I love java and so should you

I attended the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco this last week. It was an amazing event and I met some unbelievable people. Here are my comments and observations, and of course my 2 cents on the winners.

First off, those that dont know TechCrunch (plug) it is THE technology blog for the Silicon Valley technology company click. A great blog, great people, well presented, well managed. Excellent all round. As expected they put on an equally great show! What a job. Only criticism (dah), the poor wifi internet connections plagued the show and caused quite a problem for those attending (that have to keep up with the day to day of their startups) and especially the poor companies with booths that had to demo their INTERNET based websites. Wow - I sat through at least 20 demo failures. I take my hat off to the companies that had to demo on the stage in their presentations that suffered major connection drops too.

Next year - overcompensate and give everyone a cable or at least get T1 lines with enterprise wifi routers :) at a internet convention.

OK, moving on. The format. Basically 50 technology companies were picked to pitch their business idea to a panel of experts for 8 minutes. The top 6 were chosen and out of them one winner received $50k and a lot of exposure and probably a good chance at funding. Good model, love the idea, the whole thing just works.

The winner was Yammer.com. A simple, well implemented website that caters to enterprise collaboration and communication. In my opinion, they were one of the top "website" offerings however I did not see that much innovation in their solution, or see any evidence that they could scale and support a large adoption. Which brings me to my next point.

Why was technology not even mentioned in this convention? There was not ONE word of technology, architecture, or how these sites or products were actually built. This is at a time when 99% of startups fail because of poor technical architecture and implementation. It should have been the second most important question after the business model. If I was involved, I would have had a technical architect or a qualified CTO up on the panel for every presentation that asked the relevant questions and thereby gave the panel and investors some idea of the "how" and the technical integrity of the company. Wow. Just a little insight into the way the angel, VC, start up process works and how far ahead we are at JavaDojo. (plug) :)

Another interesting thing I witnessed was the celebrity in the angel and VC people. They are treated and act like gods. The conference was very well represented with money guys and they were very "available", which is an unbelievable opportunity for these companies that make the trip and pay the ticket price. Nice job on the invites and for showing up!

My favorite's were Yossi Vardi and Marc Cuban. All out cowboy's and open book straight shooters. Yossi with his wit and sense of humor stole the show and made me really want a meeting with him, just to hang out, let alone pitch, and Marc Cuban with his "rich kid" dont give a damn attitude, which makes him a super celebrity and everyone think they can make it. Loved this part of the conference a great deal.

From a quality of innovation and technical evolution perspective, I walk away from the conference feeling pretty bummed. I saw little "new" and a lot of the old. Most companies had just found new ways to work with old ideas, using web 2.0 spaghetti script to make pretty interfaces that had no use really other than solving a problem that they invented. Other that the Hitachi image search guys and the Swype team, I saw nothing that was all out "fresh".

My pick for next leader and success story is the otherinbox.com (Joshua Baer), and ClosetCouture.com (Christine Elia_. Christine killed it! I would work with her in a second - what a great presentation.

In the Pit, my favorite company was Spellr.us. What a simple and well implemented solution. It was the ONLY solution I saw that actually did anything useful!. Kevin is a honey and I loved him too. Go boy!

I was very happy to see adgregatemarkets.com and see there product. It was the closest offering to our incaMoon product and made me happy that we are entering a new market as I hoped. I would love to work with them and help them implement the pureSolv platform to make their Ad stores scale as they grow. What a great presentation by Henry Wong their CEO and founder and a wonderful team, shout out to Nihal!

In summary, TechCrunch50 was cool. It was a great event. The web 2.0 companies out there right now are not impressive. As an investor I would not have spent a dime. Its a real down year for the industry. No Googles, Twitters or Facebooks.

To all these companies - spend some time on your back end! Make sure your technology can handle your success before you launch. The consumer will not return to your site or service if it fails or breaks ONCE. The web is fickle. Talk to us if you need help, I will always answer emails to help people with architecture. :) Martin

Hello all, Martin here. I am an avid electronic music producer on the side and am part of a growing collective of digital content authors that are constantly looking for ways to distribute and be compensated for the hours of time behind the software engineering the art we love.

Software and hardware evolution has made it possible for individuals to produce top quality audio, video and visual art, without the "big budget" studio's and corporates being involved. The internet and social networks have provided a channel for us all to get our art out there.

The music industry as an example, is changing - the empowerment of the artists via the evolution of technology has almost made the industry unnecessary, and this blog is a little about how we are helping empower this new breed of artist with even more tooling.

We invented incaMoon only 4 months ago. incaMoon is a widget based web store. There is no limit to its uses. It lets anyone sell anything they choose, for any price they choose, from any location.

