Arrived in San Francisco and spent my first day today at Jeff Pulver’s Video on the Net Conference being held at the San Jose Convention Centre.
It’s my first time visiting San Jose and it was pretty cool commuting with an old buddy of mine down the 101 this morning past the headquarters of Google, Yahoo! and Adobe.
The weather here is crappy at the moment like it seems to be everywhere right now – London is freezing all of a sudden, New York is snowed in, and the temperature here in Silicon Valley is definitely not what I expected. But enough of that…
The 2nd ever Video on the Net Conference is positively hopping. I was fortunate to go to the first one last September in Boston and the quality and attendance has grown leaps and bounds. The panels are top notch and some real heavy hitters including Jeff Jarvis, Jeremy Allaire, Niklas Zennstrom and execs from AOL, Yahoo! and IBM gave barnstorming speeches today. It was fascinating stuff.
I ran into some old faces from last time and some new ones too. The guys from Vividas are doing cool stuff with full screen, high res video, Bubbleply are going from strength to strength, and I particularly liked a new offering from Doubleclick that offers a platform for inserting ads into flash files – very cool.
Jeff Pulver hosted a fun and semi-private hotel suite party tonight and in usual fine party throwing fashion he organized Playstation 3’s, buckets of booze… and I ended up playing poker with him… and losing!
My memories of the Cal Train ride back to San Fran are hazy – I really should call it a night…