Last night’s Tech Cocktail in D.C. was great. Over 300 people showed up for the event and it proved that D.C. does indeed have a bubbling tech scene. There were numerous demos and a number of free handouts from Ligit and AOL. All in all I would say it was a successful events. Thanks to Frank Gruber and Eric Olson for putting it together.

I’ve compiled all of the photos that showed up on Flickr from the Tech Cocktail album and from Jason Garber who posted his photos on his Flickr profile. I’m sure there are many more photos that I missed but I included close to 120 of them in the following video. Enjoy! Also, be sure to check out the Tech Cocktail conference that Frank and Eric will be putting on next month in Chicago. I’ll be speaking at it with a number of other great speakers so be sure to attend!

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Twitter is closing in on a Series C round. The valuation? Apparently $60 million up from a previous round at a $20 million valuation. So Twitter, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley is worth $60 million and Slide is worth $500 million? Apparently!

The biggest challenge to Twitter is figuring out how they are going to make money. Twitter could attract over 100 million people and theoretically shut off the system because they couldn’t afford to keep it up and running. Would people start paying for the site if it ends up going down? Given the amount of time I spend on the site, I’d be willing to pay $5 a month to keep it up and running.

This round of funding comes days after two lead developers have left the company. There are still few details about why the developers left but given the slow pace of innovation at the company due to their overwhelming focus on scaling, a few extra dollars in the bank will definitely be useful for attracting new talent and also protecting against and downturn.

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I am extremely happy to see an interesting phenomenon taking place in the web industry today: people are talking about money. It’s surprising to say something like that but it’s true. Web 2.0 was definitely somewhat of a bubble in the sense that there have been a number of venture capitalists that invest in ridiculous business concepts.

As a few of us concluded last night following Tech Cocktail DC, the source of this may just be the wild west mentality in which people have visions and dreams of success even though they don’t know how they’re going to get there. They have solutions to problems that only exist in the virtual world. The problem with this is when you start creating solutions for products that are already free. An example of this would be someone pitching, “I’m going to create a better version of Facebook.”

Somehow people have started thinking that these crazy ideas that occasionally attract large waves of traffic will suddenly turn into sustainable businesses. Unfortunately they are not and I am starting to see an increasing number of people that actually realize this. This is healthy but it also means that the days of throwing ridiculous parties involving drunken revelry as Caroline McCarthy calls it, may just be slowing.

We’ll all show up to a great party but it doesn’t mean that we are the ones that will fund it. As we read more articles about doom and gloom in the economy it wouldn’t be surprising to find less funding for parties and crazy ideas. The high risk VCs out west that will fund any Stanford grad with an idea are in for a surprise when funding dries up for their “investment fund.”

O.k. so enough of the doom and gloom. The best part of all of this is that people with real businesses are the ones getting funding. Now we can start talking about real entrepreneurship which is about managing cash flow, building client lists through business development and all the nitty gritty details about running a business. We can also talk about how are passions help get us through the hard times.

This is the real story behind entrepreneurship. People that manage to generate real businesses out of their passion. So what’s your passion and how are you going to make money from it?

I come from the world of PR. My goal in PR is to create third party creditability and help shape public opinion by building relationships with opinion makers. For years these relationships were with journalist and industry analyst.

With the rise of bloggers and social media the PR practitioner’s goal has changed. Now the PR world is focused on reaching bloggers and consumers through social media. This makes the PR pro’s job much harder, but ultimately more successful and more fulfilling for the public.

There has always been and interesting relationship with PR people and journalist. Typically journalists have to write stories to fill up column space that resides between advertisements. These ads are what pay the bills and keep traditional media running. PR pros pitch stories because we know journalist have a ton of space to fill and we think they story would be a good fit for them.

Journalists are like your mercenary writers. They write to pay the bills and may or may not have a passion for what they write about. I am not saying all journalists simply work for the highest bidder, but I know plenty of journalists who work at a publication because it’s their job not their passion.

Bloggers are more like volunteer soldiers. They do the work and write because it is there passion. If I reach out to a blogger who writes about cars I can be pretty sure that he or she has a passion for automotive excellence. This passion is what makes working with bloggers a sheer joy and gives credibility to what they have to say.

This is also why PR pros find bloggers so attractive. The public doesn’t trust journalists as much as they used to. The world is filled with stories of professional writers taking bribes and making up stories to fill papers. This might happen in the blogger world but it isn’t as prevalent yet.

When a blogger post something the public generally trust it because they understand that the blogger wants to write about when he or she is covering. This also brings up an interesting question. Should bloggers get paid for their posts?

Right now the public trust blogs because the blogs are untouched by the almighty dollar. If you look at the blogosphere right now you can see a change on the horizon. More and more bloggers are monetizing their sites to form supplementary income. Will this money ultimately ruin the blogging world?

You can look around and see the bloggers who write for a living. Do you trust these bloggers less because they are getting paid for their posts? Do you see the blogger as journalist 2.0 or do you think that they are something different? Can we trust blogs in the future? Let me know.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to briefly speak with Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media. I must disclose that Buddy Media is one of the sponsors of our site. They also are one of the few companies in this space with a proven business model that continues to generate substantial revenue for their company.

Buddy Media focuses on helping brands navigate the social networking and social media space and create an engaging experience for users. This contrasts with typical advertising campaigns outside of social networks which currently offer substantially less interaction. It’s straight-forward and it makes a lot of business sense.

Buddy Media has an impressive client list as you will hear in the podcast. They also recently launched the Buddy Media ad network following a substantial round of funding that we wrote about on this site recently. It’s refreshing to hear from a company like Buddy Media given their legitimate business that consistently generates revenue from the company. Listen to the podcast to hear more!

