With InTooch, Instantly Turn New Connections Into Relationships That Matter

For those of you who go to a lot of conferences and events like I do, collecting business cards, exchanging data and keeping in touch with people after the fact is a daunting task.

Sure, there are apps who have promised to faciliate the exchange of information in the past, but most require both people to have the app installed or the need to work in some unnatural and awkward way.

And, then there's card scanners. I've invested in three over the years and two of the three ended up in a yard sale not so long ago. 

The other one I donated to Goodwill. 

Bottom line, they're not accurate so you're stuck stuck fixing all the mistakes or retyping the contact info into your database for the second and third time.

I recently started working with a French-founded start-up called InTooch who is now based in Silicon Valley. 

InTooch is a mobile application that allows you to instantly turn people you meet into personal and business relationships that matter.

Selected to present their technological innovation with over 75 other companies on the DEMO Fall stage this week, their demo will be included in the social media category.

Did you realize that of all the people you meet at a conference or even in a personal situation, you won't stay in touch with 85% of them? InTooch aims to not just decrease that number but improve those relationships using their app.

The great thing about the product is that it's easy, it's fast and it's free. Instantly, the moment you meet, the InTooch social connector exchanges contact information and connects you on your preferred social networks on the fly.

While many apps have tried to solve the contact update and data overload problem, most require both people to have the app installed for it to work, or they involve connecting in an awkward way.

In doing research about how people around the world stay connected, they discovered that the majority call each other to exchange numbers in real time more than they connect on social networks and exchange a business cards. InTooch takes it a step further by allowing people to share more than just numbers in real time, including your social data.

 How it Works:

Whenever you meet someone you want to stay in touch with, simply call their cell. The app detects that you have called someone for the first time and prompts you automatically to exchange your business or personal contact information.  

 

Works on Any Receiving Device: you can send and receive new contact information regardless of what phone the other person has. If the other person doesn’t have InTooch, it simply sends a link and the rest is done seamlessly through their social connector technology.

 Social Network Integration: In just one call, you can connect through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. There’s no need to search for a contact in each social network nor to send invitations – connections are simply established on the fly.

No Need for Both Parties to Have the App: unlike so many solutions which require both parties to have the app installed to work, InTooch works regardless of whether the person you just met has it on their phone, making it the most natural, straight forward and easy way to share your personal or business details.  Obviously if the other person has the app, exchanging data is even faster.

 New Connection Highlights and Personal Match Score: For personal encounters, InTooch brings augmented reality to your connections, alerting you to all the things you have in common with another person (friends, places you visited, music, movies you like, social network info, check-ins, interests you share) so you can instantly engage in mutually interesting conversations.

It also provides a matching score based on an algorithm which calculates the probability of how well you should get along with that person.

Geo-Tagging of New Connections: since it’s much easier to remember where and when you met someone than his/her name, InTooch automatically tags the location of the initial connection, so you also can search for people by when and where you met them.

Privacy (Control What Data Your Share): InTooch respects your privacy, allowing you to customize what information you want to share and with whom.

InTooch is available for download at http://www.intooch.com and is free for users. Currently, InTooch works with both the Android and the iPhone (except for iOS6), with support for iOS6, other platforms and mobile devices coming later this year.

 

8 Commerce Apps Strut Their Stuff at DEMO 2012

On the DEMO Fall 2012 stage this afternoon, eight commerce apps showed off their latest and greatest at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, CA.

Invenia announced the launch of ENSAFER, an innovative cloud encryption service. Ensafer offers users of Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive and alike, to encrypt their data integrated in their service of choice, with all complexity hidden. Ensafer is end-to-end encryption technology, solving an unsolved demand -- the encryption of files as you store, share and collaborate with them in the cloud. They peg themselves as "security by design."

Billing itself as the Expedia for telecom deals, WIRESURFER online marketplace provides small and medium businesses with an easy way to research telecom providers and their promotions as well as order services from national carriers for free.

