Flought, a really fun project, was the winner of this idea. You can find more about the teams that participated, here.

These are some of the pictures that I took during the event. The Startup Weekend took place at the Kicklabs Offices, a very cool place! (Look at the pictures)

Sustainable Brands 2010 – Where the Sustainability & Brand & Design Communities Come Together to Shape the Future.

Join 700+ sustainability executives, business and brand strategists, designers, and communications experts who are building brand value through sustainability. Join market-making companies such as Hewlett Packard, Bumble Bee Tuna, IDEO, Johnson & Johnson, Nokia, Coca-Cola, Clorox, Nestle, 3M, Life Technologies, Williams Sonoma, SAP and many others at SB’10.

SB’10 is excited to announce key presenters from among the 100+ top thinkers and practitioners in sustainable brand and business innovation who will be on deck this year to share with you the latest in sustainable brands leadership.

This is a great video that presents the SB Conference! Take a look..

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Sustainability Executives
find new ideas, partners and tools
learn more >>

Brand Strategists
build authentic, transparent brands
learn more >>

Designers & Innovators
better product and service design
learn more >>

Marketers & Communications Pros
tools and language to talk about sustainable innovation
learn more >>

Follow SLM on Twitter and visit it’s Facebook page

This is the brand new SB’10 Brochure

See you there!

For one more year, O’Reilly and UBM Techweb co-produced a very successful conference on May 3-6 in San Francisco,CA. One of my favorite presentations was the one from Drew Houston (Dropbox) and Adam Smith (Xobni) with the title: “From Zero to One Million Users” This is their presentation:

Many great keynote speakers and some of them were: Tim O’Reilly, Ben Huh (I Can Has Cheezburger), Ge Wang (Stanford University, Smule), June Cohen (TED Conferences), Kevin Lynch (Adobe Systems Incorporated), Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare, Inc.) and my favorite Steve Blank (Stanford/Berkeley/Columbia) You can view all the keynote speeches here

Photos from the event:

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp –13 week online sustainability training program intended to get business professionals up to speed on what they’ll need to be competitive and sustainable. Brought to you by the producers of the Sustainable Brands Conference.

Participants will learn from some of the world’s top sustainable business practitioners. Each of our faculty members is a leading sustainable business expert in his/her specialty, counseling many of the world’s top global brands about how to step up to today’s market demands and successfully build business value and brand equity by innovating for sustainability.

The course follows Sustainable Life Media‘s 4-step prescription for building the better brands of the future: “Observe, Re-Design, Measure and Communicate.” In just an hour-and-a-half a week, over one business quarter, you and your teams can gain a solid grounding in the core disciplines needed to move successfully in to the new age of sustainable business. Topics include market drivers, business model and product innovation, supply chain partnerships, brand strategy and marketing, metrics, and more.

If you haven’t yet taken the time to give yourself a full orientation to the basics of building a sustainable brand, now’s the time. Sessions are available live and on-demand.

Recently I attended a very interesting event of SFAMA (San Francisco American Marketing Association) at the offices of Adaptive Path in San Francisco. The subject of the panel was “How Tech Bloggers are Leading the Marketing 2.0 Revolution”

1) Robert Scoble of Rackspace/Building 43
2) Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester
3) Kevin Marks of Google and
4) Mark Silva of Real Branding

The discussion was about success stories of small businesses, specific tactics for driving local search optimization and the use of social media as a business driver.

Robert Scoble said that ‘we participate in news’ and marketers have to consider this as an opportunity. He also talked about the Zappos phenomenon and how the company ‘pushes’ the employees to use Twitter. “Most of the companies push their brand instead of creating relationships with the users and add value and this is wrong!”

Kevin Marks believes that the information is like a fruit. Marketers let the fruit mature and they offer it to consumers/users. The users will share these fruits with their peers and the information will be expanded. The Marketer creates content for the public and then he/she waits to get the feedback. “It is wrong that Marketers send more information than they receive..”

Jeremiah Owyang said that “people go to people for information” and according to a recent research of Forrester, the corporate blogs is the less trusted source of information for the users.

