Live Blogging from SF NewTech MeetUP

by francine Hardaway on July 11, 2007

I’m sitting next to Rafe Needleman, live blogging at the San Francisco New Tech meetup. It’s at the Action Theatre at the Metreon, and not only are all the seats taken, but there are people standing in the aisles and sitting on the floor.

Five companies are going to make five-minute pitches about their new technologies. The first is Guy Kawasaki, who has just launched Truemors for $12,000. (Rafe has just whispered that you get what you pay for…)

Of course they have put him on first, because Guy is a celebrity.

He says he was on a panel with the founders of Plenty of Fish and Hot or Not and discovered out that contemporary founders were working in their bathrobes, without venture capitalists (he is one) and he decided that was the way to go. So he created Truemors with some buddies in South Dakota.

He enables people to post gossip, rumors and news by emails, text message, web form, or voicemail. “In a sense it’s like Twitter with content,” he says, pitching the democratization of information. “You don’t have to blog, you don’t have to own a web site, you can just post.”

Truemors is a little like unmoderated blog comments. With no ownership of the blog. Guy admits that 99% of the blogosphere hated Truemors, and referred to it as a poor idea, poorly executed. But every time somebody says something bad about it, Guy gets 250,000 page views. Half the blogosphere complains that Truemors censors; the other half says there’s too much crap up there.

Truemors for Facebook will let you post a Truemor and you can choose whether all of Facebook sees it or just your friends.

Time’s up, but Guy doesn’t stop. He just plows on into his pitch.

“Truemors.com is for telling the world. Truemors for Facebook is for telling your friends. Two entirely different visions.”

Visions????????

Guy is a VC. He has been disintermediated, because before it took $1,000,000 to do stupid things, but now you can do stupid things for $12,000.

As Guy predicted, I’m misquoting him here, but I’ve got the sense of it. “For years people thought you could not run a sub-four minute mile. Then Roger Bannister did it, and then four more people did it. Now I have done it for $12,000 and I hope I inspire others.”

“It nothing else, Truemors will make you a more interesting person at a cocktail party.”

Guy has taken thirty minutes of the five minutes allotted to him, but the audience doesn’t mind. He admits that he has an unfair advantage because of who he is, and he says at the end of the day there’s no such thing as an equal playing field. “Take every unfair advantage you can”. And then he’s off to play hockey, a difficult act to follow.

Blabberize
: And then comes poor little Mo, who presents after Guy. I worry about him. But he is hilarious, putting on an Indian accent for the freshman computer class he was teaching, freaking them out about having an instructor they don’t understand and then letting them off the hook.

From this experience, he somehow got the idea to create a site that lets you upload a picture and make the picture talk. You haven’t lived until you have created a talking llama. You MUST go to the site and see…

Anyone can go and make pictures talk. It was designed for parents to make their newborns talk, but you won’t believe what people are really doing with it. And Blabber, of course, is working on a Facebook application. Mo amuses us so much that we don’t mind that he, too, goes over his allotted time.

And then we get to JuggleMyStuff: project management for teams. By this time, having laughed till the tears rolled down my face at Mo, and listened attentively to guy, Chelsea and I get up and leave. No serious new tech for us!

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