward publishing a report on the state of the market. The date of publication has slipped a bit, for two very different reasons. First, I have been dealing with a bit of a family crisis, as my very ill father has had to enter an assisted living facility, and is now receiving hospice care. But more pertinent to the study itself, the pace of the technical world has made the research and the report very difficult.

These difficulties also included the obvious fact that the staff of the various product companies are extremely busy. This has led to rescheduling of demos, slipped deadlines on demo materials, and in some cases companies opting out of the study simply because they have no time. (Note: some of the companies in the study are sponsoring my research, but some are not, so money is not a requirement, although it comes with extra benefits, including a chance to review their respective chapter of the report, and a briefing after the report is completed.)

Another factor making the research difficult is that new streaming application companies are popping up all the time. In just the past two months I came across Podio, Cohuman, and Flowr, and all have become involved in the study.

And a third factor is that the products keep changing. While I was writing up the section about Flowr, this week, I logged into my Flowr account to check a detail. I saw that some major user interface changes had taken place, and I sent an email to my contact there asking for updated screenshots for the chapter. I am still awaiting them, but I will likely get them in the next few days. However, by that time, something equally significant may have happened on Yammer, or BantamLive. I might have to turn around and ask those companies for updates. And so on.

It is these last two factors that are the most challenging, as an increasing tempo and rate of innovation in this hot corner of the social business marketplace makes pinning down the players in a short window of time very difficult.

I had a insight the other morning, in that semi-asleep moment just before fully waking up. I saw the report as a version, just like the products that I am reviewing.

So rather than trying to be completely comprehensive, and issuing the report once per year, I am going over to a more agile model.

The report will be versioned, and the first version — coming out the week after next — will be version 2010.1. I have decided to make the calendar year the prefix of the versioning scheme, for simplicity’s sake. I plan to release new versions every six to eight weeks (2010.2, 2011.1, etc.), adding new product reviews and updating others, as major updates in the streaming apps are announced or released.

Here’s the outline of the report, version 2010.1:

The Streams In Business Research Report 2010.1

preface

Introduction — A summary of the subject, the approach taken, and the scenarios used to evaluate the products (see Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product Evaluation).

Product Evaluations: Positioning, Scenario-based Evaluation, and Conclusions for the following products

• BantamLive
• Coffee Bean Technology
• Cohuman
• Flowr
• IBM Connections
• MangoApps
• Newsgator
• Podio
• Socialcast
• Yammer

Conclusions

• Dimensions of Differentiation
• Communication 
• Coordination
• Context
• Community
• Complement
• What’s Ahead

In upcoming versions, I hope to include other competitors such as Salesforce Chatter, Socialtext, Traction Software, Huddle, BlueKiwi, Brainpark, Jive Software, and others too many to mention. That is a function of their ability to work with me on the evaluation, though.

What Does This Mean To A Report Buyer?

Obviously, this rapid change in the market has repercussions for buyers of the report (and buyers of the products, as well). For example, Betty Ling might buy a copy of the report on 5 November, and by 15 December new product releases may come along to change her thinking about which product might be the best for her company.

Since we can’t put a brake on the market, We can offer the buyer the opportunity to stay up with it. So, I am going to modify my pricing model to allow a buyer three versions of the report. So Betty could download the 2010.2 version of the report in December, and also a copy of the 2011.4 report in June 2011, just to see what’s out there.

A buyer will received the current version at the time of purchase, and then can request up to two more copies via email, and those versions will be sent along. Additional versions will be available for an additional fee.

The report subscription — up to three copies within 12 calendar months from initial purchase — is $195, and this include access to all free and for fee webinars that I hold on the topic.

For information on the report and the webinars, sign up for the mailing list, here. We will be mailing out updates in the next week about the report and webinars.

Streams In Business: Yammer and Bantam Live Announcements

I have been head down on a project this summer, and I am very excited about what will soon coming to light. The Streams In Business Study And Report (formerly Microstreams In Business) has had me focused pretty exclusively all summer on a very innovative group of products, all sharing common characteristics and planned userbase: streaming applications applied in the context of business.

Just to clarify what is a streaming application, an excerpt from the upcoming report:

What Is A Stream And How Is It Different?

