Future of Social Gaming: Content, Content and Content! Then Monetize it. Paypal X aka Paypal As A Platform, Objectives for 2011: Mobile, Offline and B2B. Last week, Paypal did its second developer conference called Paypal X Innovate 2010 aka Paypal As A Platform (you can find all the information on Twitter with the hashtag #XInnovate).
The two days were all about crazy announcements in all payment areas: new microtransaction pricing for digital goods, fixed price for B2B payments (50 cents per transaction), Paypal Mobile Express Checkout, Facebook will continue to use Paypal as an option for Facebook credits purchasing and which will also pay its developers through Paypal and last but not least, a partnership with Verifone to reach the offline world. Silicon Valley Places: create together a collaborative list! One week ago, Paul Graham, famous essayist and more recently founder of the Y Combinator, wrote his monthly post about some Silicon Valley places that made this location so unique.
Among them, he named Stanford University, the “lucky office” which has been the first office of Google and Paypal but also the 280 “which is one of the more beautiful highways in the World”. A lot of people did not agree with P. Graham list arguing that some other places in the Silicon Valley deserved to be also in this list. One of the most famous, Robert Scoble, wrote an article few days after “Silicon Valley places that Paul graham didn’t cover”. He added IBM Almaden Research Lab, the XEROX PARC … and the Winchester Mystery House (!). What I propose is to create a listing of these places and explain why they matter. (source: SF Mayor Gavin Newsome Lays Foundation for Electric Car Network. One week after its speech at the Web 2.0 Summit, Better Place, which aims to build a worldwide electric car network, made a great deal today with the Bay Area’s major cities.
In the presence of the mayors of Oakland and San Jose, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Better Place's founder Shai Agassi, in San Francisco’s city hall, Gavin Newsom announced: “Our aim is to make the Bay Area – and eventually California – the electric vehicle capital of the US.” $1B Investment to Build Agnostic Car Electric Network by 2012. 140 Characters Conference: What the Real Time Web can bring to the World? Yesterday, the San Francisco 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) gathered the emerging social media expert crowd from the Bay Area.
The topic of the day was “What the Real Time Web can bring to the World?” The 140 charact ers conference objective follows Twitter spirit: “One can change the world with one hundred and forty characters.” @Jack (Jack Dorsey, co founder of Twitter). Future of Money and Technology Summit: Transparency and Financial Education for the Benefit of People. Finovate Spring 2010: When Startups Meet Finance, Good Ideas Emerge. Finovate is the celebration of finance and money from the Silicon Valley perspective.
The geeks wear blazers and the bankers leave their ties at home. This year’s trends were simplification, visualizing money to better manag e it, and personalized offers for financial products. In the simplification area, Expensify has a great tool to outsource business expenses, and the company yesterday announced a powerful analytics framework which allows the business manager to see which employee spends what compared to others. Also, oFlows offers a paperless platform for loan origination to reduce cost, timing and be ecofriendly to banks.
Microfinance USA 2010: Storytelling and New Technologies as Key Success Factors for Microfinance. Last week, Microfinance USA 2010 conference took place in San Francisco with a clear goal: how to develop and communicate about microfinance in the USA, even though 85% of the American population has never heard of it.
The open ing session with Maria Shriver and Kiva CEO Premal Shah highlighted the top priorities of this new industry. Social Meets Mobile at the Social Developer Summit. The Future of Location-Based Services (LBS): Context and Privacy. “Mobile and Geolocalization are the third chapter of the Internet revolution, after Search and Social,” Robert Scoble said during his keynote at Geo-Loco 2010 in San Francisco this Wednesday.
Location-Based Services (LBS) are at the peak of the hype cycle, especially with Foursquare, and we are still in the industry’s infancy. The emergence of dozens of LBS startups has been enabled by great progress on the infrastructure side in the last few years. But according to the event’s speakers, pure geodata applications will not be relevant soon and still have to add real value: context. Real time geodata is not just a feature but something which could be tremendous when combined with information: for example, friends with location or buses with location. Summit at Stanford 2010: What’s New in the Mobile Monetization World? One of the panels at this morning's Summit At Stanford 2010 was "Mobile Monetization - Billions for the Taking.