They provide a map so you can click on any part of the country to find the best deals nationwide and the layout is slick and clean, so you can compare deals side-by-side. Using wiresurfer, SMBs can compare the offerings from national carriers including AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast Business Services, EarthLink, InterCall, tw telecom, Windstream and XO Communications.  

eBREVIA unveiled something they're calling the eDiligence Accelerator. The company's initial software employs natural language processing technology developed at Columbia University to assist attorneys and business professionals in analyzing, extracting information from, and summarizing legal documents.

Then we moved to fashion. Well, sort of. THREADMATCHER is a social commerce website that allows users to curate the clothes that they both own and wish into virtual closets, and get relevant recommendations by following the curation of others who share as similar style.

The team says, "ThreadMatcher provides the ultimate personalized shopping experience. To users, it's a style expansion. By following the curation of others who share a similar style, users can find out what's new at their favorite brands as well as discover other products and brands that they wouldn't have otherwise known -- all this directly from people whose style they trust."

Like I said, it doesn't mean the site is design and fashion conscious, but it does curate people with like-fashion interests. It seems like a perfect app for Silicon Valley geeks who don't have a clue how to dress.

Other apps shown in the Commerce section included Plus2 Technologies, Plutus Software, Trinity Group and Gaxsys.

 

Below, entrepreneurs and investors talk about the apps they just saw: Tony Conrad, Founder/Partner, about.me/True Ventures, Jason Johnson, Managing Partner, Founders Den Harshul Sanghi, Managing Partner, American Express Ventures and Seth Sternberg, PM Director G+ Platform, Google. The panel was moderated by VentureBeat writer Meghan Kelly.

 

 

Intel Capital Global Summit Invests in 10 Innovative Tech Companies

Former Facebook's Kevin Colleran: Insider View Mixed with Humor

Everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg's name and and if you live in Silcon Valley, you likely know a handful of other senior level Facebook execs as well.

In Kentucky, that's not the case, nor is it the case in other parts of the world.

I was surprised I had not run into Boston-based Kevin Calleran, Facebook's 7th employee in my circles before now....now being this past week in of all places, Kentucky. That said, I met the CTO of the White House for the first time in Louisville at Idea's Festival annual event - same time, same place a year ago.

Kevin did a l'il history of Facebook to a less social media savvy crowd than he may be accustomed to in Silicon Valley or Boston. Most people in the room were Facebook users however, which was a mix of high school and college students, academics, innovators, technologists, researchers, artists and local business owners.

Kevin's a natural sales guy and no surprise that its his background and raison d'etre. He's a great storyteller and adds a lot of humor throughout his talk, all done in a very informal style. In the early days, he ran the East Coast office out of his New York City apartment for months before meeting Zuckerberg for the first time. He laughed as he shared stories of the first two years, most of which captured humorous early stage moments.

He moved onto memories....you know, the Facebook kind. Showing a video of a Facebook employee who captured every moment of his life in his timeline (from birth and graduation to marriage, his child being born and beyond, Kevin notes that his only recollection of his grandparents is the four black and white photos in his house.

While he's no longer officially at Facebook, he's certain still a positive spokesperson for the company. He says of Mark's vision: "Mark never wants 'that to ever happen again. Mark feels that every piece of our life should be chronicled." 

He then went deeper into the company's history, what Facebook was and where it is today. A few of the latest stats according to Kevin's data:

• There are now 955 million active users
• Instagram just passed 100 million users
• 552 million daily active users on average
• 543 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in June 2012
• Facebook is now translated into over 85 languages and has nearly 4,000 employees.

He showed the game that was created over a forty hour period and how Facebook was thereafter translated into 85+ languages. When they launched the translation app, 95% of the site got translated into French in less than 24 hours.

He also heavily encouraged hackathons and believes every company should do them. He says that some of the best products they have ever shipped have come from an all nighter coding event. In other words, "academics meet coder types all night long and great ideas have come out of it."

In addition to a trend of people moving to more of an 'asset-free life,' he shared some of the Emerging Themes are in technology: 

Mobile:

• Rent or lease only: rather than own something, almost everthing is available to lease or rent, so there's a trend away from owning material things.
• The world is moving mobile. 31.5% of U.S. households are mobile only and users log on an average of 77 minutes per day using apps on their smartphone.
• 40% of Facebook's traffic is mobile-specific.