A ‘stream’ is the implementation of a social model of interaction, relationship, and communication. Social tools are generally based on the idealization of social networks, in which people connect to other people in many ways. John might connect with Mary, who also connects to Ahmed, but John may not know or connect to Ahmed.

Streams are based on directed networks, where John ‘follows’ Mary but Mary may not ‘follow’ John back. This is derived from the public blogging model, where authors publish their work freely and anyone may choose to read those works, or to subscribe to a feed from that blog. In a sense, streams are an extension, or advance, on the basic publishing model of blogs. This is why some have chosen to call streaming ‘microblogging’, focusing on the similarity of publishing involved, and making a distinction between long-format blogging and short-format ‘microblogging’. This distinction may not be the most productive one, especially in the business context.

So, streams are based on directed networks that emulate or parallel social networks. Relative to any user, there are upstream contacts (those that the user follows, ‘following’), and the downstream contacts (those that are following the user, ‘followers’). Note that a follower can be followed, as well.

There is growing interest in the use of these technologies, as I discovered with a poll earlier in the year. But just as important is the level of innovation going on in the space. These week, two of the companies I have researched for the report made big announcements

Yammer — It has been two years since Yammer debuted at TechCrunch50, and won best of show. This week at TechCrunch Disrupt the company announced the ‘new’ Yammer, with a bunch of new features:

The New Yammer Is Here!

Since our inception, Yammer has had a public API, allowing third parties to develop applications on top of Yammer. We’ve now expanded to a full platform, on which third party companies can develop new applications and integrate existing enterprise apps. We’ve built several of our own applications that are available today:

• Polls – Tap the wisdom of crowds by quickly and easily creating a poll and asking co-workers to identify the best option
• Questions – Ask co-workers and quickly find answers in a searchable knowledgebase
• Events – Invite co-workers to company or group events and track responses.  Download event into Microsoft Outlook or Google calendar
• Links – Share URLs with co-workers in a form that displays web content such as videos and images inline

Soon we’ll add other applications to the list including Ideas and Tasks. In addition to our own applications, we’re partnering with the following companies who are building applications that integrate with Yammer. 

• Zendesk for Customer Support – Attach a Zendesk ticket to a Yammer message so that all customer service agents can collaborate and resolve issues quickly
• Box.net for Enterprise Content Management – Reference files from Box.net’s leading cloud content management solution in Yammer messages
• Crocodoc for Document Mark Up and Review – Collaboratively highlight and comment on PDFs, Word documents, images and other files that are attached to Yammer messages
• Lithium for Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) – Enables employees to share and discuss feedback from brand influencers and customer conversations that take place in Lithium’s leading customer community solutions
• Expensify for Online Expense Report Management – Notify the appropriate people when an expense report requires action

I think that Yammer’s notion of becoming a platform for other services to plug into is interesting, but I’d like to see an interoperability protocol rather than a bunch of competing APIs from a slew of platform companies.

Positioning around the platform idea is a sign of the rapid maturation of this marketplace, though, and I bet that in a subsequent iteration of my Streams In Business study I will be evaluating APIs of platform competitors, like Podio, that I saw earlier this week for the first time.

[And candidly, I continue to wonder why it took Yammer two years to implement tasks.]

Bantam Live — Bantam Live is a NYC-based start-up that has integrated a full twitter client into their stream CRM solution:

via BusinessWire

The new offering is at no extra charge to existing plans. Features include:

- Twitter Functionality: Tweeting, replies, timeline, profile, @mentions, retweets, saved searches, lists, following/follower stats, favorites, tweet emailing, etc. are now all here in a tabbed interface, similar to the new Twitter site. The essential communication features of how people use Twitter to interact are now within the social CRM app of Bantam Live.

- Contact Management: Users can create new contact names and profiles from Twitter within Bantam Live with one click. First name, last name, headshot and bio are automatically populated along with tags in a newly created contact record page in Bantam Live that embeds the contact’s live Twitter feed.

