even the memorable moments in your life pile up, when placed next to each other, like a stack of pictures … and of those, which moments really stand out?

Scrapblog had been TechCrunched before, but not like this: The Real Scrapblog is Here … Finally. Previously, either we were still open with the first version, or we had put on the "bubble wrap" as we prepared for launch.

Except, of course, we haven’t launched yet!

We had been handing out a preview URL (www.scrapblog.com/preview) to friends and previous users of Scrapblog, to help us kick the tires, adjust the mirrors and rev up the engine before we got on the highway.

Despite our plans, it didn’t quite work out that way and once TechCrunch posted URL, bloggers picked it up and word started to get out.

At this point, our advisors, including Shel, David and Tara, and our peers, including Jeremiah, Hyku, Douglas Karr, and Ryan Stewart pitched in with their respective megaphones to point out that we’re still tidying up around here

Lost in this excitement was a bit of heroism by our developers, who had already been pushed to the max. As  Tara and Ryan
describe, Omar and his team stepped up to the plate to collaborate with Adobe’s Apollo team, who wanted to demo a kick-ass application. Since Scrapblog is built in Flex, Omar downloaded the Apollo SDK and stitched together a demoable application for the platform.

With a bit more work, we can be ready for Apollo, which totally rocks. It’s a bit early, but it’ll be great to support mobile and wireless platforms, including laptops, and to be able to work on scrapblogs, presentations and slideshows on the browser, without being connected to the internet.

As a bonus, it runs on the laptop as well and now we can demo Scrapblog without being connected

,,, to be continued …

Technorati Tags: scrapblog, techcrunch, david parmet, shel israel, tara hunt, jeremiah owyang, hyku, douglas karr, ryan stewart

We’re very close to sending out our first invites at Scrapblog it hurts … and our developers have had their longest week getting everything ready. It’s really an amazing application, but then again, I would say that, wouldn’t I, considering I work there …

But you can be the judge of that as well. Michael Pick and Robin Good at MasterNewMedia reviewed Scrapblog recently and made some great screencasts of Scrapblog, which I’ve embedded here:

If you’d like a preview invite, please comment below or email me privately.

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Between travel to Austin, my hard drive crash and the launch of Scrapblog, I haven’t had the occasion to talk about RefreshMiami. The easiest is to post this e-mail, from Brian. By the way, I think this will be a great Refresh meeting:

Hey folks,

Your friendly organizer here, just wanted to give you all a heads up on the exciting stuff we have planned for [tonight], one of our biggest yet.

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This is another placeholder, I’ll repost the Scrapblog slideshow I created when we open up our firewall again in a few days.

If you’ve followed this link, thanks for stopping by. You may want to see the other cartoons Hugh drew that night.

From what I hear, it’s been challenging to organize blogger/geek dinners in Miami, for reasons I won’t go into (I’ve read all the posts and comments). Somehow we got past the cynicism and understood that "Love and goodwill are driving this revolution. The selfish will be left behind."

Because when you look past the local politics and the flash of ZIP 33139, aka South Beach, you’ll find real people that care, that are friendly, that want to make a difference, that want to do the right thing. And so it was that night, when we got together, had a good chat, drank some mojitos and caipirinhas and dug in to some good pasta and pizza, all in the coziness of the back porch of the Margherita Regina restaurant on Lincoln Road. We were joined by Chris Saylor, Caleb Elston, Brian Breslin, Maria, Gus and Michelle Moore, Cristina, Frank Astor, Jason Baptiste, Carlos Garcia, Jorge Barroso, Leonard Boord, Jason Korman and Hugh.

Our dinner was organized quickly, in 48 hours, using Upcoming.org, RefreshMiami.org and a couple of local blogs. I also posted to Craigslist but I don’t think that made a difference. Brian helped a lot by posting to RefreshMiami. The idea was to get together, meet Hugh MacLeod and meet other local bloggers. Stormhoek tried to get wine, but 36 hours was too short notice to get the bottles.