Transportation Reinvented:

• Uber (see my review on Uber when it launched in Paris)
• Parking Panda (shows nearby parking garages and space availability)
• Lyft (ride-share program)

Rental Culture:

• Zip car (rent by the hour for when you need it)
• Airbnb (is doing a million room nights, people are renting out their homes while they're on the road)
• Spotify (there's no reason to own music anymore when you can pay $10 a month to have access to any music you want)

Distributed Workforce: (technology enabled entrepreneurship/self employment & task entrepreneurs)

• Task Rabbit (you can outsource work to people who can do a task for you within your zip code)
• Cherry (a new request a car wash app. The idea is that you park your car at work or home and you put up the address where your car is parked and someone will come and wash your car for you)
• Instacart (you can get people to your shopping for you)

Now in its Third Year, Tech4Africa Hits Johannesburg Next Month

Now in its third year, Tech4Africa is a premier mobile, web and emerging technology event held in Johannesburg on October 31-November 1 at The Indaba Hotel, Gauteng.

The theme is “Unlocking the next billion consumers” and sessions will be focused around mobile and content, the enterprise opportunity, entrepreneurship and financing, social business and innovation.

The Developer Day and Hackathon on the kick off day includes three tracks: a day on Agile software development, a Hackathon with sessions on Ruby on Rails, Python, Raspberry Pi, PhP etc., as well as workshops for social media marketers on apps ecosystem and monetization.  

Keynote speakers include IBM's Tom Rosemalia and Ralph Simon of Mobilium, with other speakers being Amolo Ng'weno, MD of Digital Divide Data in Kenya; Neal Ford, Director, Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks; Vérone Mankou, CEO of Way-C in the Democratic Republic of Congo; Emma Kaye, CEO of Bozza, Josh Adler, social entrepreneur and others.

IBM's Global Entrepreneurship Programme has been brought into the Tech4Africa 2012 agenda and Claudia Fan Munce, Managing Director at IBM Venture Capital Group, will introduce GEP and an award programme. Tech4Africa 2012 will also be running Ignite again - a start-up workshop and pitching competition, which is being run by AngelHub and Deloitte.

A Google G+ Hangout will be held live at the conference so that tech hubs from around Africa can be part of the conference and so that delegates can interact with a panel, asking questions and finding out more about what is happening on the ground in Senegal, Liberia, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, Kenya, Congo and other parts of Africa.

Disclosure: we are a media partner of the event.

Reid Hoffman on Lessons Learned Over 20 Years

Reid Hoffman is one of my favorite entrepreneurs in the technology industry. 

I was introduced to him and 'his world' when I first moved to California six or so years ago. There was even a time I was talking to LinkedIn about working with them though it now seems like it was another lifetime. Things move so quickly in Silicon Valley.

Some people decide to move west for access to technology and money, and so they can work with the smartest and brightest people in the industry'. For me, since I'm more of an artist tha a geek, a big part of it was the opportunity to work with "the smart and bright" but it was also a lifestyle and attitude decision.

Silicon Valley represented a fresher, more aggressive, dive in or die approach to business and entrepreneurship that was intoxicating after working in Boston where most company execs took a conservative and apprehensive approach more often than not, operating from a place of fear rather than opportunity.

And, given that I was in the technology industry, doing my thing here only seemed natural. People who personified the best in entrepreneurial attitude in the early days for me were people like Jeff Hawkins, Dick Costolo (he was building Feedburner at the time), and Reid Hoffman.

It was 'this mindset' that was prevalent when I moved west that Reid emphasized this past week in a fireside chat in San Francisco with Panda Daily's Sarah Lacy.

One of the things that I really like about Sarah Lacy's interview style is that she likes to be and "is" provocative and isn't afraid of 'owning it.' Men never seem to get slaughtered for this approach, but women often do, and playing in a world where Hollywood and creativity meets tech and business, I think Sarah pulls this off consistently well.