- CRM and Activity Stream Collaboration: Users can search for keywords in tweets and discover new prospects, customers, and partners. Replying directly, importing new contact names and their tweet content, commenting on tweets to team members, creating and assigning tasks to coworkers, and notifying coworkers of such activity are features that are now available. All activity is recorded in the history section (next to the contact’s live Twitter feed tab) on a contact record page in Bantam Live. Moreover, all activity is displayed in the Bantam Live activity stream for team members to monitor and interact.

Bantam Live’s focus is to help small businesses that are using Twitter as upstream input to their sales outreach activities. A Bantam Live user might discover someone in Twitter complaining about a competitor’s product, and use that as an opportunity to find out more from the dissatisfied customer. That could lead to an internal work flow, like analyzing the information, or kicking off a sales effort, all managed within Bantam Live.

It’s obvious that open social contexts like Twitter naturally lend themselves to being augmented or extended with other streaming applications, in the case of Bantam Live, one focused on sales. I think this trend is going to be huge.

For example, only today, I had a demo of UberVu, which takes a very similar approach — allowing users to ‘listen’ to Twitter and other streaming sources and to converse with the individuals making the posts — but all in the context of a sophisticated and rich analytics framework. Ubervu users can post information, and task others to take action based on it, all in the context of a visually rich context for marketing and business intelligence.

As I said, these advances only underscore the point I made earlier: these streaming tools represent a sweeping change for the better in the business context, and their adoption rate is likely to accelerate as these tools grow in capabilities and with rising awareness of their potential in the marketplace.

_

Update on the Study and Report

The Streams In Business Study And Report (formerly Microstreams In Business) project has been delayed, partly because of unusual demands on my time because of unforeseen family issues, and party because I have been coming across new companies with very innovative technologies that I wanted to research and get into the report.

The study has focused on the following technologies, with sponsorship from those denoted with an asterisk. A number of companies that I contacted declined to be involved. Note that involvement requires only that the company undertake to mock up the scenarios that I outlined in Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product Evaluation.

Products:

• BantamLive*
• BlueKiwi
• Coffeebean Technology*
• CoHuman*
• Flowr
• Huddle
• IBM Connections*
• Mangospring
• Newsgator*
• Socialcast*
• Traction Software
• Yammer*

I am planning to complete the report in the next week or so, and to schedule a series of free webinars digging into various aspects of the technologies revealed in depth by the scenarios involved.

If you are interested in learning more about the report or webinars, click here.

Surrender To The Stream, And Be Happy

Streaming apps — based on the open follower model, or variants of it — will be the dominant motif of the web for the foreseeable future. And this is having an impact on everything that touches it, including our sense of time.

A great deal of research has shown that that our perception of time is quite malleable. For example, we have all experienced boredom as making the clock slow, and, an the other hand, how time seems to move more quickly during periods of happiness or excitement. Can this be exploited to make work more fun?

Robert Levin, A Geography Of Time

Psychologists and planners have sometimes used the “time flies” phenomenon to their advantage. In one project, for example, psychologist Robert Meade was able to improve workers’ morale by speeding up the psychological clock. Meade took advantage of the fact that that time is experienced as shorter when people believe that they are making progress toward a goal. The sense of progress, he found, can be enhanced through simple procedures such as establishing a definite end point to the task and providing incentives to reach those goals. Before his experiment, Meade herad comments from workers like “It sees like the day would never end” or “It seems like I’ve been here all day but it’s not even lunchtime yet.” After establishing a sense of progress there were proclamations like “The day went by so quickly — it seems like I just got started.” It is difficult to know, of course, to what extent speeding up the passage of time led to a more pleasant experience  or vice versa. The direction of cause and effect, however, is less important than the net effect on workers’ well-being. Employers might be pleased to note that these increases in morale are often accompanied by accelerate production.

Management may have a hard time accepting the soft benefits of time compression and the way that tools modify our consciousness, but they will readily accept improvement in productivity and work attitudes.

One of the effects of participating in open streaming apps (like Twitter) as part of your workday, or the use streaming apps specifically designed for business use (like IBM Connections, Yammer, or the myriad other offerings) is how it shifts users’ perceptions of time, in the way that Meade research suggests.