We’d like to thank Jason of Stormhoek.com, Leonard of TheGorb.com, and Carlos of Scrapblog.com, my employer, for sponsoring the event and footing the bill.

Anyway, Gapingvoid is one of the world’s top blogs and it feels like I just got my 15 minutes of blogging fame Thank you for stopping by. Leave me a comment and I’ll come by your site.

Don’t know Gapingvoid? Go read it. Now.

Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, stormhoek, "hugh, macleod", "geek, dinner", web2, "web, 2.0", miami, florida, refresh, refreshmiami, tech, web, online

Customer service is the new black. The Customer Service is the New Marketing panel at SXSW talked about how "online businesses that provide superior customer service are earning fanatical devotion … Doing business online is anything but impersonal and an obsessive attention to customers *after* the sale is a killer advantage." The panel featured Thor Muller, Managing Dir, Satisfaction Unlimited, Heather Champ, Community Mgr, Flickr, Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com and Nick Wilder, Principal, 30 Boxes

Heather spoke in good detail about how Flickr manages their community:

• They keep different channels of communication open with their members. They have a help link at the top and footer of every page, a help by email with a drop-down topic selector and links to forum topics and activity. Flickr’s team can access this help and feedback system on the fly from wherever they are and they use a sitewide status message to let people know what’s happening.

• Flickr has three forums: Flickr Help, Bugs and Ideas - that provide immediate feedback on the mood of the community on any particular day. Community managers, including company founder Stewart Butterfield, monitor these daily to take the temperature of the community. About a million photos are uploaded every day, so a lot of people actively participate on the site and in the forums.  For example, the community recently flared up over Yahoo!’s decision to convert "Old Skool" Flickr users were not happy about this and within a few weeks of the announcement, 2,650 comments had been posted on the forum thread about the change.

• Even as things get heated in the forums, Heather’s mantra is to use a "soft pleasing tone of voice"; she even taped this sentence to her laptop, as a core principle to follow. The point is to cool things down by being level-headed at all times. She will let members be abusive to her, but never to one another.

• When they know of a new feature or a bug, they will put a notice on the top of mebers’ home page with a link to the discussion

• Every Flickr empoyee is an active member of the site with their own photostream: they are who they say they are and you can see their profiles. In fact, the people who built Flickr really participated and actively engaged with the community

• As an online service provider, you cannot assume nothing is going to go wrong … but you can prepare for when things do. For example, on July 19th 2006, they had to take site down to fix a nagging issue. On this occasion, since they didn’t know for how long the site would be down, they replaced the standard "flickr is having a massage" error page by a coloring contest with a way to win a free pro account. The contest details were on the flickr blog, which is run on a separate system and is not connected to the Flickr site. Within 24 hours, they had 1100 photographs. They gave away 14 pro accounts to the top entries as well as a 3-months pro account to all contest entrants. They did this because they didnt know how long it would take them to bring Flickr back up, so they wanted a way to engage with the community.

• They remain honest, transparent and they ‘fess up when they do things wrong, in particular Stewart

• How do you deal with crazies? It’s important to realize that people are very passionate about certain things and you have to remind yourself not to get angry and to understand when to step away and take a breather. The key is to have a firmly established community guideline, so that you can take the appropriate action when people step over the line. Sometimes there’s "trout slapping" going on between members, and the community managers have to position themselves as referees: "step back from the abyss and if not, we’ll lock down the forum". You can have people rail against you, but not against other people in the community. They only delete spammers out of the forums and infrequently block people from forums, if they’re being real jerks. This action is not irreversible and gives people time to reset. According to Heather, it’s good to wear "asbestos underpants" when dealing with hot topics.

• It’s important to hire the right people and their employees have been interviewed by 8 or 9 people. You need to find people with the same values. Also, everyone has to answer 10 to 20 customer care questions everyday to understand the interaction with the community. "We’re all in this together".

• Is there a cancellation policy? Flickr has a firm, no refund policy. Because a year’s membership costs a mere $24.95, it’s more expensive to deal with refunds, so they’re not given. But you want to make sure people are there because they want to be there, not because you’re holding them hostage, so it shouldn’t be hard for users to cancel their accounts. In fact, every additional minute members spend trying to cancel their account creates unnecessary hatred, so the advice is to make it easy for members to discontinue their membership if that’s what they wish.

