January 20, 2008
Crunchies 2007 Award Ceremony and After Party
Crunchies 2007 After Party, originally uploaded by Zivity.
Yesterday I attended The Crunchies, an award ceremony to honor innovation in the tech community. The event was organized by TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, and VentureBeat.
My personal highlights from the award ceremony were:
- Live performance by The Richter Scales, singing “Here Comes Another Bubble“.
In case you haven’t seen the video before, it is must viewing. It combines melody from Billy Joel with acapella (my favorite kind of music) with technology startup themes and humor. The video opens with a line from my friend and Powerset investor and board member Peter Thiel stating there is absolutely not a bubble in technology. The song later features lyrics such as “Babies blogging in the womb” and “I sold my twenties for a worthless pile of tech stock”. My friends in the group, Tom Shields and James Currier, invited me to come sing with them sometime, which could be a lot of fun. - Fake Steve Jobs accepting the Crunchies award on behalf of Apple for the IPod.
His speech is totally hilarious. The whole speech is like one big inside joke. I had previously read his book “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody“, an autobiography of Steve Jobs as told by Fake Steve Jobs, and this video conveys the parody well. - A video of my friend Nova Spivak (Founder of Radar Networks) answering the question about the most important technology innovation. Given the position he has taken in recent panels we have been on together, one might have thought he would talk about the Semantic Web, but instead Nova argued passionately about the virtues of Cool Whip!
He illustrated many uses of the technology and had had the crowd rolling with laughter. This also inspired us to attempt to have a cool-whip afterparty, which fizzled out.
- Running video commentary by Sarah Meyers. Even without the platinum wig and corset she wore during her Party Crashers career (including crashing Powerset’s Series A Funding Party), she’s still adorable and very personable.
- Luke Nosek from The Founders Fund presenting the awards for “Best Business Model” and “Most Likely To Succeed”. While many of the candidates were Founders Fund portfolio companies, I appreciated that he was wearing a Powerset t-shirt (with the grunting pigeon) under his jacket.
The After Party took place in the famous Green Room. My group had to wait a little while to get into the party, which exceeded the capacity of the room. The wait itself was fun because we were joined in line by MC Hammer. The party was enlivened by a photo activity sponsored by Zivity. In his award introduction Luke Nosek had described Zivity as “Myspace for Grownups.” People took photos with props, costumes, and attitudes, accompanied by several Zivity models. I included a photo of me (in cowboy hat) with Pearl and Cyan in this post. The rest of the collection is fun.
Overall, while the event had its ups and downs, there was really a nice sense of community and cameraderie in both the presentations and in the audience. The award recipients made really brief and generally humble speeches (with the exception of Fake Steve Jobs, of course), most of them thanking their engineers and their moms. The videos shown during the ceremony were mostly sent in by nominated companies. Altogether it felt more like a summer camp show than the Oscars and it is good to see our community not taking itself too seriously. On that note, it was great to see Om Malik on stage at the event shortly after recovering from a heart attack that had left him hospitalized and the subject of much concern among his friends. When people saw him at the event there much applause and support.
I took some photos of the event myself and plan to post them here soon.
Posted by barney on January 20, 2008 at 6:49 pm | No Comments
May 9, 2006
Esther Dyson found in zero gravity
We met with Esther Dyson today and she told us about her trip to Zero-G on Saturday. Other friends on the trip include James Hong and Kim Malone. I might have come too if my old Mayfield email were still working… but Esther says I’ll have another chance!
Posted by barney on May 9, 2006 at 5:42 pm | No Comments
September 28, 2005
Going Deep for Digital
Here’s an interesting article fom the NYT, Going Deep for Digital, about the coming launch of major movies in 3D and the conversion of cinemas to digital technology.
[on] Nov. 4, when “Chicken Little” opens across the country – and in at least 85 movie theaters equipped with costly state-of-the-art 3-D projection equipment, silver screens and the latest in goofy-looking 3-D eyewear.
This quote from a Disney exec indicates that after many slow starts, 3D might finally be going mainstream:
“I honestly don’t think it’s a novelty,” said Charles Viane, president of distribution for Disney, which may release all its future animated movies in 3-D should “Chicken Little” meet expectations at the box office. “I think you’ll miss the dimensionalization in movies that don’t have it.”
I’m a believer in the coming age of 3-D. I think it will have broad implications for our interaction with media, and also will fuel strong growth for successful new companies over the next 5 years. For more on 3-D, see my flickr photo album from my trip to SIGGRAPH in LA. Watch this column for more on this trend.
Posted by barney on September 28, 2005 at 4:34 pm | 1 Comment