Simply by providing a context in which users establish what they are working on, and posting notes about their progress — or asking other for help to make progress — and receiving feedback as they make progress, workers using streaming apps are likely to experience time as moving more quickly. This is either associated in our minds with other experiences that make us happy, or directly makes us happy. In either case, it seems fairly obvious that users are happier when exposed to social work contexts with these characteristics.

Management may have a hard time accepting the soft benefits of time compression and the way that tools modify our consciousness, but they will readily accept improvement in productivity and work attitudes.

Note that incentives can be amazingly minimal: just the positive regard of close contacts can be enough.

And the same holds true in our activities outside of the workplace. To be happy, it seems that we simply can share our near-term goals and our progress in reaching them with our friends and family in real time, not just stretched over weeks or months. Learning how to knit, or play the blues, or performing your next Karate kata with a groups of similarly involved others makes time pass more quickly.

There is also ample evidence to show that we learm more and make better decisions when we are engaged and happy, too. so this turns out to be a fairly virtuous cycle.

So, the next time someone suggests you are doing something childish, illegitimate or almost immoral by Twittering what you are up to, tell them about Meade’s research. And then get back to the stream.

Yammer And The Federation Of Work: Going The Wrong Way

Yammer has decided that they are going to go down the old Basecamp path, and force people who work with different companies to have separate logins:

via email

Dear Stowe,

We want to make you aware of a change to Yammer that will have an impact on you. You currently have more than one email address registered to your Yammer account. We’ve decided to move to a one-email-per-account model. This means that we will soon remove secondary email address(es) from your account.

Why are we doing this?

As Yammer evaluates its plans for future product features, we’ve realized that allowing users to have more than one email address linked to their account could result in potential problems. For example, admins from different networks might seek to apply conflicting settings to an account which is in both networks. There could also be confusion between work and personal Yammer accounts. We believe that cleanly separating Yammer accounts based on one email address per account is the best way to avoid these problems from occurring in the future.

How does this affect you?

• We will create a separate Yammer account for each of the following company email addresses that you have: stowe@js-kit.com and stowe@ninety10group.com
• When you want to switch between these Yammer accounts you must first log out and then log in with one of your other email addresses.
• Your same password will be securely copied to each of your new accounts.
• Soon, our desktop and iPhone applications will allow you to be logged into more than one account at the same time. Just register each account on the application and you will be able to toggle between accounts.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact help@yammer.com

We appreciate your patience, and apologize for any inconvenience that this change causes you.

Thanks for using Yammer,

The Yammer Team

This is a particularly bad move. First of all, it will lead to the same Federation of Work problems that I wrote about years ago vis-a-vis Basecamp:

Basecamp and The Federation Of Work

I have run up against what I think is a basic flaw in the Basecamp model.

Many times in the past few months, I have started a project up with a group, or groups, who like me are already using Basecamp. The problem that arises: Whose Basecamp implementation to use?

I would, of course, rather manage projects that I am involved with in my own Basecamp instance, while the others have the same perspective. But what happens, quickly, is that I have a bunch of memberships in other Basecamp projects, which do not collate into a coherent single view.

What’s missing is a fundamental insight: the federation of work.

Basecamp lacks the notion of federating project work. While I can invite my pal, Greg Narain, to join a project I am running, Basecamp is only willing to consider Greg as another individual, not as the owner of his own Basecamp instance. As a result, Greg must login to my instance to participate, and the status of the project does not show up on his dashboard.

The solution? 37 Signals should rework their participation model to reflect their new-found success: there are thousands of Basecamp users out there, and more of us will be running into this limitation. More important, perhaps, is that a federated model more accurately reflects the nature of the world. I am involved in a dozen or so projects, and I would like to have a single, coherent view of what’s going on across the board, as do all over my partners-in-crime.

Certainly, a single company still needs to be the administrator for each Basecamp project, but that doesn’t mean that we need to login at ten different instances everyday.

Basecamp should look at the federation model of Jabber and other successful bottom-up, federated tools. Within Jabber, I can login to my local server, and IM with any other trusted server in the world. The servers simply have to establish a trust relationship. In the Basecamp world, I should be able to invite Greg to participate in a project, and when he agrees, he should be able to simply point at his own Basecamp instance, rather than having to create a brand new, easily forgotten login.