" Speakers were Sunil Verma from Mobclix (ad exchange system on mobile), Anderson Thees from Apontador (LBS leader in B. Founder Conference 2010: entrepreneur’s lonely journey to success. Yesterday, the Founder conference 2010 gathered two hundred enthusiastic entrepreneurs looking for advice and cofounders to start their new business.
First speaker was Aaron Patzer, well-known CEO of Mint.com which has been boug ht by Intuit for $170M in 2009. According to Aaron, the entrepreneur path is a long journey. “In the early days of Mint.com, I was living in Sunnyvale, most boring place in the Bay Area and had no sex life for a year” Confessed Aaron, “but self-doubt is okay as soon as you know what you’re aiming at”. Plug and Play PACT 2010: Lack of True Billion Dollar Ideas? On March 24th, Plug and Play Techcenter hosted its spring PACT.
VC + Wisdom of the Crowd = Welcome to Peer Financing. Last Friday at the Peer Financing for Developers conference at the Sun Campus in Santa Clara Menlo Park, CA, the discussion of new project-financing possibilities was a heated one. PayPal Platform Product General Manager Jason Kor osec made a clear call to developers: “Stop spending time on putting your idea in a PowerPoint to convince VCs," Korosec said. Office 2.0 ou ma première conférence dans la Valley - Partie 1. Première expérience d'une conférence californienne, 3 jours avec 500 personnes attendues dans un hôtel du centre ville de san Francisco sur le thème du travail 2.0 ! Booyah's Secret Gaming Recipe Could Make it the Next Zynga. Booyah does not yet have the brand-name hype of Zynga or Foursquare in Silicon Valley, but if we talk about their two first apps, MyTown and Nightclub City, it’s clear Booyah is already becoming a serious force.
Booyah was c. Social Gaming : Booyah sur les traces de Zynga. Avec MyTown et NightClub City, la start-up américaine pourrait bien connaître une notoriété équivalente à celle de l'éditeur de jeux 2.0 sur réseaux sociaux et éditeur de FarmVille. Will the Future of Human-Machine Interaction Come From Microsoft Video Games? Image by Getty Images via Daylife Usually when we think about human-machine interaction, we imagine robots acting like regular people but without any emotions.
Science fiction has tried to define what the future of these machines that might one day replace humanity will be, but that event doesn't actually seem possible in the next few years. But one industry could be very interesting for the future of human-machine interactions: video games. We had the example of the Wii, released in 2006, which captures your movements with controllers and reproduces them on screen.
What Microsoft revealed at last year's E3, the Natal Project, is simply a game changer: with some basic hardware (sensors with infrared signals, HD video camera and microphone), users no longer need controllers to play videogames. Social networking is becoming the playground within the Internet. The latest study from the Nielsen company shows that social networking is becoming the number one activity on the Web in terms of time spent, averaging five-and-a-half hours per user per month in December 2009. Techcrunch 50 - Les start-ups sur un piédestal. Après Office 2.0 la semaine dernière, j'accède ce matin aux Techcrunch 50 et son univers plus "branché" comme l'a illustré Mathieu avec Ashton Kutcher.
Cela se confirme car j'ai pu apercevoir Demi Moore à quelques pas de moi! Aux Techcrunch50, avec l'atmosphère feutrée de la salle de conférence, la musique techno à chaque pause et la lumière tamisée, on s'attend à des annonces fracassantes et on espère apercevoir le Google ou Facebook de demain. On ne peut rêver d'une meilleure plateforme de lancement pour une start-up au vu du nombre de Venture Capitals (VCs) partenaires de la manifestation et de la cohorte de journalistes/bloggers présents dans la salle ! Mon choix se porterait pour le moment sur Me-trics pour son potentiel à long terme(www.me-trics.com) et icharts(www.icharts.net, non encore ouvert) pour sa simplicité et sa valeur ajoutée. A suivre de près. 7 - Le dossier de L'Atelier. Cash Cow Spotted. Facebook Signs Up For a Quick Win With PayPal. Surprising news yesterday from Facebook: the social network officially signed a strategic agreement with PayPal to become one of the alternative methods to pay for Facebook ads and Facebook credits.
Future of Money and Technology Summit: Transparency and Financial Education for the Benefit of People.