 

 Interview with Buddy Media CEO, Mike Lazerow [18:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s post about how he was moderating a panel at Web 2.0, was receiving negative feedback from people on Twitter and immediately switched course of the presentation. Jeremiah is a quick thinking guy and decided to open up the panel for audience suggestions. I’m not quite sure if it was his memory of the Zuckerberg-Lacy interview that moved him to switch but it was a good call.

Just yesterday I was working on a powerpoint for a presentation that I’ll be giving next week and I thought to myself, “what if I had Twitter streaming during the presentation.” For the audience I’ll be speaking to next week it would be useless but I could imagine this making sense with more tech savvy audiences. As Jeremiah points out though, too much audience intervention creates chaos as we witnessed at SXSW with Zuckerberg.

I think a little Twitter intervention may be useful but then again, you are acknowledging the kids that are passing notes. The kids passing notes are definitely not the kindest kids in class so giving them the time of day is not always best. I have not had the opportunity to sift through Twitter while in a presentation but next time I’ll surely check it out.

Do you think using Twitter to monitor the reaction of an audience is useful? Have you ever used Twitter while presenting?

I just got back from a great lunch with a local executive who helps run a mobile application company. One of the primary things they are specializing in is building mobile social networks and helping other companies plug into those networks. We had a great conversation about the future of mobile and social networks and the challenges that social networks currently face in entering the mobile arena.

It is also common knowledge that social networking sites already face a challenge within their businesses to effectively monetize their sites. So far, nobody has been extremely effective at it. Facebook has been pulling in new executives to try and make an attempt at new monetization strategies but ultimately working to monetize a site which I argue will not be a central destination point a few years from now is relatively worthless.

Instead, the social network sites are going to turn to mobile as one of the central locations for monetization. Text messages and subscriptions are the norm on mobile carriers. This leads me to believe that perhaps social networks will potentially become a subscription service. The only counter argument to this is that Twitter is not currently monetizing their site aside from one ad that’s displayed on the Japanese version of their site.

While there are no answers as to what will happen in the future, I think a lot of potential for social networks exist on mobile. The real question is if the mobile applications will be monetized or if Twitter is destroying the opportunity for future players. How do you think social networks and mobile will work together?

Not long ago, Web 2.0 was a thing that social media people gave advice on, developers and designers laughed at and the majority of people had no idea what the heck was going on. At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, there has been a bunch of buzz about nothing. Tom Foremski calls it “Web Two-Point Yawn.”

The “tools of Web 2.0″ have become ubiquitous for the most part and those that get it, get it. Dan Farber sums it up when he describes Tim O’Reilly’s keynote last night:

We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. “We are in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 is all around us,” O’Reilly said. He got nods from the crowd of the converted, who were busy Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, and SMSing, practicing continuous partial attention.

Most of us have heard the schpiel before and now we are active participants in the social web. While there is innovation taking place every day, we are now more connected then we have ever been and it’s difficult to see how more connected we could become without literally being attached to everybody we know at the hip.

The people who are now adopting to the new technologies appear to be enterprise companies and soon enough we will be on to the next big wave, whatever that may be. We can imagine our lives as if a character in a science fiction novel but ultimately I believe we are close to maximizing the utility of social technologies.

New tools will pop up daily that help transform the way we connect but an industry has now been created and it’s time to get to work on making these tools work for businesses. That’s where the money is to be made. We have now been living with these social tools for years now and are great at socializing via the web.

As Steve Perlman implies in his interview with Charles Cooper of CNET News.com, it’s time for real innovation. He claims, “Most of what you see here will be obsolete in three or four years.” I guess Twitter and others better start working on generating revenue then!

This morning, the MySpace applications went live for all users on the popular social networking site. While applications have always been accessible via http://apps.myspace.com, the applications directory is now being promoted via a link at the top of the site. Previously, it appeared as though MySpace was out of room with their links at the top of the site. So how did they fix the problem? Simple, just reduce the font-size of the links! Looks like the user-interface group over at MySpace has a little work to do.

The addition of the “Apps” link at the top of the site should draw more attention to the rapidly growing base of applications and hopefully increase the growth of the more than 2.1 million app installations that have already taken place. MySpace has been extremely slow to roll out new features and viral components as they have been trying to avoid spam that many users suffered when the Facebook platform launched.

Well, at least that’s the excuse they’ve been giving so far. It’s also rumored that MySpace will be adding notifications by the 30th of this month which will hopefully increase the rate of application growth for most developers. As of now there are no viral components and most of the installs on top applications have been driven from external sites.

We will have to wait and see if the new public link to the applications directory will drive a substantial amount of traffic to applications. We will also have to wait on the MySpace platform to become as viral of a platform as Facebook has been so far.

Peter Kafka is breaking the news yet again that another top engineer is leaving the ranks at Twitter. This comes only a day after it was announced Blaine Cook was leaving from leaving on amicable terms. So what the hell is going on over at Twitter?

Fortunately the site has continued to run smoothly over the past couple days but something must have gone wrong in the past couple weeks. Was it a conflict of egos? There’s no telling what went wrong exactly and all we can do is speculate but as far as I’m concerned, Twitter is having some serious issues with keeping their top brass.

Lee Mighdoll, the newest engineer to depart the company came aboard January 8th, less than 5 months ago. Let’s see if Mike Arrington decides to express his personal vendetta against another Twitter engineer today. According to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, “After three months, both Lee and Twitter came to the conclusion that the match was not perfect.”

In a letter to Silicon Alley Insider he continued, “We are seeking to fill this role with a refined search criteria that fits with our plan to scale Twitter as a company and as a service.” Good luck Twitter! Looks like Twitter needs to create a more “Googley” environment with world-renowned chefs and all the perks one could ask for.