She asked him about the very analytic and organized way he approached his career. Reid took a more methodical and structured path than so many others I was inspired by at the time, something he admitted to when Lacy took us through his career and myriad of start-ups. He said he made a list of all the skills he'd need to run a company and went through acquiring them one-by-one: from Apple's eWorld project, Fujitsu and SocialNet to PayPal and LinkedIn and everything in between.

"Entrepreneurship is about jumping off a cliff," Reid says. "You have to figure out what kind of founder you are: Design, Product or Engineering? Once you know, then acquire the other skills you need to get to the next level." For him, it was product management early on in his career. 

When you start out as an entrepreneur reminds Reid, "you're never going to know the right thing to do all the time." Of his PayPal days, he laughed as he referenced a Peter Thiel quote who had said "I've never learned so much in my life except between 2 and 3 years old." Adds Reid, "If you're not red lining and failing enough, you're not learning enough. Don't beat yourself up and have to succeed all the time."

Advice he shared from his start-ups and things all entrepreneurs should think about:

1. Think about how your product will evolve and plan for it.

2. Think about how and where you'll raise your next round as soon as you've finished raising your first round. If you're not, you'll die.

3. Hire people with deep expertise in areas you don't have but really need. 

4. Hire really fast learners - this is more important with early stage start-ups than someone who has 20 years of experience but may not be a fast learner and can pivot with you when things go south.

5. Hire people who are smart collaborative team players. Ask yourself: can they navigate, learn and adapt quickly and shift gears when you change a strategy overnight. He referred to the fact that PayPal had so many near death experiences.

6. Find something unique and new or be first or second. A Groupon variation could work, but not a third or fourth one.

7. Three things you must have is virality, SEO and differentiators so you can build a set of products that can be built into an ecosystem.

8. You should always have a mindset of being terrified. Be paranoid, especially as a developer. (Note: he subscribes to belief that only the paranoid survive).

9. On choosing your team, go for people who share your vision and can go with you through the bad and the good times.

10. Build a team with people you simply can't 'hire.' (I LOVED THIS ONE and it is so so true).

One of the funniest and truest analogies he brought up was how much creating a team and bringing on an investor for a start-up was like a "shotgun marriage." He says with a grin, "Let's have dinner a couple of times, sign a paper and get married. Then you start running very fast, together and you all have to get along. If the alignment isn't there and you can't get along, it's not going to last."

We moved into company experience and opinions, which included both successes and failures.

In the early days of PayPal, the founders (Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk & Luke Nosek) had different ideas of what PayPal 'should be'. He said, "company direction changed often...we pivoted so many times, that it took us awhile to figure out what PayPal needed to be to sustain itself. Staying independent was highly risky given where we were at."

He says of Friendster, "they failed to get their team to operate well. They also had two minute load times which is essentially like saying F-U, go away."

On Tribe, he says "they got taken over by a community that was mostly Burning Man."

Of gigs he was most surprised that failed? After pondering for a bit, he said, "probably Digg because they had so many users and they had momentum."

Of products that haven't really progressed since they started? Yahoo Mail was his first answer, but then quickly added, "but maybe Marissa will fix this."

Of things which have accelerated faster than he thought they would? Twitter, which he passed up as an investor and is sorry that he had. "I couldn't understand their motivation early on," he said, but then suddently I got it, 'oh, it's a public sphere of attention gestures."

I had to laugh because it was a much geekier way of saying what I was thinking in those days "geeks with egos and ideas who needed to talk using as few words as possible with symbols that didn't make sense." Obviously Twitter has evolved into something so much broader today and rather than a platform designed by geeks for geeks, among other things, it has become a megaphones for brands.

On Zynga, he says noting that he just came from a board meeting and there were obviously things he couldn't talk about, "they have a lot of money in the bank, social gaming is an important category and matters and they have tons of users." On what he advises the team: "Don't worry about the market and what they're doing, just focus on building out your vision. The game is in front of you."

Lacy asked him if he felt that Zynga went public too early. "No, I don't think so," he says, "because it will take so long to build products and the rest of their vision out. They're going through a bit of a storm, but they have the fortitude and the team to pull through it." One of his funnier moments was when Mark Pincus asked him when games would show up on LinkedIn. "His answer? "Never," he said with a laugh. "It's not our business."

