Barney Pell's Weblog

June 22, 2008

Talin's 50th Birthday Party

Last night I hosted a party for my good friend Talin, to celebrate his 50th birthday. Talin had notified people that he had a surprise theme for the party, which turned out to be a social experiment. Talin contributed a pile of $100 bills, one for each year of his life, and said that the only rule was that the group of attendees had to figure out how to spend it before midnight. They even had to figure out the process by which the decisions would be made.

In the end, after hours of partying mixed with negotiation and philosophizing, the money was allocated approximately as follows:

• $2000 to be spent on microfinance loans (each person would spend $100).
• $1000 on a program to stimulate Talin's dating life in the short and long term.
• $1200 donation for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (to be matched by Google).
• $400 to buy Talin a Kindle reader, including an e-book version of The Game, by Neil Strauss, which is required reading for Talin's dating life enhancement program.
• $400 to pay the caterers for who brought the yummy and nearly endless supply of dim sum.

Mike Arrington attended the party, his first time at Barney's house, and was surprised to find how few of Talin's friends read TechCrunch, but despite that he had a great time.

The whole photo set is here.

Posted by barney at 1:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 28, 2008

Cyan Banister in Nerd Girl video

My friend Cyan is featured in this music video. It's awesome!
I like the starting lyric: "Nerd girl, I don't deserve you. I don't get the references you allude to."

Posted by barney at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 25, 2008

LA Times on Founders Brunch and the PowerStache

My friend Jessica Guynn just wrote an article that appeared online in the LA times today entitled: Brainstorming over bagels: Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seek camaraderie and capital at brunch.
The article will appear in the LA Times print edition tomorrow morning.

The articles covers the Founders Brunch, a networking event for founders of companies that I attend regularly.

Many of my friends are quoted in the article, and there are photos of Auren Hoffman and Keith Rabois (our host this time). Peter Thiel expressed the networking aspect of this kind of event well:

Founders Brunch is important for the same reason Silicon Valley is important: There are all of these subtle network effects," said Peter Thiel, a 40-year-old former PayPal executive now bankrolling some of the hottest Internet companies. "Otherwise why wouldn't you start a tech company in Fresno where everything is cheaper? The advantage to being in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco area is that so many other people are doing the same thing."

Jessica noted that I had a new beard, and I explained my recent decision on growing it:

Barney Pell, the 39-year-old co-founder of Powerset, a natural-language search engine trying to challenge Google, sported a new beard he vowed not to shave until his San Francisco start-up launched its new product.

To be more accurate, I vowed not to shave off my beard until the launch, but I didn't vow that I wouldn't shave at all. I made that mistake during graduate school. I thought I was ready to submit my PhD thesis in about 3 months, and vowed not to shave or cut my hair until it was done. This was partly a way to motivate myself to finish, and partly a way to let my friends stop asking about my progress as they would clearly know when was done. As it turned out, my thesis advisor thought I had more work to do, and I wound up taking a full year before finishing. So by the time I was actually ready to submit my thesis, I had really long hair and a very full beard indeed. I'm not going to do risk that again...

Anyway, you might think I'm a maverick, but it turns out that most of Powerset is in on the gig. Almost all our employees are growing moustaches and/or beards in preparation for our upcoming launch. Even women who can't grow nearly as nice moustaches as the men have painted them on from time to time. And our folks even registered a domain name and created a website, PowerStache.com, featuring photos taken over time as people grow their beards and moustaches.

It's pretty silly and really wasn't initially a coordinated effort, but it's fun and reflects the excitement inside the company as we are nearing the time when the early version of our product will be available to the general public.

Posted by barney at 7:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 20, 2008

Crunchies 2007 Award Ceremony and After Party

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 at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 19, 2007

My first trip to Korea

Last week I visited Korea for the first time. The primary reason was to give an invited keynote talk at the International Semantic Web Conference. I have posted about that talk separately. This post is about what else I did on my trip to Korea.

The conference came at a busy time for me so, I had to keep my trip to Korea very short (less than 4 days on the ground!). This was sad for me because I have heard about Korea for such a long time, having grown up with Korean family (my step-father was Korean). I did manage to make a visit to two interesting Korean companies.

First was NHN, the parent company of Naver, Korea's dominant web portal / search engine. Naver pioneered human powered search, as now seen in Yahoo Answers, among others. It turns out that the technical folks at NHN are already collaborating with the tech folks at Powerset on Hbase, the Powerset-initiated open source project for big distributed tables, ala Google's BigTable. They are also working with a local university to apply Hbase to distributed storage of large RDF databases, a perfect tie in to the activity at the Semantic Web conference. NHN is a pretty amazing company, especially for one that most people in the USA have never heard of.

Second, I visited KT, formerly Korea Telecom. I met with there with SanKu Jo, Vice Present of New Business Group, and Dongmyun Lee, Vice President of BcN business Unit, who are also quite visionary in semantic technology.

While there was not much time for fun, my hosts at NHN (Paul Sung and Ed Yoon) picked me up at the airport and took me out to a meal at a traditional Korean restaurant. We sat on the floor which was heated from below. I was told this is traditional for Korea and it makes for a comfortable bed, without needing a mattress. It also helps relieve the fatigue of sitting cross legged on the floor while eating from the low table. The next day, during an hour between my company visits and catching the next flight, we went to a high-up mountain fortress in the clouds, from which we could see all of Seoul.

My only other time out in Korea was at a dinner in Busan with the conference organizers and other invited speakers. We went out to a Korean seafood restaurant. The highlight of this for me was eating some other-worldly sea creature that responded to prodding as though it didn't realize it was no longer alive.

Although I only got a taste of Korea this time, I look forward to visiting again soon and hopefully to have more time to see this amazing country.

