Gawker: valleywag, sf tech sessions

To-Do tonight: Besides eating that whole bag of Fun-sized Snickers

Nick Douglas — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 19:21:53 EST

Discover why you should care about social bookmarking. SF Tech Sessions holds a meeting tonight from 7-9pm at CNet in San Francisco. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff, David Galbraith from Wists, and Kaboodle CEO Manish Chandra are slated to speak. $5 at the door gets you all the pizza and bottled water you can carry. [SF Tech Sessions]
A neuroscientist explains how aging brains work, at San Francisco's Bazaar Cafe. Given the city's average adult age, "aging" here means "past 30." [Ask a Scientist]
Just move to the Bay Area from Beer Country? Pay $60 for this San Mateo event and learn what wine goes with what food. Hint: Everything goes with salmon. [Local Wine Events]
Update: Sold out. ~~Hear a man even more full of himself than a Silicon Valley bigshot: Evolutionist author Richard Dawkins speaks in San Francisco. [Eventful]~~

With contributions from Megan McCarthy

To-Do tonight: Better than Sozzled Sunday

Nick Douglas — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:52:00 EDT

A tech bubble is measured by the number of industry events each night of the week. A full Thursday schedule doesn't mean we're back in 1999 — it just means the recession's long gone.

Why have I been hiding it from you? Thursty Thursday is the leading weekly Thursday-after-work-happy-hour-gathering-for-professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's unofficially run by the sexy folks at worldwide PR firm Bite Communications. Tonight it's at a downtown San Fran bar, the Royal Oak. No web page for this, so just show up after 6:30 and yell, "I'm here to meet the non-geeky PR people!"
Third Thursday, though, has a Meetup page AND an Upcoming.org listing, so you won't miss the June edition of this monthly Palo Alto event. Tonight's speakers include former venture capitalist Jeff Nolan or VP of virtual world builder Linden Lab.
If tonight's SF Tech Session feels even more comfy in the Microsoft SF office than earlier sessions, it's because organizer Niall Kennedy joined Microsoft's Windows Live team this month. Tonight, the demo session features Box.net, Fabrik, and Amazon's S3 — three online storage services.

To-Do: Drink with flacks, heckle Meebo

ndouglas — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 11:20:05 EDT

The Mozilla Foundation shows the best Firefox Flicks at San Fran's Kabuki Theater at 2 PM. The best grassroots ads for the indie Firefox browser will be shown — and the best of the best get prizes, including a massive three-screen monitor. [Spread Firefox]
Thursty Thursday, "the leading weekly Thursday-after-work-happy-hour-gathering-for-professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area," starts at Gordon Biersch (Embarcadero and Harrison) after work (Googlers: this does not mean 2 AM) tonight. Bring your liver.
Niall Kennedy hosts another SF Tech Sessions demo night. Meebo (use your IM accounts on the web), Userplane (chat and video chat), and Linden Lab (explore the fancy 3D world of Second Life) demo their products at Microsoft's SF office. No bar and fish tray this time, but Niall promises pizza and "soda and other fizzies." Or brown-bag it from Thursty Thursdays. [SF Tech Sessions]

Geeking out: SF Tech Session at the Westin

ndouglas — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 21:58:20 EST

Recent Technorati emigrant Niall Kennedy hosted a swanky demo session last night at the Westin St. Francis. This is the second of his SF Tech Sessions. Chicago startup Blish.com bought the room, the drinks (for the record, I stuck to beer and coffee), and the pricey salmon platters.

Niall basks in the light of a thousand IPOs.

One of the less lucky presenters. This fish's business plan was deemed a menace to the economy.

Years after his lounge-piano career, Brian Sherrill still hasn't changed his clothes.

The glitz screams "dot-com bubble," but Blish founder Brian Sherrill said he'd rented the room sight unseen. "I thought it would be some normal hotel conference room. Then I came up here and went, 'Whoa.'" Still, every dot-commer there wanted Blish to sponsor their next party.

After the jump, more gilded hotel shots and some demo snarks.

Photos: the omnipresent Scott Beale [Laughing Squid]
Notes more meaningful than mine: Notes from SF Tech Session [Rajlogs]

"Pssst...I hear Kevin Burton bought someone in this room." "I'm right here, dude, and I didn't buy anyone." "See, it's so secret even Kevin doesn't know."

Skobee presenter Noam Lovinsky: "It's a consumer service, but I'm sure we can, uh, leverage your paradigmatic edge competency across the enterprise."

Skobee's the first to present. You use it to organize outings big and small with your friends. Looks handy.

The second speaker presents Vast, a topical ad search engine. For Vast's dating profile category, he says, "We had to pull a lot of results out. Thousands of Russian brides, lots of porn..." TailRank's Kevin Burton: "Can I get a disc of that data set?"

Mozes CEO Dorrian Potter: "And with enough seed money, I could afford a shirt with a collar."

Potter's mobile-bookmarking site Mozes.com has tags, of course, but not that hippie share-at-will kind: they sell tags as keywords. The peanut gallery around me is not impressed.

Finally, two reps from Songbird shuffle in. They're over an hour late, but they present their product.

"Ohhh, hey, hadn't noticed that bug — er, feature — before."

Songbird is part browser, part media player. One of the demoers shows off the song display. And the sliding tracker. And the volume slider. Blogger Eran Globen: "Gee, I wonder if it does stereo."

Four companies, three of them dot-coms, and a dot-com sponsor. A posh 32nd-storey location. An audience of dot-commers and startuppers. Keep saying it: There is no bubble, there is no bubble, there is no bubble...