Ask the Startup CTO

Sebastian Hassinger has worked in the IT industry for over 20 years.

He built the first website for Apple Support in 1995, founded two ISPs during the dot-com boom (one too early, one too late!), was senior strategist for IBM’s Pervasive Computing initiative, and is now the founder and CEO of Tech Propulsion Labs, a Vietnam-based web and mobile development firm providing services to startups in the US and Europe. He has written several technical books and holds over a dozen patents.

Ask the Startup CTO will be able to help with technology strategy assessment for startups and firms of all stages. Make sure your technology choices support your business model, explore options to pivot or expand your business based on tech capabilities, map out a development roadmap that aligns with your business objectives, discuss recruiting and managing development resources or even your very own CTO, and more!

Sebastian will be at pariSoma on July 6, from noon – 5pm.  There will be eight 30-min time slots available.

Founders Round Tables

pariSoma has teamed up with Founders Space to host a series of Founders Round Tables.  The idea is to get a handful of founders & advisors together and talk about issues we all face.
This is an informal gathering at pariSoma in San Francisco.  It’s an opportunity to get to know one another personally and exchange ideas.

We’re going to keep each Round Table as small as possible.  Because of this, we can only invite a limited number of founders & advisors each time.  If you’d like to get on the waiting list, simply contact us using the form at Founders Space http://www.foundersspace.com/founders-roundtable/

Please include details about yourself and a link to your company, and we’ll invite you as soon as a seat opens up

When? July 9th from 10am to 11.30am

CC Salon

At Creative Commons, we love to share.

And while CC is primarily known for its work enabling openness and collaboration in the digital world, we’re interested in how the culture of sharing is changing offline life as well. Join us at the next CC Salon, where we’ll present three projects focused on how sharing ideas, knowledge, and even physical space can revolutionize the way people create, work, and play.

The evening’s presenters are Jack Herrick, founder of the collaborative how-to manual wikiHow; Clément Alteresco, COO of innovation/strategic development agency faberNovel, which founded collaborative workspace pariSoma; and Neal Gorenflo, founder of Shareable, a new magazine and online community dedicated to sharing.

You’ll even have the chance to walk away with one of our cheerful new green I Love to Share shirts, which we’ll be selling at the salon.

Hope to see you there!

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Startup Happy Hour

Wednesday, July 28, 6:30pm-8:30pm
Join pariSoma and Storytelling MediaSouthBeachMissionBay.com as we host “60 second spots” mixer. Listen to elevator pitches, network with the startup community, and have some drinks. We will also have an open mic for other startups to get their 60 seconds!

Featured startups include:

Ask Your Target Market gives you serious market research at silly prices. For those who cannot afford the money and time associated with traditional market research, AYTM is your online, self-service market research platform with a built-in U.S. consumer panel.

Backblaze automatically backs up all your laptop or desktop data online with unlimited storage for just $5 per month. TechCrunch called the service “Dead Simple Online Backup.” Start backing up your data free at our website: www.backblaze.com.

ClearGears is an HR software company that makes performance reviews better by making them faster, simpler, and more frequent. We continually collect 360 employee feedback, so employees always know where they stand in the company. Managers can track an employee’s progress over time and see a snapshot of company trends as well as detailed reporting.

Cooliris was founded in January 2006 with a simple mantra: “Think beyond the browser”. The company creates products that transform the browsing experience across screens, making discovering and enjoying media more exciting, efficient, and personal.


The Doochoo project is about revolutionizing the way opinions on the web carry meaning, starting with some applications, followed by a proprietary platform that will give opinions on the web tangibility and critical weight.

Livefyre is a revolutionary new commenting platform for your site that: turns your comments into live conversations, drives traffic to your content based on the topics you post about, encourages higher quality comments through game mechanics, builds an active and engaged community around your content, and more!

Mockingbird is a flash-less online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, and share mockups of your website or application. With Mockingbird, you get useful UI elements, smart text resizing, easy coloring, and a lot more to make mocking hurt less.

With tweebus you can cloudsource, publish, and monetize social content about the things you and your users or customers care about. It’s the easiest, quickest way to build sites or apps full of rich, relevant media and information, and to see and connect with the larger community that shares your interests. Format tweebus as traditional content, animated streams, or as sponsored conversational marketing including live, viral chat and in-stream ads. tweebus is social content you can use.

The network Vidtel is a cloud-based video conferencing service provider for small-to-medium enterprises. Vidtel’s service enables a business of any size to experience high-quality video conferencing without investing thousands of dollars in infrastructure. Available as a subscription fee, the Vidtel service supports on-demand high-definition B2B video conferencing between various standard video endpoints. Vidtel is creating the video equivalent of the PSTN (the regular phone network) with the vision that any standard video device will interoperate with any other. Visit www.vidtel.com.

Sponsors

BEAR Data Systems, Inc. is a global value-added reseller that helps clients design, optimize and support mission-critical IT infrastructures. By combining expert engineering resources, best-of-breed technologies and superior customer service, BEAR Data delivers high performance IT solutions and services including virtualization, unified communications, networking, storage, database, security, wireless, staffing and support contract management. For more information, please visit www.beardatasystems.com.

