Monday Dec 12, 2011 I was scheduled to play a bit of Golf with Tony Perkins’ crew and attendees, to his “AlwaysOn Venture Summit” at the Ritz Carlton “Ocean” Golf Course in Half Moon Bay, CA – 30 miles Southwest of San Francisco.
That was my last chance to “breath” before diving into two days of intense panel sessionns, finance, and founder presentations.
So the hard part was out of the way, by 7PM Monday evening:) Now… on to a series of photos and posts about what I see over the next two days of the conference. Posted below, in reverse chronological order… so the newest posts are on top.
I’m disappointed with my photos from this conference… i was shooting using an Android phone, and an iPhone. As I recently blogged, my almost-new Nikon camera gear was stolen recently in downtown San Francisco. You can’t buy one to replace it, even if you want to — because the flooding in Thailand shut down the production lines at Nikon.
Wednesday Dec 14, 2011:
The Sun Sets on the AlwaysOn Venture Summit 2011
5:00PM The Sun sets on AlwaysOn’s 2011 Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay, California (photo at right).
As is usually the case with AlwaysOn events, this has been a terrific conference. A lot of mileage was covered in two short days. Congratulations to the AlwaysOn team for putting on another highly informative, successful event!
Note / Tues Dec 27: I have photos and sumaries from about 5 more sessions… I’ll post them later this week ]
Tony Perkins interviews Satjiv S Chahil, Apple-Sony-Palm-HP ideas and innovations guy
2:00PM: Tony Perkins is interviewing Satjiv Chahil, the magician behind building brands at Apple, Sony, PALM, and HP. Satjiv started by telling stories about how he and his team at Apple Computer brought the CD to the computer, replacing the floppy disk drive; evangalized the Mac in Japan, and on Television; put the first “url” (web address hyperlink) into a TV commercial (in an ad for BMW); created the Tom Cruise “Mission Impossible” ad featuring the Mac; and hired Janet Jackson to do a $1M Apple promotion in Tokyo.
Satjiv’s stories are amazing, classic stories spanning four great brands [photo at right]. He ended up being recruited out of Apple by Sony to launch the Vaio, the first thin laptop computer; then PALM; then HP.
Some of Satjiv’s most remarkable stories, imho, come from his days at PALM… he created the TV ad which was filmed in the Kyoto train station, where not a single word is spoken… a lady in one train, exchanges business cards with a fellow on another train, by beaming train-to-train between two PALMS. Weeks later, Dave Letterman had a gig piece, mocking the ad… with Letterman as the guy on the other train.
My friend KC Leung of PapiTV.com is setting next to me, streaming live video onto Justin.TV from his Dell Axiom… here’s a link to a video of this interview:
http://www.justin.tv/kctv88/b/302610119
SaS panel at AlwaysOn Half Moon Bay 121411
Paul Kwan, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, moderated an outstanding Software as Service (SAS) panel session… it was the single most informative panel discussion that I’ve heard on the topic… ever. The panel members are definitely at the top of their game (photo at right):
- Byron Deeter, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Dan Finnigan, CEO, Jobvite
- Doug Merritt, CEO, Baynote
- Mark Gorenberg, Partner, Hummer Winblad
Kicked off the day visiting with a CEO who is raising capital, over breakfast at the Hotel. The Ritz Carlton has Toasters to throw your bread into, at the buffet breakfast, that take about 15 minutes to make your toast. Nice! Good thing I wasn’t in a hurry:)
This morning’s keynote was delivered by Dr. Stephen Hoover, CEO of PARC (formerly Xerox PARC) in Palo Alto (photo at right).
Tony Perkins introduced Stephen with some interesting memories about interviewing Steve Jobs at NeXT, recalling Jobs telling him that he was “blown away” by three things he saw at PARC, when he was 27 years old: Graphically based user interfaces, the mouse, and object oriented programming. “The first one blew me away so much”, Jobs said, “I almost missed the other two”.
Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners gave a great “big picture” speech about the issues facing the US, and the World today – photo at right.
Joe Schoendorf Accel Partners at AlwaysOn Venture Summit
[ Thurs Dec 22, 2011: more presentation summaries pending, I'll post them this weekend ]
Tuesday Dec 13, 2011:
I’m going to add snapshots from the sessions from today, many of which have been terrific.
Attached are screenshots of my Tweets from the conference this afternoon. More on this post later, and all day tomorrow… along with some of the many interesting things that are being said at this conference.
My favorite from today: Ann Winblad said “90% of the data in the world today, was created in the past 27 months”. Now that’s amazing.
Monday Dec 12, 2011:
Golf on the “Ocean” Course at the Ritz Carleton… I arrived late, played the first 4 holes, then had a great time with the AO crowd at the clubhouse. There was a tie for first place…