I’m blogging live from DEMOfall 09 in San Diego California… I’ll also be live tweeting.  The show is about to start shortly.  Please refresh your browser regularly.

The show is starting now… First up an introduction video.

Now the intro to the conference – Chris Shipley and Matt Marshall are thanking partners and talking about the format for DEMOfall 09.  VentureBeat has launched DEMOBeat.  VentureBeat also talking about VentureBeat Profiles, which is the integration of their Profiles acquisition.

Chris Shipley says now is the best time to be starting a company and innovating.  Hewlett-Packard Co is first up to bat… They’re a DEMO veteran. (more…)

When I watched Sanjay Jha, co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of Motorola Mobile Devices, announce the MOTO CLIQ™ (which will be called MOTO DEXT™ when it launches in the rest of the world) with MOTOBLUR at Mobilize 09 on Thursday, something interesting happened… something that I haven’t seen in a long time. The audience got visibly excited about Motorola.  Did they seem as excited as they seemed about Apple when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 3G? Maybe not, but they were genuinely interested, and at least among the people around me, there was a palpable sense of relief that Motorola announced an innovative device and software. (more…)

I’m live blogging from Mobilize ’09 in San Francisco, California for as long as my laptop battery lasts. I’ll also be live tweeting.

After a quick, “mininote” introduction by Om Malik, Founder of the GigaOM Network and James Kendrick, Editor, jkOnTheRun (GigaOM Network), Pankaj Kedia, Director, Global Ecosystem Programs, Mobile Internet Devices at Intel has taken the stage… (more…)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook acquired Friendfeed today for for nearly $50 Million US.  Friendfeed is a useful real-time social media aggregation and commenting service, and it’s easy to see why it caught Facebook’s attention.  Over the past several hours there’s been plenty of speculation by tech bloggers about why the acquisition took place and what this means for Friendfeed and Facebook users… (more…)

I recently received an email from a start-up called USCORE who wanted to learn more about my consulting services.  USCORE aims to give high school sports teams who are filming games the ability to easily tag each play within the video with the name of each player involved.  Parents that can’t make their child’s game can sign up to receive MMS messages on their mobile phone that show any play their child was involved in real time.

As part of my due diligence, I agreed to see a demo of USCORE’s product.  After multiple assurances that my mobile number would be removed from their system after the demo and I would never be spammed, I provided USCORE with my mobile number so that they could show me their ‘powerful’ MMS feature.  Unfortunately, the MMS demo didn’t work.  And, yesterday, almost four weeks after I saw the initial demo, I learned how ‘powerful’ USCORE’s MMS feature was when I received at least 139 unsolicited MMS messages. (more…)

I just updated the background on my Twitter profile, and thought it might help to share some of what I learned in the process. Here’s how my new Twitter background looks:

Recreating this look (or a variation of it) is VERY easy, if you’ve got Photoshop. You really don’t need to pay someone to do it for you to get a decent result.  Here’s how I created mine: (more…)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the value of social media monitoring tools in brand and marketing campaign management.  Having now demoed a number of social media monitoring solutions, I’ve realized that while there are a lot of great tools out there, there is still a lot of opportunity for product improvement – especially around mobilization and social media response. (more…)

UPDATED 7/31/09: Below, you’ll find a list I compiled of mobile developer relations professionals on Twitter.  It’s interesting to see how many mobile companies are starting to use Twitter to engage with their developer communities.  The most prolific developer relations tweeps seem to be from Windows Mobile (which lists Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as communications channels on its site), the  Symbian Foundation (which has devoted a whole page on its website to list its Twitterers), and Motorola’s MOTODEV (which also runs communities on YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn).  Twitter is rapidly becoming a great way for developers to aggregate the latest news and information about the various developer programs they participate in, without having to separately check in with each mobile developer community site. (more…)

These days, for every inspiring story that I hear about a mobile independent software vendor (ISV) / developer that’s “raking in loads of cash” through Apples’ App store, I hear a handful of stories from mobile ISVs that are trying to dig themselves out of the red.  While the press is focused on the “iPhone Gold Rush,” I’m hearing of a disturbing number of mobile ISVs that are struggling…badly.  Over the last couple of months, I’ve had conversations with an increased number of mobile start-up execs who by day are attempting to dig their ISV out financial crisis and by night are pinging their social networks, quietly looking for a new job and complaining that the mobile industry is “broken”. (more…)

Yesterday, in researching the list of The Europas’ (TechCrunch Europe Awards) nominees for my last post, it hit me – there are still a lot of start-ups with great products that just don’t understand basic marketing.  Without calling anyone specific out on their mishaps, here are the top 5 basic marketing lessons you can learn from some of the The Europas’ nominees’ mistakes: (more…)