As the scope of the email data breach that affected customers of top companies like Target, Best Buy, J.P. Morgan Chase expands to a point where it could become the biggest of its kind in U.S. history, the company behind the breach, Epsilon, finds itself in hot, boiling hot, waters on Capitol Hill.
Join us on July 31 for our Social Curation Summit in New York, where you'll learn new strategies to connect and engage with your audience using visual communities such as Pinterest, BO.LT, and Tumblr. Speakers include Scott Belsky (Behance), Shane Rahmani (Thrillist), and Elias Roman (Songza Media). Register by June 7 and save. 
I was surprised that Washington, D.C. was crowned the top socially networking city. I guess politicians need to keep on top of their constituents and minute-minute-votes on Capitol Hill. Palo Alto, the home to Facebook headquarters, is nowhere to be found on the top 100 social networked cities.
Spurring the technology and web startup economy, especially in areas outside of the valley, is of particular interest to Social Matchbox, an event bridging entrepreneurs with industry professionals in the DC area. The group’s next event takes place Thursday, August 20th, and will feature the launching of eleven DC startups.
What started out as a job fair for startup founders seeking sweat equity and full-time, paid employees has evolved into a more inclusive event for debuting companies as well as networking with others in respective and cross-fields of interest. With two years of events for the startup community, Social Matchbox is moving its event to a new location and kicking off the autumn season with a renewed sense of encouragement for professionals out there.
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It’s almost time for TECH Cocktail DC 4. Coming up later this month, the 4th TECH Cocktail in DC will be held on Thursday, February 26, from 6:00 – 8:30 pm. The location for TECH Cocktail DC is at LeftBank wired bistro lounge in the Adams Morgan neighborhood.
This is a new location for the TECH Cocktail DC event, but it’s got a laid back vibe to match the casual and welcoming theme that TECH Cocktail is known for. The event is free to attend, as usual, but you’ll still need to RSVP. Get there early enough to grab a drink before it gets too crowded.
The TECH Cocktail series has grown a great deal in the past couple of years, starting in Chicago and making its way across a number of cities, including DC. Hosted by Eric Olson and Frank Gruber, the TECH Cocktail events have proven to be a great way to meet others on the tech scene and get the word out about your company. If you’re interested in sponsoring the event or learning more about TECH Cocktail DC, click here for more details.
Everyone loves a good Tweetup. How about a Tweetup on steroids? That would be called a Twestival. And there will be one in Washington D.C. (among other cities across the world) to help raise funds and awareness for charity: water. Along with 100+ other cities, the Twestival will take place on February 12, 7:00 pm – 11:00 pm. For D.C. attendees, the benefit will take place at Local 16. Click here for more details.
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This morning I wrote about the launch of the BuzzLogic ad network. I also said that we will most definitely begin to see more ad networks launch before consolidation starts to take place. Well here’s another to add to the list! BrandClick is launching an in-text advertising network which “tags specific brand name keyworks and creates links to a chose destination”. What’s unique about the service?
Aside from the company being based in the D.C. area I’m not quite sure what makes this different then existing text-based ad networks. The critical partnership which the company is touting is with the National Newspaper Association. Currently the company has a number of locally-based content providers and advertisers. It’s clear that this company is at the extremely early stages but it’s great to see another company in the D.C. metro area giving it a shot.
The company has a lot of work to do on their design but then again when your company is dealing with text links, I don’t think design really matters that much. In an already saturated market getting the attention of publishers requires networks to generate high CPM rates. Only the large ones in addition to a few niche players have been effective at generating great CPMs.
I think BrandClik is going to need to find some big advertisers before they hit it big. Additionally it makes sense to focus on a specific industry. Rather than discount them before they’ve had a chance to succeed, I’ll give this company a few months to see if they can put together an impressive list of publishers and advertisers.
One of my own personal missions over the past couple years has been to contribute to the D.C. web-startup ecosystem as much as I could and help foster a more thriving environment for entrepreneurs. Over the past couple years a lot has changed and a lot continues to change. Over the coming weeks Social Times will be working on some interesting projects which I hope will continue to contribute to the local technology and entrepreneurial environment.
It’s only one component though as it truly takes a community to build the ecosystem. I’m hearing about more and more events and slowly we are beginning to see signs of an emerging hotbed of technology and entrepreneurship. I also believe that we are slowly witnessing the meshing of what was previously distinct sub-communities. There are still serious challenges facing the local environment though.
In the D.C. metro area there are a number of leading universities but when it comes to entrepreneurship and technology, none of them have the national exposure of universities like MIT & Stanford. That’s not to say that the local universities aren’t capable. The University of Maryland for example has the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship dedicated to creating a healthy environment for startups and has a great group of venture advisors as well.
The biggest problem is that many of the people filtering through the local universities are not gaining much experience as it applies to technology. In an article yesterday, Howard Anderson highlighted some of the primary factors that help germinate successful tech startups: “sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes (a Google or a Facebook, and so on) to”.
D.C. has plenty of sophisticated money, at least one template success: AOL, but no leading technology universities. So this is something that local universities need to focus on.
I would list off a number of other factors but I honestly believe that we have everything else in place. The local media is becoming more active in what has become a highly active community, a local startup incubator has succeeded in getting their first company a Series A (I’m assuming more will come in the near future) and the local events are getting bigger and bigger.