• Finally, it’s important to subscribe to watchlist feeds to see what people in the blogosphere are saying about the company in blog posts and comments

Technorati Tags: flickr, customer service, marketing, communitysxsw, sxswi, sxsw2007, sxswi2007, sxsw07, sxswi07

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Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid.com will be in town this week and we’ll be going to dinner. The details are to be determined, but the dinner will be held on Thursday, March 13 15th, 2007 at 8pm. We know it’s very short notice, but we only confirmed this today. Please sign up at this post on the Scrapblog blog so we can get a headcount and plan accordingly.

Most readers of this blog would know Gapingvoid, but if you don’t, here’s a quick bio of Hugh MacLeod. Besides "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards", Hugh’s main gig is Marketing Strategist for Stormhoek, a small South African vineyard, whose Web 2.0 approach to wine making is currently getting a lot of international attention in the wine trade. Hugh also does the marketing for a bespoke Savile Row tailoring firm, English Cut with Thomas Mahon, arguably one of the best half-dozen tailors in the world. Stormhoek and English Cut have all to do with what Hugh calls "The Global Microbrand". He was named one of the top 50 marketers of 2006 by AdAge.

There may even be some some Gapingvoid and Stormhoek goodies to give out. And again, we apologize for the very short notice and hope you can make it.

Update:  The dinner will be held at Regina Margherita at 626 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, FL 33139

Technorati Tags: gapingvoid, hugh macleod, scrapblog, dinner, blogger

I’m sitting at the "Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses" with Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Oberkirch, Adam Darowski, and Lionel Menchaca.

Jeremiah is live blogging this event as well here.

The speakers are:

Ted Rheingold, Top Dog, Dogster Inc, panel moderator

Tara Hunt  , CoFounder & CMO,  Citizen Agency

Gabe Rivera, CEO,  Techmeme

Shanalyn Victor, Owner/Designer,  Pixelgirl Shop

Ryan Carson , Dir,  Carson Systems

Ted gave a 5-minute walk-through of the many ways people are making money online. Microsponsorship stands out as one of the truly new ways for people to cover costs and start making money online.

Ted: did you all plan to make money or how did it happen?

Shanalyn started Pixelgirl Shop as a free site but had to start a shop in order to pay for the hosting fees, that were exploding. For Tara and Chris, they needed to support their passion, the work that were doing, because rent is definitely not cheap in San Francisco.

Ted: did anyone study business before running a business?

Ryan encourages everyone to keep trying to get funding for side projects, it is doable.

Ted: how much can you find out on the internet or do you need to seek mentors?

Tara and Chris seek mentors to get new perspectives and may eventually hire a CEO to run the business. Shanalyn found that the "mentors" she found were thinking too small and she was shooting higher. Before your site is popular, people wlll forget about you, so it’s a constant effort to get top of mind. Ted’s mentor urged him to spend 50% of time selling, if not, "you’re going to fail". Tara agreed: everytime you post to a blog, when you post pictures, when you travel and meet people, all these things keep you top of mind in the community.
In fact, you have to be part of the community you serve, and luckily it comes naturally to some. But you need to find ways to get involved, not really in a "selling" way, but in a "learning" way, with your peers.

Ted: how do you determine the pricing of what you’re selling?

For Ryan, the only way to know is when you see people buying the stuff. The worst thing to do is to offer too much for free, because people will take it and not pay. So there needs to be a balance. Tara: do your research to see what the market will bear. Shanalyn had to raise the pricing of everything to lighten the amount of work she was doing fulfilling the orders. For Ted, it was about getting a first good sponsor. Once you have that, you understand where the floor is, and it makes it easier to get the next sponsor. But he’s gotten the price point wrong many times and has had to adapt and experiment.

Essentially, the best pricing model is to open an excel sheet and figure out how much you need to make to quit your day job. 