Posted by barney at 9:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 17, 2007

More on pigeons and search

I have written previously that using "keywordese", the language of keywords used to query search engines today, is like using a "grunting pidgin language" instead of a human natural language to communicate our intent to the search engine. This also explained the joke on our Powerset Series A Funding Party t-shirts with the grunting pigeon.

In an unexpected confirmation of the connection between pigeons and keyword search technology, a reader pointed out to me an article on Google's website about Google's PigeonRank technology.
This technology employs huge arrays of pigeons that are trained to peck at pages that are more likely to be high quality results. Although each pigeon is fallible, the wisdom of the crowds means that the results of the whole coop can have high quality.

So far, the PigeonRank technology appears to be applied only to rankings, not to query languages. But it is possible that such work is happening in secret.

Posted by barney at 1:47 PM | TrackBack

February 14, 2007

Powerset Series A Funding Party

Powerset had party last Saturday night to celebrate our Series A funding! The party took place at Frisson, a trendy bar/restaurant in San Francisco's financial district. We wound up with perhaps 500 people attending, completely filling up the space (and all available parking for blocks around) for most of the evening.

Party supported by our sponsors and investors

While the event was lavish and brought back memories of the heady dotcom boom days, when some companies spent a significant portion of their funding on their launch parties, we actually were fortunate to have the cost subsidized by our investors and partners. I want to thank them here.

Continue reading "Powerset Series A Funding Party"

Posted by barney at 11:57 PM | TrackBack

February 4, 2007

Barney on Cooking With Geeks (Podcast)

I was invited a few weeks ago to attend an experimental dinner event called "Cooking with Geeks". The idea was to combine a salon with a cooking lesson and podcast it to the world. The Cooking With Geeks podcast is now available (the previous link is to part 1, after which you can watch part2).

Here's the writeup from the CWG website:

We got a group of geeks together, had a great chef come in and teach us how to cook, handed out some wine, and kicked off an interesting conversation. Come on along for a San Francisco geek dinner.

Geeks involved are: Barney Pell, CEO, Powerset; Mary Hodder, CEO, Dabble; Henri Poole, founder/director, Civic Actions; Kathleen Lyman, CEO, LaunchMedia; Steve Gillmor. Our co-hosts were Robert Scoble [of Scobleizer fame] and Fred Davis, co-founder of Wired Magazine. Videographers are Eddie Codel and Glenn Gullmes. Chef is Rozana Ogneva of www.AreYouBeingServedCatering.com. Our host is Jeannine Barnard.

I knew some of these folks before, in particular Mary Hodder is a friend of mine. I didn't know just how expert Mary was about food. The food itself was delicious and we all gave our compliments to the chef. In addition to food, we covered several interesting (to us) topics. Here are a few that I remember after a month (I haven't watched the videos yet).

• I brought up the question of whether the MySpace generation would grow up to regret sharing all their personal information, and shared my view that more likely they would come into power and reshape the mainstream perspective on private/public information so that is is no big deal.
• We had an unexpectedly long discussion about Powerset (in Part 2) with several good perspectives shared by the other guests.
• Mary talked about trends in personal video creation, mixing, and sharing.
• Fred talked about the early history of Wired magazine, and his later startup companies.
• And we learned about the long history of publishing in the computer industry.

I enjoyed the event and look forward to doing this again.

For folks who don't live in the Bay Area, I think this dinner gives a pretty typical glimpse into how folks here in the tech industry combine work and play in social contexts. It captures pretty well the way that everyone is passionate about ideas, technology, and startup companies.

Posted by barney at 10:01 PM | TrackBack

September 23, 2006

Banksy exhibit in LA

I attended Banksy's Barely Legal exhibit in LA. Banksy is an underground graffit artist and prankster, based in the UK. He is so stealth that he didn't even attend his exhibit and nobody knows what he looks like.

The highlight was clearly the painted elephant in the living room. In addition to looking quite fashionable (though blending in with the wallpaper), the elephant seemed happy, eating gummy bears and hay through the afternoon.
(Animal protesters were unhappy about this, so the security around the elephant was high).

Another highlight was Banksy's practical joke where he replaced his own mock copies of Paris Hilton's new album in the stores.

The exhibit was well attended by people in the know in Hollywood. We saw McCauley Caulken and Christina Aguilerra at the event. Apparently Angelina Jolie was there the night before.

Sean Bonner wrote a blog entry about the Banksy event, revealing the location which up until then was a secret.

Posted by barney at 2:07 PM | TrackBack

July 16, 2006

Powerset Summer Party 2006

We had a party at the home of Steve and Lucinda Newcomb to celebrate Powerset developments (including angel funding) . We invited 700 of our closest friends and family, and it seems like 400 of them came. Fortunately, Steve completed work on his new deck just in time to hold all the guests. We thought about having a contest for people to guess what Powerset is up to, since it's unusual to throw a party while a company is still "semi-stealth", but then we decided it might be getting too easy by now and there was no need to tempt fate. Fortnately we did have NDAs and job applications available, in classic silicon valley party style.

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April 1, 2006

Barney's birthday bash 2006, with fashion apparel

I had a really fun party last weekend to celebrate my birthday. As usual, the party started around 4pm and continued until about 3:30am. The best birthday gift I received was from my friend Cheryl Smith, who hired in models (Christina and Hana) to serve as hostesses for the event. She even made custom tank tops saying "Barney Rocks" for them to wear. A few friends later inquired how they could order shirts of their own. If the volume of orders keeps growing, we might distribute the shirts through my friend Mike Ross's lingerie company, Figleaves!

Posted by barney at 6:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2006

Edwardian Ball

Last weekend I went to a ball in honor of Edward Gorey (http://www.edwardianball.com), an illustrator and novelist I am only now coming to appreciate. More photos are available in my Flickr set

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