Hacks/Hackers Meetup

Semantic Web technologies have been touted for their promise in being able to help organize content intelligently, increase reader engagement and automate repetitive tasks. As leaders in the field gather in San Francisco for their annual Semtech conference, Hacks/Hackers is hosting a panel of top industry figures to discuss applications of semantic technology for journalism.

The panel will include Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead for Thomson Reuters, Amra Tareen, CEO of Allvoices.com, Nate Weiner from The Idea Shower and Edwin Khodabakchian of Feedly.

Schedule:
7pm- Drinks, snacks
730p-830p – Panel discussion
830p-9 – More discussion, networking

Attendees will be asked for a $10 donation at the door to cover costs of drinks, food and the space.

Hacks/Hackers is a group for journalists and technologists looking to build the future of media. More details can be found at http://meetup.hackshackers.com.

PhoneGap SF Meetup

Are you a web developer who would like to start building native apps for the iPad/iPhone?

An expert in HTML, CSS, JavaScript but you don’t want to learn Objective-C?

Perfect! PhoneGap is your new best friend.

At this meetup we’ll get you started.

The requirement for this Meetup will be to bring a Mac laptop. You don’t need an iPad/iPhone because you can use the simulator, but if you’ve got one, bring it and you can launch your apps on your device.

Space is limited. Learn more and RSVP at our meetup page

Ask the Tech Journalist

Alex Salkever is Director of Marketing Communications at Picarro, the leading maker of greenhouse gas and molecular analyzers and a C-round startup backed by Benchmark and Greylock. He is also a senior blogger at AOL DailyFinance.com and a regular contributing writer to numerous publications in the greentech, travel and business news space. Previously he was the technology editor of BusinessWeek.com and senior director of technology research at a boutique brokerage providing hybrid research to large hedge funds. He is an expert on PR, marketing, media, communications and greentech.

Alex will be providing free advice to startups about PR through the unique eyes of a journalist on July 13, from 2-5pm.

Ask the Lean Startup Lawyer – June

Antone Johnson PhotoAntone Johnson, founder of Bottom Line Law Group, will host “Ask The Startup Lawyer” office hours again at pariSoma on Thursday, June 24 from 1230 to 530.

A veteran business and intellectual property lawyer, Antone has served as an attorney and executive for technology and media companies at all stages of growth, from incorporation and seed funding through venture capital financing rounds, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions.  As the former head of worldwide legal affairs for eHarmony, and one of the original lawyers at MySpace, he is particularly well versed in legal and business issues related to social media, Web 2.0, digital media, e-commerce, online advertising and marketing.  pariSoma startups and San Francisco community members are welcome to sign up for free consultations.

This event always fills up quickly, so reserve your spot now!

SF Drupal Users Group – June

This is the monthly San Francisco Drupal users group.

Come on down and discuss Drupal and Drupal technology with other people who use Drupal, we showcase sites which are using Drupal to help us all see real world applications of Drupal.

Our Tech Sessions cover all areas of Drupal technology and are very informative.
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Dorkbot SF

Dorkbot is a semi-regular meeting of artists (sound/image/movement/whatever), designers, engineers, students and other interested parties who are involved in the creation of electronic art (in the broadest sense of the term). Dorkbot was started in New York in 2000 by Douglas Irving Repetto and has since spread to over 40 cities worldwide.

RU Sirius – The Mondo 2000 History Project

R.U. Sirius will discuss his plans for a multilayered open source participatory history of MONDO 2000 online, in print, and in film and read a few fragments of preliminary work. MONDO 2000 was a psychedelic/cyberculture magazine that was popular in the early ’90s.
R.U. Sirius was the cofounder and former Editor-In-Chief of MONDO 2000 from 1989-1993. Since then, he has edited many magazines and websites and written many books including True Mutations, The Cyberpunk Handbook with St. Jude, and Design For Dying with Timothy Leary.

Get involed with the MONDO 2000 History Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._U._Sirius
The RU Sirius Show

Michele Pred – Black Friday Shopdrop

Michele Pred will be discussing her Black Friday IKEA shopdrop project. Shopdropping is the opposite of shoplifting where merchandise is covertly placed in a store for display and sale.
Michele Pred is a conceptual artist who works with found/confiscated objects and technology imbued with cultural and political meaning. Her work has been reviewed and featured by The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, ARTnews, Art in America, WIRED, Travel and Leisure Magazine, Ready Made Magazine, Associated Press Television, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC, ABC, The San Francisco Chronicle, Corriere della Sera (Italy), TV4 and Dagens Nyheter (Sweden).

Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries, art fairs and museums in London, Stockholm, New York, Bologna, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the 21st Century Museum, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Di Rosa Preserve in Napa, CA and is held in numerous corporate and private collections. Michele is the founder of the San Francisco Bay Area based art collective Quorum. Her work can currently be viewed at the Neuberger Museum in New York.

http://michelepred.com

Jeremy Bornstein & Lenny Raymond – The Mongoliad

The Mongoliad is a new kind of serialized novel, created by Neal Stephenson, and written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other great authors. It will be told via custom apps on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Android, and will be something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.
Jeremy is President and CTO of Subutai and Lenny is Vice President for Keepin’ It Real. More info on the Subutai Team here

http://subutai.mn/
http://mongoliad.com/

MC Jonathan Foote