At any rate, Jason and company are well-known for rejecting new features, but this is more than that, this is a fundamental need that should have been forseen from the start. And, in a way, it’s just another indicator of the success that the product enjoys.

When I wrote that in March 2006 it led to an argument with Jason Fried of 37signals, who basically said I was an edge case. I pointed out that success would lead to more of this sort of use — individuals working with many project groups in many companies. I said he would have to fix this falw, and years later they hacked an afterthought onto Basecamp to make it easier to switch accounts.

Yammer is headed down the sam cul-de-sac. This is a bad move, and one that irks me personally since I sketched out a vision of federated businesses collaborating through Yammer a year ago to the CEO, David Sachs. Obviously, I didn’t make the case persuasively enough.

Consider this idea. Imagine tens of thousands of companies that are managing work using a service like Yammer. Imagine if a company, AdjectiveNoun, could post a request for proposal, and distribute that to all companies and individuals that are following the company. Responses to the RFP could be directed to a defined context in AdjectiveNoun’s Yammer implementation, and would be streamed to AdjectiveNoun staff.

I think this is a breakthrough idea, and the first company to do this well will explode.

But you can’t get there without a federated model of work, and a global namespace. So Yammer is going to ultimately unjigger this mess they are creating. Probably not until some upstart comes along to upset things.

Maybe I’ll see one this week at Techcrunch Disrupt, who knows?

Microstreams In Business: Research Study And Report

Over the next few months, I will be developing a report on the use of microstreams in the business context, called Social Architecture: Microstreams In Business. I plan to analyze the promise and actual benefits of streaming applications in the business context.

The report will provide in-depth review and analysis of general purpose technologies such as Twitter and Facebook in the business setting, but will dig deep into offerings intended specifically for the business, such as Yammer, Salesforce.com Chatter, Threadbox, SocialText Signals, Workstreamer, Socialcast, Socialwok, Present.ly, Shareflow, BantamLive, and others.

Our goal is to determine key factors that these applications are focused on, and what the important differences are between them, to help business users make the best choice when considering a microstreaming (or microblogging) tool.

Subscribers to the Microstreams In Business research will receive

• a copy of the final report, planned for late August 2010 release;
• a two-hour web briefing discussing the findings and their application to the specific company’s needs.

The full research sponsorship is $500.

Cristóbal Conde on The Social Business

Although he never uses the term, Cristobal Conde really understands the nature of the social business, starting with the individual, the use of social tools, and the new role of management:

This interview with Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Dan Neville/The New York Times

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?

A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.

Q. Why did that shift occur?

A. I would say two things. One is just the massive information revolution. But equally important is the fact that before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

Q. How do you create that culture?

A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

Q. How long have you used it?

A.
About seven months. By having technologies that allow people to see
what others are doing, share information, collaborate, brag about their
successes — that is what flattens the organization. I think the role of
the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed
to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of
the show, rather than being the lead.

I think too many bosses
think that their job is to be the lead, and I don’t. By creating an
atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get
a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people
they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

Q. What kind of things do you write on Yammer?

A.
I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see
more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what
are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are
their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now,
what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a
broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a
long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too
formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it
takes.

A free flow of information is an incredible tool because
I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the
C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think
about them.”

via www.nytimes.com

This is a must read piece for anyone wondering about the benefits of social tools, and the impact that a tuned-in senior executive can have on a organization.

Conde paints an unflattering portrait of himself as having been an autocratic workaholic, but he realized that no matter how smart he was he couldn’t make every decision in a business with more than a few hundred employees. It wouldn’t scale. But he thought it through and moved to a much more decentralized organization with very high levels of autonomy, which I feel is one of the defining characteristics of a social business (see Defining Social Business).

TechCrunch50: What Ever Happened To Awesome?

[I am returning to my old 3 threes review format for conferences, starting with this week’s TechCrunch50. This format involves a description of the three most interesting, challenging, or compelling companies, people, and ideas from the event.]

What ever happened to awesome?