While D.C. is filled with extremely intelligent individuals, many of them are coming here with jobs already filled. Many of them aren’t young enough to take ridiculous risks and learn from a series of failures. Not that you can’t launch a startup at any point in your life, it just becomes harder when your responsibilities increase.
What do you think the next steps should be to build a thriving ecosystem? How can we get the universities building more technical programs?
This week a new company released their event announcement service to the D.C. technology scene. A little bit of buzz began circulating about this new service (DC Gary’s Guide) that Gary Sharma announced to a few people early on in the week. The site is GarysGuide.org (named after the founder) and it attempts to track all of the technology and new media events going on.
It started off with New York and then Boston but has since expanded to D.C. Among those that are active in the new media crowd here in D.C. there is another site that many of us turn to for event information: DC Tech Events. Ross Karchner has been running the site as a hobby for the past couple years and has kept it extremely simple. Every time he posts out an event, the information is distributed via Twitter and via email thanks to Feedburner.
That’s as far as it goes. Gary is taking it one step further by providing daily and weekly newsletters that highlight events as well as new job postings on the site. The only problem as of now is that Gary doesn’t have much of a reach in D.C. That may soon change as people become familiar with the site. It’s well designed and constantly maintained making it equally reliable to DC Tech Events with the addition of job postings.
When it comes to design and usability, Gary may have the upper hand but Ross Karchner currently has the reach. Across all of DC, I would argue that there is nobody that has completely dominated the event directory when it comes to leveraging all the distribution channels possible. Did Gary just bust open the door for competition? Who will win? Who do you support?
Update
It’s clear that I jumped the gun on this one and should have looked into this more. Apparently Gary is an aggressive spammer. While I think the design of the site is great, it’s clear that D.C. supports Ross Karchner and DC Tech Events. As a policy from now on Social Times will do the same thing given Ross’ thorough coverage of tech events taking place in D.C. Hopefully my week ending sensationalistic headline didn’t do too much to harm D.C. Tech Events!
Over the past few months I’ve been in countless discussions about the future of D.C. technology and ways that we can contribute to making this area a thriving technology scene. One of the conclusions at SocialDevCamp this past weekend was that we need more media coverage from blogs because nobody is doing it in the mainstream media. The Washington Post furthers its disconnect from the bubbling D.C. technology community with a post entitled, “A Tech Stable, But Hardly a Staple“.
I’ve ranted about the trouble facing the Post in the past but this article highlighted my complaints. Steven Pearlstein, a 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, suggests that “now may be a good time to redefine our [Washington's] aspirations and reconsider our strategies.” Honestly, he provides a great contrarian perspective to counter the arguments held by a number of local residents that voiced their opinions at this weekend’s event in Baltimore, Maryland.
As Pearlstein emphasizes in his article, in the technology market in D.C. “the premium is on reliability, not cutting-edge innovation.” This is one of the reasons why you will meet a lot of conservative investors. If you want to find high-risk investors you might want to head out to Silicon Valley. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t local investment, it’s just not in fresh new web startups.
So where do we go from here? Well it’s obvious that the Washington Post is not a supporter of the 500 or so people that are trying to make this area a center for innovative internet technology. All we can do is continue to blog about the events we participate in and the companies that surround us and perhaps one day this will become a center of thriving internet startups. Until then, all we can do is talk about it and execute on our own business plans.
Of course we all know of the local chatter revolving around the fact that DC is or is not a good place to bring up a budding business. Many around, including me, like it here and think there are good things in the works. However, others, especially VC’s, think greener pastures are elsewhere. Well it is our chance to show them they may juts be wrong.
I was chatting with Keith Casey of Casey Software and WhyGoSolo a little while back and he was telling me about this business plan competition coming up in the area, and he said it would be a great opportunity for the local tech communtiy to stand up and be seen and heard.
The competition Keith was talking about is the Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition
That day is the no-holds-barred deathmatch of entrepreneur vs entrepreneur. There are presentations in the morning, a round of eliminations, and then the culmination of the entire contest… the finalists get to present in front of a public audience affectionately called the STARTUP SMACK DOWN.
The panel will include several VC’s, professors, and other local entrepenuers. Keith makes a great point when he states :
I think it’s time to put up or shut up. If we storm the place… if we completely pack the final presentations with the best and brightest from the DC Tech community, people will notice. The VC’s will do a double take. The professors will take note. The students competing will reconsider immediately leaving for friendlier places.
I am all in as they say in Texas Hold’Em. What about you ? We would love to get everyone we can in that auditorium as Keith says to make people take notice that we are here and ready to flourish. If we can start the create a minor shift in the perception of some of the panlists, they may take that back with them and start a little buzz. And that would be good for all of us.
So here are the details:
Date: Saturday, April 26 2008
Time: 1-5 PM
Where: ICC Auditorium, Georgetown University (Building 26 on this map)
So what do you say ? Stop by and join the Facebook Group I created: DC Technology Business Plan Competition Crashers if your interested.
This post was orginially posted on East Coast Blogging. Jimmy Gardner is founder of 2Plus11 Technology, a technology consulting firm, and a local entrepreneur. He writes the blog, East Coast Blogging and is a avid advocate of the local DC area technology community.