Then, there's the Facebook IPO. Reid says, "they decided they could increase their offering and when you do an IPO, you need to create a positive outlook for the future."

On LinkedIn and their IPO, he says, "we decided to go with the New York Stock Exchange, because we felt that it aligned better with our own brand."

Lacy asked him if he felt that Groupon went public too early?

"It's easy to get sidetracked and distracted with an IPO," he says. "They need to focus on building out new products....and when you have to deal with so much marketing and press, it is easy to get defocused, rather than concentrating on the things that you need to do to make your product better. They mishandled some of the things around the IPO and got distracted, but I think the relationships they have with merchants is better than people think." Like his remarks about Zynga, he adds, "the game is still in front of them."

On whether they should have taken the Google deal. "I'm always bullish...I think it's better to go long."

What about now and in the future? He says he wants to work on things that make a difference in the world. As for what that means to him? While Reid isn't Pierre Omidyar or Tony Tsieh in that he hasn't spend a chunk of his life in a business that honors and invests in businesses for social good, making a difference is what inspires him more than making money. Hear hear.

He serves on the boards of Do Something (an organization for young people taking action), The Weekend to be Named Later, Kiva.org, Mozilla and Endeavor Global an international non-profit development organization that finds and supports high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets.

Reid - thanks for sharing your inspiring words of wisdom and lessons learned.

Cory Doctorow on the Century of War Against Your Computer

Cory Doctorow spoke this week at the LONG NOW Foundation. The topic? A provocative one entitled: The coming century of war against your computer. 

The war against computer freedom will just keep escalating, Doctorow contends. The copyright wars, net neutrality, and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) were early samples of what is to come. Victories in those battles were temporary.

Conflict in the decades ahead will feature ever higher stakes, more convoluted issues, and far more powerful technology. The debate is about how civilization decides to conduct itself and in whose interests.

Stewart Brand's fabulous summary of the event below where Doctorow kicked things off by framing the issue this way: “Computers are everywhere.  They are now something we put our whole bodies into---airplanes, cars---and something we put into our bodies---pacemakers, cochlear implants.  They HAVE to be trustworthy.“

Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: “I can’t let you do that, Dave.” (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubrick’s film “2001.”  That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.)  Who decides who can override whom?

The core issues for Doctorow come down to Human Rights versus Property Rights, Lockdown versus Certainty, and Owners versus mere Users.

Apple computers such as the iPhone are locked down---it lets you run only what Apple trusts.  Android phones let you run only what you trust.  Doctorow has changed his mind in favor of a foundational computer device call the “Trusted Platform Module” (TPM) which provides secure crypto, remote attestation, and sealed storage.  He sees it as a crucial “nub of secure certainty” in your machine.

If it’s your machine, you rule it.  It‘s a Human Right: your computer should not be overridable.  And a Property Right: “you own what you buy, even if it what you do with it pisses off the vendor.”  That’s clear when the Owner and the User are the same person.  What about when they’re not?

There are systems where we really want the authorities to rule---airplanes, nuclear reactors, probably self-driving cars (“as a species we are terrible drivers.”)  The firmware in those machines should be inviolable by users and outside attackers.  But the power of Owners over Users can be deeply troubling, such as in matters of surveillance.

There are powers that want full data on what Users are up to---governments, companies, schools, parents.  Behind your company computer is the IT department and the people they report to.  They want to know all about your email and your web activities, and there is reason for that.  But we need to contemplate the “total and terrifying power of Owners over Users.”

Recognizing that we are necessarily transitory Users of many systems, such as everything involving Cloud computing or storage, Doctorow favors keeping your own box with its own processors and storage.  He strongly favors the democratization and wide distribution of expertise.  As a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who co-sponsored the talk) he supports public defense of freedom in every sort of digital rights issue.

“The potential for abuse in the computer world is large,” Doctorow concluded.  “It will keep getting larger.”

For more information on future LONG NOW Seminars in San Francisco, visit their site. They bring one amazing speaker after another to speak, so it's worth attending one if you haven't and live in California or don't live closeby but can plan a trip around one of their upcoming events.