Technorati Tags: sxsw, projects, profits, revenue, ted rheingold, dogster, tara hunt, citizen agency, ryan carson, shanalyn victor, pixelgirl

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The University of Miami Business School hosted an MIT Enterprise Forum Florida event on the Web 2.0. (http://www.mitforumfl.org/events/calendar.cfm?id=35).

The speakers were:

• Alex von der Goltz – Boston Capital Ventures (moderator)
• Jason L. Baptiste – CEO of Publictivity.com
• Carlos Garcia – CEO of Scrapblog.com
• Leonard Boord – CEO of The Gorb
• Peter Pezaris – President and Founder of Multiply Inc.
• Jason Gorham – CEO and Founder of CareerMetaSearch.com

The event started with a 7-minute presentation by each speaker followed by a moderated panel discussion and Q&A session.

Jason Baptiste presented Publictivity. Frank Aster is the Co-founder and David Cann the lead developer.

The four pillars of Publictivity:

- a beautiful interface
- collaboration
- web 2.0 grows up
- PR specific functions

Jason gave the first public demo of Publictivity. This is a hosted enterprise collaboration platform which includes the following features and functionalities. This is not an exhaustive list:

- calendar system with links to contacts and parsing of dates
- to-do system
- file uploader and storage
- internal chat system
- collaborative word processor / wiki
- social bookmarking with bookmarklet for the browser
- RSS subscriptions on search terms
- graphical representations
- clipbooks : results of PR campaigns

The user interface is indeed very nice and there is ajax everywhere. Publictivity is coming soon and is due to launch in the next 60 days. They will offer a 2 month free-trial period. The idea is to make it affordable to everyone

Carlos Garcia presented Scrapblog*, a free, web-based service that allows everyday people to create and share multimedia scrapbooks. Users can mix their photos, videos, audio, text and a bunch of creative elements in an environment that is truly drag-and-drop easy. Scrapblog has been developed using the latest Flex development tools and has been self-funded for the last two years. Carlos completed the first round of financing yesterday with Longworth Ventures.

Leonard Boord introduced The Gorb in a very compelling presentation, where he ran through 119 slides in 7 minutes! Caleb from uSnacks helped put the presentation together, which was about “You, Bob and The Gorb”. In a nutshell, “our imperfections make us unique” and The Gorb leverages the power of anonymity, community and consensus to provide the reputation of individuals. The Gorb’s team focused on creating a very clean interface, with a “monster algorithm under the hood”.

How do you rate someone? All you need is an email address. Note that everyone has optional and non-optional e-mail addresses. Generally, non-optional e-mail addresses, such as the ones provided by your workplace, often follow the same format with the domain name. So by aggregating the ratings of everyone in such domains, it is possible to compare the reputation of one company versus another.

The Gorb may have a significant impact on local search as well. Currently, local searches are based on proximity. If you’re looking for a dentist, for instance, you will get the location of them on a map. However, you may want to visit the best dentist in your area, and not just the one that’s closest to you. The Gorb’s reputation system is ideally suited for this.

How about negative criticism? Well, if you receive negative criticism, you may respond to it. Generally, the way you handle criticism reveals more about who you are as a human being. Also, the community can reject negative criticisms. Finally, the monster algorithm eats up people who give too many negative criticisms

Peter Pezaris spoke about Multiply as well as his earlier successes. Most significantly, he had started Sportsline with 4 other developers who invested $2,000 each, bootstrapped it, then sold it some years later for $46m to CBS Sportiline.com. Multiply is about sharing stuff with those you know, and not with the whole world. The Multiply social network has grown to nearly 5 million users.

Jason Gorham presented CareerMetaSearch.com, a passive candidate search technology that allows employers and recruiters to find the best-qualified candidates, faster and more cost effectively than conventional methods. They provide a system that targets passive candidates who may not even be looking for a change and converts them into job applicants. This provides hiring managers with fewer but much better qualified candidates.

Overall, this was a good event. More pictures here.

*NB: I work at scrapblog.com

Cross-posted to refreshmiami.org