Twitter accounts of the speakers:

Robert Scoble – @scobleizer
Jeremiah Owyang – @Jowyang
Kevin Marks – @kevinmarks
Mark Silva – @MarkSilva

Event: WordCamp 2009 (San Francisco)

Date: Saturday 30th of May

The ‘WordCamp 2009‘ is the event of the year for the bloggers of Bay Area (and the rest of the world). I was there as a volunteer! I was excited to be there, meet people, help on the event and listen to all these different speakers. The list of the speakers was long and very interesting!

More than 700 people attended the event. There were very interesting presentations. John Lilly the CEO of Mozilla spoke about Firefox and the use of blogs. Chris Pirillo talked about Online Communities and Tim Ferriss talked about his blog and his experience with WordPress. The two most exciting presentations were the ones from Matts! Matt Cutts and Matt Mullenweg rock! The one is an expert of Google SEO and page rank and the other one is the CEO of Automattic (WordPress)

Pictures of the event and the video with the highlights!

But who is Chris Pirillo?

Chris Pirillo has been participating in Internet conversations since 1992, having launched Lockergnome.com as a content publishing network and building Gnomedex to be one of the blogosphere’s highly regarded conferences. He publishes a personal blog and lifecast to tens of thousands of viewers, and is a top subscribed partner on YouTube. When searching Google for “Chris,” his site is listed as the first result. He’s a monthly columnist for CPU Magazine, and has authored books on business and personal technology. Chris also produces weekly video segments for CNN.com Live, where he offers tech advice to a savvy audience. (WordCamp.org)

Take a look on a part of his presentation.

A post about WordCamp 2009 is coming….

Yesterday I visited the Cool Product Expo 2009 in Stanford University. I saw several new ideas.. Some of them were quite complicated and some others were too simple. Most of them were interesting though.  Some of the interesting products were the new Yahoo Service “Search Pad”, Cooliris browser add-on, the Hot Topper, NeuroSky and many more..

Here is all the companies that participated: 23andMe, 3Brick Design,  3Prong Power, Adolph Consulting Services, Aerobie, Inc., Alite Designs, Anybots, B.Minima, Blackbird Guitars, California Cars Initiative, Catapult Design, ConXtech, Cooliris, Cyclute, D.light Design, Dante Beatrix, Inc, Development by Design, D-Rev, Driptech, Elliptigo Inc., Embrace, Evernote, Green Gears, Green Harvest Technologies in cooperation with Ziba Design, HandMe, HighLite, Jaipur Knee Project, Joby, Karven Holdings LLC, Klutz, Logitech, Lunar Design, MagnoGrip Inc., MINIWIZ S.E.D. Co., Ltd, NeuroSky, Nila, Obscura Digital, Pianistica, PlantSense, Plug-In Supply, Psyleron, redmark, Speck Design, Stanford PRN, TacDial, Taco Lab, Think Gum LLC, Tieks, Visible Energy, Volkswagen, Xhibitr, Yahoo! Inc,.

Today I attended the launch of the Seesmic Desktop. Seesmic owns the very famous Twitter client Twhirl (1.2 M downloads until today) that is in the top list of  clients with Tweetdeck. Loic Le Meur, the founder of Seesmic presented today, at Seesmic’s offices in San Francisco, the new Seesmic project that will (soon) combine Facebook and Twitter in one client. The event was also live via the Ustream channel of loic with an average of 500 users.

The new Seesmic desktop is a preview and can be downloaded only by the Seesmic team members. You can join the team and download the new Twitter client. There are several new features but the most interesting is the UserLists where you can make lists of your friends and have a separate column for each list. The whole design reminds me iTunes. Simple, with a left sidebar and other ‘Mac design ideas’.

Twhirl has some cons that Seesmic wants to get rid of them.. There is not a twhirl.com domain and its name is quite hard to say it. Seesmic wants also to strength its brand name by creating the Seesmic Facebook application and the new Seesmic Desktop.

So, join the team, test it and give your feedback to Loic and his friends!

Look the pictures of the event…

Yes.. Tonight we had our annual pillow fight in San Francisco.. Whoever had his/her Valentine could come and celebrate.. Whoever didn’t have his/her Valentine could come and find a new one! The weather was great and thousands of people came at the event!

Take a look on the video