Photo credit: Oreillynet.com.

 

MobileDay for Connecting to Your Biz World From Some Exotic Spot

You Want to Talk When? It’s happened to the best of us: we plan for months to get away from it all, leaving the laptop and the smartphone back home, while taking in the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, or the coves of Kauai.

But, as you’re setting up your vacation auto-response with one foot out the door, an R&D team manager says they’ll be ready to present early next week, or your coworker explains that he just doesn’t feel comfortable dealing with a client on his own, or your CEO schedules a review at the exact moment of your tee time.

For business professionals, taking off on a jaunt to some remote location is a fleeting reality when people in your business and personal life expect you to be connected all the time.

MobileDay is a new app which launched earlier this month, which provides one-touch access to any conference call in North America, without the need to remember call-in numbers and access codes.

It's great for connecting when you otherwise wouldn't or find difficult to. Need to discuss last month’s business plan with your boss from the top of Deer Valley? Want to review projections with your team from the scuba rental shop in West Palm Beach? Or, outline next steps with product development from the Victorian Grand’s porch at Mackinac Island?

With MobileDay, you can handle this with ease on your smartphone, which surely you'll need for all the cool Geocaching you plan to do with your family on vacation anyway.  

Flipboard's 2nd Anniversary: The Team Celebrates in Palo Alto

Flipboard is turning two years old this weekend and celebrated its anniversary this past week in its Palo Alto CA parking lot with friends, family, employees, investors and Silicon Valley influencers.

For those of you who don't know what Flipboard is, you're missing out on a beautiful online experience. Pegged as a 'social magazine', Flipboard is an app for the iPad, iPod and Android which allows you to view content in a way that is stunningly delicious, where photos and simplicity rule.

Part aggregator and part stunning UI for content you already consume, it was listed in the 50 Best Inventions in 2010 by Time Magazine and they describe the experience: "Flipboard ends the chaos by grabbing updates, photos and links from your friends and other interesting people, then reformatting everything in a wonderfully browsable, magazine-like format." Well said and it's spot on.

The other thing that makes Flipboard such a cool app is the people behind it.

The team is headed by former Tellme head Mike McCue, who is a natural "marketing machine," precisely because he "isn't one."

Mike one of the most genuine, down-to-earth understated entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, with a heart and brain that are equally matched.

So, when the team said c'mon down and celebrate with us, how could I refuse?

They have attracted great talent who want to make a difference in the way we consume content today.

In a world where we're constantly barraged by irrelevant stuff, whether its from social media or websites and blogs, Flipboard lets you dictate what you want to see in a gorgeous format.

The casual outside party held a number of surprises, such as the photo booth where you could get your photograph taken in front of magazine cover, like Rolling Stone. You could also feel ten years old again, while you fished for a miniature teddy bear wearing a Flipboard T-shirt from a machine. And, they had a buffet of pork, beef and chicken barbecue as well as a variety of salads, beer, soda and wine. 

Below Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and Klout's COO Emil Michael 

We all know that Scobleizer aka Robert Scoble is a huge fan of the app :-)

Back to the local touch. Sinister Dexter who has an awesome sound, played blues, rock and hopping jazz for several hours and sadly by the time I wanted to kick off my shoes and swing dance to a number, they were starting to pack away their instruments.

Kudos to the Flipboard team for all of their successes to-date. I, for one, am a fan, and no I sadly don't have any stock or work for them.

Photo credits: team show in car and Emil/Mike shot from Eric Alexander of Flipboard, other photos by Renee Blodgett.

CarWoo! Teams Up With AOL Autos: Consumers Get Best Offer Deals on Cars

This week, CarWoo! announced a partnership with AOL Autos.

How it works: the partnership provides "Best Offer" deals from 10,000+ U.S. dealers to arm buyers with the information needed to quickly and easily negotiate great market prices on the car of their dreams while retaining their privacy.

CarWoo! essentially puts consumers in the driving seat so to speak, allowing them to accept the best bids on cars in an open transparent way so they can get the best price for a new or used car. 

Below is the CarWoo! interface, but gives you an idea of how the system works.