Why was I looking for a new vehicle? When selling my music, I was not happy with the current set of products designed to enable producers to sell their work. They were buggy, uncustomizable, and charged too much. They also limited me in several ways. I could not develop my "brand", and was always pushed into their way of thinking. It was clear there was "a better mousetrap". After designing incaMoon for music files, we quickly realized there was no reason to limit it.

There are many forms of digital files and products dependent on digital files that have value. So why not extend incaMoon to ANY digital file. So we did. This has enabled the world of digital artists, authors, content authors, and anyone that authors and produces a digital file with value in the intellectual property. We are merely enabling a marketplace for them.

We then realized why limit incaMoon to digital product? So we extended the design further to enable ANY product to be sold in incaMoon stores. A perfect example is a small winery. They can add their stores to any relevant website and sell more wine. The point of incaMoon is that as a user - you have nothing to lose!

This gets us to the social networks and the blogs. We have all bought into the social network concept and have been maintaining our virtual personality and manage our various "home" pages on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogger or any HTML based social website. This is in essence our "brand". We all have relationships with our viewers. So why not be able to sell our wares from these locations. This is yet another goal of incaMoon. To enable people to create storefronts that define, "themselves" and their "brand".

The biggest difference with incaMoon is that it is an embeddable widget. It is not a separate website like all the other web stores. We don't want the web user to have to navigate to our website an actually see that as the downfall of the web model to a large degree. Less navigation's equals more productivity and better web experiences. So incaMoon is totally different in this aspect. The customer makes the purchase within the widget. They never move away from YOUR page, your brand. It is as if they are buying from YOU, incaMoon is just the enabler.

We can do this through clever use of the Java technologies. There are new Java platforms which enable a widget to co-exist within the web browser and talk independently to our servers to make the transactions possible. In essence a totally invisible communication channel is established between your storefront and your catalog, and more importantly your ability to accept payment and receive money.

We then continued the design to attack another dark topic on the web, banner advertising. We are all sick and tired of little images with silly wording to "sell" us to "click" away into another world of websites to ultimately buy something from someone we don't trust. incaMoon can now be used in place of the banner advert image, so that the buyer can actually make the purchase within the banner ad, just like the web store. No navigation's, no leaving the brand, no logging in again and again and having to subscribe to so many websites.

incaMoon extends this even further by allowing you to drag and drop your favorite stores from the browser page to your desktop! This way you can keep your favorite stores in a favorite store area without having to browse the web again.

That is incaMoon in a nutshell, a universal storefront for the masses. With infinite possibilities, enabling anyone to make money off their art, product or brand, without selling out to another company or branding through another entity. Self empowerment. Manage your own business!

Thanks for reading and get your incaMoon store now to see what we are talking about.

Martin Folb
martin_folb@javadojo.com

People often ask me what does javaDojo stand for? Are we martial artists? coffee makers? coffee educators? so let me go ahead and start this blog with a little bit of a mission statement.

Hi, I am Martin Folb, CEO of javaDojo. javaDojo was started in 2005 by Ian Moore and myself with one sole intention. To create a software company dedicated to all things Java. That's "java" the programming language, platform, culture and philosophy started and managed by Sun Microsystems. Both Ian and myself had been working with Java since its birth back in the day and had evolved a love for the technology and its consistent and astonishing power and evolution. Its not as much the language itself, but the intention of Java that we have always loved. It is a liberating technology, with a heart close to the community of developers that build amazing things with it. We love Java, and so should you. Why?

Java, and more importantly, the Java virtual machine or VM, has found its way onto almost every operating system and device. It is one of the only platforms which crosses all boundaries and promises to finally deliver a "standard" on top of which we can all benefit. Its the people's platform. Standards create consistency and reuse which means higher quality and faster evolution of technology. So ultimately, Java will bring cooler, and more amazing products to the consumer and the business user.

So this is who we are, we are a Java shop. We build software with Java. We lust for the cutting edge of the technology and for the continued evolution of the perfect platform. We have built and are building platforms on top of Java which will astonish you. Perhaps not in the code itself, but in the ability to launch websites, applications, businesses and consumer products, quickly, easily and with the lowest possible cost. Our platforms also deliver amazing user interfaces, the likes of which you did'nt know were possible.

We want javaDojo to be the home of the finest Java minds, and we are always ready to meet aspiring Java engineers, or those that love Java. If you are interested in chatting about cool new Java ideas, our platforms, our visionary products or to just chew the fat, don't hesitate to comment on the blogs, forums or send us an email.

Thanks for reading!

Martin Folb
martin_folb@javadojo.com
www.javadojo.com