Maybe it’s just me getting old and curdudgeonly, but I had hoped that I would see 10 or so really interesting products debuted at TechCrunch50. Instead, the most fun I had was talking to returnees (like David Sachs of Yammer) and hearing what their plans were for third generation products. The awesome start-ups just weren’t there.

Three Companies

Microsoft (Bing) — It’s unusual for me to praise Microsoft, but the newly announced Bing Visual Search was very impressive: the first Microsoft technology I’ve really imagined using since OneNote.

The service arrays results of certain searches in tables of images — like womens shoes, or other products — and provides controls to allow the searcher to change characteristics unique to the search domain to further refine the search results. Very impressive.

Threadsy — I think that the first company to come up with the right way to allow infovores (or ‘onfovores’) to manage their ever-expanding streams of links, recommendations and commentary will become the next big thing. No one so far has cracked that code. I thought that Threadsy was the best candidate at the show, however. And the company was runner-up in the final judging, so I guess others agreed.

AnyClip — I love the idea of being able to access any scene in any movie, since I am constantly pulling out movie references. AnyClip seems geared to supporting my addiction in exactly that way. As the judges said at the presentation, if they can work out all the agreements with the studios this is going to be a great service. And the demo showed that it really worked.

Three People

Mike Arrington/Jason Calacanis — Mike Arrington’s meltdown in the final 20 minutes of the conference was extremely odd (although consonant with Arrington’s Murdoch-like media baron persona), and highlighted Jason Calacanis’ showmanship, by contrast. I found myself wondering if the meltdown was staged, at first, but I guess it wasn’t just a ploy for press attention, but appears to be a real business breakdown between the two, and it means the end of Techcrunch50 as a conference, apprently.

George Zachary — A difficult choice for the best judge, considering that the group including Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Bradley Horowitz, Sean Parker, and a dozen other luminaries. Chamillionaire proved himself capable of holding his own, in this crowd, by the way.

Penn Gillette — Penn Gillette appeared to show off his new iPhone app, which seemed pretty lame. However, he wins the award for his one liner. When asked what he was going to do next, which was intended as a question regarding the business behind the app, he responded “I guess I will go to Vegas and shoot some guns at my partner.”

Three Ideas

Dolls Are Scary — I found the obsession with toys and dolls creepy (see TechCrunch 50: Digital Bedtime Stories Are Icky). More importantly, showcasing this niche, as opposed to general purpose Web 2.0 apps, suggested to me that we aren’t seeing as many products intended to be worldbeaters.

Maybe 50 Is Too Many? — Cramming 50 companies into two days meant that the conference started early, ran late, and the companies only had 6 minutes for their pitches. Despite 50 sounding like a small number, I came away feeling like ten or fifteen less — like the original TechCrunch40 — might have been better. Moot now, since the event seems to be headed for the dustbin of history.

The Flow Is Still A Torrent — No one has solved the stream problem: how to effectively throttle the stream so that people can stay on top without drowning. It might be interesting if there was a conference dedicated just to this issue, and showcasing various approaches. (Jason… are you listening? You don’t need Arrington for this.)

Techcrunch50 in Retrospect

So, a few days have passed. I have given away all the tchotchkes and washed all the tshirts (Zark get’s kudos for best shirt, by the way). Looking back, it really didn’t amount to much. No staggeringly beautiful SlideRocket, no enterprise-suitable Yammer, no crowd-pleasing Twitter client breakthrough.

Perhaps its a sign of the times. San Francisco and the attendant tech scene is under the cloud of the econolypse. Despite the bonhomie and attempts at pressing on, the layoffs, stillborn companies, and career wreckage is taking a toll. The investors and entrepreneurs that were preaching thrift and ‘longer runway’ last fall seem to be in a perpetual state of enforced optimism, but the tech start-up scene seems low energy now.

The high points for me were discussions with more established companies, like Yammer, and hearing what David Sachs, their CEO, is contemplating for next year and beyond. Or seeing serial entrepreneur Brian Alvey, former CTO of Weblogsinc, take another run at blogging with his Crowd Fusion. While these are young companies, they are not blazing a trail in the wilderness, defining a new product category.

So maybe it’s a time of consolidation and small advances. If so, Techcrunch 50 was the perfect show.