Moderator
Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, All Things Digital, Wall Street Journal
Panelists
Bret Taylor, Co-founder, FriendFeed
Loic Le Meur, Founder, Seesmic
Jeff Clavier, Founder, SoftTech VC
Leah Culver, Co-Founder, Pownce
Event Description:
As the consumer web evolves, we're seeing a trend towards immediate
sharing of everything about our lives online. The current batch of hot
companies in the consumer web space of life-streaming are all about
helping you share the important (and sometimes not so important)
details of your life with friends and family “as and when they happen”.
The tools that let us broadcast our lives in real-time are radically
changing the way we keep in touch with people we know and, for the
socially bold or privacy nonchalant, get in touch with people we don’t
know. Market leaders are jumping on the bandwagon. Google acquired a
key player, Jaiku, few months ago. AOL added life-streaming features to
AIM few weeks ago. Come and hear from leading companies in this space,
and learn what these thought leaders see as the future of the consumer
web.
Bios:
Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, All Things Digital, Wall Street Journal
Kara Swisher, with Walt Mossberg, co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital,
a major high-tech conference with interviewees such as Bill Gates,
Steve Jobs and many other leading players in the tech and media
industries. The gathering is considered one of the leading conferences
focused on the convergence of tech and media industries. Kara Swisher
started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San
Francisco bureau in 1997. Her column BoomTown originally appeared on
the front page of the Marketplace section and also online at WSJ.com.
Bret Taylor, Co-founder, Friendfeed
Before FriendFeed, Bret was a Group Product Manager at Google, where he
launched Google Maps, the Google Maps API, and founded Google’s
Developer product group. Bret was most recently an Entrepreneur in
Residence at Benchmark Capital, where he developed FriendFeed with
co-founder Jim Norris. Bret has an MS and BS in Computer Science from
Stanford University.
Loic Le Meur, Founder, Seesmic
Loic is the CEO and visionary behind Seesmic, founded in 2007, with the
goal of transforming online video into a medium for threaded,
interactive video conversation. Prior to Seesmic, Loic incubated
several other start-ups including four French companies: Ublog, (merged
with Six Apart in 2003) and RapidSite, (acquired by France Telecom in
1999) two popular blog companies, B2L, an interactive agency in 1999
(acquired by BBDO) and LeWeb, one of Europe’s leading web conferences
for businesses and web 2.0 innovators in 2005
Jeff Clavier, Founder, SoftTech VC
Jeff Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, a seed
stage venture capital firm. Since 2004 Jeff has become one of the most
active investors in the Web 2.0 space, financing 40+ early stage
startups. Announced in September 2007, his last fund, $12M SoftTech VC
II, has invested in 22 companies in a year – most of them being
stealth. Jeff’s areas of interest include Social Media and Communities,
Search, Monetization, Consumer Infrastructure and Gaming. Before
founding SoftTech VC, Jeff was a Partner with RVC (the venture capital
arm of Reuters) investing in enterprise software and media. While
studying Computer Science in Paris, Jeff developed (in C/Unix)
real-time front-office applications for a tiny French startup, Effix,
which became a market leader internationally and was acquired by
Reuters in 1993.
Leah Culver, Co-Founder, Pownce
Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka
as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to friends. Leah
is the lead developer for the site and spends most of her time working
on feature development, fixing bugs, scaling the site, and maintaining
the API. She's a recent computer science graduate from the University
of Minnesota and enjoys the challenge of developing a web application
from scratch. Leah also writes a blog about her experiences as a
software developer at leahculver.com.
