Internet Tech Boston

Last night I went to a little soiree hosted by PermissionTV’s PR firm – BluePoint Venture Marketing. It was a fun night at BluePoint’s great office-loft location in the heart of Lexington. I got a chance to meet folks from a couple of the local Boston venture-backed internet software companies that BluePoint works with.

Carlos Larracilla and Tom Chevalier are co-founders of People Ahead, a job board that utilizes intelligent technology to match employers and potential employees. I first became aware of People Ahead at last month’s Web Innovators 19. It sounds like a great idea. As a person who is responsible for hiring tech, creative, and client-managing talent, it’s very time consuming to sift through resumes finding the right skill set and the right past experience. It would be great for the “computer” to hand over targeted resumes for my review.

The big draw of the evening was learning how to count cards in a hands-on demonstration from Dave Irvine,

one of the original MIT blackjack club members featured in the best-selling book “Bringing Down the House” and the hit movie “21.” Dave was an (obviously) smart guy who told the tale of his time in the MIT Blackjack team with a mix of humor and suspense. Good times were had by all.

Earlier this month, I attended SummerMash Boston with a few folks from PermissionTV. The folks at Stickam were holding interviews with attendees and streaming live on Mashable. Well, they’ve finally gotten through the backlog and have posted the recorded sessions on their site. Below is the discussion that I and Craig Daniel, my cohort in the PTV engineering team, had regarding our favorite Video 2.0 company – PermissionTV. I  think that the PermissionTV video player is better than Stickam’s, but I guess I’m just a “company man.” What do you think?

I and a contingent of PermissionTV rabble-rousers attended Mashable.com’s SummerMash Boston event. We wanted to meet some folks and maybe spread the world on what our company has been up to. Here’s what the $21 ticket got us:

1. A live, streaming interview of us discussing PTV, that was shown on the Mashable.com homepage during the event.
2. Some crazy photos of the PermissionTV Team with Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, and another one here.
3. An intro to Chris Brogan, local Social Media hero who’s now following PermissionTV.
4. An intro to Adam Ostrow, Mashable Editor in Chief, who told us the secret to getting covered in Mashable – “Have an interesting story to tell, that’s not being covered anywhere else.” Eureka!
5. 5 new followers of PermissionTV.
6. Coverage from Marcel Moreau (aka Combusting Boy) at Summermash Boston 2008 Roundup.
7. Free food and two free drink tickets. w00t!
8. A dancing Owl
9. The most ridiculous picture of the PermissionTV Crew known to man.
10. Best Job Title of the Evening – Saul Colt, Head of Magic at FreshBooks.

All in all – it was a good event, I’d say! I met a lot of interesting people and had good fun along the way. For anyone else who was at the event, I’d love for you to share stories and links to pics in the comments below!

Update: Looks like the owner of the Flickr stream turned their pictures private, so some links above might not work properly. You can see all the fun pics here.

I was happy to learn that LiveAutographs, a client I’ve worked with lately, was featured in a TechCrunch blog post by none other than Michael Arrington himself. What is LiveAutographs? I’ll let Mike explain:

LiveAutographs [is] a site that sells celebrity autographs that are guaranteed to be authentic – because they take a video of the celebrity writing the autograph and message and post it on their website.

That’s right, when you view the video of your favorite celebrity autographing event, you’re experiencing the power of online video in your hands. That’s PermissionTV’s slogan, for those of you who aren’t already in the know.

OK, so LiveAutographs is not the next internet revolution. But, it’s a fun idea and a smart use of online video. More importantly, when Mr. Arrington gets his personalized William Shatner autographed “I Love TechCrunch” T-Shirt, he’ll be “testing [PTV!] software.” Do you think his next post after that will be about PermissionTV?

The recent explosion of online video will be one of the hallmarks of the online industry in 2008. Already in 2008, Yahoo’s acquisition of Maven Networks for $160 million a couple weeks ago has gotten the attention of many people, even if it was overshadowed by talks of Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo.

I work at a smaller competitor to Maven called PermissionTV. Our newest product, the PermissionTV smartplayer™ is the first intelligent, interactive online video platform that reacts and responds to the interests, desires and actions of website visitors. Where Video 1.0 was a purely passive experience, we’ll be paving the way for a truly interactive experience with the web visitor. That’s what we’re calling Video 2.0. Here’s a marketing video that describes our latest product.